The Diminishing Returns of Influencer Marketing and What Brands Can Do About It.

Influencer marketing was supposed to be the great equalizer. A way for brands to bypass the gatekeepers, speak directly to audiences through voices they trusted, and drive action in a way that traditional advertising couldn't. For a while, it worked (kind of). Creators built audiences, brands paid for access, and everyone made money, or at least the creators did.

Then every brand started doing it. And the thing about a gold rush is that eventually someone starts selling fake gold.

The returns are thinning. Most brands can feel it, even if they can't quite articulate why. Engagement rates are down, audiences are more sceptical, and the gap between what agencies report and what actually drives commercial outcomes is getting harder to ignore. But here's the thing, influencer marketing isn't dead. The way most brands are using it is. And the fix isn't finding better influencers, it's understanding that the entire direction of influence has reversed.

The trust erosion is real, and Let’s be honest, it’s kind of self-inflicted.

Let's not pretend this happened overnight. The industry eroded trust in influencer marketing systematically by making any post about a product an ad, and then acted surprised when audiences stopped buying in. Influencers didn’t help. They realized that they could get paid for every product post, so stopped their organic interest and pushed brands to cough up.

The result was kind of disastorous. Creators promoting products they've clearly never used. The same talent cycling through competing brands month after month, skincare one week, a rival skincare the next. Feeds so saturated with #ad content that audiences now scroll past sponsored posts the way they skip YouTube pre-rolls. The audience isn't stupid, they just stopped caring.

And that's before you get to the agency side. I've written about this before but it's worth repeating: inflated view counts padded with audiences from countries the brand doesn't even operate in. Agencies pocketing leftover influencer spend as margin without telling the client. Results bought through paid amplification and dressed up as organic performance. The industry built a model on a lack of transparency and now wonders why the trust isn't there.

This isn't a market correction. It's a consequence.

Reach ≠ Influence

Here's the fundamental misunderstanding that got us here: brands have been buying reach and calling it influence. They're not the same thing.

A creator with 2 million followers who posts a scripted ad that gets a million views sounds impressive on a slide deck. But if none of those viewers change their behaviour — don't click, don't search, don't buy, don't even think about the brand differently — what did you actually pay for? Awareness? Maybe. But awareness without intent is just a tiny bit of noise in a very noisy room. Go check the stats about how many videos a person scrolls past on TikTok and then think about the real impact your 2 second of skipped ad content had…

On the flip side a creator who organically promotes a product and talks about it in a way that resonates with their audience can shift real commercial outcomes. The metrics most brands optimize for, views, impressions, follower count, are vanity metrics dressed up as performance indicators.

The word "influencer" itself has become part of the problem. It implies that having an audience automatically means you influence that audience. It doesn't. Influence is earned, it's specific, and it's volatile. The second an audience smells inauthenticity, it's gone. And right now, a lot of audiences aren’t exactly smelling roses.

The direction of influence has flipped

This is where it gets interesting, and where most brands are getting it wrong.

The traditional model worked like this: brand has a message, brand pays a creator to deliver it, creator pushes it to their community. Brand > creator > community. Top-down. Simple.

The problem is that's not how culture moves anymore. Culture doesn't start with brands. It starts in communities; Discord servers, Reddit threads, comment sections, group chats, niche corners of TikTok that most marketing teams don't even know exist. Creators don't manufacture culture, they translate it. They pick up on what's resonating in their communities and amplify it outward, the smart ones do. The brands that are paying for attention can tap into that energy. The ones that aren't are still pushing messages into a current that's flowing the other way.

The direction of influence has reversed. It's community > creator > brand. And the brands still briefing top-down campaigns, handing creators a script and hoping the audience doesn't notice, are playing a 2019 game (I said what I said).

So what should brands actually do?

This isn't a "burn it all down" argument. Influencer marketing still works when it's done properly. But "properly" looks very different to what most brands are running.

Tap cultural nuance, distribute at scale

You don't need to embed yourself in every micro-community. That's expensive, it's slow, and the return rarely justifies the effort. What you need is creative that's born from cultural specificity — content that taps into the nuances of how communities actually think, talk and behave — and then you use targeted paid to push it outward.

The cultural nuance is what makes it resonate. The paid amplification is what makes it reach. And here's the bit most people miss: when the creative is genuinely good, when it feels native to a community rather than manufactured for it, it has a halo effect. You don’t need to be a member of that community to feel the importance of it. It doesn't just perform within the target audience, it bleeds into broader groups because it feels real. Authenticity scales in a way that polished brand messaging doesn't.

Bring creators into the building

This is the biggest missed opportunity in the industry right now. Most brands treat creators as a distribution channel. Brief them, pay them, get the content, move on. But the real value of creators isn't always their audience… It's their insight.

Creators who are embedded in communities understand what those communities want, what they're frustrated by, what they'd pay for, and what would make them switch. That's product development intelligence that most brands are paying consultants millions for, and it's sitting right there in the people they're already working with.

Bring creators into the product conversation. Into positioning. Into operational decisions. Let them shape the thing you're selling, not just promote it. When a creator has genuinely influenced how a product is built, they are more likely to organically promote it. They're not a hired mouth reading a brief, they're a stakeholder with skin in the game. The audience can tell the difference.

Let communities shape the brand

If creators are your bridge to communities, use that bridge in both directions. Most brands use it one way to push a message out. In my experience the smart brands use it to listen. I’ve always noticed a distinct difference between brands who celebrate “how many engagements did we get” to “what is the positive and negative sentiment that was shared and how strong was it”. The qualitative data that can be found in comments sections is invaluable and more brands should seek to utilize it.

What are the communities your audience belongs to actually saying? What do they want that doesn't exist yet? What are they complaining about? If you can absorb that intelligence and let it shape your products, your campaigns, even your brand positioning, you stop being a brand that advertises to communities and start being a brand that's shaped by them. That's how you become influential across all channels. Not by broadcasting, but by reflecting something back that people already feel.

Demand transparency from your agency

I keep coming back to this because it matters. If your agency can't show you the creator contracts, can't break down direct costs versus agency fees, and can't tell you where the views are actually coming from, that's your answer. The lack of transparency in this industry is one of the core reasons trust has eroded, and it's on brands to demand better. Unpopular opinion amongst creators and agencies, but you’re (the brand) the ones in control.

See the contracts. Know the costs. Understand where your spend is going and what it's actually driving. At Ardent we make constant reference to costings in our reports because the results only mean something when you know what you paid for them. If your agency resists that, ask yourself why.

The opportunity is right there

Influencer marketing isn't finished. But the version most brands are running, top-down, transactional, optimized for vanity metrics, is hitting diminishing returns and it's not coming back.

The brands that will win are the ones willing to reverse the flow. Let communities inform creators. Let creators inform the brand. Build products and campaigns that reflect genuine cultural intelligence rather than broadcasting a message and hoping it lands. The influence is still there, it's just not where most marketers are looking for it.

Is that a harder model to operationalize? Yes. Does it require brands to give up some control? Absolutely. Will every brand do it? No. But the ones that do won't just run better influencer campaigns, they'll build brands that don't need a campaign to sell, just organic always-on advocacy.

And honestly, isn't that the whole point?