Kolsquare’s third annual market study is out, and we brought two guests onto a webinar to pull it apart, hosted by Eugen Knippel, VP of Global Voice at Kolsquare. Sophie Douez, journalist at Kolsquare, designed the questionnaire and wrote the analysis. Jamie Love, CEO and founder of influencer growth agency Monumental, has spent eight years running campaigns for brands across Europe, the US and the Middle East. One has the data, the other the client conversations that explain it.
Here is what came out of the hour. The full replay is available here.
The clearest finding in the study is also the simplest. Almost nine in ten brands and agencies plan to spend more on influencer marketing next year, and the remaining 10 to 11% are holding budgets flat. Not a single respondent said they were pulling back.
That figure has climbed steeply: 54% two years ago, 75% last year, 89% now. As Sophie put it, this is no longer a market testing whether the channel works.
The obvious follow-up is whether that money buys more. Jamie was direct about influencer inflation. Creator fees have risen, partly because creators can see how much brands now depend on them, but the way brands work with creators has changed too.
“We’re not asking them to do a cute little post, tagging and hashtagging. We’re involving them a lot more in the process and thinking much more deeply about the relationships we have with them. It might not even be that we’re working with more creators. We’re working with them in more ways.”
Jamie Love, Monumental
79% of respondents now call influencer marketing either a core channel or an important supporting one. Only 3% describe it as experimental, which Sophie found low given how many sectors are still arriving at the channel.
Conviction tracks experience. The longer a company has worked with creators, and the larger its team, the more likely it is to describe influencer marketing as a core strategic lever rather than a campaign tactic. That plays out geographically too. The UK moved early and hard on influencer marketing and is the most likely market to call it core. Spain, written off as immature only a few years ago, now sits close behind.
Jamie’s view from the agency side is that the barrier to entry is lower than most brands assume. Monumental recently ran a first influencer campaign for an accountancy platform, hardly the obvious category. His first question to a new client is always about budget, not to price the work but to design something realistic for it.
Three in ten brands attribute more than 25% of total revenue to influencer marketing. A smaller group, 5% of all respondents, attribute half.
Jamie was not surprised. Tracking has become harder, acquisition costs keep climbing, and the wider ecosystem has been unkind to performance marketers since the Meta and Apple fallout and successive data protection changes. Influencer marketing still behaves like a friend referral, which makes it both more persuasive and easier to ask questions about.
Asked where the extra money will go, 67% of respondents said paid media to boost influencer content. UGC and long-term creator relationships were close behind, and affiliate marketing showed one of the biggest relative jumps from a smaller base.
The mechanics matter more than the percentage. Jamie’s teams rarely amplify everything. A campaign typically starts with content creation and organic posting, then the data from that first wave decides what happens next: new hooks, more content, or the top performing assets pushed into a paid campaign to drive conversions.
“Influencer content just converts way better than brand content. We halved the cost of acquisition for a subscription client by using creator-led content. The creator tests that content for you with an engaged audience, and you can benchmark it against the rest of their output.”
Jamie Love, Monumental
One metric his team watches closely is view-through rate. Anything above 70 to 80% is a strong signal that the content holds attention and is worth putting money behind.
That testing loop also produces findings you cannot brief for. On one men’s product, the top performing creators were women recommending it, not men describing their own use.
The tabloid headline is that TikTok is down 12 points. The more useful reading is that brands are spreading their activity across more platforms and asking each one to do a specific job. Worth noting: respondents were asked to name only their top five platforms, so a drop reflects a change in priority rather than abandonment.
LinkedIn, Facebook and WhatsApp all rose. Jamie’s observation is that the platforms gaining ground are the ones that link content directly to a product page or a website, which is not a coincidence when the goal is measurable return.
Instagram slipped two points and remains, in Sophie’s word, ubiquitous. And a small but real group of European brands now report using Chinese platforms. At 2 to 3% of respondents that still represents 30 to 40 brands.
TikTok has not stopped working. It is being used more deliberately.
“TikTok is incredible at discoverability. No other platform, maybe apart from Pinterest, can do that organically. For clients with a tighter budget and a product that takes a bit of education, TikTok is the place to go. But if you’re selling a t-shirt and you’ve got 50 beauty creators, put it on Instagram Stories with an affiliate link. It might not be the sexy placement, but it will get you further.”
Jamie Love, Monumental
Creator portfolios have doubled over two years. Bigger budgets explain part of that. Risk management explains the rest.
As top-tier fees climb, the maths on a single large creator stops working. Jamie described a recent quote for one Instagram Story that could not have been recovered even by selling out the product, once management fees and margin were accounted for. Working with a larger number of smaller creators spreads the risk, reaches more defined communities, and in his experience returns better ROI.
Sponsored posts still dominate, and that is unlikely to change soon. Underneath that, national preferences diverge more than you might expect:
Jamie did not hedge.
“I know what I should say, but in my opinion it’s a waste of money. Put it on TikTok affiliate and at least you get something back.”
Jamie Love, Monumental
The mass gifting era, where a hundred tubes of cream went out and everyone hoped, is over. What still works is narrower: a high value or genuinely relevant product, a smaller creator with a niche community, an existing relationship, or a moment with real gravity around it. Monumental saw strong results from a gifting activation tied to a Sephora opening, and from city activations in Paris and London that landed far better than the same idea in the US.
Sophie’s framing was that the surviving version of gifting is really just relationship management. Jamie agreed, and would not call it gifting at all.
One audience question settled quickly: yes, gifted content must be disclosed as advertising, event participation included.
Reach sits at the top of the list of metrics brands report on. More interesting is which metrics they actually trust.
Respondents trust the numbers they see on the platforms themselves, a view count as reported by Meta, far more than they trust sentiment or even engagement rate. ROI is measured by only around 30% of respondents, which is striking in a market moving this fast.
“The spending is outrunning the maturity. There’s still a lot of confusion about what they should be looking at and what they can trust when they evaluate a campaign.”
Sophie Douez, Kolsquare
The UK is the exception. It runs well ahead of the European average on ROI measurement, in line with a performance-driven market that has been connecting influencer activity to business outcomes for longer.
Jamie’s reporting splits along the same lines his clients think: brand metrics such as reach and engagement, usually benchmarked against paid advertising, and performance metrics covering sales, traffic and softer signals like email sign-ups. He also noted that EMV and share of voice, terms you hear constantly in the industry, rank low on what brands actually report.
Use of dedicated influencer marketing platforms jumped again this year, mainly for discovery, audience quality checks and demographics.
AI is a more uneven picture. Plenty of respondents use it for management and operational support. Very few use it for predictive analytics, which both speakers identified as the biggest missed opportunity in the study. Scouting profiles, spotting traits and behaviours across a large creator set, analysing campaign data and optimising against it: that is where the gain sits.
“The bit I still wouldn’t use AI for is the middle. The connection, the conversation, the creative part, the briefing. If the glorified admin either side gets easier, happy days. But that middle bit has to be human led.”
Jamie Love, Monumental
The counter-example arrived unprompted. Both speakers described AI-written outreach, blasted to any scraped email address, arriving with no named creator, no budget and sometimes no identifiable brand. Jamie bins them on sight.
On AI creators, Jamie is curious rather than convinced. McDonald’s ran its first AI ad in Japan and it performed among their best, which he read culturally as much as technologically. Eugen’s own look inside the Kolsquare platform added a note of caution: several of the largest AI creator accounts hide around 90% of their likes, and few of them hold brand partnerships of real commercial value.
The top conditions brands place on creators are unchanged from last year: compliance with advertising regulations and signed corporate charters. Professional standards are now the entry fee.
This year the study asked for the first time whether brands require creators to have completed responsible influence training or certification. Around 30% across Europe say they do, which is high given the programmes do not yet exist in every market. In Benelux, where the certificate launched recently, it is already at 40%. The UK certificate arrived after the study was fielded, and the US self-regulator launched one this year too, so expect that number to move.
“It’s not only about brand safety and avoiding a bad buzz. It’s about the communication lines being clean between brands and creators about what’s expected from a collaboration.”
Sophie Douez, Kolsquare
More money, spread across more platforms and more creators, with a growing share going into amplifying what already works. Measurement has not kept pace with spend, and the biggest untapped gain from AI sits in analysis and prediction rather than content. Professional standards are quietly becoming a precondition of the work.
Sponsored posts still lead. Everything built around them has changed.
Watch the full replay or get the complete findings from the third annual Kolsquare market study, The Future of Influencer Marketing 2026/2027.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, offering a data-driven solution that empowers brands to scale their KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing strategies through authentic partnerships with top creators.
Kolsquare’s advanced technology helps marketing professionals seamlessly identify the best content creators by filtering their content and audience, while also enabling them to build, manage, and optimize campaigns from start to finish. This includes measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.
With a thriving global community of influencer marketing experts, Kolsquare serves hundreds of customers—including Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, Lush, and Hermès—by leveraging the latest Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies. Our platform taps into an extensive network of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers across 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
As a Certified B Corporation, Kolsquare leads the way in promoting Responsible Influence, championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations that inspire positive change.
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