From Belief to Proof: What UK Influencer Marketing Teams Told Us at IMK London

When a roster doubles, relationships strain before systems do

This was the clearest convergence of the day. Asked what breaks first as a creator roster scales, tables did not point at tooling, process or reporting. They pointed at relationships.

Managing more creators across more tiers makes it harder to sustain the personal connection each partnership depends on, and that applies to brands and agencies alike. Briefing quality drops fastest without active management. Briefing calls are time-consuming, and running several briefs in parallel can pull against a consistent brand strategy rather than reinforcing it.

Vetting suffers in a quieter way. Brand safety checks on comment sections and creator conduct stay stubbornly manual, and they get harder as volume rises. For sensitive categories, medical clients were the example given, the stakes of getting that wrong are high enough that nobody in the room was willing to automate it away entirely.

What helps absorb growth without adding headcount:

• Segmentation into silos by category, with specific team members assigned to each, so expertise compounds per segment rather than thinning out across the whole roster.
• AI tooling in place of additional hires. Several teams found this more useful than extra headcount, particularly for the repetitive layers of vetting and brief preparation.
• Personalisation that evolves rather than disappears. Agencies described adapting briefs as volume grows, though they were clear this depends on creators themselves being willing to adjust.

Notably, no table proposed slowing roster growth to protect relationship quality. The fix was understood to sit in how the work is structured.

The open question: that logic holds when a roster doubles. Whether it survives a roster tripling is a different matter, and nobody in the room claimed to have tested it.

Disclosure works best when the relationship is real

One table went further on compliance and arrived somewhere more interesting than risk management.

Their finding: disclosure reads as an advantage when influencers only partner with brands they genuinely believe in, and that belief is most legible in long-term partnerships. The inverse was just as clear. One-off, single-transaction deals read as inauthentic and convert worse. For the relationship to feel real to an audience, there need to be other touchpoints with the creator beyond the post.

Creators themselves want to be valued rather than used for a placement. The examples that worked involved bringing them behind the scenes, into events with real customers, and in some cases into product development. That investment builds advocacy that outlasts a single campaign, which is a harder asset to buy and a harder one for competitors to copy.

Two further points came out of that table. Creator content increasingly functions as its own media channel, and brands are starting to repurpose it across other channels rather than treating each asset as a one-off. And publishing methodology, being transparent about how campaigns actually work, was seen as a genuine commercial edge rather than a compliance exercise.

The open question that followed: if disclosure only pays off in long-term partnerships, does that leave short-term, always-on affiliate models at a structural trust disadvantage? Or is there another credible way to signal real belief in a brand at speed? The table did not settle it.

The thread running through all three

Read together, the three themes point in the same direction. The brands making progress on proof are not the ones with the most sophisticated attribution stack. They are the ones that built structure around relationships, segmentation that preserves expertise, partnerships long enough for disclosure to read as endorsement, and a measurement case made internally before the data arrived.

That is a slower argument than a single ROI number. It is also considerably harder to dismiss.

The UK is one of the most demanding influencer marketing markets in the world, with a regulatory environment that keeps tightening and buyers who have already tested most of the tooling available. Conversations like this one are worth having in public.

IMK London will return. In the meantime, if the themes above describe your current reporting problem, Kolsquare gives influencer marketing teams the measurement, compliance monitoring and competitive intelligence to make the internal case with evidence rather than assertion.

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IMK is an event series for influencer marketing experts, created by Kolsquare. This debrief synthesises workshop table notes from IMK London, 28 October 2026.