In the ever-evolving influencer marketing industry, it’s difficult to anticipate what trends will shape influencer campaigns and strategies even just a month from now, let alone a year. Perhaps the only constant is its unwavering growth, with spending on influencers set to reach $24 billion by the end of 2024, up from just over $21 billion in 2023, according to data from Influencer Marketing Hub. 

Additionally, nearly 60% of marketers said at the start of 2024 that they planned to up their influencer spend this year, while just under one quarter said they would be allotting over 40% of their overall 2024 marketing budgets to influencer marketing, per Influencer Marketing Hub. 

Ad Age spoke with 20 influencer marketers across agencies, consultancies and brands about their predictions for the biggest trends they anticipate will shape influencer marketing strategies over the second half 2024. Below are six of the most widely shared predictions among the group, from LinkedIn’s burgeoning role in influencer strategies to the increased adoption of generative AI.

A growing distinction between influencers and creators

Until recently, the terms “influencer” and “creator” have largely been considered interchangeable. But several influencer marketers anticipate more brands will develop distinct strategies for collaborating with the two categories of social content makers in the coming months. 

“‘Influencer’ represents a status, whereas ‘content creator’ represents a function,” said Errick Page Jr., influencer partnerships specialist at The Martin Agency. “You cannot be a content creator if you are not constantly creating—weekly, daily. You have to have a cadence.” 

Influencers, meanwhile, “may or may not” be content creators, and often kick-start their social media careers by capitalizing on a moment of virality to establish themselves as a kind of digital celebrity, Page said. He pointed to Hailey Welch, aka the “Hawk Tuah Girl,” who recently drew widespread pop culture attention for her vulgar response to a man-on-the-street interview, as an example of an influencer who will now need to “start creating content to sustain [her] newfound popularity.” 

More brands are beginning to recognize the different roles influencers and creators play in the marketing funnel, launching campaigns that leverage the two groups in distinct ways, said Cristina Lawrence, executive VP of consumer and content experience at Publicis Groupe agency Razorfish. Razorfish’s clients are increasingly interested in leveraging a “media mix model” for their influencer and creator campaigns to “hit every different audience or niche that [they] possibly can … in different places in the funnel,” Lawrence said. 

Razorfish now often breaks clients’ influencer campaigns into three tiers—influencers, for “broad reach and brand awareness”; creators, to help pump out short-form video content, often for a brand’s own social channels through the agency’s in-house “Creator Colab” offering; and micro- or nano-influencers with niche but highly engaged audiences, Lawrence said. 

See also: Inside CeraVe’s new influencer-led campaign

Peter Chun, senior VP and global head of partnerships & growth at VaynerX, agrees that micro- and nano-influencers who have carved out unique online niches play an increasingly pivotal role in influencer strategies. 

“Content consumption has never been more fragmented or more personalized than it is now,” Chun said. “Savvy brands will recognize that the more creators they have, the more sound their strategy will probably be. It’s less about trying to be appealing to every consumer that’s out there,” and instead about identifying relevant subcultures on platforms such as TikTok and identifying creators “whose voices matter in those niches.” 

“Looking at it from a marketer’s lens, I think there’s reward in being consistent with niche content,” said Christina Westley, head of influencer marketing at PepsiCo. “I’m finding even in my work that there have definitely been campaigns where we’re going after very niche creators [where] what makes them special is that there are few people who could do what they do.”

Effectively, creators are a “shortcut for brands to become more culturally relevant … because of the connection they have to their audience and the trust they’ve already earned from them,” said Austin Pollock, senior VP of brand partnerships at digital media company Doing Things. The company recently partnered with Kantar on a report digging into how audiences perceive influencers and creators differently, which revealed that 80% of Gen Zers and 77% of millennials view brand partnerships with creators as “more organic” than those with influencers. 

Also read: 37 ad exec predictions for the rest of 2024

LinkedIn becomes a larger piece of influencer strategies

LinkedIn is no longer just a platform for job applications. A growing number of creators—including those who have built their careers on TikTok or Instagram, such as influencer Brook Monk—are exploring LinkedIn in response to the platform honing in on them with new content formats, including video, and creator-focused tools such as a “brand partnership” label for sponsored posts. And brands and agencies are taking note.

“LinkedIn is kind of evolving from its original remit as a professional networking site, and we’re starting to see that brands, companies and actually just everyday people are using it more as a lifestyle platform,” Lawrence said. LinkedIn’s introduction of video content will likely accelerate the platform’s transformation from “just a job site to a creator platform” that people, especially “those who normally wouldn’t engage with TikTok, like an older demographic,” turn to for pop culture engagement, said Meridith Rojas, co-founder of brand consultancy Free Electron. 

Rojas recently garnered over 60,000 impressions on a LinkedIn post with a video of her discussing the return of Victoria’s Secret fashion show this fall, “and the people that were commenting were like, retired pilots. I was like, ‘What are these people doing on LinkedIn?’ And that was the ‘aha moment’ of, ‘OK, this is officially becoming a social platform.’” 

Several influencer agencies and consultancies that focus exclusively on LinkedIn influencer marketing have emerged in the past year, including Creator Authority (founded in January by Brendan Gahan, former partner and chief innovation officer at creative agency Mekanism, and Mandi Hopper, formerly of influencer agency Collectively) and Influence by Verbatim. A slew of brands have already begun sponsoring creator content on the platform, though those partnerships have largely been limited to business-to-business brands, such as Sprout Social and Notion, thus far. 

But at least a handful of business-to-consumer brands are likely to experiment with LinkedIn influencer marketing before the year is out, Lawrence said. Razorfish recently pitched the platform to one of the agency’s dating app clients alongside more traditional influencer mediums such as TikTok or Instagram, she added. 

“LinkedIn is a recommendation that we put in front of not just our B2B clients, but our B2C clients, too,” she said.

Creators (and brand partnerships) go multimedia

At the top of 2024, several influencer executives predicted creators and their content would extend beyond social media feeds to mediums such as connected TV, out-of-home displays and in-store activations. That trend has already taken off halfway into the year, with companies such as creator shopping platform LTK and influencer marketing agency Linqia both bringing creators to CTV with new ad offerings and TikTok recently bringing creator-generated content to out-of-home displays by integrating its “Branded Mission” tool (which allows brands to crowdsource TikTok content for ad campaigns) to its digital out-of-home offering, “Out of Phone.” 

In January, link-in-bio platform Linktree, spotlighted seven creators on a digital billboard in Times Square, including podcast co-hosts Brook Averick and Connor Wood and YouTuber Kurtis Conner. Breastfeeding platform Swehl similarly displayed culinary creator Molly Baz on a Times Square billboard—and when it was deemed too “inappropriate” by billboard company Clear Channel Outdoor, Seed, a probiotic brand, offered its own billboard space to Baz. Skin care brand Glow Recipe is inviting fans to a meet-and-greet with influencer Katie Fang this weekend to promote their new product collaboration. 

“Brands are understanding that if they leverage [creators’] audience affinity outside of social media—in real life and in different brand touchpoints—it has a real, tangible impact,” said Shira Jeczmien, CEO and founder of Screenshot Media, a Gen Z media company and agency. “They’re maximizing creator content by using it across various channels—their TV ads, in-store displays and some digital out-of-home.” In other words, influencer marketing increasingly “doesn’t end with a post—it starts with a post.”

But it’s not just influencer marketers who are taking creator content to new mediums. “We’re seeing more and more creators become multi-platform storytellers,” said Neil Waller, Whalar co-founder and co-CEO. “I think we're just going to see creators branch into more different platforms and different types of storytelling—more people going into podcasts, more people doing newsletters, more people creating membership groups. It’s already happened, but the next wave that’s happening is even bigger.” 

Waller anticipates a number of those creators will experiment with more traditional entertainment formats, such as TV series or even films. Earlier this month, TikTok star Khaby Lame launched a three-episode series on streaming platform Tubi in partnership with Procter & Gamble and Group Black. And YouTube phenom MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, is reimagining his social media survival games in an upcoming reality competition series with Amazon Prime Video. 

Additionally, nearly 100 creators helped storyboard and animate the upcoming Lego Pharrell Williams biopic “Piece by Piece” through a partnership with Lego coordinated via Tongal, a platform connecting creators with brands and studios, said Tongal Co-Founder and CEO James DeJulio. 

The tense political climate fuels more scrutiny in brand-creator partnerships 

With both the U.S. presidential election and the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war swiftly approaching, brands will be vetting potential influencer and creator partners with much greater scrutiny over the next several months. 

“This kind of doubling up on the need for more rigorous processes around brand safety and risk assessment, we’ve seen that happening in volumes,” said Tyler Vaught, Edelman’s global head of influencer marketing. “And it’s not just a quick once-over to make sure their existing process is okay—it’s a very rigorous, multistep process that these brands want to adhere to” to determine whether creators even hint at their political leaning on social media. 

See also: How brands and creators are navigating partnerships in a tense political climate

Creators, too, will be investigating brands’ political associations more thoroughly before inking deals, said Sadie Schabdach, executive VP of influencer marketing at Dentsu Creative. “There’s an expectation from the creators’ side that, if they are partnering with a brand, that brand is going to sort of sit on the same ethical spectrum as them.”

If a creator agrees to partner with a brand that has been involved in past controversies or that supported a politician or organization that the creator’s audience disagrees with, they could easily find themselves embroiled in criticism—especially if the brand puts paid support behind their content and puts them on more users’ For You Pages, she said.

“It’s definitely a conversation we’re having on both sides of the contracts,” she added.

Agencies and creators integrate generative AI 

While TikTok and Meta are focusing on flashy innovations such as AI-generated influencer avatars and celebrity AI chatbots, few creators and agencies are likely to integrate those technologies into their content in the next several months. Instead, they’re leveraging AI for more practical purposes such as video editing or searching for influencer partners with certain characteristics. 

“I do think AI will help [creators] on the production side, whether it’s editing a longer-form piece of content into a shorter-form piece of content, or being able to add different backgrounds to appeal to different audiences,” VaynerX’s Chun said. Indeed, 97% of over 2,200 creators surveyed by creator education platform Creator Now in late 2023 said they were already using AI tools in their creative process, largely for brainstorming and researching topics. Roughly 35% reported leveraging AI to assist in editing their content. 

Andrew Franz, CEO and co-founder of influencer marketing firm Panel, agreed that editing tools will be the most valuable application of AI for creators in the immediate future. “The biggest pain point, I think, with most of our creators right now is the hours that it takes to turn raw content into a finished product,” he said. “There are several [AI] tools trying to figure that out. But they’re not there yet, and I don't know if it's going to [take] six months or more like six years to get there.”

Several influencer marketers told Ad Age they’ve begun embracing generative AI tools to help them discover potential brand partners, which allow for “faster” and “more semantic searching versus doing very manual searches based on content parameters that are finite,” said Dentsu Creative’s Schabdach. The agency also harnesses generative AI to help automate its influencer vetting process and “understand very quickly what content an individual has shared previously [and] where they may or may not be problematic because of a word they’ve used or an association that they have.” 

But both creators and marketers experimenting with generative AI over the next several months will also need to keep the murky ethics around the technology in mind, said PepsiCo’s Westley. She specifically pointed to the world of virtual influencers and how some companies (such as Levi’s) are creating AI-generated influencers or models of color rather than partnering with actual, human creators of color—“especially with so much discrepancy between what influencers of color [and white creators] are making” from brand deals, she said. 

Still, many advertisers won’t be jumping at the chance to work with virtual influencers anytime soon. “We’re not partnering with any AI influencers at the moment, and we don’t really have any current plans to, “ said Sarah Gerrish, senior director of creator & influencer at Movers+Shakers. “We use it in certain aspects of a bit of our business [and] everyone kind of tapped into it a little bit, but I don't think in the next six months that anything major is going to happen in AI.”

Emphasis on performance

With advertisers’ influencer marketing budgets this year projected to be roughly 15% larger than their 2023 spend, according to eMarketer data, many brands and agencies are going to be particularly concentrated on ensuring their influencer partnerships are generating a meaningful return on investment over the second half of 2024, several influencer marketers agreed. 

“We’re seeing that clients are demanding maturity from how they measure influencer effectiveness,” Razorfish’s Lawrence said. “And so there’s more and more performance-based influencer campaigns where brands are tracking and asking for business impact. They want to see that versus the traditional vanity metrics,” which include likes, comments, follower count and other standard social media statistics. 

Some brands and agencies are instead measuring the performance of influencer campaigns using newer models. Screenshot Media, for instance, recently pivoted to the VIT (visibility, impact and trust) measurement framework, where visibility refers to reach; impact to audience engagement and penetration; and trust to brand recall and brand lift, Jeczmien said. 

The VIT framework is also being adopted by companies such as Unilever, as its head of beauty marketing, Jessica Grigoriou, recently said in an interview with Glossy. “We especially look at that when we have large influencer marketing campaigns,” she said. 

The desire for more concrete performance metrics in influencer marketing is also behind an ongoing expansion of affiliate marketing programs (including influencer storefront platforms such as Walmart Creator, and TikTok Shop’s affiliate program), as it provides advertisers with more direct metrics (such as conversion rates and the number of sales creators’ content drives) “that have a little bit more meat to them than impressions and some of these other, higher-level metrics we tend to use,” Westley said. 

But even as more brands hone in on determining the ROI of their influencer campaigns, they shouldn’t solely fixate on measurement, said Gem Garcin, associate creative director at influencer marketing agency Open Influence. 

“I think it’s scary for brands, when you invest [in influencers], to not just be pounding your [unique selling points] and saying like, ‘This is why this brand is amazing; this is why the product is amazing,’” she said. “But I think brands will start to do a lot more showing versus telling, where [they’re] sort of naturally integrated into the content versus very forced. And in the end, I think they'll get more bang for their buck by allowing it to be constantly seamlessly integrated into engaging content. I think only focusing on sales and revenue in the short term is very shortsighted.”

Marketers consider Gen Alpha in their influencer strategies 

Gen Z is typically the target audience for brands’ influencer marketing efforts, but brands will be increasingly developing influencer strategies aimed at Gen Alpha—those born starting in 2010—over the rest of the year, several influencer marketers told Ad Age. 

“We’re going to start to see a lot more of this in the next 12 months—what are Alphas watching, what are Alphas saying, and how are they influencing the creator space?” said Rojas of consultancy Free Electron. Gen Alpha slang terms such as “sigma,” which refers to someone independent and self-assured, are increasingly popping up across brands’ social content and will likely bleed over into their influencer campaigns—especially as more of them look to Gen Alpha creators as brand partners, she said.

Rojas anticipates a growing number of tween and teen Gen Alpha influencers—such as Salish Matter, a 14-year-old creator who frequently stars in videos posted by her father, YouTube star Jordan Matter—will “come into the fold” in the near future. 

Of course, marketing to an age cohort whose members are largely 13 or younger and working with Gen Alpha creators can be a tricky space to navigate, but advertisers can’t afford to ignore them due to their outsized influence over family spending, Rojas added. Gen Alpha’s spending power is projected to exceed $5.6 trillion by 2025, according to a recent report from consultancy Human8, and they’re shaping their (largely millennial) parents’ purchases of everything from cars to cosmetics more than any previous generation. 

“I remember being at this exact inflection point with Gen Z 12 or 13 years ago,” Rojas said. “There’s always this initial fear of, ‘Oh we can't do that,’  but the brands that are bold and smart understand that this is a generation you can't skip over. They’re going to influence so much spending power in the coming years.”