In 2023, more brands than ever incorporated influencers in their marketing strategies. And as influencer marketing has become an increasingly essential strategy for reaching young consumers spending hours each day with creators’ social content, a growing number of brands have turned to Influential to help them leverage the power of creators in their own campaigns. 

The influencer marketing agency celebrated its 10th anniversary with a year of record growth— jumping from $100 million revenue in 2022 to an estimated $150 million in 2023—and executing a series of innovative influencer-led campaigns. Perhaps its most significant accomplishment of 2023 was its takeover of the beach spot at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity previously held by X, formerly Twitter, which reflects influencers’ growing role in the advertising world.

“We wanted to be the first large company in the influencer space to spend the time and effort to get not just creators to the Croisette, but also to get CMOs, creators and celebrities into the same location,” said Ryan Detert, CEO of Influential. And that the agency did, uniting chief marketing officers from brands such as Coca-Cola, e.l.f. Beauty and Mastercard with influencers including Paris Hilton and Adam Waheed in Influential’s prime waterfront space at Cannes. 

Influential last year helmed dozens of influencer-led campaigns and initiatives for clients including Amazon, McDonald’s, Hilton and Walt Disney Co., among a slew of other brands. For Hilton, the agency partnered with TBWA\Chiat\Day New York to produce the first-ever 10-minute-long TikTok video from a brand, casting seven influencers—including Chris Olsen, Boman Martinez-Reid and Paris Hilton herself—to appear in the lengthy ad and lampshade its drawn-out duration.

While the video’s 10-minute span may be unusual for a short-form platform like TikTok, Hilton’s spoofy ad stopped many curious TikTok users in their scroll. Within 48 hours of being posted, the video racked up nearly 4 million views and more than 200,000 engagements. It now sits at almost 36 million views and more than 616,000 engagements, which include likes, comments, shares and saves.

The Hilton ad wasn’t Influential’s only venture into innovative influencer-led marketing formats. Just two days after Meta’s Threads launch in July, the agency brokered the nascent platform’s first brand deal—a Hulu-sponsored post from comedy creator Adam Rose. And toward the end of 2023, Influential leveraged its role as one of the first TikTok Shop partners in the U.S. to guide brand and creator exploration of the new commerce platform. For Coca-Cola, those initial experiments with Influential led to the creation of its TikTok-Shop-exclusive “Happy Tears” soda. 

Influential also teamed with McDonald’s on its “National Menu Hacks” campaign designed to capitalize on TikTok’s love of “menu hacks”—custom orders not found on a restaurant’s menu. The agency recruited five creators to showcase a series of featured menu hacks and encourage viewers to share videos of their own custom McDonald’s orders using the hashtag #McDonaldsHacks. That campaign generated 1.4 million engagements, and the hashtag received 9.6 billion views during the influencer push’s 30-day span, according to Influential.

The McDonald’s campaign also highlighted Influential’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, as each of the five creators who kicked off the menu hacks challenge was diverse, Detert said. By the end of 2023, more than 90% of the agency’s influencer campaigns included at least one creator from a diverse background, and more than half (57%) of Influential’s campaigns starred a majority of diverse creators. 

“In 2023, we tended to see more and more spend from brands [on diverse influencers],” Detert said. “And everybody knows now that it’s beyond just doing what’s right—it really is better for business. We’re seeing better metrics from diverse creators than non-diverse ones.”