Predictions for 2025: Influencer and Creator Marketing ~via Jason Brandt
I met Jason Brandt in 2011 when I did some work with Zemoga, one of my most fun engagements due to Jason and his team, and the work they included me with Cafe de Colombia in Colombia. Thanks for including me in the post Jason. /Ted
2025 will no doubt be another year of change, innovation and experimentation for markets looking to new platforms, data management tools, and yes, AI, to grow.
For any brand to effectively compete, watching tech from the sidelines is no longer an option. Ensuring fit-for-use platforms are well researched, trained and implemented within a culture willing to leverage the investments is vital for brand growth.
Influencer and social media marketing is no exception. Still growing at +15% a YOY, more brands are looking to social media content creators to engage younger audiences who prefer self-selected, peer-to-peer storytelling, recommendations and advice.
Given that, please see our 2025 Influencer marketing predictions we believe will rise over the next 12 months and beyond. Enjoy!
Influencers as Agency Creative Directors and Consultants
Historically, traditional creative agencies have preferred keeping creative teams “in-house.” However, as budgets tighten and agencies adjust their compensation and response time models, they will explore new ways to collaborate with non-agency creative voices.
Sharing briefs directly with social media creators is just the beginning. We will see creators being staffed as agency resources — and, in some cases — stepping into roles as creative department leads.
Progress has been slow, with agencies assembling hubs of talent that include a writer, a graphic/visual designer, a producer, and a media/data analyst. However, these hubs have often been limited in scope, with their content relegated to smaller, more disposable assets.
This dynamic will shift as creators are hired as senior creative leaders within agencies, bringing fresh perspectives, greater influence, and expanded creative power.
Longer-Term Brand Relationships: From Campaigns to Always-On Collaborations
As influencer marketing evolves, brands will move beyond one-off campaigns toward always-on partnerships with influencers. This model enables long-term brand storytelling, where creators become embedded in the brand’s identity as trusted ambassadors.
Key Elements of Longer-Term Relationships:
Ambassador Programs: Influencers sign annual or multi-year contracts, becoming recognizable brand faces in multiple campaigns, product launches, and industry events. Example: adidas ongoing partnership with creators like BadBunnyApparel and Beyoncé’s ivypark
Serialized Content Series: Creators produce recurring, story-driven content that ties back to brand values. Example: MrBeast long-term partnerships with brands like Honey and Shopify .
Experiential Content Integration: Influencers co-host live events, webinars, or immersive brand activations, blending digital content with real-life interaction. Example: Glossier, Inc. pop-up stores featuring influencer meet-and-greets.
Media Buys Against Influencer Content for Clearer ROI: Blending Authenticity with Data-Driven Results
As influencer marketing budgets grow, brands will increasingly use media buys to amplify influencer-created content, ensuring greater reach, enhanced targeting, and clearer ROI tracking. This approach merges the emotional storytelling of influencer content with the data precision of traditional paid media campaigns. Examples:
Boosted Influencer Content: Brands will pay to boost influencers’ organic posts across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, ensuring reach beyond the creator’s existing followers. Example: Fashion brands boosting TikTok influencer content during major shopping events like Black Friday for maximum sales conversions.
Whitelisting Campaigns: Brands gain permission to run ads directly from influencers’ accounts through whitelisting. This keeps campaigns authentic while providing access to robust ad tools, such as custom targeting and lookalike audiences. Example: L'Oréal using top beauty creators' accounts to run sponsored campaigns that blend seamlessly into followers’ feeds.
Creator-Led Performance Campaigns: Media buys can be linked to key performance indicators like conversions, app installs, and click-through rates, ensuring campaigns drive measurable outcomes rather than just brand awareness. Example: Fitness apps like MyFitnessPal partnering with influencers to drive downloads through in-feed and Stories ads.
Integrated Paid Partnerships on Emerging Platforms: Meta’s Threads is expected to play a new role in paid influencer marketing as the platform evolves. By integrating Threads into an all-Meta strategy (including Instagram , Meta Facebook, and Messenger), brands can run cohesive campaigns supported by both paid and organic content streams.
The Rise of the Product Co-Creator
Influencers co-create products with brands and co-own marketing and sales operations. Compensation will shift from “pay per post” to a dual ownership model. This model will extend into a new form of affiliate marketing, where influencers manage “stores” for partner brands and earn commissions on all sales generated from their audiences.
The terms of the model will range from co-branding to co-creating special product versions tailored to specific audience segments. This approach helps brands struggling to connect with certain demographics, serving as a “shortcut” to consumers’ hearts — and wallets.
Examples of this trend include Addison Rae’s Item Beauty, Emma Chamberlain’s Chamberlain Coffee, Charli and Dixie D’Amelio’s Social Tourist (which ended in 2023), and Tabitha Brown’s partnership with McCormick spices, which dates back to 2019 but remains a standout early example of this model.
Social Commerce: The Next Wave of E-Commerce
The rise of TikTok Shop has transformed social commerce from a trend to a central sales driver. With $100 million in U.S. sales on Black Friday 2024 and influencers generating 20% of Cyber Monday’s e-commerce revenue, the platform has set a new industry standard, forcing major retailers and emerging players to adapt.
Amazon Live has partnered with TalkShopLive to integrate live shopping events featuring celebrities like Martha Stewart and Jennifer Hudson, while Walmart has expanded its partnership with talkshoplive® , embedding shoppable content into its platform for a seamless experience.
Emerging companies like Orca, a social commerce platform producing shoppable livestreams, paid content, and affiliate-driven campaigns, help brands maintain control over branding, customer engagement, and data while leveraging influencer-led events and interactive videos.
Looking ahead, with a potential TikTok shutdown on the horizon, expect a surge in brand-operated social commerce platforms and deeper integrations with alternative social live-streaming services as brands and creators vie for consumer attention.
The Rise of Influencers as 1:1 Life Consultants
There are countless creators covering health, fashion, finances, food, travel — you name it. In 2025, we’ll see a new monetization model where creators will offer their services directly to their audiences as life consultants, providing one-on-one help in their areas of expertise.
This evolution makes perfect sense and can scale based on income levels. Examples could be social media tastemakers to help revamp our wardrobes, re-work our home, add to cooking skills, improve our resumes / marketability or guide us in starting a business or side hustle? You name it.
We’ll also see the rise of consumer-driven “classified” marketplaces where individuals seeking personalized life assistance can post ads looking for influencers as service providers.
We already see this with the popularity of apps like Intro, where you can book time with your favorite business mogul. Some other notable life consultants leading this trend include @zebthe3rd @mindset.w.mads, @thewardrobeconsultant, @alyssanobriga, @morganbullock_, and @tomassvitorka.
@The Rise of BTB
Influencer marketing has primarily been a BTC (business-to-consumer) medium. In 2025, we will finally see BTB (business-to-business) influencer marketing emerge as a viable option for companies looking to influencers to tell their brand stories.
BTB creators can share tips, insights, and personal experiences for customer nurture programs, lead generation, or pure brand awareness. What makes them valuable is their credibility and ability to make complex, jargon-filled industry content relatable and contextual for any sector — from financial services to technology, staffing, and beyond.
So, why hasn’t this become more common? Primarily because BTC-focused social platforms haven’t traditionally been spaces where businesses engage. That will change in 2025.
The platform to watch out for here is LinkedIn where agencies like LEADERS @creatorauthority @creatormatch are already hyper focusing. Some creators to watch in this space include @dustinhowes , @JasonFalls, Ted Rubin , and @Jacquelineburns.
Brands Add More UGC and EGC Talent to Their Creator Stable
Unlike social media content creators, UGC (user-generated content) creators produce content and “ads” for brands to use in their marketing without promoting the content on their own channels. This means real people — who may not yet have significant social media followings — create content for brands in an authentic, sometimes rough-around-the-edges style.
This approach opens a new pathway for brands that value real, relatable content but want more control over the final output. It allows brands to produce content more cost-effectively while delivering messages grounded in the voices of regional customers seeking fresh, relatable faces.
EGC (employee-generated content) follows the same concept but uses employees as the content source. While potentially more challenging to execute, EGC can be a powerful way for lesser known, misunderstood, or struggling brands to present a more relatable and authentic personality from within the company. This strategy also allows companies to reward employees for representing their brand with pride.
One independent brand that has done this well is Beachwaver Co. , whose founder, @SarahPotempa, and her team host their own TikTok Shop Lives and regularly post behind-the-scenes content about the brand.
Hollywood 2.0: Blurring of Hollywood and “Socialwood”
We will see the lines between Hollywood and the creator economy continue to blur. With ongoing writers' strikes, tired IP projects, and the rising cost of subscription-based “elite TV” channels, the dark horse of the entertainment industry could very well be social media content creators.
This trend manifests in two key ways: IP migrating from social media to traditional platforms or traditional media leveraging social platforms to drive awareness through unconventional methods.
Beyond the obvious example of MrBeast and his Beast Games partnership with Amazon, one of the standout hits of 2024 was The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. What started as a drama-filled storyline on TikTok became the top-rated show on Hulu, highlighting the growing potential for viral social content to evolve into major TV productions.
Another example is actor Brian Jordan Alvarez, who used a TikTok dance trend to galvanize views for his FX series, The English Teacher. His creative social media push moved the show from number 14 to number 11 on Hulu’s top rankings.
As fewer and fewer people opt for the traditional theater experience and more turn to social media as an original entertainment source, creators are finding ways to write compelling stories and use technology to produce high-quality content that rivals Hollywood’s output.
Dana and the Wolf exemplify this trend as a creative duo releasing near-weekly web series on YouTube, which they later edit into shorter chapters for Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms. Their content is funny, smart, offbeat, charming, and refreshingly honest — created by a team that answers only to themselves. Other notable examples include Zach King, Michelle Khare, and Rhett and Link.
Creators Repackaging the News: The Rise of Social Media-Driven Journalism
This trend has been emerging gradually, but we will soon see a more explicit blending of social media content creators taking hard news and “repackaging” it for their audiences, who prefer receiving news through social channels rather than traditional outlets.
A recent Pew Research Center study reports that 57% of U.S. adults get news from social media. This varies by platform: 52% of TikTok users get their news from the app (up 10 points from 2023), while 59% of X users turn to the platform for news.
Not only will more influencers begin fronting hard news, but conventional journalists will spend more time on social channels building their audiences and communities. We will also see journalists and social media creators collaborating to communicate stories effectively on each platform while ensuring story credibility.
Synthetic Influencers
Referring to AI’s five stages of development (1. Chatbots, 2. Reasoners, 3. Agents, 4. Innovators, 5. Organizations), the industry is barely out of stage one. However, with the recent release of OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, signaling an entry into stage two, perspectives on AI influencers are shifting. Previously, AI influencers seemed like little more than chatbots with faces — at least for the time being. But with o1, the potential appears more promising.
Synthetics can be valuable in customer service, personalizing chatbots, supporting sales presentations, producing videos, and even fronting products — as long as it’s clear they are synthetic talent. This use case is expected to grow throughout 2025. Additionally, there’s growing optimism about synthetics playing a larger role in brand strategy.
Lifelike influencer @lilmiquela has 2.5 million Instagram followers, works with brands like Prada Group, PACSUN, and Samsung Electronics America, and has a human follower base of over 70%. In contrast, more illustrated creations like @imma.gram may attract brands targeting younger audiences.
Compared to the 400 million influencers worldwide, synthetic creations remain a minority. For now, brand experimentation will likely be limited to products where synthetic talent feels more natural — such as fashion and entertainment rather than food or travel. Other use cases to watch include using synthetic talent for pitches, A/B testing, or enabling passive income for influencers who approve their likeness for use.
This dynamic will likely shift toward more mass adoption as creating synthetic influencers becomes easier and consumers grow more open to following them. Meanwhile, real-life talent and creators will become increasingly valuable, setting high-end, authentic brands apart from the fast-fashion and fast-food-style players in the industry.
Alternative Platforms to Experiment with Marketing
With rising competition and shifting algorithms on established social media platforms, brands will explore alternative platforms to diversify their marketing strategies. These include:
Niche Communities: Platforms like Discord, Reddit for Business (Subreddits), Mighty Networks, and Geneva offer spaces where brands can build targeted, highly engaged communities around specific interests such as tech, gaming, wellness, or fashion.
Decentralized Networks: Social platforms like Bluesky Social and Mastodon provide decentralized environments where creators own their content and brands can engage more directly with audiences.
AI-Powered Search Advertising: As AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Bard, and Perplexity reshape search habits, brands could advertise within AI-generated search results or recommendations, opening up a new frontier for marketing visibility.
The Private Web: Messaging-Based Communities
As consumers grow wary of public social media sharing, The Private Web — consisting of private messaging groups and DMs — will become a key marketing channel. Platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram , and direct messages on Instagram for Business or X provide intimate, trusted environments where influencers and brands can build deeper, more personal relationships with their communities.
Brands will explore creative ways to integrate marketing into these closed, permission-based spaces through direct brand announcements, exclusive offers, and even personalized customer service. This shift reflects the growing desire for personal, less-public online experiences.
Going IRL: The Comeback of Experiential Events
As digital marketing saturation continues, brands will increasingly turn to eventized programming — real-world experiences designed around cultural moments — to break through the noise and create lasting emotional connections. These events will blend physical and digital elements, offering immersive brand storytelling that resonates both online and offline.
From branded pop-ups and live activations to influencer-hosted experiences, eventized programming will help brands tap into cultural conversations in real time. Think experiential product launches tied to major cultural events, festival sponsorships, or creator-led workshops that generate buzz-worthy, shareable content. Transparent data collection will take place on the ground, enabling brands to surprise and delight attendees with post-event content from influencers, including personalized sales messages and exclusive offers.
Conclusion
Please reach out to Shira Lazar What's Trending and/or Jason Brandt with any questions or if you want to discuss further.
