The Business of Fashion’s case study on the new world of influencer marketing opens with a formula most of us know by heart: find a creator with hundreds of thousands of followers, send a detailed brief with must-hit talking points, go back and forth, approve, pay, count the likes (Business of Fashion).
That formula is over. Here is what replaced it, and what it means for a brand launching in the German-speaking market.
Reach is no longer enough
Influencer marketing is still one of the best ways to get a brand in front of new people. But it is now judged on conversion as much as awareness. One talent manager in the case study calls the combination of both the holy grail, and the brands featured, from Tarte to Free People and DeMellier, plan for it.
In practice, that means every campaign starts with a goal written as one sentence, and the creators, platforms and metrics follow from it. A launch needs reach and recognition. A hero product needs consideration. A code needs a reason to act now. When a brief asks for all three at once, the report later looks confused.
The money follows the eyeballs
The shift is structural. Most of the time people spend with media is now online, and much of it is creator content. WPP forecast that social media advertising, creators included, would reach $413 billion in 2025 and overtake traditional media. Tools such as ShopMy and AI matchmaking platforms have made creator programmes easier to run and easier to measure.
For brands, that raises the bar. When everyone can buy reach, what sets a campaign apart is the talent sourcing, the brief and the follow-through.
Discipline, in four habits
What I see working, in the case study and in my own campaigns:
- Gifting with intent. Seeding is a talent sourcing tool, not a giveaway. It shows who likes the product before anyone is paid. I run it this way in influencer marketing.
- Affiliate and paid, side by side. Paid posts buy a moment. Affiliate links keep the best creators motivated after it.
- Creators earlier in the process. The strongest programmes bring creators into product and campaign ideas, not only the last step.
- One posting window. Many posts in a few days read as a launch. The same posts spread over a month read as noise. For Sol de Janeiro, 25 posts in one window reached 5.97M people.
Creators push back, and they are right to
The other change is on the creator side. Creators know that a feed full of ads loses their community’s trust, and no single fee is worth that. They push back on scripts and ask for creative room.
I write briefs that fit on one page: goal, key message, approved claims, must-haves, no-gos, labelling, rights and dates. Everything else is the creator’s voice. It is the difference between content that looks like an ad and content that works like a recommendation.
What it means for your brand
Discipline is not less creativity. It is creativity with a reason behind every choice: why this creator, why now, why this format, and how we will know it worked. That is the work I take on for brands, from the first shortlist to the report. More on how I run it is on influencer marketing.
Source: “From Hype to Discipline: The New World of Influencer Marketing”, case study, The Business of Fashion, 2026.
