Influencer marketing is attracting more money, more creators and more attention from major brands. The infrastructure behind those campaigns, though, isn’t expanding at quite the same speed.
A new Kolsquare Future of Influencer Marketing report shows that 89% of brands and agencies expect to increase their influencer marketing budgets over the next 12 months. Meanwhile, 84% already use AI or automation somewhere in their influencer operations.
Yet influencer marketing remains disconnected from wider marketing strategies at many organizations. That gap is becoming harder to ignore as brands manage larger creator rosters and put significantly more money into the channel.
Kolsquare developed the research with B2B International, surveying 1,123 marketing decision-makers across seven European markets during May and June 2026.
Influencer Marketing Spending Keeps Accelerating
Brands aren’t showing much appetite for slowing their creator investment. The report found that 89% of brands and agencies intend to increase influencer marketing spending during the coming year. That figure has climbed sharply from 75% in 2025 and 54% in 2024, showing how quickly creator partnerships have moved deeper into mainstream marketing budgets.
The amount companies spend is also rising. Around 60% of surveyed organizations now invest more than €100,000 annually in influencer marketing, while 36% spend more than €200,000. Larger businesses are pushing those totals higher. Companies with at least 500 employees report median annual spending of €312,000, while businesses employing more than 1,000 people reach €367,000.
That kind of spending changes the nature of influencer marketing. Creator campaigns are no longer small experiments sitting on the edge of a brand’s media plan. For many companies, they have become substantial marketing investments that require stronger systems, clearer accountability and better performance tracking.
Brands Are Managing Much Larger Creator Networks
Higher budgets are bringing bigger creator rosters with them. Kolsquare found that 85% of brands and agencies increased the number of influencers they worked with over the previous year. Around 37% now manage relationships with at least 100 influencers, compared with only 18% in 2024.
Working with that many creators creates an operational challenge that can easily get overlooked. Every partnership can involve contracts, campaign briefs, approvals, content deadlines, usage rights, payments and performance reporting. Multiply those requirements across dozens or hundreds of creators and a relatively simple influencer campaign quickly starts looking like a large marketing operation.
This is where the infrastructure question becomes important. Brands can expand their creator networks quickly, but their internal processes don’t necessarily scale at the same pace. Teams that once managed a handful of partnerships through spreadsheets and direct messages may suddenly find themselves coordinating campaigns across multiple platforms, markets and departments.
Measurement Remains a Problem for Influencer Marketing
More spending has not completely solved influencer marketing’s long-running measurement problem. Engagement rate remains the most commonly used KPI among respondents at 37%, followed by views at 34%. Those metrics are easy to access, but they don’t always explain what a creator campaign actually contributed to the business.
Confidence in those measurements varies considerably. Around 41% of marketers say they are extremely confident in measuring engagement rates. Confidence reaches 56% for views and 50.6% for impressions, where platforms typically provide straightforward data.
Things become murkier once marketers move beyond basic platform metrics. Only 22.5% report the same confidence in measuring sentiment, while confidence around Earned Media Value drops to 21%. Connecting creator content with brand perception, purchasing behavior or longer-term customer value remains much harder than counting views.
That measurement gap becomes more significant as influencer marketing budgets increase. A €20,000 experiment can sometimes survive with basic engagement reporting. A six-figure annual creator program will face much tougher questions about what that investment actually produced.
Influencer Marketing Still Operates Separately From Wider Campaigns
Influencer marketing has largely moved beyond its experimental phase. According to the report, 79% of brands now consider the channel either a core growth driver or an important supporting part of their marketing strategy. Only 3% continue to describe influencer marketing as experimental.
The organizational structure behind those campaigns tells a different story. Roughly three in ten brands still run influencer marketing as a stand-alone activity. At the same time, the share of organizations connecting influencer activity with broader integrated brand campaigns fell from 45% in 2025 to 32% in 2026.
That creates an unusual situation. Influencer marketing is becoming more financially important while remaining separated from other marketing functions inside many businesses. Creator teams may be generating content and audience engagement without fully connecting that work to paid media, affiliate marketing, e-commerce, customer acquisition or broader brand campaigns.
For brands increasing their creator budgets, that separation could become difficult to maintain. Bigger investments naturally bring more pressure to show how influencer activity contributes to the rest of the marketing operation.
AI Is Becoming Part of Creator Campaign Management
Technology adoption is moving quickly as marketers search for ways to handle the growing workload. Around 84% of surveyed organizations now use AI or automation somewhere in their influencer marketing operations, suggesting that these tools are already becoming normal parts of campaign management.
Audience analysis and fraud detection are among the most common AI applications, with 62% of respondents using the technology for those tasks. Content analysis follows at 59%. Predictive applications remain much less common, however, with adoption sitting at only 14%.
Dedicated influencer marketing platforms are also spreading rapidly. Platform adoption increased from 39% in 2025 to 65% in 2026. That jump reflects a practical problem facing creator teams: spreadsheets, emails and individual social media dashboards become difficult to manage once brands start working with large numbers of creators at the same time.
AI can reduce some of that administrative pressure. It can help teams analyze audiences, identify suspicious activity, review content and organize campaign data. Still, automation doesn’t automatically create a well-connected influencer strategy. Brands need processes around the technology for it to make a meaningful difference.
Bigger Influencer Budgets Are Exposing Infrastructure Gaps
The creator economy spent years convincing marketers that influencer campaigns deserved serious budgets. That argument is becoming less important because the money is already arriving. The bigger challenge now involves building the operational systems needed to manage it.
Brands increasingly need influencer marketing infrastructure that connects creator campaigns with paid advertising, affiliate programs, e-commerce, brand strategy and performance measurement. They also need clearer responsibilities across marketing, finance, legal and other teams involved in creator partnerships.
Rapid spending growth can actually make weaknesses inside those systems more visible. A fragmented workflow may work when a company manages ten creators. It becomes far more difficult when that same business starts coordinating 100 creators across several campaigns.
The next stage of influencer marketing growth, then, may be less about convincing companies to spend and more about helping them manage what they’re already spending.
Brands Are Raising Their Expectations for Creators
Brands are also becoming more selective about what they expect from creator partners. Reach, engagement and audience demographics still matter, but companies are increasingly looking at values, conduct and professional standards when deciding who represents them.
According to the report, 34% of brands now expect creators to take a stand against bullying, an increase of nine percentage points. Environmental awareness requirements also increased, climbing from 17% to 30%.
Formal training is starting to appear in creator selection criteria as well. Around 29% of marketers require a Responsible Influence certificate or similar training where such programs are available. That signals a gradual professionalization of influencer marketing as brands put more structure around who they work with and how those partnerships operate.
For creators, this could make professionalism increasingly valuable. A large following may open the door, but brands managing substantial budgets also have to think about reputation, compliance, audience quality and potential brand safety issues.
The Creator Economy Is Entering an Infrastructure Phase
Influencer marketing isn’t fighting for a place inside major marketing budgets anymore. For many brands, it already has one. The challenge now is making sure the systems behind those investments can handle the scale.
Better measurement will be part of that shift. So will stronger campaign integration, creator relationship management, automation and coordination between internal teams. Brands working with hundreds of influencers simply need more structure than companies running occasional sponsored posts.
AI and dedicated influencer platforms can make the workload easier, but technology only addresses part of the problem. Companies still need to decide how creator marketing connects with the rest of their business and which metrics actually matter.
The direction is fairly clear. Influencer marketing investment continues to climb. Now the infrastructure supporting that investment has to catch up.
Sources
Net Influencer — Influencer Marketing Investment Is Outpacing the Infrastructure Built to Manage It, Report Finds
https://www.netinfluencer.com/influencer-marketing-investment-is-outpacing-the-infrastructure-built-to-manage-it-report-finds/
Kolsquare — Influencer Marketing Resources and Research
https://www.kolsquare.com/
