By Shea Brennan, Insight Executive
2025 is drawing to a close, and what a year it has been in Media. Even as murmurs of mergers and anticipation for AI dominated the headlines, one subject that has permeated throughout the industry this year is influencer marketing. From marketing giants like Unilever committing huge swathes of their budgets to the field, through to some of this year’s most awarded campaigns being influencer-first, this is certainly an exciting time for the relationship between influencers and the media plan.
As an emerging channel growing at unprecedented scale, the bank of evidence on the effectiveness of influencer campaigns is finally starting to catch up with investment. A landmark paper from Felipe Thomaz of the Saïd Business School, How Humans Decide has outlined the propensity for different media to influence at different stages of the purchase journey, with paid media most effective during the priming stage before owned, shared and earned touchpoints become most impactful once a consumer is actively in the market.
Among the most intriguing findings of the research is the variation in consumer behaviour: across the population, receptivity to media sits on a spectrum, but clusters at the extremes, with 23% being ‘unreceptive’ to nearly all media and, at the other end, 10% of consumers susceptible to a wide array of messages. This shows that, while large databanks like that used by the Oxford scholars can offer clues to marketing success at an aggregated level, brands should always pay close attention to their category and its consumers. Tools like the7stars’ Gravity Planning framework offer an effective way to understand the distribution of category shoppers across the active, primed, dismissive and inert stages of purchase.
Despite these developments, the ability to accurately measure whether an influencer campaign has been successful is still in its infancy. While traditional media has long been measured, and the tools to do so honed and perfected, many still rely on a disjointed array of metrics such as engagement and comments to determine the success of a content-creator-led ad. This creates a world in which many advertisers are stepping into the unknown; as Kantar’s Jane Ostler aptly describes, ‘50% spend on influencers [means] 50% spend over which you don’t have complete control’.
To tackle this challenge, the7stars has developed the Influencer Affinity Score framework. Working in collaboration with our in-house creative agency, Supernova, the7stars conducted proprietary research to understand what makes an influencer campaign successful. The findings revealed that the best content creator partnerships are those which are both culturally relevant and feature influencers who are aligned with the brands they promote. Such influencers are those which are seen as authentic, credible within the category, and relatable to the audience.
While not a catch-all measurement solution, Influencer Affinity Score goes beyond platform engagement metrics to provide a clearer picture of how a campaign resonated with audiences and its impact on the brand health funnel. This, combined with sales uplift analysis and marketing-mix modelling, can help bolster the marketing toolkit and offer indicators for future adjustments.
Like any channel, measuring success in influencer marketing is complex, but with the amount of money being invested in content creators rising steeply, it is paramount that brands continue to invest in understanding whether their advertising budgets are being spent wisely.
