As global investment in influencer marketing continues to rise, so too does the pressure on marketers to prove its value and to strike the right balance between giving creators freedom and maintaining brand integrity.

For all its upsides, Channel 4 CMO Katie Jackson warns creator marketing risks triggering what she calls a “brand flattening” effect, where brands surrender too much control over how they’re perceived if they don’t take a strategic approach.

“The advent of creator marketing means brands are giving away what they mean to people to creators and influencers,” she says. “It’s a proper wave of brand flattening.”

According to WPP Media, creators are forecast to generate $184.9bn (£137bn) in global revenue in 2025, up 20% year on year. By 2030, that number is expected to more than double to $376.6bn (£277bn).

Meanwhile, creator content is set to overtake professionally produced content in ad revenue this year. This means revenue is moving away from professional studios, media companies and publications towards individual creators and the platforms that host their content.

If you start to see a problem in a specific area, it’s very easy to just turn the performance marketing tap on to offset those losses.

Katie Jackson, Channel 4

“[Brands] are giving away interpretation and definition of who they are to a bunch of folks who have massive followings on social platforms. That’s kind of worrying,” Jackson notes.

That’s why Channel 4, she says, has a responsibility to define who it is and own the narrative. The brand has an established creator marketing approach, having appointed influencer marketing agency The Cast in January to help it engage younger audiences.

“We wanted to find a longer-term strategic partner, rather than just an executional partner when it came to thinking about creators and influencers as part of our overall approach,” explains Jackson.

“Channel 4 means a lot to a lot of people, but we need to remind people what that is by actually saying it ourselves, rather than expecting people to just think they know because we do a couple of things here, there and everywhere, and we make some great shows.”

Performance v brand

Jackson links the brand flattening trend to a broader shift away from long-term brand building and towards short-term performance marketing – a swing that’s created what she describes as a “vacuum” around brand identity.

“You’re not really standing for anything anymore, because you’re not investing in it,” she adds. “A lot of [brands] are spending all their money on performance and still looking at last click [attribution].”

Research from Marketing Week in partnership with Kantar and Google backs this up. Fewer than a fifth (17.3%) of brand marketers believe their business invests sufficiently in building the long-term health of its brands, according to our Language of Effectiveness research.

Meanwhile, just two-fifths (39.2%) of brand marketers currently measure whether their work is delivering business outcomes, with conversion rates (60.8%) the most popular metric used to show effectiveness.

While most marketers acknowledge the value of balancing short-term tactics with long-term brand building, the reality is more complex, with many marketers caught between pressure to deliver each quarter and their own belief in brand.

This echoes true with Jackson, who says the constant need to deliver immediate results often undermines belief in brand investment.

“If you can’t prove short-term return on your marketing investment, an argument that says ‘over the next two to three years, investing in brand will pay back’ won’t cut it,” she adds.

Channel 4: Expansion on social platforms ‘non-cannibalistic’ to growth

More than half (52.9%) of marketers agree their campaigns are skewed too heavily towards performance/sales rather than brand building. However, that’s not the case at Channel 4, where the product (entertainment) provides a built-in “halo effect” that reinforces brand equity.

“We’re lucky, because a lot of our brand equity is derived from the quality of our content and the tone of our content, so that actually makes our job somewhat more straightforward,” she explains.

“The more we invest in marketing activity around specific shows that do a good job for our brand, the more we can prove long-term that brand health metrics will continue to grow.”

Still, Jackson acknowledges the temptation to crank up performance spend during tough economic times. In challenging times, many companies will opt to cut back on marketing budgets or move budget from brand channels to performance channels, as charted in the 25 years of the IPA Bellwether report.

“If you start to see a problem in a specific area, it’s very easy to just turn the performance marketing tap on to offset those losses,” she adds. “But wherever it is appropriate, make sure that you’re reminding people of the fact that this is a drug.”

Jackson traces the rise of this “short-term performance drug” back to Covid, when many brands leaned into direct-to-consumer models to maintain customer contact. Then came the inflation spike, and consumers pulled back on spending, forcing brands to slash budgets and prove near-instant results.

“Therefore, marketing budgets are reduced, because clearly, the top line is reducing. Overall profits are being squeezed. So there is a demand on marketers as a result of that curve to prove short-term impact,” she notes.

Support from the top

Among marketers at businesses that do prioritise brand, 60.3% say this is possible because senior leadership understands the value of brand health to long-term performance, according to Language of Effectiveness data.

This rings true for Jackson, who notes it’s not possible to come up with a “watertight rationale” if the CEO or CFO “fundamentally doesn’t buy into the idea of brand”.

But for those who do have leadership backing, the challenge becomes how to educate and articulate marketing’s value across the organisation. This is the responsibility of the CMO to explain the job of the brand and “bring the organisation on the journey,” Jackson notes.

“Many still don’t understand the basic tenets of why and what and how we put together our plans. And that’s not their fault. That’s on me. That’s on us. We have not done a good enough job of explaining how we approach our strategy and what we’re hoping to achieve, and why it’s important,” she notes.

Her pitch to CFOs? Keep investing in short-term tactics and you’ll need to keep “feeding that beast forever”. Or take a more balanced approach and reduce future dependency.

“If you want to continue to invest in lower funnel, you need to guarantee me that amount of investment forever, because it’s a short-term hit. Whereas actually, what I’m trying to suggest to you is that if we invest in brand now, over time, you won’t need to be spending quite as much in marketing over a five to 10 year period, because we will be doing a better job over a longer period.”