Influencer marketing didn’t begin, as most people might imagine, when social media grew popular and made stars of regular people like your neighbour. The truth is that it began way back in 105 BCE when gladiators – some rising to celebrity status – promoted or endorsed products like wine and oil. Of course, the term influencer, as we now know it within the cultural and business sphere, only came into being in the early 2010s.

And the practice, naturally, has changed since ancient Rome, and it continues to do so. Making companies, just like those wine and oil producers, have to keep up with its evolution in order to stay connected to an often fickle audience.

We Are Social, an international creative agency with an emphasis on social, released a new report titled Future of Influence: The trends shaping the future of influencer marketing. The report is a culmination of interviews with experts, academics, media, creative technologists, influencers and content creators across fashion, lifestyle, music and sport in Canada and the rest of the firm’s global network. The initiative yielded insights from three areas of focus: culture, technology and the creator economy.

Content creators, traditionally, create their content in isolation. All they need is a smartphone, good lighting and a product to unbox, test and talk the audience through. According to the report, working in isolation, along with a progressively saturated sector, has led to influencer burnout (between 61% and 90%), while 71% have considered quitting. And so, creators have started to come together to create in groups – i.e. hype houses, metalabels, media collectives – ultimately sharing resources and supporting one another. Fresh thinking comes with collaborations and alignments that also strengthen the creators’ impact in a crowded space.

“It’s really hard to break through the noise, so we’re seeing creators, and even celebrities, show up on each other’s feeds, promoting each other’s products and content,” explains Kathleen McGoldrick, director of influence at We Are Social Toronto. “Brands and marketers should anticipate this to continue.” Not only should they expect more of this but they’ll also begin competing with creator-led brands or co-branded products.

With emerging technologies like AI, there’s been concern about how it will impact the ability influencers have to, well, influence. Can artificial intelligence create content that is better, faster? The answer to that question doesn’t actually matter to content creators. They know they need to coexist and seem to be moving one step ahead, adopting multiple new technologies. Think Web 3.0.

“Brands and creators are going to start to get a lot more creative and a lot savvier. It’s not just going to be the everyday social post, it’s going to lean in a lot more into those technologies with a focus on how their content can live longer,” McGoldrick says. 

Social media content creators have also begun to come up with different ways to cater to their followers. For example, influencers are slowly moving away from endorsements and launching their own brands and products, such as a podcast or or their own merch, ultimately gaining more control over their audience and their space in the market.

“The biggest shift is the way that influencers and creators are diversifying their revenue streams,” says McGoldrick, “they’ve learned quite a bit from the previous companies that they’ve worked with, and are tapping into their own entrepreneurial mindset. They’re working alongside brands a lot more creatively. Doing things like longer partnerships or capsule collections or limited editions with them.” This doesn’t mean that creators won’t pursue the customary brand collaborations on social media, they just have the potential to become more expensive and more selective. For brands and marketers, this will also mean the concept of co-creation will become more and more common.