Influencer marketing has ballooned into a $12 billion industry in the US. And yet, running campaigns can still feel unpredictable.
Business Insider asked more than a dozen executives at top brands like Poppi, E.l.f. Beauty, and the National Football League what challenges they face when working with creators. Three common pain points emerged.
First, it’s tough to find relevant talent amid a growing pool of content creators. It can also be tricky to agree on content copy when balancing a brand’s messaging goals with the creator’s own voice. Lastly, campaign performance can be erratic as social-media algorithms become more personalized and harder to crack.
Buying influencer ads, unlike TV spots or display ads, requires a human touch. It’s tough to automate (despite some attempts to do so). Forty-five percent of brands said they relied on manual processes like spreadsheets, emails, and DMs to run creator campaigns, according to a June survey of 209 executives conducted by Northwestern University and LTK.
“We’re dealing with people, and making content is their time and their business, and it’s hard,” said Lindsay Burstein, senior director of integrated social and communications at Keurig Dr Pepper. “We’re always looking for ways to do it faster and in a way that feels more real-time so that we’re keeping up with the pace and the culture of the internet. But also knowing that these are people. They have lives. They have other commitments.”
Read on for more details on the common pain points that emerged from our conversations with marketing executives at 14 brands. These execs were recently featured in Business Insider’s 2026 list of innovative influencer marketers.
1. It’s hard to find the right creators for your brand when there are so many
- “The landscape of the influencer, creator, and affiliate model is changing every single day, and new people are coming in and identifying as an influencer,” said Patrick O’Keefe, chief integrated marketing officer at E.l.f. Beauty. “I would love a model or a plan or a program that would capture all the new people coming into this space in real time.”
- “We’ve just seen this space get so much more saturated than it ever has before,” said Kiara Kempski, vice president of global consumer marketing at The Knot Worldwide. “The game of scale is totally changing.”
2. Breaking through the noise
- “The feed is so loud right now,” said Anna Doré, Rothy’s vice president of brand and communications. “In this AI-driven algorithm world where we’re all being served the same content on the feed, we, more than ever, are going to be looking to great tastemakers.”
- “There is a ton of content that’s just content for content’s sake that’s out there,” said Ian Trombetta, the National Football League’s senior vice president of global social, creator, and content marketing. “The creative bar is going up in order for us to drive that organic reach and engagement.”
- Ninety to 95% of the content that we see in our own feeds is not from accounts we follow, Keurig Dr Pepper’s Lindsay Burstein said. “Followership matters a little, but not nearly as much as I think it once did because the algorithms just don’t favor it the way that we used to.”
3. Agreeing on content that works for both a brand and a creator’s audience
- Some brands “are a little bit too prescriptive and don’t allow the creators to do what it is that they really are good at, which is understanding their audience and how to create great content and formats that work for their audience,” the NFL’s Trombetta said.
- “Overbriefed” projects are “not the business that we want to be in,” said Sophia Sesto, Poppi’s vice president of culture. “We want to take these opportunities and work with the talent to make something special” and “lean into their personalities and let them carry the brand forward with us.”
- “For a long time, the industry treated creators as ad placements,” said Samim Sadrzadeh, director of creator content and partnerships at Disney. “We think that significantly undersells the value they actually bring.”
- “We start from a pretty simple place, which is creators know their audiences better than we ever will,” said Stacy Martinet, Adobe’s chief content and creative officer. “The most effective approach has been to treat creators as creative partners, first and foremost.”
