By C200 member Jennifer Quigley-Jones
Influencer marketing is a core media channel and a cross-functional discipline touching brand, performance, PR, and product. In 2025, the global Influencer Marketing market was estimated to exceed $32 billion, representing 35% year-over-year growth. With that expansion comes a new pressure: how do leaders scale Influencer Marketing and drive better results across the businesses they serve?
For many leaders, the instinct is to ask their teams to use tech or the company-approved AI tool and hope it improves the workflow.
But the reality is that Influencer Marketing breaks many traditional operating models. It is one of the few channels that combines media, partnerships, content production, community management, and cultural interpretation. It’s far more nuanced than a simple LLM prompt.
From Creative Instinct To Structured Intelligence
One of the changes happening inside high-performing teams is making creative processes more repeatable. AI is helping turn what was once a highly manual and inconsistent process into something more scalable and repeatable. Brief writing is a clear example. I’ve seen teams spend days, or even weeks, aligning on messaging and direction. Now, strong first drafts can be developed far more quickly by drawing on audience insights, past campaign learnings, and established brand tone.
The impact is tangible. Many teams have found that using AI in the briefing process improves content quality and saves significant time.
But what makes this effective is the input. One of the biggest missed opportunities I see is not building internal “story banks” tailored to creator verticals that effectively codify brand narratives, so AI outputs are grounded in something real. Without that, AI risks producing content that is polished but generic.
AI raises the baseline, but the true takeaway here is that organizations in any industry can aid scale by codifying institutional knowledge.
The Search For Cultural Signal, Not Just Creators
Briefing creators is becoming more efficient, yet discovery remains complex. Most discovery systems still struggle to identify cultural nuance. Many operate on a relatively blunt model, which includes keywords, demographics, and follower counts. But that’s not how marketing works when it comes to cultural relevance. Brands are no longer looking for creators who simply fit a category; they’re looking for creators who feel right.
“There’s a real need for tools that allow searching by aesthetic, not just keywords,” Sarah Adam, Head of Partnerships & AI, Wix noted. That gap is becoming more apparent as Influencer Marketing matures.
Culturally attuned brands are starting to bridge it manually by pulling insights from platforms like Reddit or YouTube to understand emerging conversations and subcultures. Others are experimenting with AI to synthesize these signals, though access to data remains inconsistent.
For now, discovery sits in an in-between state: partially automated, but still heavily reliant on human intuition to source cultural tastemakers with deep niche authority.
Building Bespoke Solutions
As Influencer Marketing grows across departments, one of the biggest challenges becomes coordination. Multiple teams, overlapping campaigns, and duplicated outreach can erode brand perception. In an industry where relationships are the foundation of value creation, duplicate outreach sends the opposite message. It signals a transactional rather than intentional approach to creator partnerships, undermining the authenticity brands seek to build. Creators are quick to recognize when outreach is generic, leaving them feeling like interchangeable names on a list rather than carefully selected collaborators. Over time, creators may become less willing to work with the brand.
To combat this, one marketing team built an internal tool that integrated into their workflow via a Chrome extension and project management system. This is where leaders should pay attention. Not every investment needs to be transformative. Often, the greatest gains come from identifying where time, effort, or clarity is being lost and fixing it precisely.
AI Limitations
For all the progress in AI, Influencer Marketing remains fundamentally human, and that creates natural limits. Brand safety is one of the grey areas. While AI should assist with flagging potential risks, it cannot fully interpret context, tone, or cultural nuance. The stakes are too high. A misaligned partnership or overlooked detail can escalate quickly in a public environment.
As a result, most organizations are settling into a hybrid model: automation where possible, flagging to human-in-the-loop systems. AI can automate certain tasks, but human oversight remains essential, particularly for brand risk and cultural currency.
Internal Policies
One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is restricting AI tools. In larger, more traditional organizations, internal policies often restrict which AI tools can be used, sometimes limiting teams to proprietary systems that lag behind best-in-class platforms. This creates a two-speed market, where smaller, more agile brands can experiment faster–and scale quicker.
This matters because Influencer Marketing is no longer a niche or experimental channel. A 2025 global survey found that 14.4 percent of marketers allocated 10 to 15 percent of their marketing budgets to Influencer Marketing, while nearly 12 percent devoted more than half of their budgets to it.
The risk for larger organizations is advanced access to AI, and slower operational adaptation.
Empowering Teams
Perhaps the most underdeveloped area, but the biggest opportunity for leaders, is learning. Influencer Marketing generates vast amounts of data: briefs, content, performance metrics, and audience responses. Yet much of this remains siloed or unused.
As creator programs scale, I have witnessed brands experimenting with AI-driven systems to analyze past campaigns, extract insights, and feed them back into future planning. Others are exploring internal AI assistants that can support KPI modelling or multi-market strategy decisions.
This is where efficiency becomes strategic. Not just doing campaigns faster, but doing them smarter over time. Smart brands are getting ahead by investing in AI education, hands-on experimentation, and building internal knowledge-sharing. They are empowering teams to think beyond current limitations by combining existing tools to get closer to these “ideal” use cases or building their own solutions.
What’s Next?
Operational infrastructure is becoming the differentiator in Influencer Marketing. This means enabling teams to experiment, learn, and systematize what works. The brands pulling ahead are not treating Influencer Marketing as a series of isolated campaigns, but as a long-term organizational capability. Every campaign becomes a source of insight that improves future decision-making, strengthens performance, and builds a competitive advantage over time.
Leaders who prioritize this balance will be the ones who turn Influencer Marketing from an executional channel into a true strategic capability.
C200 member Jennifer Quigley-Jones is VP of Strategy & Partnerships at PMG, where she sets the strategy for the future of creator marketing and partnerships for global brands. She previously founded Influencer Marketing agency, Digital Voices in 2017, growing it into a global business before selling it to PMG in late 2025. A sought-after speaker, Jennifer has shared her expertise at TEDx, SXSW, Web Summit, and Cannes Lions, exploring the future of the Creator Economy, AI, and entrepreneurship. Before founding Digital Voices, she worked at YouTube helping creators grow their audiences and earned a Kennedy Scholarship-funded Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
As a leader in female entrepreneurship, Jennifer actively supports C200’s mission to inspire, educate, and advance women in business while mentoring the next generation of founders.
