Not because it doesn’t work.But because it’s finally being forced more consistently to prove that it does.
When I was at Unilever, my team helped architect its first significant move into influencer marketing. So I’ve been watching the recent debate around its investment in the channel with interest. And if I’m honest, a bit of bemusement.
Having spent time inside a business like Unilever, it’s worth saying this upfront: what gets said on investor or analyst calls is often picked up in a way that doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening on the ground.
The regular reinvention of marketing communication model every few years is usually designed to provoke and catalyse change, not to be applied uniformly across hundreds of brands.
That’s where some of the commentary has gone slightly off track.
Ritson’s latest column in Adweek, for example, seems to take Unilever’s CEO Fernando Fernandez statement fairly literally, as if it will become a blueprint for every brand. Others are defending it as if influencer marketing is the answer to everything.
It won’t land at the level of investment being discussed across the portfolio. And it won’t apply consistently across categories.
But that’s not the interesting part.
What is true is that brands are now putting serious money into influencer marketing, and that changes a lot.
When a channel sits in a small innovation budget, it isn’t that accountable. But when it takes a meaningful share of spend, the question becomes much simpler:
Is it driving incremental business results?
Having led a number of programmes during my time at Unilever, and from what I’m hearing from people still there, as this shift began last year we’re now moving into the first full year of proper implementation. Which is exactly when meaningful evidence starts to build.
I’ve also heard of other FMCG / CPG businesses following suit and leaning more heavily into influencer-led strategies over the past year, in one case driven by investor pressure to follow Unilever’s lead. This is happening across a growing number of businesses.
And that’s why a reckoning is coming.
Not because influencer doesn’t work. In many cases it does.
But because it often hasn’t been forced to prove it rigorously. Yet.
I remember one FMCG business becoming so tired with being told by Meta to put more and more budget into social that they decided to test it properly. They shifted almost all of their spend for one of their brands in the US into Meta.
And guess what happened?
Not because social doesn’t work, but because Media 101 still applies. Effective media planning requires multiple channels working together.
If you’ve scaled investment, you’ll recognise the shift in questions:
Is this better than where we were spending before?
At that point, this stops being a channel debate.
It becomes a measurement problem.
And that’s where things can break down.
Not because the data isn’t there, but because no one owns the decision across the full mix.
There’s a real desire to understand impact, but less confidence in acting on it.
This isn’t new, but it is a gap we see regularly with clients at Entropy. There’s a clear desire to understand the full impact of spend, but then a need for the leadership to validate, trust, and act on the findings to unlock the real business benefit.
The opportunities can often be very significant, but it can take, dare I say it, a bit of bravery to trust the evidence and act on it. It also means sometimes being willing to challenge the conditioning that others internally may have been subconsciously exposed to, cutting through the hype, media interest and the narratives pushed by sales teams with a vested interest.
We’ve built our hybrid consultancy measurement proposition to help brands take that leap.
Alex Tait, Entropy’s Founder
