‘Added at the end’: Why brands still struggle to build influencer marketing properly

A billion-dollar industry still being treated as an afterthought.

Our Head of Brand and Partnerships, Rachael Webb, spoke with Mediaweek about why so many brands continue to bolt creators onto the end of campaigns rather than building them into the foundation. The problem is not awareness. Most marketers already believe in creator-led work. The problem is execution: late briefs, one-off budgets, and measurement frameworks borrowed from channels that operate nothing like this one. When you add creators at the final stage, you are not running a creator strategy. You are running a creative production sprint with no memory, no momentum, and no real chance of building the kind of connection that compounds over time.

Rachael is direct about where the real opportunity sits: always-on structures, properly resourced and built around how creator content actually performs across the funnel. Not peaks and troughs. Not a macro talent drop for a launch and silence in between. The brands making genuine progress are the ones treating this channel with the same strategic rigour they give to everything else, which means testing creative variables before briefing campaigns, understanding usage rights, and knowing what they are actually trying to achieve before they brief anyone.

The shift, as Rachael puts it, is from proving necessity to solving execution. That framing matters. It means the industry has moved past the why and is now stuck on the how. That is precisely where we do our best work. Read the full piece over on MediaWeek here