Influencer marketing is getting big, very big. Unilever now says half its $10bn annual global marketing budget must go to influencers, content creators and advocates.    

At our own Effie Europe Awards, analysis by Kantar shows that the number of winners featuring creators as the main touchpoint has risen from 0% in 2023 to 13% in 2025, with 67% of campaigns now including influencers as part of the schedule.    

But when a channel becomes bigger, it also needs to take on more responsibility. As influencer marketing is trusted with greater budgets, more agencies and advertisers are leaning into the channel to deliver results for their clients.   

That puts greater pressure on influencer marketing agencies to lead by creating a culture that’s responsible to consumers and clients, whether they are the new generation of entrepreneurial specialist agencies or a specialist function with established networks.   

At EACA we’re convening a new Influencer Marketing Council, chaired by Thomas Angerer, co-founder of BeInfluence, to create common standards and identify challenges that run across the channel. We’ll also be publishing an Influencer Practitioner Guide later this year to help spread best practice.   

One of our key ambitions will be to ensure that all influencers working with brands are trained – influencer marketing’s version of the blue tick – to ensure they know how to openly and honestly declare relationships with brands.    

Why Training Matters   

Brands and agencies partner with influencers to generate authenticity, third-party recommendation and debate around the issues and products they want to celebrate. But for too long agencies and advertisers have been slightly in awe of influencers, pussy footing around and not wanting to tell them what to do.    

The bottom line, however, is that the content won’t be authentic if influencers pretend they don’t have a formal relationship with a brand when they do. We need to call a spade a spade or in this case call an ad what it is. Doing this doesn’t reduce the value of the content or its ability to drive key KPIs, it just treats the viewer as an equal citizen.    

Influencer partners come in all shapes and sizes – from micro to macro – but what they all carry with them is risk if they don’t adopt responsible behaviors. They can do an amazing job for brands but there are rules and increasingly laws, both at an EU and individual country level, they also need to follow.  

It’s not always the influencers who have grown up online who are the worst. Traditional, offline celebrities can be some of the worse when it comes to code breaking, although some of the more famous online celebrities can also be challenging partners in this regard.   

The SROs Are Watching  

When influencers fail to declare relationships, it’s usually the brand and the agency that suffer both in terms of bad publicity and any legal consequences.   

Research by the ASA in the UK, found that on average, just a third (32%) of 18–64-year-olds exposed to influencer adverts as they had originally appeared on social media could say that what they had seen was ‘definitely an ad’.   

Data from the European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA), which includes 28 advertising standards bodies, finds that 22% of all complaints against online ads are against influencer marketing content. At least half of these complaints relate to disclosure issues or the legality of the advertising.   

There is a simple solution: Agencies should only recommend or use influencers who have undergone some form of training so that they understand what they need to declare and how they can do it.  Their databases of potential partners should be tracking who has and who hasn’t been trained.    

This is not a huge demand. The AdEthics training from EASA takes just 90 minutes and gives influencers the essential knowledge they need to join the ecosystem of responsible marketing, from disclosure to best practice. So far more than 10,000 have been trained in 12 countries.   

If we want influencer marketing to continue to grow, then we all need to insist on the same basic standards. We want to celebrate the channel’s ability to drive growth not its ability to keep account directors up at night or its capacity to damage brand reputation.    

Influencers don’t have to do it, of course, but if they don’t then they shouldn’t expect brand support for their content.