Few creators have been able to export their star power beyond the walled gardens of the social internet.
And although the influencer sector hasn’t wanted for commercial growth in recent times, the marketing benefits of a creator partnership or influencer campaign have been largely restricted to channels like Instagram and TikTok.
But this year, brands including personal care and household product maker Arm & Hammer, toy brand Miko and tech firm Snapdragon began experimenting with the use of influencer-made marketing content, in place of traditional creative assets, in programmatic ad inventory accessed via Amazon, The Trade Desk and Google’s DSPs.
The ads were placed in static and animated inventory on Amazon’s own platform, as well as in video placements on publisher sites. Streaming inventory hasn’t yet been put to use, but media buyers say testing with Amazon Prime will begin in this context next year.
According to Ceri Williams, paid media director at Goat, the broader use of influencer content in programmatic advertising is set to shift up a gear in 2025. The WPP-owned social media agency, which sits within its GroupM media buying and planning business, is just one agency trying to push forward the use of influencer-made assets beyond a mere experimental method.
Goat began testing display campaigns inventory on Amazon Ads in November 2023, The Trade Desk in January and DV360 in April. In one early test for client Arm & Hammer, organic content produced by nine influencers was repurposed for paid media formats and run through the Amazon Ads DSP. That campaign included a retargeting phase, which used the influencer creative to drive audiences toward Arm & Hammer’s Amazon product pages.
The agency used the solution with nine clients across 2024, Williams said. The budgets assigned to each campaign ranged between $63,000 and $254,000 (£50,000 and £200,000), with some campaigns extended “in flight” with additional spends of up to £100,00 ($127,000), Williams said, though she didn’t provide client-specific spending figures.
Williams said that Goat “really ramped up the programmatic offering” in the second half of the year following an uptick in client enquiries. “We started to get a lot more briefs, a lot more excitement and a lot more traction,” she added. In the new year, six clients are set to integrate Goat’s Amazon Ads solution into their influencer campaigns, Williams said.
“Moving into 2025 the plan here is to not only expand Amazon across more clients … [but to] keep increasing that budget that the clients come back with,” Williams said. Goat planned to begin testing the solution with Amazon Prime Video inventory next year, she added.
Each of the Goat clients confirmed to have used the solution ignored or declined requests for comment. But CMOs have used practices similar in spirit, if not in scale, as Goat’s solution in recent years.
It’s been a common practice to commission creator-made assets for use in a platform’s own paid ad inventory, for example. And few marketers forgo the chance to boost a partner influencer’s posts up the algorithm rankings with paid spend.
Kelly Olmstead, chief marketing officer of footwear brand Allbirds, told Digiday that the brand has utilized “allow-listing” — when a creator provides a partner brand access to their social accounts for the purpose of running paid ads from within that account — on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok since October 2023.
“We were really surprised by the impact that some of these performing influencer ads have driven in terms of consumer response,” she said, without providing specific performance data. Creative made by influencers, she added, had “more credibility” than traditional ads.
Creator marketing agency Props, as another example, runs campaigns that use both allow-listing and influencer content in programmatic inventory. The agency has been running influencer assets in display inventory via Google’s DV360. The company specializes in the travel and finance sectors, said Joseph Perello, CEO of Props. “It’s become an awareness and a conversion channel,” he said.
Perello added that the company expected to begin planning campaigns to run on CTV inventory, namely Roku and YouTube, in the new year.
Thomas Markland, founder and managing director of influencer agency HYDP, said his agency has worked with clients and their media agencies to insert influencer content into digital ad inventory since 2021. He said HYDP has thus far steered clear of programmatic.
“To be honest, we believe that programmatic is not the most effective media buying format [and] we have concerns over brand safety with programmatic buys,” he said in an email.
The agency’s clients spend between $1,000,000 and $150,000 each year, he said. Markland declined to name HYDP’s clients, citing nondisclosure agreements.
In addition to the scale of distribution that programmatic offers, Brittany Wickerson, global head of media at We Are Social, told Digiday that incorporating influencer content into programmatic ads offers marketers several advantages.
“It could extend the lifetime and value from a partnership/piece of creative, while also creating greater consistency and therefore association and recall across platforms,” she wrote in an email. “It can also give brands a cost effective solution to creating a bigger bank of content to access, and content from influencers can often be more relatable and authentic.”
Wickerson said that We Are Social pitched a similar solution to a client in the second half of 2024. She declined to name the client, but said the team expected to pitch it to additional clients in the future.
Influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy helped clients run influencer-made assets in off-platform ad inventory for clients, starting with L’Oréal in 2022, Liptons and Heineken in 2023, and Sainsbury’s this year. L’Oréal’s campaign utilized Amazon Ads.
In each case, Billion Dollar Boy’s strategy involved repurposing content made for a social-first campaign and running it in surplus media spots acquired by the brand’s in-house team or media agency, said Piet Southey, the agency’s head of clients, Europe.
He said the primary drive growing the practice’s appeal to clients was in the “cheaper production route” the practice offered.
Markland told Digiday that HYDP clients are becoming more amenable to running influencer content away from social platforms. He said that previously “they only saw value in traditional influencer marketing … over the past six months, we’ve noticed that brands are now speaking our language.”
“With declines in viewership and ad revenue across traditional media, we expect more brands to look to creators for ow cost production in 2025,” Markland said.
