In a crowded marketplace, influencer marketing ranks as an effective strategy for brands to reach new audiences.

Yet, many marketers, whether in B2B or B2C, still equate influencer marketing with A-list celebrity promotion. Think Salesforce enlisting Matthew McConaughey to fight for AI and customer data privacy. Or model Hailey Bieber, wife of singer Justin Bieber, showing up in an Erewhon grocery Instagram story to talk about a great smoothie.

But for every big celebrity, hundreds of influencers work with companies of all sizes. Recent research from Influencer Marketing Hub finds that 26% of U.S.-based companies spend more than 40% of their total marketing budget on influencers.

Interestingly, another research report finds that nano influencers — those with fewer than 10,000 followers — yield a better ROI than some of the A-list celebrities.

Is it better to go with a few big, expensive influencers or do you go with many smaller, inexpensive influencers?

We took the question to CMI’s chief strategy advisor, Robert Rose, for his take. He also adds a wrinkle to the dilemma. Read on or watch the video to see what he’s talking about:

Influencer marketing wrinkles smoothed by AI

What happens if the influencer goes rogue? What if they spew heated political rhetoric? Or what if they talk about your competitors and have a toxic moment?

Managing a portfolio of influencers can mean managing a diverse range of thinking. But it also means you get a diverse set of actions, and some of them may not be in your brand’s best interest.

This week, an article in The New York Times discussed the growing trend of brands using AI tools to scan social media influencers’ content and grade how likely they are to share strong political opinions on their channels.

In this divisive atmosphere, brands of all kinds have shied away from getting political out of fear of offending the very consumers they want to attract. So, an AI tool that can assess the potential of political conversations can be immensely helpful.

That’s especially true, given the growing impact of influencer marketing. The Times article reports on a July House Judiciary Committee hearing in which a representative from WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency, disclosed that news media ad buys — historically, a major recipient of ad revenue — make up less than 5% of its overall ad spending.

Just last week, X and its mercurial CEO Elon Musk decided to sue GARM, a nonprofit amalgamation of consumer brands that banded together to say they aren’t advertising on the X platform any longer. That’s one way to handle this influencer challenge: Stop supporting the platforms where your brand’s content could appear next to things antithetical to your company’s focus.

However, the AI grading approach is also intriguing. It puts an interesting lens on what it means to be an influencer these days. If this technology can predict the likelihood of influencers to espouse their political beliefs, it can also analyze just about any other type of content.

To me, this creates an intriguing tension where the world of AI, influencer marketing, and brand safety come full circle.

Pick many smaller or one big influencer?

Influencers are often influencers because they move back and forth fluidly between a transparency and/or at least a filtered view of their private lives. They live in public with multiple brands and more performative types of activities. But today’s G-rated influencer who shows off their family and is good for promoting a kid’s brand is tomorrow’s not-safe-for-work celebrity who ends up getting arrested for something.

Increasingly, influencers will have to monitor their brands more tightly. And brands will be more judicious about who they work with.

So, back to the initial question: Do you manage 100 influencers where one of them is bound to go rogue and do something stupid? Or do you put all your eggs into one influencer basket and do the necessary background research and ongoing monitoring to ensure that they are a good spokesperson for the brand?

The answer isn’t terribly clear. But given the advent of the tools that can calculate scores and historical information about influencers, it won’t be long until you can look at a report and see not just an influencer’s current rating and brand safety grade but all the times they’ve gone out of the box.

What I do know is that influencer marketing is growing and should be an important part of your go-to-market plan. Working with recognizable human and influential faces will be increasingly important as AI pervades the content ecosystem.

But just like media buying and assessing brand safety have become specialized skills, so are engaging, managing, and measuring influencer programs. Who does that for your brand? Do they have the necessary framework, standards, and measurement approach for your company? Those are the meaningful challenges in the months ahead.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute