What you need to know: 

• Hypetap CEO Detch Singh reckons the omnipresence – and omnipotence – of influencer marketing at Cannes Lions 2025 is a crystal clear signal of where the smart money is moving.

• The former investment banker saw the movement early, getting in in 2013, about the same time as Gogle took over Howard Hughes' old LA studio and seeded the boom with incentives, coaching and a near endless pipeline of creators.

• Now WPP is forecasting user generated content ad spend will overtake traditional media spend this year – with a big chunk of that UGC bracket arguably influencers.

• Measurement Singh reckons measurement has likewise overtaken - or at least caught up with – traditional media.  

• Now blue chips are diverting massive chunks of budget to influencers. Cue the agency pile in, with the likes of WPP, Publicis and OMG acquiring or rapidly spinning up specialist units. 

• The US and UK markets are at the forefront of the change, but Singh says Australia is playing catch up - but that likely means a rapid acceleration is on the cards.

• Singh says brands have to get their risk-reward balances right, brief properly, but then let go of the reins to get the upside influencers can deliver. 

• But also that firms in the US are now listing the chance of influencers not delivering the returns they have powered to date in corporate risk registers.

The golden age of influencers

Detch Singh has spent more than a decade at the coalface of influencer marketing. Now it's hitting serious ad budget pay dirt – and Singh sees only more upside.

Per Singh, this year's Cannes jamboree was confirmation of what most already knew. Influencers are it.

“I could not escape creator. I deliberately went to panels about retail media and the core Cannes Lions track panels, and I feel like every panel I went to - even if it had nothing to do with creators or influencers – it was brought up as something they're doing, or something they're thinking about.”

Singh knows how to make long-term bets. The former investment banker read the runes and exited finance in 2013 to get in early on influencer marketing in 2013. A big signal at that time was likely the news that Google had repurposed Hollywood mogul Howard Hughes' old studio in LA, turning it over to the new wave of video loggers and offering them support and incentives, which climbed with the amount of views and followers they attracted. Twelve years on, that seeding has yielded massive returns – both for YouTube and its rivals.

Back then it was part of experimental brand budgets. Now the biggest blue chips are including influencer performance on their stock market risk registers.

From tactic to ecosystem

For Singh, there’s two things happening. First, as influencer marketing matures, strategy has become more sophisticated.

The brands that are doing it best – and for the large part he says it’s still the challengers – have evolved influencer marketing from a channel to an ecosystem.

“It can be social-first, but that doesn't mean there can't be a supporting campaign around it,” he says, i.e.: “You can be pushing out creator-led content on out of home, or programmatic TV”.

Australian ecommerce brand Meshki is one of a growing number of brands seeing success with an ecosystem approach, and the trend is playing out on a global scale.

Singh points to the latest forecast from WPP Media. Published a week ahead of Cannes Lions, the report suggested user generated content – a massive chunk of which is creator content – will this year overtake professionally produced content in ad revenue.

Which some may argue is a massive snowball effect for TV and online publishers battered by platforms and now existentially threatened by AI. But good for the platforms that have sown the new ad world order.

But Singh says brands are just following the opportunity.

“If you talk to a lot of the marketers in the US or in Europe, where I am, it's all done that way - channel agnostic,” he says. “They're using creators as the production element and they're co-creating with them.”

As brands buy-in to that co-creation play-book, the usage fees associated with leveraging that content cross-channel account are taking a growing cut of overall media budgets.

“We've got clients that we're working with in the US at the moment, they've got mammoth budgets… You've got a mid-tier client in the US that on one campaign will spend [the equivalent of] an entire year's budget for seven brands [spent by an enterprise client in Australia] - and a lot of their budget is going to usage.”

Second is the measurement piece, which is starting to rapidly mature.

“10 years ago, it wasn't very measurable, so the only people that did it were the people willing to have a punt and just know it worked” – i.e. those with little budget to do much else,” per Singh.

“But it was giving them really massive returns, so they kept doubling down – and measurement didn't matter to them because they didn't have a big multi-channel approach like maybe some of the bigger brands do.” Plus, the sales kept coming in. And if it works...

All this came at the height of DTC business models, where the Dollar Shave Clubs and other Davids disrupted increasingly panicked Goliaths. Hence the big brands realised they were “losing share from some of these challengers” and started to play around with influencer using small test budgets.

As the investment grew, so too the specialist agencies and the rigour. Hypetap, for one, has “invested a tonne in measuring the effectiveness of this channel” per Singh, whether that’s looking at performance or brand health metrics.

He reckons it’s come so far that the channel’s measurability is comparable to – if not ahead – of traditional media.

“A lot of our clients are plugging influencer into their market mix models and being able to see the outcomes,” he says. “There's lots of literature, there's lots of research, there's lots of investment ... I don't think it's possible to dispute the ROI.”

Agencies pile in

Multinational and independent agencies have always been adept at following the money.

OMG, Publicis Groupe and WPP have all in recent years rolled out specialist influencer units. Indie media shops like This Is Flow are touting sophisticated influencer offerings – and there are many others making similar claims.

Per Singh, the surge is driven by “a commercial imperative”. “[Holdcos are] losing money by not being able to do it properly," he suggests. Meanwhile, the walled gardens are where influencers tend to play, the open web and its spoils are contracting.

“If you look at WPP, for example, they've done it through acquisition. They bought Goat in the UK, and now Goat is part of the WPP Media arm of influencer… they just weren't doing it as well [before] so they needed to acquire that expertise," said Singh.

“Same thing with Publicis. They've bought Influential in the US for $500 million, then they've gone and followed that up with Captivate, to plug that into Influential.”

He notes the bulk of the acquisitions are happening in the US and UK, where brands are reallocating spend into influencer much faster than – to date – seen in Australia.

“If you look at Western influencer spend, 70 per cent of it is in the US. Something like 8 per cent is in the UK. Australia is sub-one per cent.”

While that’s partly down to scale, Singh reckons a lack of local investment in the channel has only widened the gap.

“At Cannes, I really realised how massive it is in other regions, versus Australia and New Zealand… we're playing catch up.”

The good news, per Singh, is that means there’s “more headroom to grow”.

Ultimately, he thinks the local marketing industry can take a cue from the US in where things will head, sooner or later.

“I've actually seen IPO prospectuses on the NASDAQ that say, ‘one of the main risks to our business is if we don't do influence – if influencer doesn't give us the same return as it did last year’,” says Singh. “In the US, it's core to business growth – it's not just an awareness channel or a performance channel, they're getting business outcomes from it.”

Derisking influencer

But influencer marketing comes with risk – corporates have to cede a degree of control and move quickly to tap trends. Not something they are renowned for.

“There are risks, there's lots of moving parts. Creators aren't typically the most professional people and agencies and brands weren't equipped to assess the risk or mitigate the risk,” said Singh.

His advice for brands is to methodically assess creators for brand safety – i.e. asking '"does this creator fit the brief, are they authentic, do they have the right audience?"

Which is something Unilever has done rigorously – and is now committing fully 50 per cent of its massive global ad budgets to influencers by mandate of the CEO. (Per Unilever chief Fernando Fernandez: "The point is not if the returns are higher versus the past, the point is the returns [via influencers] are higher versus any alternative allocation of funds today and versus any other option. They are higher returns." He should know, he's the former CFO.)

But while Unilever is going military grade on creator vetting, most brands could also benefit from doing the basics.

“Things like competitor checks,” per Singh. “If you're doing campaign for Woolies, you want to make sure that creator hasn't been talking about Coles for the last three months.” Same thing with profanity or other off-brand comments, with many firms are now using AI to crawl and trawl video and audio turn it to text, and raise any red flags.

Either way, Singh says there’s a balance to be struck – and brands need to be willing to give the creative reins to the creators.

“There's lots of brands that are way too prescriptive when it comes to influencer content. Then it doesn't perform, then they say it doesn't work,” he suggests.

Singh notes the data coming out of Cannes that a lot of influencer advertising is effectively being wasted due to poor branding practices (i.e. half, per CreativeX founder and CEO, Anastasia Leng.)

But beyond those basics and key pillars, he says brands have to learn to let go

“I think we've entered an era of co-creation, and I think there's an art to briefing creators that is very different to briefing for traditional advertising. That is, you've got to have the key messaging, you've got to have the objectives, and you've got to have the guardrails, but you've also got to have lots of creative freedom within those guardrails so that the creator can create content for their audience. And it makes sense, because they typically understand that audience better than you do as a brand.”

It's complex, he says, especially for marketers and brands used to dotting all the Is and dotting all the Ts end-to-end. But that is no longer how the game works.

“There is huge upside in influencer, but there's lots of moving parts. You just need to be able to mitigate the risk and get the full upside.”