What you need to know:

• Influencer marketing is increasingly being positioned as a full-funnel strategy – and brands are increasingly buying that narrative. According to the Digital 2025 report, Australian brands last year invested US$520 million on the influencer channel, up 13 per cent YoY – a growth rate just outpacing social media.
• Cross-platform reach is where its headed. Influencers are evolving into multi-channel publishers, with brands reporting stronger results when amplifying influencer content across social, digital, out-of-home (OOH), and podcasts.
• This Is Flow is one of a growing number of agencies getting on the front foot as influencer continues to climb, hosting clients for another education Playgroup session tackling the channel's evolution into a cross-media ecosystem, set with a panel discussion from the agency's in-house affiliate specialist Callum Wingrave, along with AiMCO MD Patrick Whitnall, Fabulate co-founder Ben Gunn and ecom pureplay fashion retailer Meshki's director of marketing, Alex Rushton. 
• The agency commissioned research from Glow to paint the picture, affirming that younger audiences trust influencers over celebrities – findings include that 70 per cent of 18-24-year-olds discover brands through influencers, and around two thirds of those 19-39 were more likely to buy from brands that used influencer content across multiple channels. 
• Meshki has so far seen strong results pushing its influencer content cross-channel, with paid social, ecom, EDM and OOH helping to drive sales uplift and repeat sell through on featured products. Rushton said the brand "can't keep up" with the demand. 
• Meanwhile, affiliate and performance-based approaches to influencer marketing are on the rise. Wingrave and Whitnall outline a win-win for brands and creators shifting from flat influencer fees to revenue-sharing models that incentivise sales.
• Measurement on some channels is patchy but maturing – with tech like geolocation to mobile ID signals enabling brands to track in-store visits, conversions, and return on ad spend from influencer-led campaigns.

Once dismissed as tactical, influencer marketing is making a solid case for a bigger slice of the media plan. It's eyeing full funnel dollars.

Last month’s annual Australian Influencer Marketing Council (AiMCO) Awards set the tone. The flurry of winner’s speeches from creator talent and agency leaders alike noted a welcome surge in interest – and investment – from big name brands and marketers.

The same week, the Digital 2025 report (from DataReportal and funded by social media and influencer agency We Are Social and media data platform Meltwater) affirmed the trajectory: It estimates that  Australian brand investment in influencer-led campaigns was last year up 13 per cent to US$520 million.

The data showed influencer advertising’s share of Australia’s total digital ad spend was up 5.3 per cent in 2024, reaching 3.6 per cent.

Media agencies have been reading the tea leaves, and they’re moving in quickly. GroupM was joint headline sponsor of the AiMCO Awards alongside specialist agency Hello Social – both agencies bumped up from second-tier packages last year.

Indie shop This Is Flow is also keen to take a lead, tapping influence as the theme for the second iteration of its educational Playground series, after kicking off with AI last year, partnering with Glow to survey 1,500 Australians for some fresh research.

The study

Flow’s findings suggest that influencer is closing in on word-of-mouth recommendations as the gold standard of product discovery, and particularly for younger consumers – 70 per cent of respondents 18-24 years old now discover new brands through social media influencers.

Unlike the traditional celebrity, whom only 2 per cent would trust for similar recommendations, per the survey, the appeal of the influencer is in their authenticity and relatability – factors that 62 per cent of respondents said they would prioritise over expertise. The sentiment intensifies to 75 per cent among 18-24-year-olds.

Parasocial (i.e. one-sided) relationships – shaped by consumers’ consistent engagement with their favourite influencers, and the perceived access those influencers give their audience – are another driving factor. Per the data: 85 per cent of 18-24s engage with influencer content weekly, and 50 per cent of female respondents in that group interact daily. Even for the slightly older 25-39 demo, weekly engagement sits at 75 per cent.

The report argues that the growing cross platform reach of influencers beyond social media – now spanning podcasts, newsletters, digital video and more – renders them publishers in their own right.

Viewing them as such and driving influencer investment cross-channel, per Flow, is a sure bet for advertisers looking to boost consumer trust. The data agrees: 40 per cent of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that use influencer content across multiple media channels, with the trend skewing more strongly for younger demos – 66 per cent of 18–24-year-olds and 60 per of 25- to 39-year-olds.

One quarter of respondents agreed that integrating influencer content across multiple media channels was a more authentic and well-rounded approach for brands.

Cross-channel, full funnel

Australian fashion ecommerce brand Meshki is already reaping the benefits after taking influencer cross-channel.

Speaking on a panel at This Is Flow’s Playground session last month, the brand’s recently joined marketing director Alex Rushton said it was an early concern of hers to properly leverage the surplus of content created by the circa five to six hundred influencers Meshki works with each month.

“Even over the last few months, we've made it a huge priority at Meshki to ensure that our influencer content is used holistically across the brand and every touchpoint of that customer experience.”

Joining Rushton on the panel, alongside Flow Collective affiliates lead Callum Wingrave and AiMCO managing director Patrick Whitnall, was co-founder and chief revenue officer for influencer tech platform Fabulate, Ben Gunn. He backed Meshki’s approach.

“Why would you just create a creative asset that should just live in one platform, in one environment? If it's great content, it should be seen by as many of your potential customers as possible."

Beyond paid social media ads, Gunn said social media content often lends itself to a broad range of programmatic channels.

“We will often run influencer content [for Fabulate clients] outside of the walled gardens of the platforms in digital online environments and traditional digital channels, in out of home, [and] podcasting is another one,” per Gunn. He advises marketers to also look at how they can re-use their influencer content in earned and owned channels.

Whitnall agreed the case for cross-channel amplification is strong, citing the growing number of AiMCO’s clients and partners that claim to be seeing “much better engagement and results” from their influencer creative than their brand work. But those looking to leverage that influencer content elsewhere, he warned, will need to “sort out their content usage” agreements with creators – i.e. ensure their contracts cover the use of the creator’s content in paid channels.

At the least, Gunn said brands should establish influencers' rate cards for paid channel usage at the contract stage, or else “lose all their leverage and pay the consequences” if they decide to tack on any additional channel usage later in the campaign.

Meshki’s approach

For Meshki, Rushton said ramping up influencer content on owned channels has been an easy win. Whenever the brand adds shots of an influencer wearing product on an ecommerce listing there’s clear uplift – “we see better sell through of that product”.

Same goes for EDM. “I know it sounds so simple, but we put an influencer picture in an EDM, and the product sells out – we can't actually keep up.”

“We're looking at our approach to get more of that influencer of content up there, across more of our stock, so that we can see sell through across a wider depth of our business.”

Then there’s the obvious paid amplification on social media – and for Meshki, it makes for almost guaranteed sell-through.

“We had a jacket that was not selling. We could not sell it – we had it in campaigns, we put on our socials,” explained Rushton. “Then, we put it on an influencer and pushed it through paid channels and it sold out. It was even an older style, but it sold out. We restocked it, and it sold out again. I think we've got two units left in one size.”

Now, explains Rushton, they’ve been testing out how that looks above the line – starting with out of home. An campaign launched to coincide with the Formula 1 in Melbourne this week will see influencer content go live across the dynamic screens at Spencer Street tram station.

“We see this as a huge opportunity for us to sell through our collection during this period... We'll work with all of our teams to make sure we've got the right influencer and that we’ve got the right content going up at the right time in the right spaces for people – and to make it shoppable.”

Creator commerce, affiliate boom

Affiliate also has a growing role in the influencer realm, even if it hasn't yet reached the maturity of other video channels.

“We define affiliates as third-party advocates that promote the brand’s service on their behalf, which is basically what a creator does. It's just the means of communication,” explained Flow’s Wingrave. “If you think of where blogs were five years ago to now, creators are just bloggers, but they communicate in different languages."

He said creator commerce will be the next major milestone for influencer in the performance space, accelerated by the eventual arrival of TikTok Shop in Australia later this year. But there’s also significant opportunity to drive bottom of funnel effectiveness in creator campaigns via an affiliate approach.

The short-term approach, per Wingrave, is to tap into affiliate technologies and processes to begin measuring things like return on investment (ROI) and return on advertising spend (ROAS) both across the creator channel and for individual creators themselves.

“When we did it in on behalf of a major coffee company in the past, we effectively took courses to 50 influencers from their PR company, and onboarded them into our affiliate technology, our SaaS platform.

“What that allowed us to do is just onboard them as affiliates, not change anything commercial, but just allowed us to start to paint a commercial picture of the returns that their creator assets, their media, was driving from a performance standpoint.”

The longer-term version, Wingrave said, is to gradually wean creators away from big upfront fees and transition the bulk of their renumeration to affiliate fees.

Take the example of his team’s creator campaign for a streaming client’s 2019 launch into the Australian market – each influencer was given a bonus nominal fee for every sale they made.

“It was probably a third or a quarter of the CPA [cost per acquisition], but it allowed the creators to see what could be made from a performance standpoint… At the moment, they're very accustomed to working into that awareness funnel, so we have to show them with extensive data,” per Wingrave.

“We were able to sit down with each creator after the fact and say: you can see that there's money to be made here.”

Around three quarters of the creators on the campaign agreed to transition to a new model, which reduced their upfront fees, and instead paid them the “CPAs for paying affiliates” – thus incentivising them to drive more sales.

It’s a better model for creators too, according to Whitnall. He said AiMCO has been encouraging its creators to look at revenue diversification and the importance of recurring income for the longevity of their careers.

“What we're trying to help them understand is ways to think about subscriptions or affiliate links or merch or podcasts or things like that that enable them to effectively have a consistent revenue stream… which is effectively paying their rent and then the cream on the top that takes you on a holiday is the brand deal.”

Measure it like it's media

Measuring the impact of influencer activity beyond organic reach and engagement metrics is the other piece of the puzzle that’s yet to fully land for most marketers.

Affiliate sales are relatively easy to track, but for other campaigns, measuring outcomes is less straight forward – though possible, per Gunn.

“Treat it like media and you can measure it better,” he said. That means determining the campaign’s intended outcome – awareness, engagement, more conversion – and measure it accordingly.

More tangible results for bricks and mortar brands can be gained using geolocation and device ID signals and in-store footfall. Fabulate recently demonstrated that approach with a QSR client.

“They did a campaign with 20 influencers, took the six strongest ones, and then amplified it out across the media – outside of the social platforms – and captured the mobile ID of those who had actually seen the content in those environments.

“Over the course of four weeks, 172,000 people went in store who saw that content… [We] know how much someone's spending when they come into the store, so you could actually do real return on ad spend.”

Even ecommerce brands, like Meshki, can play in that space, if they’re creative about it.

Rushton said they’ve seen solid results from advertising in Westfield, targeting shoppers who had visited “all the stores” and were leaving empty handed.

Using mobile ID tracking, Meshki was able to track customer acquisitions and sales uplift among those who had seen the outdoor ads. It was “so effective”, they’re now driving that outdoor strategy “throughout the rest of the year” – including this week’s Formula One campaign.