TL;DR
The brands winning at influencer marketing in 2026 treat creator fit as a hard business requirement: if there's no real brand love, there's no partnership.
The most effective creator relationships are being built on creative collaboration, not brand-dictated briefs. The more latitude brands give, the better the content performs.
AI is already separating the CMOs who are ahead from the ones who are falling behind, and the gap is widening fast.
Table of Contents
Most influencer marketing advice comes from the same places: platform trend reports, agency white papers, and vendor benchmarks. All useful, but none of them carry the same weight as hearing it directly from the people running programs at scale, especially as the financial stakes get higher.
According to our internal holiday planning research, the percentage of brands allocating 250K–500K for campaign budgets increased to 14%, and the share of brands investing $500K+ jumped significantly from 2% to 7%.
With budgets moving up-market, earlier this year, Later brought together an invite-only group of marketing leaders for CMO Circle, an off-stage conversation about what's actually changing in influencer marketing. Brands like Dunkin', Solo Brands, Fidelity, Habit Burger & Grill, Kizik, Creator Revolution, and Alibaba.com came ready to talk about what's working, what's shifting, and where the next bets are landing. Across two days of conversation, four themes kept surfacing. Here's what they said.
Brand love has become a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have
Ask any experienced influencer marketer what makes a campaign land, and you'll probably hear some version of the same answer: authenticity. The word has been repeated so many times it's started to lose its edges. But listening to CMOs across categories describe what they actually look for in a creator partner, a clearer picture emerges: authenticity has moved from a tone preference to a hard selection filter, and the brands treating it that way are building more durable programs.
Our internal data proves the cost of getting this wrong: 12% of creators cite "poor product-audience fit" as a primary reason collaborations fail, specifically noting that when a product doesn't align with their genuine style or audience's taste level, the content sounds like an advertisement rather than organic storytelling, which ultimately kills conversion.
Jill Nelson, CMO of Dunkin', put it plainly: "When brands are able to identify people that are authentic fans of the brand and that can really speak to their priorities and their messages in a believable way, that's the best kind of marketing. When brands work with authentic fans, it shows up in the work. The work just feels really natural — it doesn't feel like advertising."
Liz Vanzura, CMO of Solo Brands, described the same principle playing out across their portfolio with a rule that's hard to argue with: "You can't make up brand love, and so if there's an influencer that hasn't used one of our products legitimately and isn't in love with it, we won't use them."
Bret Clancy, VP of Social Media at Fidelity, and Elizabeth Drori, CMO of Kizik, both made the same point from different angles: getting creator selection wrong doesn't just underperform, it can damage the brand. Getting it right means finding someone whose relationship with the product is so real that a brief couldn't have manufactured it. If you're thinking through how to write a brief that actually gets out of the way, the data on what creative latitude does to campaign performance is a useful starting point.
The transactional influencer model is giving way to something more collaborative
For most of influencer marketing's history, the dynamic has been fairly predictable: brand has a message, brand hires a creator to deliver it, brand specifies the format. That model still exists, but several of the CMOs we spoke with described a meaningful shift in how the most effective partnerships are actually being structured.
The research backs this up: 81% of creators report they perform best when given light guidelines and creative flexibility. Conversely, when brands hand over rigid, shot-by-shot direction, the content tanks. In fact, 38% of creators cite a "loss of creative freedom" as the top reason a brand collaboration fails, noting it strips the content of its believability.
Monica Khan, Founder and CEO of Creator Revolution, has watched this evolution from the creator side: "I'm seeing a lot more brands actually say, 'How do you typically work with brands? What are the formats that you're into? Can you give us your take on how you structure that partnership?' And now that a creator has been doing that for so many years, they could actually say, 'For your brand and your goals, I would structure the partnership this way.'"
Rah Mahtani, Head of Marketing at Alibaba.com, framed this as a structural correction the industry has needed for a while: "It's really coming back to looking at influencer as a place where you're building a long-term relationship, letting creators create the way they intended to create to speak to their audience — and moving away from influencer being just another channel for reach or sales."
The brands winning at influencer right now are treating creators less like media placements and more like creative partners, and the performance gap between those two postures is getting harder to ignore.
Small stories are quietly outperforming big ones
Jack Hinchliffe, CMO of Habit Burger & Grill, offered one of the more counterintuitive takes of the two days, presenting a framework for thinking about storytelling at scale that upends the conventional top-of-funnel logic. "It's little stories, it's authenticity, it's about human connections and human moments,” he said. “Even if it's on a really micro level, just about somebody enjoying eating a burger, that's still a story."
A sweeping brand narrative can build awareness. What actually moves people toward conversion tends to be far more specific, rooted in a real person, a real moment, or an experience that feels close enough to touch. This is exactly why smaller-scale, human-moment content frequently outperforms polished macro campaigns. According to our research, nano- and micro-influencers achieve roughly double the sales conversion rate of macro-influencers, maintaining a healthy 4–8% engagement rate compared to the 1–2% average of creators with 100K+ followers.
This has direct implications for how brands brief creators. The brief that produces a micro-story people care about is probably a lot looser, and a lot more trusting, than the one most brand teams are used to writing. It's also why the most effective creator content tends to work less like advertising and more like cultural translation. Hinchliffe's team has put this approach into practice across campaigns. See how it played out with their festival activation and in their broader creator program.
Hinchliffe was clear that this doesn't mean abandoning brand coherence. The food still needs to look gorgeous, the craveable quality still needs to come through. It's the combination of human specificity and brand consistency that makes creator content work across the funnel.
How the smartest CMOs are thinking about AI right now
Every CMO we spoke with had something to say about AI, and what was striking was the range of ways they're thinking about it. Four themes came up again and again:
Building AI infrastructure for influencer. Mahtani described a future where entire creator workflows are automated end to end, from trend identification to brief creation, outreach, pricing, and reporting. The CMO's job, in his view, is to design and oversee those systems, not participate in each step of them.
AI for scale, humans for judgment. Vanzura put it plainly: the future CMO understands AI deeply but doesn't outsource the creative instinct to it. She described being able to talk directly to her data in real time, while still owning the decisions that require real creative judgment.
AI and the authenticity problem. As audiences grow more attuned to what's real and what's manufactured, the brands using AI to amplify human creativity will be better positioned than those using it to replace it.
Speed as a structural advantage. Hinchliffe focused on the compressed cycle from insight to execution. The teams building that muscle now will carry a meaningful advantage going forward — a shift that's redefining what full-funnel creator strategy looks like at the most sophisticated brands right now.
Mahtani closed with something that should land for anyone still treating AI adoption as optional: "If someone is unwilling to adopt AI, whether you like it or not, you are going to be behind." That's not a prediction about the distant future. It's a description of where things already are.
This shift is already formalized in many job descriptions: 43% of marketers now report that managing AI tools or AI-related initiatives is an official part of their role. With 50% of creators also actively using AI tools like ChatGPT in their own content workflows, the entire ecosystem is being fundamentally re-architected.
What this means for your influencer program
The CMOs we spoke with come from different categories, serve different consumers, and run very different kinds of programs. The convergence across these four themes is exactly what makes it worth paying attention to.
Brands that are doing influencer well in 2026 share an underlying posture: they're selective about who they work with, collaborative in how they work with them, focused on human-scale storytelling rather than broadcast reach, and actively building the AI systems that let them move faster without trading away creative judgment.
These priorities aren't new in isolation. What's shifted is how seriously the most sophisticated marketing organizations are treating all of them at once.
Ready to build an influencer program grounded in the right creators and real results? Let's talk.
