Brand codes in influencer marketing are more important than ever, yet they are often overlooked. As influencer campaigns continue to grow in popularity and investment, many brands are losing visibility in the very content they sponsor.

This article explains why branded content frequently underperforms, how marketers can protect their brand presence, and why using brand codes early and often is essential for standing out. If you want strong results from creator partnerships, getting the brand fundamentals right is no longer optional.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

There’s been so many future-facing posts on LinkedIn lately that it gets easy to become a bit snow-blind. AI dominates, obviously, but there’s been a couple of interesting, and linked, trends that I’ve noticed that highlight how important the fundamentals of marketing are regardless of how channels and tactics evolve.

Here’s a few seemingly unrelated points:

• Global advertising spend has hit record highs – passing $1 trillion globally for the first time (per WARC)

• Of that record spend, one of the highest growth areas is in influencer marketing, growing by 20% and second only to TikTok in investment growth

• They may be an outlier, but Unilever upped their influencer investment by 120% last year alone – good look getting that past your CFO in your next budgeting round…

Contents

• The Battle for Influence

• The Battle for Brand

• Making it Work – Back to Basics

• FAQs

The battle for influence

So far, so good – but there’s an issue and while it manifests itself in a new channel-specific way, what happens when your brand is the ‘junior’ partner to these influencers and their brands?

To be clear, I don’t mean ‘junior’ in the sense of more recently established, or in a financial sense, but the less famous partner. While it can be a real coup for brands to get a tie-in with a more famous entity in order to enhance visibility and credibility, if not managed properly it can be that the audience focuses much more on the more famous brand, in this case the influencer.

While this has long been the case, everybody will have worked on a joint-initiative of some sort that has felt unbalanced, it can happen in much more pronounced ways with influencers. One reason for this appears to be, in part, because of the creative freedom afforded to many influencers in creating branded content. They understand their own brands and platforms very well and want to ensure that content seems authentic, but in that push for authenticity, brand codes in influencer marketing are often ignored, leading the partner brand to get lost.

The battle for brand

It seems that not only does the sponsor brand need to compete with the influencer’s brand for equal billing, but that this UGC- credibility created by influencer content (typically) means that spots are under-branded and thus, under perform.

The facts from CreativeX presented at this year’s Cannes Lions are pretty startling:

• 53% of creator ads don’t have a brand mention in the first three seconds

• Only 14% of creator ads are watched past the first three seconds

• 45% of media spend on creator ads on Meta were a “waste” – which meant that they were both unbranded and not watched past the first three seconds

Again, yikes. Again, there’s very little new happening here. Mark Ritson’s recent Cannes spot also covered a similar phenomenon across all media types, with data from System1 and Effie suggesting that brand codes in influencer marketing must be clearly and repeatedly shown to drive brand recall. The magic number? Seven, for 100% brand recall.

So, under-branding isn’t unique to the influencer space, but common sense (and a ruck of data) suggest that if you’re commissioning work on platforms that are fast paced, or include the ability for audiences to skip, and you’re already fighting for attention against a brand partner, you’d better make sure your codes are present early and often.

To learn more about how distinctive assets like logos, jingles, or color palettes drive recall in fast-moving media, read our article on distinctive brand assets for B2B growth.

Making it work – back to basics

The crux to all of this, as with many other things, seems rather obvious and quite boring – use influencer marketing as a tactic rather than as a strategy. Your brand needs fame and a clear, core idea that resonates with your audience, with lots of clear brand codes that are distinctive, at least in your category. Once this has landed and is understood you’ve then bought yourself the space to allow your chosen influencer to apply their brand (and their brand of content) to your brand without you getting swallowed up.

As fun as having Salt Bae cover your product in gold leaf (or similar), or showing off your sales team’s ‘Girl Dinner’? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly worth getting the fundamentals nailed to maximise the chance of a return on your investment.

The good news is that if your brand is consistently applied in your comms, the content creator ads can perform well. A 2024 report from System1 and TikTok found that ‘exceptionally branded’ creator-led content generated a brand awareness lift of more than 200%.

If content creators are here to stay it’s no bad thing, but those B2B marketers taking something of a watching brief are advised to use the time to get their house (and brand) in order before they join the fray.