89% of Brands Are Bringing Influencer Marketing Back In-House

A while back, an old friend of mine from the consumer goods world took me out to dinner.

For years, his company had handed its influencer campaigns to an outside agency: picking the creators, negotiating the rates, shaping the content, watching the numbers — all of it sat on the agency's side of the table.

He told me that starting last year, they had been pulling the whole thing back in, piece by piece. Built a small team of their own, picked the creators themselves, negotiated the deals themselves.

I asked why.

He said something I still remember: "When you do it through somebody else, you never quite see it clearly."

At the time, I thought that was just their company's choice.

Then recently I came across a survey by Kolsquare, run together with NewtonX. In 2025, they asked more than 600 marketing decision-makers across seven markets in the UK and Europe one thing: how do you actually work with influencers?

Reading it, I wanted to call my friend right away.

God — you weren't being willful at all. You were standing with the majority.

So what does 89% actually mean?

In the survey, 89% of brands have moved some or all of their influencer marketing in-house.

What does "some or all" mean?

It means everything from finding creators and negotiating prices to shaping content and watching the numbers — either all done by their own people, or the core parts held in-house with only the edges outsourced.

Think back to corporate websites ten years ago. Early on, everyone outsourced them; after delivery, changing a single word meant filing a ticket. And later? Any company worth its salt kept its website firmly in the hands of its own marketing department.

Why?

Because the website had gone from being "a one-off project" to "something you run every single day."

Influencer marketing is walking the same road. It used to be a seasonal splash around the holidays; now it has to be run as a daily operation.

Once a job needs to be done every day, and done carefully, it moves back from the outsourcing table into your own hands.

Why are micro-influencers so sought after?

Now for another number: 86%.

86% of brands are working with micro-influencers.

What is a micro-influencer? The kind with a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of followers. A few years ago, plenty of brands looked down on them: with a following that small, what kind of splash could they possibly make?

Today, more than eight in ten brands are partnering with them.

Why, though?

Think about how you scroll your phone. One celebrity beams at you, holding up a jar of face cream. Another is a blogger with twenty or thirty thousand followers who honestly spent half a month testing the product and walked you through what worked and what didn't, point by point.

Who do you believe?

The more followers someone has, the more it looks like an ad. The fewer, the more it looks like a recommendation.

What brands are really paying for is that sense of recommendation. To put it plainly: authenticity. That's why the survey put "authenticity" and "long-term value" right next to "reach" — performance still has to be part of the conversation, but performance alone never earns trust.

Where will the money flow?

The survey asked respondents to rank their budget priorities for 2026. The direction is clear.

Paid amplification: 62% of marketers are adding budget. Good content shouldn't sink after a single post — paying to get it seen by more people is money spent exactly where it counts.

Long-term partnerships: 59%. It used to be that you paid an influencer to shoot one video; the money changed hands, the video was delivered, and both sides walked away clean. Now more and more brands are switching to "long-term contracts."

Why?

Trust is something a single collaboration can't build. Viewers have to see the same brand again and again, from the same creator, before they take it seriously.

UGC — getting your users to speak for you: 55%.

Of course, what rises on one line of the budget falls on another. The survey also notes that a batch of tactics is cooling off — and each market is cooling off in its own way. The buzz is one thing; whether it's worth it — every market keeps its own ledger.

The 69% who put the awkward part up front

This one, I think, is underrated.

69% of marketers treat ad compliance as a hard requirement when choosing influencers.

What is ad compliance? Once you've taken a sponsored deal, you have to label it "this is an ad" — no dressing it up as organic word-of-mouth.

Brands used to find the whole business a hassle, worried that a label would make it feel "less authentic." Now it's exactly the reverse: regulation is tightening, consumers have grown sharp-eyed, and one undisclosed sponsored post blowing up can burn trust that a brand spent years building.

And there's another layer: values fit. Especially in Southern and Western Europe, brands no longer pick influencers on the strength of the numbers alone — they also ask whether the person's conduct suits the name on the door.

Choosing an influencer is starting to feel a lot like choosing a business partner.

Data can mislead. But when something goes wrong, it's two real reputations in the same boat.

Same Europe, two playbooks

The most interesting part of this survey is what happens when you spread it across a map.

Start with the average line: 78% of European marketers say they plan to work with more creators over the coming year.

Now look at the UK: 84%.

Well above the average line. The UK is one of Europe's fastest-moving, hungriest markets — new tactics get tried first, scaled up fast when they work, performance-driven, numbers doing the talking. Like a high-speed testing ground.

Head north, and the picture changes.

The Nordics and Benelux are pragmatic and scrupulous about the data. Budgets there aren't growing as fast as in the South, but every step lands firmly. Roughly a third of brands already run dedicated influencer marketing platforms, digitizing the whole flow from creator selection to collaboration to post-campaign review. Micro-influencers are their first choice too, and responsibility stays pinned to the agenda.

Small markets, it turns out, are the first to write the rules.

Then I asked my friend

At the end of that dinner, I asked him: running it all in-house — isn't it exhausting?

He said, yes, exhausting. Choosing the people, negotiating the prices, watching the execution, reviewing the results — all of it lands on you.

But there's peace of mind. Where every penny went, exactly who each collaboration was with, what people were saying in the comments — all of it in plain sight.

Since then, I've often thought about the numbers in that survey. 89%, 86%, 69%.

They all point to the same thing: influencer marketing stopped being a technical chore of "find someone, run an ad" a long time ago.

It's a long game of building trust.

Whoever runs trust like an asset gets to keep their seat at the table.

Here's to finding that person, too — the one who genuinely means it when they "recommend."