99% of brands know that long-term partnerships work. Only 35% actually do it.

The influencer marketing market has crossed the $32 billion threshold. Investments are rising, teams are structuring, and tools are multiplying. Yet, at the heart of this apparent maturity, a paradox persists: a vast majority of brands continue to run their campaigns in a fragmented manner, campaign by campaign, without a common thread or analytical continuity.

We still too often oppose the “roi culture” of marketing departments against the “image culture” of creators as two irreconcilable worlds. This division is an outdated reading. Today, the sector suffers less from a lack of conviction than from a deficit in execution. According to the Archive report, while 99% of brands recognize the superiority of long term creator partnerships, only 35.3% of them actually take the plunge. Why do decision-makers continue, in practice, to do the exact opposite of what they know to be strategically effective?

Retaining creators for the long term

For years, influencer marketing has been the stage for a dialogue of the deaf: on one side, brands demanding immediate roi; on the other, creators protecting their editorial line like a sacred bastion. This one-shot model is not a deliberate choice; it is an admission of operational helplessness. Under the guise of annual plans, many companies actually line up a disguised calendar of retail events: a highlight in January, a launch in March, a holiday campaign. At each milestone, they start from scratch: new casting, new negotiations, new briefs.

This model of eternal renewal primarily serves those who sell the campaigns, not those who build a brand. It is costly in terms of time, represents lost learning, and dilutes performance. Conversely, a continuous (always-on) approach creates cumulative value. The TopRank Marketing / Sprout Social study reveals that teams deprived of it are 17 times more likely to judge their campaigns ineffective. Yet, consistency is a virtuous mathematical trade-off: sustainable partnerships generate 70% more engagement, while 71% of creators adjust their rates for ongoing collaborations.

It is not a matter of opposing consistency to seasonal highlights; both are complementary. The real smart move consists in building a backbone of engaged creators year-round to nurture baseline awareness, and then scaling up resources during commercial peaks. The punctual campaign then becomes all the more powerful because the creator already masters the brand’s codes and their audience is already exposed to it organically.

Image is not a whim, it is the fuel of ROI

The second barrier to this rationalization is cultural. Viewing the “image culture” of creators as an aesthetic whim is a fundamental mistake. An author’s authenticity is not an abstract concept: it is their primary asset, and the very engine of engagement.

A creator locked into an overly directive brief loses what makes them valuable. The irony of the story is that the performance brands look for depends directly on the creative freedom they sometimes hesitate to grant. Restricting the image mechanically sabotages your own return on investment. This is not an opinion; it is what data demonstrates as soon as measurement goes beyond simplistic last-click attribution.

Brand awareness influence and performance conversion influence are not two airtight silos. They must be envisioned holistically, within the same measurement framework, to create a continuous feedback loop: creativity feeds conversion, and conversion data refines the creative trajectory.

Infrastructure as a universal translator

The real friction point is therefore not philosophical; it is terminological. We suffer from a lack of a common language. Brands talk in acquisition costs and conversion rates; creators talk in community and editorial consistency. As long as we do not have management tools capable of translating these two worlds into a shared reading, everyone will remain on the defensive.

The role of technology is not to control creation, but to build the infrastructure of trust (both technical and legal) that allows measuring the full-funnel business contribution while safeguarding the freedom of execution. It is only under this condition that the relationship changes in nature. When creators see the real impact of their work on revenue, they are no longer simple creative providers: they become growth partners.

The market is crossing a tipping point. Recent shifts documented by eMarketer confirm that the majority of investments are now migrating toward continuous partnership models. The sector is polarizing between those building a year-round management infrastructure and those stacking disconnected operations.

Two questions to ask yourself

The question is no longer whether influence works, but whether your way of practicing it is built to last. To find out, every decision-maker should ask themselves two diagnostic questions:

Is your influence strategy an annual plan… or a disguised calendar of operations? A plan builds cumulative value with a network. A calendar starts from scratch at every commercial highlight.

How many of your creators are still working with you from one quarter to the next? If you cannot answer, the problem is not the creativity of your campaigns. It is the infrastructure supporting them.

Reconciling performance and image is not a managerial compromise. It is accepting that one can no longer exist without the other, and finally giving yourself the means to prove it, continuously, through data.

By Alexandre Dos Santos, CEO of Affilae

Column originally published in TOP/COM, June 7, 2026.

References

• TopRank Marketing / Sprout Social, B2B Influencer Marketing Research (2025)

• Archive, Brand Creator Collaboration Report (2026)

• Printful / Archive, Long-term vs One-Off Statistics (2026)

• Sprout Social, Influencer Marketing Report (2025)

• eMarketer, Creator Partnership Trends (2025-2026)

• Influencer Marketing Hub, Benchmark Report (2026)