Does Any of It Actually Work?

The influencer industry has a favourite number. For every dollar spent, it says, you get $5.78 back.

We went looking for where that figure comes from. The trade site that publishes it attributes it to itself, with no date and no methodology. Its own underlying survey — more than 600 marketers — does not contain a return-per-dollar figure at all.

The most-quoted statistic in influencer marketing traces back to nowhere in particular. That is not a promising start, and it is the reason this article exists.

First, the honest case for

Something real is happening, and it would be lazy to pretend otherwise.

The volume argument is genuinely startling. Analysis of Fortune 100 brands between January and August 2025 found creators produced 2.5 million posts featuring those brands, against 77,000 posts from the brands' own accounts — 33 times more content, 11 times more impressions, 14 times more engagement. No brand can out-post that. If people are talking about you anyway, having some say in how is not irrational.

The money is moving accordingly. US creator advertising spend is forecast at around $44 billion in 2026, up roughly 26 per cent year on year, from $13.9 billion in 2021. And 87 per cent of marketers expect their influencer budgets to rise, with 72 per cent expecting increases above 50 per cent.

And the academic evidence — which is the evidence that matters, because nobody is selling anything — is broadly positive. A 2025 meta-analysis covering 71 papers, 135 experimental studies and 571 effect sizes found influencers significantly affect both engagement and purchase intention, and are more effective than brand posts, virtual influencers and celebrities.

So: it works. Now the fine print.

The slogan the research does not support

Every agency deck in Ireland contains some version of the line that micro-influencers convert better. It is the industry's most repeated claim and it is, at best, half true.

The same meta-analysis found that small and medium creators are more effective at driving engagement, while larger creators have greater impact on purchase intention. Bigger accounts perform better with familiar, searchable products; smaller ones excel with new and experiential products.

A 2022 study in the Journal of Marketing — one of the few that accounts for campaign cost — goes further and finds inverted-U effects for posting frequency, follower–brand fit and post positivity. More posting, tighter brand fit and more enthusiasm all stop helping and start actively hurting past a point. It also found that posts announcing new product launches diminish effectiveness.

Neither tier is universally better. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you the tier they happen to represent.

Nobody is measuring sales

This is the finding that reframes everything.

We looked at every published Irish creator campaign case study we could find — GAA players for Specsavers, a rugby international for An Post, a Dublin restaurant, a greyhound racing campaign, a pan-European drone launch. Every single published result is a reach or engagement metric. Views, impressions, followers reached, engagements.

Not one is a sales figure.

That pattern holds internationally. Among marketers increasing their influencer budgets, 89 per cent name brand awareness as a KPI and 51 per cent engagement — but only 35 per cent track conversions and just 25 per cent track attributable revenue. Separately, 79 per cent of enterprise marketers say they struggle to measure influencer ROI, and even in a vendor's own favourable survey, 58 per cent admitted they cannot measure creator-driven performance separately at all.

Now hold that against this: 65.9 per cent of marketers expect payback within one month. 48.4 per cent expect it within two weeks.

Three quarters of them do not track revenue. Two thirds expect it back inside a month. Both of those things cannot be true.

The most useful sentence in the industry, and why it is so convenient

Research cited approvingly at an Irish industry event this year carried a quote from a brand-effectiveness firm: "Creators are brand builders, not salespeople… judging creators for long-term effects yields higher returns than any other channel."

That may well be right. Long-term brand building is real, it is undervalued, and short-term sales attribution has always been a poor measure of it.

It is also the single most convenient sentence available to an industry that cannot demonstrate sales. It simultaneously explains the absence of evidence and forbids you from asking for it. Every reader should notice how neatly it does both jobs at once.

Then there is the fraud

The most-cited estimate — that influencer fraud cost brands $1.3 billion out of $8.5 billion in spend, roughly 15 per cent — comes from a 2019 academic study. It is seven years old and we could find no equally rigorous update, so we are not presenting it as current.

What is current is that brands still say it is their biggest problem. In a 2026 industry survey, 56.5 per cent of marketers named fake or bot followers as their primary quality issue, with a further 10.6 per cent citing inauthentic comments and 10.2 per cent fake engagement. Only 10.9 per cent reported no fraud concerns at all.

The Irish-specific data is older — a 2020 analysis found over 45 per cent of Irish creators artificially inflating metrics, mostly through follow/unfollow tactics, with just under 10 per cent buying followers outright and around 10 per cent of Irish micro-influencers using comment pods. That figure is six years old and we flag it as such. But nobody has published a better one since, which is its own kind of answer.

The best story in this whole area remains a 2018 one. Unilever's then chief marketing officer stood up at Cannes and committed the company to never working with influencers who buy followers, warning the industry needed "to take urgent action now to rebuild trust before it's gone forever." The reporting that day also noted that Unilever's own Magnum brand ranked among the top ten brands using paid influencers with fake followers.

The Irish audience, which is the bit that should really worry brands

Ireland has unusually good consumer research here, and it does not read well.

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission's study — a nationally representative survey of 1,000 people plus observation of 70 Irish influencers across more than 7,500 posts — found that only 10 per cent of Irish consumers trust the information influencers give them, against 24 per cent for media reviews and 43 per cent for ordinary consumer reviews. Separate 2023 research found 56 per cent of Irish people trust brand advertisements more than influencer posts, and 71 per cent believe influencers are paid for positive brand mentions.

And yet 66 per cent of people who follow influencers have bought something because of one. Of those, 24 per cent later felt misled — which works out at roughly one in twenty Irish adults having felt deceived by influencer marketing.

The trend is improving. By late 2025, 58 per cent of Irish consumers said they check influencers' posts before personal shopping decisions, 23 per cent now trust influencer posts more than brand ads, and recognition of the #ad label had risen to 63 per cent from 46 per cent in 2022. Notably, the top annoyance has shifted: 54 per cent now cite influencers who "misrepresent real life", while objections to photo editing fell from 67 per cent to 39 per cent.

Irish audiences have stopped worrying about the filter and started worrying about the life.

So is it worth it?

Our honest reading of the evidence is this.

It works for awareness, and the volume data makes that hard to argue with. It works better when the creator has genuine authority in the category rather than simply a large audience. It works badly when it is bought like media — by follower count, at scale, with a payback expectation measured in weeks.

And it is bought like media constantly, by people who do not measure the outcome, from agencies who charge a percentage of the spend, in a market where more than half of buyers say fake followers are their main problem.

The $5.78 is not a lie exactly. It is just a number nobody can show you the working for. In a channel where the entire product is trust, that ought to bother the industry more than it evidently does.

A note on the sourcing

The origin of the return-per-dollar figure was checked against both the trade site publishing it and its own underlying benchmark report; the figure appears in the former and not the latter. The meta-analysis is Barari, Eisend and Jain (2025) in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science; the cost-adjusted study is Leung and colleagues (2022) in the Journal of Marketing. Marketer survey figures are from a 2026 industry benchmark survey of more than 600 respondents and from vendor research, with vendor-commissioned material identified as such throughout. The fraud estimate is from a 2019 University of Baltimore study and is presented with its date because no comparable update exists. Irish creator inflation figures date from 2020 and are flagged accordingly. Irish consumer trust data is from the CCPC's published research and from the advertising authority's 2023 and 2025 surveys; where a sample size was not disclosed, we have not implied one. Irish campaign case studies are as published by the agency that ran them. The graphics are our own, built from the figures cited above. The photograph is used under the Unsplash Licence, by Vitaly Gariev.