Search & social · also called creator marketing
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is paying or partnering with social media creators to promote products to their followers through posts, videos or livestreams, which must be disclosed as advertising.
Influencer marketing borrows trust. Instead of running an ad, a brand pays a creator on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or another platform to feature its product in their own style. Deals range from free products for micro-influencers with a few thousand followers to multi-million-dollar partnerships with celebrities. Pricing can be flat fees, per post, per view, or affiliate commissions on sales.
Platforms support "branded content" tools that label paid partnerships, and brands can boost creator posts as paid social ads. Measurement uses reach, engagement, promo codes, affiliate links and increasingly brand lift studies.
Two big risks are disclosure and fraud. Regulators including the US FTC (through its Endorsement Guides) and India's advertising self-regulator ASCI require clear disclosure of paid relationships. And follower counts and engagement can be inflated with fake accounts, bought likes and engagement pods, so brands audit audiences before paying.
Think of it like this
Influencer marketing is like a friend recommending a restaurant, except the restaurant paid the friend, so the law says they have to tell you.
An example
A Korean cosmetics brand pays 20 creators in Indonesia US$1,500 each for a TikTok video; the videos gain 4 million views and a discount code records 3,000 sales.
Related terms
Paid social
Paid social is advertising on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest and X, where ads appear in feeds, stories and short videos.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based arrangement where partners, such as publishers, bloggers, coupon or cashback sites and influencers, earn commission for sales or leads they refer to a merchant.
Walled garden
A walled garden is a large platform, such as Google, Meta, Amazon or TikTok, that controls its own users, data, ad sales and measurement inside a closed ecosystem.
Lift study
A lift study is an experiment measuring how much a campaign changed an outcome, such as awareness or sales, by comparing exposed people with a similar unexposed group.
Ad fraud
Ad fraud is the deliberate faking or misrepresenting of ad impressions, clicks, installs or conversions so that someone gets paid for advertising that no real, interested human saw or did.
Sources: FTC: Endorsement Guides