What Australian Influencer Research Says About Creator Marketing in 2026

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast. I’m here today with Trish McGee. Trish, welcome to the pod.

Trish McGee: Thanks for having me, James.

James Lawrence: Looking forward to the chat.

So, just by way of background, Trish is Group Account Director at The Impact Agency. It’s a full-service comms agency headquartered in Sydney, but Trish, you lead client strategy and partnerships whilst also overseeing the Victorian and Melbourne presence at Impact.

Impact have just published their 2026 Influencer Pulse Check, so we thought it’d be a good moment in time to have a chat around the key findings and takeaways of that particular research. We’ll include a link in the show notes to where to get access on the Impact website.

We’re in early to mid-2026. I really like it when we get Australian research being done. I think often there’s so much information out there from North America, and to a lesser extent the UK and Ireland, that we often rely upon in the Australian marketing community. So it’s so awesome to have some local information and data.

So I think, just by way of background, Trish, what’s the context of the report? Is this the first year? Has it been done before? Why does Impact go out there and do this piece of work in the first place?

Trish McGee: Yeah, absolutely. And the local component has a lot to do with it as well.

We do lean on overseas research a lot, so it is great to have it with our own creators. Why we do it is to get a bit of a sense of what’s happening in the influencer marketing industry by speaking to the people who are shaping it.

We need to understand the role of influencers in our marketing strategy. So we need to be able to hear what’s working for them, how can they work better with brands, and what do we need to be doing to make sure we’re getting the most meaningful results for both the influencers and our clients.

But this year has been quite different, and really exciting actually, in the sense of the questions we’re asking and the scope of who we’ve been speaking to as well. Particularly just in the last 12 months, how much the industry has changed digitally with the adoption of AI, and that’s obviously been a really big shake-up for creators, as well as algorithms always changing.

Changing algorithms, the way we consume content, and the way that audiences are so fragmented into these niche little communities — it’s been a really important piece of research to understand how are we targeting these audiences? How are we counteracting AI, the AI stuff out there? And what do we need to be doing as marketers to make sure that our partnerships are cutting through, we’re still engaging with the right audiences, and able to make really meaningful content that works for everyone?

James Lawrence: Yeah. Such a rapidly changing space, and a space that is growing in importance, I think, in so many different ways. The rise of influencers and content creators — obviously it’s a much more mature space now than it has historically been — but still, so much growth, I think, in maturity in the space.

In terms of the research, just for the listeners’ benefit, they’re all Australian influencers and content creators, right, who are actually interviewed?

Trish McGee: Yeah. And ranging from micro creators, so anywhere from 5,000 followers up until a million followers plus. So getting a really good spectrum of the micro influencers through to mega, and across all different age groups and cultural diversities and age diversities as well, which has been great.

James Lawrence: It’s so interesting. I thought one of the key takeaways from the summary is that the content creators prefer to be called content creators rather than influencers. I thought that was an interesting one, given the name of the report.

Trish McGee: I know. We’re thinking about changing that, actually. A couple of years ago, it was unveiled that “influencer” is a bit of a dirty word for influencers.

So we try to refer to them as creators, and that’s what they are. They’re developing beautiful, creative content for us.

James Lawrence: I guess before we get into what’s different, what are the things that have stayed really consistent across the five years in terms of responses? Things where it’s actually interesting — with all the change we’ve had in the space, these things remain true as they were one, three, or five years ago.

Trish McGee: Yeah, good question. It’s certainly been around influencers wanting to like the product, have tried the product, and be connected to that brand or service more authentically.

We have seen that over the last five years — gone are the days of just pay-for-comment vibes in the influencer marketing space. They want to have tried the product, used it authentically, and be honest with their audience about their experience and wanting to promote that.

Another one is longer-term partnerships as well. It always just has a better connection with their own followers when they’ve been seen to use the product before and speak about it in their own words and through their own experiences, and build that longer-term relationship up with the brand and with the product.

So it can take it from introducing the product all the way through to how they’re using it in their day to day.

James Lawrence: Yeah. Because obviously we do a reasonable amount of work in this space as well. I think those two trends are so true.

And I remember when we first started kind of playing in this space — probably was five years ago, right? — and our team with this kind of contract around just making sure you’re actually going to get any kind of outputs and deliveries and whatever else. It was the absolute Wild West.

It’s like actually making sure you are going to get any kind of outputs and deliveries and whatever else. And it was a pay-to-play space in many ways. But you kind of look at the maturity of the industry and, yeah, for the clients where we’re doing this work, the proper partnerships we’re trying to build — the creators are production partners. They care about it. I think they have pride in their own brand and doing the right stuff. They are deeply protective of their audience, but they also want to do a good job for us or for our client as part of that.

It’s like all marketing, right? It’s almost like SEO where SEO is always on. You’ve got to keep doing it. Consistency. The best results that we get are when it is an always-on type engagement, where it’s not just this one-and-done. It’s a program. It’s strategic, it’s thought out, and you commit to it.

Trish McGee: Yeah. And it’s not just picking a random influencer because they’ve got a high amount of followers. It’s such a strategic approach to engaging influencers and understanding their audiences, their values, their alignment — why are they speaking to this product or service?

It’s so much more than just, “They’re pretty and have got a lot of followers, so let’s pay them.” It’s come so, so far.

James Lawrence: And audiences — even putting aside content creation and social and UGC — we have very elevated BS filters, right? And I think authenticity across all forms of marketing is so important.

So it’s almost like a natural evolution in this space, right?

Trish McGee: Yeah. People are over it. They don’t want to be lied to. They just want to be spoken to like a normal person and have relevant content coming at them.

James Lawrence: Yeah. What about platforms? There’s definitely research in there around platforms being used and changes in platform. Obviously it’s a massive “it depends” question, right? It’s right message to the right person, right time.

But I guess first of all, what stayed the same with platforms? Are there certain platforms growing or shrinking or doing certain things in certain areas, as compared to the report last year? Has there been much change there?

Trish McGee: Yeah. YouTube has emerged this year as a platform that they do really love creating content on in the sense that they’ve got a lot of creative control, longer-form videos, and they like YouTube Shorts. There are a few fewer restrictions, I think, than Meta.

However, in terms of, say, a sponsored post with a brand, in terms of performance, Instagram consistently has remained creators’ top preference in terms of doing a paid collaboration. Being able to disclose is really clear. Collaborate with the brand is great. It’s still the platform where they probably prefer to do paid jobs on.

But in terms of their own use and getting more views and potentially more engagement, TikTok has emerged as a really close second. Again, it lends itself to a lot more creative control, a lot more authenticity, a lot of just talking off the cuff with TikTok. So they feel like they can be a little bit more creative and authentically themselves on TikTok, is what we’re seeing.

But yeah, Instagram again this year has come out as the top preferred paid platform.

James Lawrence: Yeah. Do you find that yourselves at Impact in terms of when you’re working with clients? And it’d be interesting — is it you slash clients dictating channel and platform, or is it more, what’s the idea, who’s the creator or influencer that we think can best execute, and then we leave it a little bit up to them? How do you guys approach it?

Trish McGee: Yeah, that’s a good question too. It comes down to what’s the brief, what’s the objective?

Often it’s not the same content from the creator on TikTok versus Instagram, so it does depend on what’s the message we want to get across and into which audience. If we do want to skew younger, we can have a little bit more fun or a little bit less rigid content. TikTok is certainly it. Certainly when we work with creators in food and cooking, TikTok lends itself really well to that kind of content.

When it’s a bit more deep, or we want to get a longer caption across or a longer message, Instagram could be good for that as well.

So I guess it just depends on what we’re after. But it’s looking at what’s the brief, having a chat with both the client and the influencer to determine where would this sit. And what we love is when clients are open to hearing from the influencer: “Actually, I think Instagram would be better suited for this,” or, “This would be great for my TikTok page and my followers there.”

So yeah, love it when we can have some creative freedom and let them come to us about what would work best.

James Lawrence: And it’s such — I think, speaking from the Rocket experience — it’s such a challenging area where often, to succeed here, brands have to be willing to give control away. And it’s so hard, and it runs contrary to human behaviour, but also how us as marketers have been taught to be safe and all these things, and what the brand is, and don’t be the story.

But it’s a bit like a doctor or a lawyer. You need to pick the right one and then just take that leap of faith. Because once you start dictating, “No, it’s got to be like this and going to be shot in a different way, and I would prefer it to go onto this channel, not that channel,” you’re taking away all of the genius and brilliance as to why you went to that person in the first place.

Trish McGee: Mm.

James Lawrence: But it’s hard, right? And I think it’s hard then when you’re an agency and you’re sitting in the middle, and you’ve got a client where the stakes are high and they might not necessarily be engaging directly, and you can tell that the content creators that are given the licence are the ones that are then probably most enthused about the project, kind of give it a better outcome rather than the ones that are being dictated to. But it’s such a challenge, isn’t it?

Trish McGee: It is. Yeah, I know. It’s all about getting that balance right in the brief of, “Okay, you do need to do this and you can’t say this, but go for gold with the rest of it.”

It’s great when you can work with clients that are happy to hear from the experts and hear what would work best for their platform. Working collaboratively and creatively with both the brand and the influencer is the gold standard. That’s what you want to be able to do.

James Lawrence: Yeah. And I think, obviously we’re biased, but it is one of the benefits of using an agency, right? You’re using a group of people that have done it before. They’ve dealt maybe with that content creator, or at least know where to source them, and then know how to engage and what to do and what not to do.

I think that is something where that experience of having done this before does play to a client’s favour eventually.

Trish McGee: Yeah, absolutely. You know what any flags to look out for are. It helps with negotiations, knowing how much they cost you. And you’ve already built out that relationship with the influencer, who trusts you and trusts your guidance.

Yeah, that’s absolutely a great point.

James Lawrence: So if you’re listening, marketers, you’ve got to use Impact or Rocket.

Trish McGee: Yeah, exactly.

James Lawrence: We deliberately don’t shill on this Smarter Marketer Podcast, but I couldn’t help with that one.

So just in terms of going through the report here, I’d be curious what other big themes did you have we seen this year in the report?

Trish McGee: Yeah. A big focus of this report was around the use of AI for creators. So we were really interested to hear how they’re using it themselves.

The majority have come back and said that while they’re using it for kind of admin things, such as reviewing contracts and editing captions, they’re not predominantly using it to create actual new images or video. That’s still very much something they are leaning away from.

But also what we found is they’re also not really looking to work with brands that have overly curated feeds that are clearly using AI for their content development, and even more so if they’re not disclosing it as well.

And look, it is obvious when AI has been used a lot, and there’s obviously a role for it, but influencers want to work with brands that do prioritise the human, the real, and the unfiltered stuff as well.

So yeah, AI in terms of how they’re using it — it is supporting with their content development to a certain degree, but they’re certainly not leaning on it to develop new content.

And then we also asked them as well, so what role does AI play in content creation in 2026 and beyond? And are they fearing the rise of the AI influencer as well?

And look, some absolutely were. There is a bit of a fear there that brands will work with AI creators. They obviously won’t talk back, and eventually that could be an economical option for brands. But there’s never not going to be a space for human creators speaking to real experiences.

Another question we asked on that was, does that mean brands would expect that your content should cost less because they could be getting it from an AI creator? Some of them were a bit wary of that, and potentially that is something that brands will be asking of them. But ultimately the sentiment was no — they should be paying more, if anything.

People are sick of seeing AI content already online. People are becoming so distrustful of what they’re seeing online. I am in the industry and I get fooled. I’ve got a golden retriever, and the amount of golden retriever videos I end up double-tapping, just to see it’s AI.

So I think people are becoming distrustful. They want to see faces they know, from real experiences, talking about comparisons and real experiences with that product or service. And if anything, that should be the more premium content.

So there could be a role for human-led, trustworthy content, and then also a role for a synthetic influencer role.

James Lawrence: Yeah, I don’t find that surprising in the report. It just feels that the reason you go to an influencer or content creator is that they have a community of people that trust and love them, or feel favourably towards them, whether that’s fashion or B2B marketing or sport or anything, right? Pets.

So the idea that they would then be kind of dismantling that and potentially depersonalising, or making content less authentic, it just feels that it’d be counterintuitive.

A lot of the movement towards influencers and content creators has been almost lo-fi, right?

Trish McGee: Yeah.

James Lawrence: We’re used to putting out the beautiful car ad and the beautiful woman walking down the catwalk in fashion and whatever. And it’s like, no, actually we’re willing to take some guardrails off and go into the TikTok where it’s a talking head who happens to have half a million people that watch their content every day.

So it is reassuring, I think, that there has been probably a lack of AI infiltrating things other than admin and ideation.

Trish McGee: Which is more just general purpose, right?

James Lawrence: Right, which is probably how a lot of us are using it.

Trish McGee: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the trend that influencers have called out, that they expect to be seeing more of and that they’re introducing into their content. It is that, as you said, lo-fi, raw, a bit unedited, a bit very unscripted, because that’s what they’re finding audiences are engaging with and really responding to.

And there’s always going to be a place for that.

James Lawrence: Mm-hmm. We haven’t been replaced just yet.

Trish McGee: Just yet. I think you and I need to watch out.

James Lawrence: Yes.

The other measurement bit was interesting. You guys are on the comms side. We’re more on the digital marketing side, leaning into performance marketing often. We have overlap here in the Venn diagram, I guess, as to both of us playing in this space.

It seems to have been a maturation of how content creators and influencers are not justifying, but I guess what they’re feeding back to brands around measurement and how campaigns have worked or haven’t worked, and an evolution of what brands are expecting. Just feeling a little bit less top-of-the-funnel and reach-driven, which it still is, right? I think often these areas can be phenomenal for that, but also probably getting a bit more sophisticated.

Trish McGee: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I’m sure you’re seeing this as well. Reach, to a certain degree, is important, but what is a view if there’s no action or consideration off the back of that?

And that’s where we’ve been taking our reporting, and want to be introducing it more and more with our clients and really reinforcing this based off this report. Because what we found was reach is not what they found to be the most important measurement at all.

It’s around things like saves, so that nods to, was this content interesting enough for me to want to come back to, bookmark, and think about? What did they say about that product that I want to come back and hear?

Sharing it with a friend — is it worth recommending? And then high-quality comments is what we’re really monitoring and tracking at the moment as well.

So are they asking questions? Are they giving positive feedback on the post? That’s what we’re reinforcing with our clients are the high-quality metrics to measure with influencer content these days.

And then obviously your domain as well is what was the action off the back of that post? Was there a drive in search or website or page visits? That’s obviously always going to be important.

But we definitely want to steer our reporting away from just, “You reached this many people, potentially saw this post,” to how many people actually meaningfully engaged.

James Lawrence: Yeah, that’s good. It’s good to have both, isn’t it? Mark Ritson says that often good long-term marketing will have short-term results, but rarely does short-term marketing have long-term results. And I think it’s such a good one.

It can be the same conversation that you would be having with your clients that we’re having with ours around the importance of long-term marketing and brand. Reach is important, and if you’re selling something with a reasonably complex path to purchase, this is just going to be one of those touchpoints on the way through.

But I think it is important to them to also be looking at indicators that are showing some short-term performance rather than just reach.

We had a thing about being a marketer, is even if you’re half decent, you’re wrong a lot of the time. And I remember we work with a home builder here in Sydney and we piloted TikTok, and they literally sold a house off it within the first couple of weeks it was launched.

And you just wouldn’t necessarily — you might see it as a top-of-the-funnel, bring people in, recycle around DAs and CDCs and finance and whatever else, but that person was just ready to go and happened to...

So I think it is so interesting.

Trish McGee: ROI on that post.

James Lawrence: Yeah, exactly. We’re still dining out on it now.

But I think it speaks to the power of these channels. And if you look at where we are in Australia in the content creation and influencer space, it’s so immature compared to what’s happening in other parts of the world, particularly through Asia, where that is the industry, right? Search and whatever else don’t really play the role that they do. Traditional search, Google, et cetera. It is influencer-driven.

And we’re not talking about thousands of influencers. We’re talking about millions of very large influencers and micro-influencers. And it’s the way that commerce is driven online now. So I think we’re going to see so much growth in this space.

Trish McGee: Yeah, I hope so. As you said, we’re in our infancy. There’s so much further we need to go. And just a crucial part of any marketing plan is having some sort of creator, trusted voice in the mix as well.

James Lawrence: Yeah. Because it is, at the end of the day, you referenced it earlier, there are large cohorts of users in Australia that this is where they spend their time. This is where research journeys start. It’s where they are influenced.

It generally skews younger, but not always, right?

Trish McGee: Yeah.

James Lawrence: With every year that mark’s moving forward a couple of years, because older people also start adopting different platforms and technologies.

Trish McGee: Yeah, absolutely. Just searching for products or restaurants or recommendations purely in TikTok — it’s not just a random word or a profile, it’s using a full-sentence question.

And that’s why it’s really important that brands are thinking really smart about how they’re using content from their creators and what they want to brief in. Because really, they should be answering questions. They should be comparing things. They should be showing people how it works.

Because even if it’s not on that day, as you said, a consumer could be searching on TikTok, come across that post — bang, my decision’s made. I’ve seen how it works. I know what it does. I see someone I trust speaking about it. It’s such an important part of the funnel now.

James Lawrence: Yeah. Trust is the word, isn’t it? And it’s as old as all marketing, right, in terms of that trust, social proof. And this is it on steroids, in a format that allows for video, which then just doubles down the trust factor. It’s fascinating.

Just more practically, there’s a section in there around working with the algorithm, asking creators, how have you adopted your content strategy in response to platform algorithms? Which of the following changes have you made to your content to help keep audiences engaged? How does your audience help you create content?

I’d just be interested — was there any kind of interesting data collected there in terms of the changes practically to how creators are using the platforms and how they’re trying to get themselves seen more?

Trish McGee: Yeah. And look, they sometimes are just as confused about the algorithm as anyone. One day the post performs really well, the next couple of weeks, same strategy...

So yeah, they’ve had to adapt and try new ways of working to make sure that they are appearing on the algorithm, and so reaching their audience, their followers, but also now with the Meta algorithm, it extends really far.

Short-form videos still come out as a really favourable piece of content on certainly Meta that works with the algorithm. Short-form videos that are using creators’ own voice, trending sounds, things like that, that really helps.

Lo-fi content, they did say as well, has been really something that they’ve been trialling and, from an engagement perspective, working well in terms of what we’ve been speaking about. It’s real human content that people are craving online and happy to engage with.

Carousels are a really nice way as well of cutting through. So it’s having a bit of a mix of short form and carousels.

Consistency is always going to be important, but from the research, creators found that posting more regularly wasn’t helping necessarily. So it is more having considered content, but in diverse formats as well.

James Lawrence: Mm-hmm. It’s funny, isn’t it? I think there is an element of randomness, almost by design, sometimes in the algorithms. But there is just — what’s the right mix for an individual or a brand will always...

Any of these cheat sheets you read where it’s “post seven times a day” or “post on Tuesdays at night,” they’re always inevitably proven to be wrong. And it’s because I think there is this: post when there’s something good to post, try to add value to the person receiving it, and then there will just be certain platforms or format types that lend themselves better to the message that you’re getting out there.

I think the longer I’ve been working in the industry, the more you see that every rule will be broken by something else for some reason. A lot of that testing and learning and doing it in the right way generally gets rewarded.

Trish McGee: Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

James Lawrence: That’s interesting.

And then there was a section — and we’re getting probably a bit specific here — but a section just around pricing, discount codes, sponsored posts, whether you’re getting the brand to publish the post to boost the post rather, whether you’re trying to do it through the content creator slash influencer.

I guess it’s more there, like what are the big takeaways or trends in when it comes to the actual posting of content?

Trish McGee: So we’ve seen from the research that creators are very happy for their posts to be boosted. And yeah, just making sure that they have a bit of oversight of where it’s going and for how long, obviously. But yeah, everyone’s pretty on board to be boosted.

A question we asked was around whitelisting as well, which is where brands can use creator content and it doesn’t actually appear on your own channel. It also doesn’t appear on the brand’s channel, but it will come up in someone’s feed as if it’s James’ post. But then if I were to click on your profile, it’s not there.

So it’s just a bit of a new tactic that brands are trialling. And when we asked influencers about that, they weren’t overly keen actually on this, which we were surprised about. We thought, why wouldn’t they want to just be able to create a lot of different posts, appear in people’s feed, but not have to have it stuck on their grid?

But what they were worried about was the lack of understanding of who’s seeing it, where it’s going, the purpose of the content. It could risk a little bit of pushback from people that aren’t the typical followers.

So that was actually a bit surprising to see — the majority are really happy with boosting, having a bit of oversight of where it’s going and control over that post, versus the whitelisting, which is still in its infancy. But we’ll be interested to see if that changes over the next 12 months.

James Lawrence: You can see why. If you’re a creator, your audience — you build trust, you want trust to be kept, you want control, and you want to own that relationship long term.

And then as a brand, you can see why it’s more performance and scale and efficiency and how do we get... It’s almost just two competing interests. You can see the tension, the natural tension there.

Trish McGee: Exactly right. Yeah.

James Lawrence: It’s an interesting one.

So I guess just, Trish, as we wrap up, more practically, how do listeners get a copy of the report? Will it be on the Impact website?

Trish McGee: Yeah, absolutely. Just head to the Impact website. There’ll be all the details on how to download the report, as well as we’ll be hosting an event in late April as well. So there’ll be some information about that too — a panel event to speak to these findings in more detail as well.

But yeah, just head to The Impact Agency website and you can get all the details that you need there.

James Lawrence: Awesome. We’ll include a link in the show notes as well on the Rocket website to that.

So Trish, thanks so much for coming onto the podcast and sharing the top-level findings of the report. Awesome to have Australian-based research, particularly awesome that it’s then based on influencers and content creators within the local market. I think it’s so challenging to get research down to that level.

So well done, and thanks for your time today.

Trish McGee: Thanks, James. I really appreciate it.

James Lawrence: Thanks, Trish.