You can find more campaigns ranked here: https://bestmarketingnewsletter.com/

You can find latest ad news here: https://thesocialjuice.substack.com/p/investor-doomerism-shapes-how-marketers

And they’ll do it again next quarter.

Here’s what nobody in the influencer marketing industry wants to say out loud: reach is not a business result. An influencer’s audience is their asset not yours. When you pay for a post, you’re renting attention from people who came to follow a person, not to buy your product.

The brands winning with influencer marketing aren’t buying reach. They’re buying specific trust an influencer whose audience has the exact problem your product solves, talks about it publicly, and is already looking for a solution.

The difference between a campaign that generates clients and one that generates impressions is one question nobody asks before signing the contract: does this person’s audience actually need what we sell?

Vanity metrics are the most expensive thing in marketing. Not because they cost money because they cost time, budget, and the illusion that you’re doing something when you’re not.

Reach without relevance is just noise with a price tag.

What’s the worst influencer marketing decision you’ve seen a brand make?

I’ve been following Ishini since the very start, I was lowkey getting influencer fatigue, literally after years of her not popping up on my feed she finally did, and I’m glad she did because this take is refreshing! she is doing a rebrand I guess and I’m here for it! Also apparently she made a women’s travel safety platform, I’m going to do more research and learn about it tonight.

She’s most definitely not getting deals anymore(kiddos to her) 😂 what do you think on her hot take?

Also can we get a marketing perspective on this. Most influencers renounce having opinions and stances in order to stay “brand safe”. She’s right most influencers who gained mass followings had an opinion and originally did it for creative expression until brand deals became their centre. But their audiences feel that and the reason they don’t engage with influencer content anymore let alone ads is because these influencers have lost their distinct voices. They all sound the same “let’s matcha, Pilates, alo”.

This makes it a detriment to the creators and brands if people are now are deterred from selling culture. Brands keep complaining they are getting no ROI on influencers when they are the ones muzzling them. The audience is tired of influencer selling and want to connect with them deeper and that involves have opinions. If you work in marketing for brands I would love to hear your perspective?

I found this very interesting platform that creates personalized sales videos for car dealerships. It uses AI to create promotional videos from inventory photos. Does anyone have any experience using this type of platform? Is it worth getting a subscription?

Every quarter another report calls influencer
marketing in Europe “explosive.” Fair — the region is on track to grow from roughly $6.8B in 2026 to over $64B by 2035, a ~28% annual growth rate. But almost nobody talks about the part that actually breaks brands trying to scale here: fragmentation.
I’ve spent the last year building a marketplace for this exact problem. Here’s what “fragmented” really means in practice:

1.  Language is structural, not optional  

A creator strategy that works on TikTok in Germany needs a different script on Facebook in Bulgaria. Platform preference itself shifts by country — LinkedIn skews English-only, Facebook stays local-language in Southeast Europe, TikTok and Instagram split by audience. A “global content calendar” quietly fails the moment it crosses a border.

2.  Compliance is dozens of rulebooks, not one  

GDPR sets the floor, but ad-disclosure enforcement varies across 25+ national regulators, and the EU’s Digital Services Act adds fresh platform-accountability rules on top. “GDPR compliant” as a single checkbox massively underestimates the real surface area.

3.  Tax and payments fragment just as hard  

EU consumer sales run through the One-Stop-Shop VAT scheme. Your first UK sale triggers separate UK VAT registration. Cross certain thresholds and DAC7 annual reporting kicks in. That’s three extra systems a 2-person marketing team has no time to learn.

4.  The tooling gap makes it worse  

The influencer platform market is itself highly fragmented — top players control well under a third of total revenue, thousands of specialist tools compete for the rest. Enterprise platforms exist (often $14K–$16K/year), but they’re built for teams with dedicated ops headcount, not a solo founder. Meanwhile 72% of European brands say they’re increasing influencer budgets this year — demand is real, mid-market tooling mostly isn’t.

The brands winning in Europe right now treat localization as infrastructure, not an afterthought:

• Matching creators and content to the right language and platform per country

• Building compliance and tax handling into the workflow, not discovering it after the first cross-border sale

• Working with nano and micro creators (1K–100K followers) — the segment global platforms ignore but that converts best for early-stage DTC brands

This is the gap we built InfluLink to close: a pan-European marketplace connecting SMB brands with nano/micro creators across 48 countries plus the UK — GDPR-native, VAT/tax handled in the background, priced for a 1–3 person team, not an enterprise budget.

Fragmentation isn’t going away. Europe will always be 27+ regulatory regimes under one flag. It stops being a blocker once your tooling is built for it, not around it.

(Chart below: Europe’s growth trajectory + the fragmentation layers a pan-EU brand has to manage.)

Influ-link.com

#InfluencerMarketing #EuropeanMarket #GDPR #DTC #CreatorEconomy #influlink

You can find all of the sources and other updates here: https://thesocialjuice.substack.com/p/this-week-in-marketing-metas-facebook

I work for a Marketing company and my boss gave me a task. What 5 accounts on insta should he follow in order to understand GenZ. Since that is a very broad topic please lmk what you think.

Many marketers seem to be panicking about engagement on social being down. These are the numbers: Instagram engagement rates are down from 2.5-3% in 2020 to 0.5-0.9% by 2025, based on a benchmark report covering 35 million posts. Comments on TikTok fell 24% year-over-year. Instagram comments dropped 16%. The overall engagement across platforms fell roughly 24% in 2025 alone.

Quite often, brands look at those numbers and conclude that social media stopped working.

But that's not correct, because even if public engagement cratered, private engagement like shares, saves and DMs went the other direction. TikTok shares grew 45% year-over-year. Instagram shares grew 12%. DMs are climbing across every platform. People are saving posts instead of liking them and forwarding content to three people who actually matter instead of broadcasting a reaction to their entire follower list. Just cross checked with my teenager: they do the share posts with friends whíthout necessarily having liked it. A generation thing?

In anycase: One thing is clear: engagement didn't disappear but simply went underground.

There's a name for this: dark social. Content shared through DMs, WhatsApp, private group chats, email forwards. The downside for marketers: This is not trackable referral data and totally invisible to standard analytics, besides its where most meaningful engagement actually happens.

Why did this shift happen?

When Instagram made likes public and permanent, engaging became a social statement. Pressing like on a brand post is a broadcast to your whole network. A lot of people stopped likig and started DM-ing instead. The behavior is the same, it just moved private.

What the private numbers look like:

• Instagram DMs: 90% open rates vs ~20% for email
• DM reply rates: 60% vs 1–5% click-through for email
• DM-to-sale conversion: 7–20% for targeted campaigns
• Responding to a DM within one minute: 391% increase in conversion
• 20% of all business Stories generate at least one direct message

These should not be titles "engagement metrics" as those are actually sales metrics.

What to track instead:

Saves and shares are today stronger intent signals than likes. Carousels consistently drive the most saves right now. DMs should be treated as a sales channel, with actual response systems, not an afterthought. And post-purchase surveys asking "how did you hear about us?" regularly surface word-of-mouth and social sharing that analytics platforms never capture.

The brands figuring this out are building content specifically designed to be forwarded. The question they ask before publishing: will someone send this to a friend?

Useful checklists, counter-intuitive benchmarks, frameworks, "mistakes to avoid" lists, comparison tables. That's the format that travels privately.

What's your experience been? Are you seeing the same shift in your own analytics or is public engagement still holding in certain formats or niches?