Influencer marketing has split into three categories: real human creators, AI-augmented human creators (the dominant 2026 model), and fully synthetic creators.
73% of UK creator-marketing campaigns surveyed in Q1 2026 involved meaningful AI use in content production — up from 18% eighteen months earlier.
Discovery has commoditised. The bottleneck is brief quality and creative direction, not creator access.
Published by Creative Marketing Research, the independent research division of Creative Marketing Group.