Influencer marketing: €587M invested in France in 2025. The creator's post matters less than what you do with the content afterwards in paid media.
Influencer marketing is the one line of the media plan most brands still buy on gut feeling. You pick a creator because you like them, pay a fee, wait for the post, count the likes. Then you start again with someone else. My view: it is not a channel of its own, and it is certainly not public relations. It is creative production followed by a media buy. The post published on the creator's account is the least important part of what you pay for. The value is in what you do with the content afterwards.
Influencer marketing: the French market in numbers
On 2 April 2026, the French advertising regulator ARPP and France Pub published the second edition of their study on influencer spending, built on interviews with 200 national advertisers and 600 local and regional advertisers.
- €587 million invested in 2025, up 13.1% year on year. The market was worth €323 million in 2022: up 82% in three years.
- 5.2% of digital spending by French advertisers, against 3.6% in 2022.
- 84% of national advertisers now pay creators in money. In 2022 it was 33%.
- 65% go through an agency or intermediary, against 37% three years earlier.
Two other figures from the same study interest me more. First: only 18% of national advertisers worked with creators in 2025, down from 20% the year before. The money is growing, the number of brands is not. Those who are in spend more, the rest stay out. Second: half of the advertisers involved spend between €10,000 and €50,000 a year on it, and 42% find the channel interesting but complex to run.
Complex, fine. But a good share of that complexity comes from buying it without a method.
What you are buying: a creative first, an audience second
When you pay a creator, you buy two very different things. Distribution to their community, once, with no control over volume or targeting. And a piece of content: a video shot by someone who knows how to talk to a camera, in a language your brand cannot produce on its own.
Organic distribution is a one-shot. The content can keep working for weeks, provided you negotiated the right to reuse it. Brands have understood this: in the tenth edition of the Reech study, run in October and November 2025 with 400 French advertisers and agencies, 91% of respondents say they reuse creator content, mainly on social networks and in social ads.
The same study says something else: brands and agencies now favour communities of 100,000 to 500,000 followers. That makes sense if you are buying an audience. It makes much less sense if you are buying a creative. A creator with 20,000 followers who shoots a video that gets your product right gives you a better advertising asset than a star reciting your brief. The audience you can buy afterwards, at the right size and on the right target.
Partnership ads: where influence becomes a media buy
On Meta the format is called partnership ads: the ad runs under the creator's identity, but you choose the target, the budget and the duration. TikTok and YouTube have their equivalents. You no longer depend on one account's algorithm. You buy impressions, as in any social campaign.
On 12 August 2026, Agentio published a report covering $130 million in spend, 65,000 ads and 137 brands. To be clear, Agentio sells creator advertising infrastructure: they have an interest in the format looking good. The numbers are still instructive. Compared with the same kind of content run from the brand's own account, partnership ads show a click-through rate 19% higher, a conversion rate 10% higher and a cost per acquisition 5% lower. The CPM is 19% more expensive.
Read that again: 5% better on acquisition cost. That is no miracle. It is an honest gain, paid for with a higher CPM. And the rest of the report is a reminder that nothing is automatic: only one tested ad in five becomes a winner, and winners wear out after 36 days on average. Trickier still, 45% of eventual winners look like losers until they have spent $100.
In other words, creator content obeys the same laws as all your creatives. You need volume, a test budget per video and a kill rule. It is the same mechanics I describe in pre-launch creative testing. A creator is not a bet. It is one more line in your creative factory.
Measuring influence: stop counting likes
Still according to Reech, 96% of respondents use influence for brand awareness, and 65% to generate sales directly. Both goals are legitimate. The trouble starts when you judge one with the other's metrics, or both with engagement rate.
A like does not pay an invoice. And a promo code captures only a fraction of what a creator triggers: most people watch the video, then type your name into Google three days later. Your dashboard will credit the sale to brand search.
So I judge influence like the rest of the plan. For the organic part: a cost per thousand real views on target, compared with what the same volume would cost bought directly. For the amplified part: cost per acquisition, like any campaign. And for the whole: blended CAC and search volume on your name, before and after. If nothing moves overall, the number of comments does not matter.
My rule for an influencer budget
Three lines in the contract and in the budget, never one overall fee. Production: what you pay for the content. Rights: reuse in advertising, with a duration and platforms written down in black and white. Amplification: at least as much money behind the videos as in the fees. A creator paid without advertising rights is a TV spot shot without booking the airtime.
Influencer marketing for a scale-up: the right order
Start with several small creators, not one headliner. Since one creative in five wins, you need several draws. With a single star, you stake your whole budget on one video.
Negotiate rights before the shoot. Afterwards the price goes up. And do it properly: in France, the law of 9 June 2023 gives commercial influence a legal framework, gifted products included. A written contract and a clear disclosure of the partnership are not optional.
Test in amplification before you judge. Give each video a real test budget, then cut the ones that do not hold up. The method works even on a tight budget, as I explain in what you can really do under €10k a month.
Write down your red lines. For Sisley, we ran twelve markets with a 45% increase in ROAS without damaging the image of a luxury brand. That result owes nothing to a stroke of genius. It comes from rules set before spending: what we test, what we cut, what the brand refuses to show. With creators this matters even more, because you are not the one holding the camera.
Do not put everything in one place. Creator content run only on Meta is still dependence on Meta. I covered that ceiling in the glass ceiling syndrome.
What I tell founders
According to Reech, 69% of companies plan to increase their influencer budget in 2026. Fine. But increasing a budget you buy on gut feeling just means losing faster. Treat your creators as creative suppliers and your videos as ads. Set a target cost, buy the rights, put media behind them, cut what does not work. That day, influence stops being a topic of its own and becomes what it always should have been: a line in the media plan, judged like the others.
If you want to look at where influence fits in your plan and how much to put into it, we can do it together in a free audit. And to place this line against your other channels, the media mix simulator gives you a first split in two minutes.
