The Enduring Value Of Agencies In Influencer Marketing

By Himanshu Arora

In the last few years, influencer marketing has been swept up in a wave of platforms and marketplaces promising automation, faster execution and access to massive creator databases. The pitch is simple: upload a brief, pick from a list of influencers and launch your campaign.

But anyone who’s actually worked in this space knows it’s never that simple.

What most platforms offer today is scale without curation. A massive creator database that looks impressive at first glance, until you dig in and realise it’s mostly unvetted. The same names appear over and over. Engagement numbers are outdated. Audience data lacks depth. And most importantly, there’s no filter for fit.

That’s the problem. These lists don’t know your brand, tone, timing or context. They don’t know if a creator has already done four ads this week for your competitor. Or if their content has completely shifted since that last engagement report was pulled.

What platforms call a “discovery engine” is often just a searchable spreadsheet. And ironically, it’s usually the agency that puts together the final curated list anyway. They go through the data, clean it up, shortlist talent, check for brand alignment and negotiate the terms.

So while platforms are great at storing creators, agencies are still the ones activating them strategically.

Influencer marketing isn’t just about who can post; it’s about who should post. And when. And why. That kind of decision-making doesn’t come from filters and dropdown menus. It comes from intuition, brand familiarity and campaign memory, something only people inside the work actually carry.

There’s also the matter of accountability. When creators miss deadlines, go off-brief or face backlash for a campaign, platforms can’t mediate the nuance. Agencies do. They manage the messy in-between. They talk to creators like partners, handle client anxieties and make sure the work gets delivered, even when it’s uncomfortable.

We’ve seen brands fall into the trap of believing that plugging into a database equals execution. But speed isn’t strategy. And data without insight is just noise. The best influencer marketing still requires a creative brain in the room. Someone who can look at a spreadsheet and say, “None of these will work. But let me tell you who will.”

That’s the job agencies do quietly, behind the scenes, often under pressure and usually with too little credit.

It’s not that platforms are bad for the industry. In fact, they’ve helped bring structure to what was once a chaotic, opaque ecosystem. They’ve sped up processes and improved transparency. But they were never meant to replace the role of thinking partners. And when it comes to campaigns that move the needle, thinking still matters.

The smartest brands already know this. They use platforms as tools, not solutions. And they rely on people, often agency partners, to bring those tools to life with relevance, taste and timing.

Influencer marketing is too nuanced, too emotional and too real-time to be handled by software alone. As long as creators are human and audiences are unpredictable, agencies will always have a role in helping brands navigate that gap.

Not because they’re traditional, but because they still do the one thing platforms can’t: make sense of the chaos.

(The author is the Founder & CEO of Creators Network & BookYourCreator)