At the AdForum Summit in London last October, one message kept surfacing: social and influencer marketing has become the fastest-growing sector of the global advertising industry. Not experimental. Not tactical. Central.
What started as repurposed TV content has evolved into something that demands its own strategic thinking, budgets and specialist expertise. Social – meaning content, creators and communities, not just platforms – is emerging as a third pillar of modern marketing, sitting alongside creative and media.
Which means agencies need to be evaluated differently, too.
Where brands are actually built
Coolr, presenting at AdForum, put it bluntly: social is now “Where brands are built”. Not adapted from other channels. Built from scratch. That shift matters.
Social today needs its own brief, its own production calendar and its own creative approach. It’s not a 15-second cutdown of a TVC crammed into a vertical frame. It requires ideas designed for feeds, for communities and for cultural moments from the start.
SAMY made the strategic case clearer still: this isn’t about monitoring mentions. It’s about analysing consumer conversations at scale using AI and natural language processing, mapping communities, understanding attitudes and emotions, then defining where a brand actually fits in people’s lives. The output? Thousands of content assets. Millions of engagements. Sometimes billions of views.
This is infrastructure, not improvisation.
Why influencer management needs grown-up rules
Running parallel to strategy is another discipline that’s ballooned in complexity: influencer management.
Marketers now expect agencies to find, vet, contract and manage creators on their behalf. That means watertight contracts, clear deliverables, brand-safety checks, compliance monitoring and performance tracking. It also means protecting brands in an environment that remains lightly regulated and, occasionally, dodgy.
Scam artists exist. Inflated follower counts are common. Badly managed creators can torch brand equity in an Instagram story.
Why credentials now matter more than ever
For marketers appointing agencies in this space, the question isn’t just “Can you do social?” It’s “Can you prove it, and can you protect us?”
That means asking for case studies with real numbers, not vanity metrics. It means understanding how influencers are contracted, managed and held accountable. It means checking brand safety protocols and performance measurement that goes beyond impressions.
The conversations at AdForum highlighted a gap: how do marketers assess capability in a discipline that’s moved from experimental to essential without everyone noticing? The Independent Agency Search & Selection Company (IAS), for one, has started requesting detailed social and influence credentials from agencies in its network—not to box-tick, but to establish baseline competence.
Johanna McDowell, CEO of IAS, frames it this way: “Influence marketing is moving into the mainstream, but it’s still a complex and evolving discipline. Marketers need to select partners with proven expertise, transparent processes and the ability to safeguard both performance and reputation.”
The South African context
South African brands are also investing more heavily in creators, community-led storytelling and continuous content streams. Which means the same questions apply. Marketers need to interrogate credentials with the same scrutiny they’d apply to a major media pitch or a brand repositioning.
Social-first might well be the future of brand building. The question isn’t whether to invest. It’s whether you’re working with an agency that can handle the scale, complexity and accountability that Influence now demands – and whether you’ve asked the right questions to find out.
The IAS (Independent Agency Search and Selection Company) in association with the AAR Group (UK) was founded in South Africa in 2006. IAS specialises in client/agency relationship management and helping clients find agencies.
