There has been an increase in retailers and brands of all sizes turning to creators to drive innovation, hyper targeting, content-first awareness campaigns and word-of-mouth significantly more than in prior years. Such unique trends will play a key role in the influencer marketing space this year.

Specific trends that will dominate the 2022 influencer marketing: Video content will continue to drive greater engagement and conversions, Influencer benchmarking will increasingly inform influencer strategy, Co-op creator influencer marketing will expand as retail media groups grow and content-first creator campaigns and influencer boosting continue to accelerate as they outperform traditional ad creative.

This was amplified by LTK, the global influencer marketing platform that works with more than 5,000 brands to power creator commerce when it released its annual Brand Influence Forecast for 2022.

This comes as advertisement and social media penetration and spend continue to record impressive growth with latest projections showing an even rosier future.

A report from Statista projects that nearly $356 billion were spent on digital advertising in 2020. This figure is forecast to increase at a rapid pace in the upcoming years. According to the latest projections, digital advertising revenue will amount to 460 billion U.S. dollars by 2024.

At the same time, a report by Research and Markets indicates that the global advertising agencies market will grow from $346.12 billion in 2021 to $383.67 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.8%. The market is expected to reach $553.11 billion in 2026 at a CAGR of 9.6%.

Social media users are now equivalent to 58 percent of the world’s total population. And as social media user growth increases, people say they are spending more time on social media each day than they did the previous year, at 2 hours and 27 minutes. This is according to a recent report by Hootsuite, the global player in social media management, and We Are Social, the socially led creative agency. The report further says that Facebook remains the world’s most used social platform, followed by YouTube and WhatsApp.

Still on social media, TikTok has been named the world's fastest-growing brand by the Brand Finance Global 500 2022 report.

With an astounding 215% growth, the entertainment app's brand value has increased from US$18.7 billion in 2021 to US$59.0 billion this year. Claiming 18th spot among the world's top 500 most valuable brands, it is the highest new entrant to the Brand Finance Global 500 2022 ranking.

On appointments, WPP has announced the appointment of Rose Herceg as President, Australia and New Zealand.

In her new role, which aligns with the country leadership structure in other major markets, Rose will lead WPP’s business in Australia and New Zealand, supporting agency CEOs, promoting WPP’s collective capabilities and bringing together people and resources on behalf of clients.

At the same time, Essence Global, part of GroupM, has promoted Tim Irwin to global chief operating officer.

In his new role, he will drive Essence’s growth and operations across the globe and help ensure the agency’s ambitious business plans come to fruition. He will continue to be based in London.

And Publicis Groupe has appointed Jane Lin-Baden to its global Management Committee, effective immediately. Jane first joined Publicis Groupe three years ago, and serves as Managing Partner, Asia-Pacific and Chief Executive Officer, Publicis Groupe North Asia, based in Shanghai.

Bob Koigi is an editor at Marketing Report EU

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