Is the money that brands invest in influencer marketing going down the drain?

Influencer marketing is a fixed and absolutely immovable piece in the “media mix” of brands. However, and despite the fact that brands pour extraordinarily large budgets into this discipline, the truth is that Not all influencer marketing campaigns come to fruition and brands lose money hand over fist when they decide to hang on the arm of certain content creators.

According to a recent analysis carried out in the United States by influData, in the period between September 2024 and August 2025, brands based overseas invested heavily in influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram, but Such campaigns sometimes turned into million-dollar losses.

The report of influData shows that $51.6 million in Earned Media Value (EMV) actually went down the drain by deriving from influencer accounts in which more than 50% of the “followers” were fake profiles, bots or inactive users.

Between September 2024 and August 2025 American brands evaluated by influData generated a total of around $5 billion in EMV on Instagram with their influencer marketing campaigns. EMV is a metric that describes the value of unpaid exposure that brands achieve on Instagram through mentions, user-generated content, and interactions such as likes and shares.

However, for 12,840 of the companies analyzed in the influData study A good part of the EMV emanating from the campaigns with influencers eventually ended up in rubbish because they paid for 57,767 posts, “reels” and “stories” that did not ultimately translate into a truly real reach.

Influencer marketing makes both small and large brands lose money

It is particularly interesting that the brands that lose the most money with influencer marketing are not only more or less unknown companies but also large corporations of global make.

The American fashion retailer Fashion Nova has the dubious honor of topping the list of the brands that lose the most money with influencer marketing with 1,222 posts of questionable nature and a wasted EMV of $1.35 million.

Victims of the traps of influencer marketing on Instagram are also multinationals such as Disney, who lost 3.83 million in collaborations with creators whose followers were mostly “fake”, Target, Sephora, Amazon Fashion, Walmart, Shein, Revolve, Marvel Studios, Chili’s y Ray-Ban

But why do brands (even the most powerful ones) choose to associate with inappropriate influencers when they have advanced analysis tools at their disposal? Everything would actually be due to a misunderstanding, since Many marketing managers clearly wrongly consider it a guarantee of success that influencers have many followers at their side. And they relegate key metrics such as interaction rate, viewing time or the proportion of truly genuine target audience to the background.

Despite the obsession of many brands with the number of followers, the truth is that An influencer with fewer “followers” ​​who are truly authentic can provide significantly better results for brands.

In this sense, it is absolutely decisive that, before forging an alliance with a certain influencer, brands take the trouble to closely examine the data at their disposal (and of course go beyond the number of “followers”).