Influencer marketing has changed quickly. What used to be a fairly experimental channel now sits much closer to the centre of the media plan for most brands and agencies, with bigger budgets and a lot more scrutiny on what actually works.
It’s also become part of the everyday media consumption for most people. Recent findings from Ofcom show how embedded social platforms are in daily life, with many adults spending several hours a day on their phones, and for most audiences that now includes a steady stream of creator-led advertising.
Most of the mechanics around influencer marketing have evolved. Usage rights are one of those areas that haven’t kept pace in the same way.
They’re still usually agreed right at the start. A campaign is scoped, a few possible use cases are discussed, and a number is attached to that. It gets signed off and, more often than not, left alone. The difficulty is that campaigns don’t really behave like that anymore, which makes life difficult for creators and advertisers alike. It also creates a growing gap between how content is priced and how it actually delivers value once a campaign is live as Benjamin Woollams, Founder and CEO, TrueRights, explains…
A model that hasn’t quite caught up
In practice, content tends to follow its own path. Some posts barely go anywhere. Others perform well and get picked up again, pushed into paid, extended across different formats or channels, and reused in ways that weren’t part of the original plan.
That’s not unusual now, it’s just how campaigns run. The issue is that while usage has become more fluid and performance-led, the commercial side hasn’t adapted to reflect that. Rights are still priced based on what might happen, not necessarily what does. By the time you know how something is actually being used, the deal is already set. There isn’t much room for that to move.
That approach made sense when campaigns were simpler and more predictable, but feels less aligned with how the channel operates in the industry today.
Where it starts to feel off
The knock-on effects of this become apparent when looking at a few campaigns side by side.
For agents, usage rights are often the part that takes the longest to land, and the hardest to justify once they get there. There isn’t a clear reference point, so pricing becomes a case of working towards something that feels reasonable rather than something grounded in a consistent or objective framework. Sometimes that means long email threads, sometimes just settling on a number that both sides agree with.
Creators tend to notice it later on. A piece of content does well, it gets reused, sometimes quite heavily, and the original agreement doesn’t really stretch to cover that. In a lot of cases, they don’t have a clear view of where it’s running or for how long.
Brands, on the other hand, usually try to simplify the whole thing by buying flexibility upfront. It avoids having to reopen conversations later, but it also means paying for usage that may never actually happen.
None of this is dramatic on its own. It’s more a steady inefficiency that shows up across most campaigns if you look closely enough.
Why it matters more now
That kind of friction was easier to overlook when the stakes were lower. They aren’t anymore.
The UK’s creative industries generate over £100 billion a year, and creator-led content is taking up a bigger share of marketing spend. At the same time, the value attached to individual creators is becoming harder to ignore, as seen in recent high-profile deals that highlighted how much value is now at stake, and how unclear the mechanics behind it can still be.
Against that backdrop, usage rights start to feel less like a detail and more like part of the commercial model. They shape where money goes, even if they’re not always treated that way.
There’s a growing sense across the industry that the current approach has been stretched as far as it can go. Not because it was wrong, but because the environment around it has changed.
All of this is starting to raise more practical questions for the industry. How do you tie rights more closely to actual usage? How do you reduce the amount of guesswork at the start of a deal? How do you make it easier to explain where the numbers come from? There isn’t a single answer to these questions, but the direction the industry is heading in is fairly clear.
What needs to change
If the current model is built on assumption, the next step is fairly straightforward in principle. Usage rights need to be more closely tied to how content is actually used.
That doesn’t mean overcomplicating deals. In many cases, it’s about stepping away from trying to price every possible outcome upfront, and instead creating a clearer link between usage and value as a campaign unfolds.
In practice, that could mean more flexible rights structures that allow for scaling based on performance. It could mean better visibility over where content is being used, particularly once it moves into paid media. That visibility also becomes important over time, making it easier to understand and track how content is actually being used, and giving both sides more confidence that usage remains aligned with what was agreed. It also points to the need for more structured, data-led approaches that reduce reliance on manual negotiation and make pricing more consistent, so no one is starting from scratch each time.
In some cases, that is already starting to happen, with more data-led approaches emerging that allow pricing to scale in line with how content is actually used, rather than being fixed upfront. That shift makes it easier to connect spending to outcomes, and gives both sides a clearer sense of what they are paying for, and why.
The ultimate goal is to make these negotiations more grounded. When both sides can see how content is being used and how it connects to value, conversations become simpler, faster, and easier to stand behind.
Conclusion
Usage rights have sat in the background of influencer marketing for a long time. They’ve been something to agree on early and move past. That’s starting to shift now as creators and their representatives become more aware of how their work is being used and more focused on how that usage is valued.
The gap between how rights are handled and how campaigns actually run is becoming more visible. It shows up in pricing, in negotiations, and in how value is shared once a campaign is live.
For anyone working in this space, the takeaway is fairly simple. This isn’t just a contractual step to get through at the start. It increasingly shapes how campaigns scale, how value is shared, and how confident both sides feel in the numbers they’re working with.
Bringing more structure and transparency into that part of the process feels less like an optimisation now, and more like something the industry is going to have to get right if it wants to continue to scale without friction.
