Eighty-one percent of UK brands plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2026, and 32% now spend between £100,000 and £499,000 a year on creator activity, according to Kolsquare data cited in Marketing Week's December 2025 outlook on the year ahead, written by Amrit Virdi. The more interesting story isn't the number — it's what that money is being redirected toward: slower, more deliberately crafted content, creators pulled from outside a brand's usual category, and creative that gets pre-tested on synthetic audiences before a single real person ever sees it.

What Did Marketing Week's 2026 Outlook Actually Find?

Marketing Week's "A new frontier" report, published 12 December 2025, framed 2026 as a turning point after a year — 2025 — dominated by AI conversations, a potential TikTok ban, and a creator economy that kept expanding regardless. The headline figure is the budget one: 81% of UK brands are increasing influencer spend next year, with roughly a third already in the £100k–£499k annual range. But the report's more useful signal for marketers is behavioral, not financial — it's a shift in what brands are actually asking creators to make.

Why Are Brands Choosing Slower Content Over Speed?

One of the clearest trends the report identifies is a pull away from the fast, trend-chasing content that's defined social feeds for years. Brands are moving toward content that's more intentional and more crafted, favoring quieter formats, longer-form pieces, and real-life events over the next fast-cut trend edit. It's a direct response to feed fatigue: when every account is optimizing for the same fifteen-second hook, the differentiator becomes the account that isn't doing that.

What Does "Out-of-Category" Creator Casting Actually Look Like?

The second trend is about audience reach rather than content pacing. Instead of always briefing the expected creator — the wellness brand booking the fitness influencer, the hotel booking the travel account — brands are increasingly working with creators from outside their category, plus episodic formats, specifically to reach audiences their usual casting never touches. A hospitality brand working with a comedy or food creator instead of another travel account, or a wellness brand tapping a finance or productivity creator, is the kind of pairing this trend describes. The logic: your existing audience already follows the obvious creators. Growth comes from the overlap you don't already own.

Why Are Brands Pre-Testing Creative With Synthetic Audiences?

The third trend is the one with the clearest tech-adjacent story. Brands are putting new emphasis on creative pre-testing using synthetic audiences — AI-modeled response panels standing in for real consumer research — specifically because it offers what the report calls an "agile and cost-effective" way to see the impact of creative before it airs. Rather than waiting on a slower, more expensive traditional research cycle, marketing teams can run creative through a synthetic panel, get a directional read, and adjust before a campaign goes live with real media spend behind it.

What Should Marketers Take From This Heading Into 2026?

Put together, the three trends describe a market that's spending more on influencer activity while getting pickier about what that spend produces. More budget doesn't mean more of the same content, faster — it means brands can now afford to slow individual pieces of content down, cast further outside their comfort zone, and validate creative before committing real media dollars to it. For hospitality, wellness, and lifestyle brands specifically, the out-of-category casting trend is the most immediately actionable: it's a low-cost experiment to run against a single campaign before rebuilding an entire creator roster around it.

One Media Society builds influencer and social strategies around where audiences actually are, not just where a brand's usual casting list points. Talk to us about testing an out-of-category creator partnership for your next campaign.