Three years ago, the head of marketing at a top-5 Indian D2C beauty brand told me agencies handled 78 percent of her influencer activity. Last month she told me it was 22 percent. The other 56 percent had migrated in-house or onto platforms like ours. She wasn't unusual; she was leading the trend.
The shift isn't about agencies failing. It's about brands maturing. A first-time-influencer-spending brand needs a guide; a brand on its 30th campaign has internalised the playbook. The question for any agency reading this is: what's your value when the brand is no longer learning?
The three things brands learned to do without you
We asked 22 brand-side marketing heads what specifically they stopped paying agencies for in 2024-2025. The list converged tightly:
- Creator discovery · platforms like Qolab, Modash, and CreatorIQ surface candidates faster than human-curated agency lists.
- Negotiation · once brands learn the rate bands, the agency 'we'll negotiate for you' value drops to nearly zero.
- Coordination · WhatsApp + Google Docs + an in-house intern handle small-cohort campaigns at 90 percent of the quality.
The three things brands cannot or will not do themselves
Same conversation, asked the opposite question. What did the brands still gladly pay agencies for?
- Strategic positioning · 'we have a new product category, what kind of creator narrative should we build over the next year.' This is consulting, not execution.
- Crisis handling · ASCI complaints, creator drama, viral negative posts. Brands want a third party who already knows the players to handle this.
- Big-creator access · the top 200 Indian creators have agents and gatekeepers. Direct contact is hard. Agencies with real relationships save 3-6 weeks of back-and-forth.
The new agency model · operator, not middleman
The agencies growing in 2026 look very different from the ones that grew in 2020. They're smaller. They're more senior. They charge retainers, not commissions. And their value isn't in being the bridge between brand and creator; that bridge no longer needs them. Their value is in being the operator behind the brand's influencer function.
Concrete shift: instead of 'we'll run a 12-creator campaign for ₹35 lakh,' the pitch becomes 'we'll embed for 6 months and build your influencer function so you can run it yourself by month 7. Fee is ₹6 lakh/month.' Total spend is similar; positioning is completely different; client is much harder to lose.
Specialisation, not scale
The other path that's working: deep category specialisation. 'We are the best Indian agency at running beauty creator campaigns in Tier-2 cities.' A focused positioning lets a 6-person agency outperform a 60-person generalist agency on every metric brands care about, because the team has muscle memory for the category.
The three pitches that win brands back
From the brand-side interviews, three pitches consistently re-engaged brands who'd previously moved in-house:
- 'We'll audit your last 4 campaigns and tell you exactly what you're leaving on the table. ₹0 for the audit, you decide on engagement after.' Low-risk re-entry; almost every brand says yes.
- 'You have an in-house team; we'll be your benchmark layer. We'll show you what a top-quartile campaign in your category looks like, monthly. ₹X per month.' Sells comparative intelligence, not execution.
- 'We have direct relationships with 40 creators in your exact niche, half of whom won't work with brand-side outreach. ₹X per campaign + ₹Y per creator unlocked.' Sells access, the one thing platforms can't replicate.
Any of these positions you above the platform layer rather than competing with it. Trying to out-execute a software platform at coordination work is a losing fight; bringing what platforms cannot is the winning one.
