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Kolsquare has published research on trust and brand safety in influencer marketing. The study found a wide gap between young consumers' willingness to drop brands over value clashes and marketers' view of trust as a major issue.
The report examined sponsored content across five European markets and found that transparent, compliant creator partnerships matched or outperformed non-compliant campaigns on engagement and earned media value. The findings point to a disconnect between consumer behaviour and how some marketing teams assess risk in influencer work.
More than half of consumers aged 18 to 34, or 55%, said they had stopped buying from a brand because its values conflicted with their own. By contrast, only 4.97% of influencer marketers identified brand safety as a major challenge.
The research also found that 75% of European marketers plan to work with more creators in 2026. Yet only half of teams spend 30 minutes vetting a creator and review only part of that person's content history.
Trust gap
The figures suggest many brands are expanding influencer activity without building the checks needed to assess whether creators align with brand values. This creates commercial exposure as consumers become more selective about the companies they support.
Quentin Bordage, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Kolsquare, said trust now has a direct bearing on spending decisions.
"Consumers are becoming far more selective about who they trust, and where trust goes, spending follows," Bordage said.
"The brands that will win in influencer marketing are not necessarily the ones working with the biggest creators, but those building the most credible and transparent partnerships. Trust has become a performance metric in its own right," Bordage said.
The report presents brand safety not simply as a matter of compliance, but as a factor linked to campaign results. It said creator selection should be treated as a brand decision rather than only a media-buying choice, with values alignment affecting performance.
Kolsquare compared compliant and non-compliant sponsored content across every creator tier in the five markets covered by the study. It also set out a brand safety playbook for influencer marketing programmes at different stages of development.
Scaling pressure
The study argued that the operational challenge becomes sharper as brands increase the number of creators they use. Manual checks alone are unlikely to close the gap as programmes grow because teams have limited time to review content histories in depth.
Raffaella Pierpaoli, Head of Content and Social, Intarget, echoed that point, framing the issue in terms of audience relationships rather than risk management alone.
"The correct perspective is not about safety at all. It's about choosing to adopt a transparent relationship with your audience. Trust will, without question, drive better performance," Pierpaoli said.
The report also highlighted what it described as the commercial advantage of long-term creator relationships built around shared values, compared with one-off activations. That suggests some marketers may need to reassess how they measure the return on influencer partnerships when audience trust can affect both engagement and buying behaviour.
Kolsquare said it serves more than 2,000 customers and works across a network of creators with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on platforms including Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat.