New NDA columnist Simon Crunden CEO of The Freethinking Group, a portfolio companies including Republic of Media, Intelligence22 and Numodo, with offices in Manchester and Edinburgh.
As you age through your media career you’ll often find the tasks you enjoy get taken away and given to someone more capable.
One of the tasks I try to keep hold of is producing an annual trends deck. You can read all the trends pieces you want, but there’s nothing quite like WRITING one to make you think about the near future and what’s going to be important.
While producing a trends deck for a client this year I came across an interesting data point which might signal an emerging issue worth paying attention to:
Are consumers paying less attention to social and digital advertising because of micro influencers?
Most of trend spotting is, if we’re honest, reading and considering other people’s trends (talent borrows, genius steals) and the first flag of this potential issue came from Kantar’s Marketing Trends 2025 report. Their 2024 study found that 31% of global consumers said “ads in social media platforms captured their attention”. The same study with the same methodology in 2023 had 43% answering positively. That’s a fall of more than a quarter of positive respondents in one year?
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but it was a big enough drop to encourage me to go and find other sources on consumer engagement and attention with social advertising.
YouGov’s Profiles panel is several hundred thousand strong, and asks UK consumers which media has the biggest chance of grabbing their attention. Amongst 18-49 year olds, the percentage identifying online ads as most attention grabbing has fallen from 33% in January 2024 to 25% in January 2025.
Saying there is a trust problem with social ads isn’t ground breaking news, but what’s alarming is the large drop in the (already pretty low) volume of those who trust social ads, in a short space of time.
To look at the cause, we looked at the trends in social media advertising and the one that stands out is the rise of UGC shopping ads on TikTok and Meta. You only have to spend a few minutes on TikTok or Instagram to see the rise of UGC shop ads in action, a trend backed up by Google Trends data showing search interest doubling for “TikTok Shop” since 2023.
These ads were a great idea inspired by genuine product reviews. On a UGC platform, why not encourage TikTokers to share the cool, useful and good-value products they love with others, and maybe give them a little commission on the sales?
But if it worked, perhaps it worked a little too well. The lure of commission has encouraged millions of micro influencers to sell low quality products with spurious claims and pushy sales techniques.
Reddit users commented “I can’t go through my fyp anymore without getting a stupid amount of promotion from the TikTok shop. makes me not wanna use tt”, another said “the whole app sucks now because of [TikTok Shop]. All the shitty influencers that were popular in 2020 and now are fizzling out have become the next QVC Channel it’s disgusting. The lies and bullshit to sell a product is crazy”
The Advertising Standards Authority is dealing with monitoring at a scale never imagined before. The introduction of AI monitoring of social media ads through it’s Active Ads Monitoring system has increased the number of ads scanned per month from 100,000 in 2023, to over 3m in 2024. In 2023 alone, ads identified by the system accounted for 85% of all advertisements amended or withdrawn following enforcement actions.
The ASA are rightly focused on areas of potential harm like pharmaceutical ads and illegal vapes, but the insidious influence of a crap product sold by an unscrupulous user is damaging trust and attention for all social ads.
Social media and influencer marketing are increasingly important pillars of reach and attention for many brands, and action may be needed to ensure they remain effective as media channels.
Hopefully that action will come from the natural reaction of consumers. If TikTok and Meta see engagement and time spent dropping due to UGC ads, they’ll be quick to adjust their algorithms to correct the problem.
If they don’t, poor ad attention will soon cost them media budgets – and that’s a slide they won’t want to see in next year’s trends decks.
