“Influencer marketing fundamentally shifts the dial,” said Guzman Y Gomez CMO Lara Thom. “The day Maccas works out that social media is a real thing, I’m fucked.”

It’s fair to say marketers are in two camps about influencer marketing. Samsung’s Global CMO, Younghee Lee, was telling journalists at Cannes this year that “buying” influencers with money is not sustainable. But here in Australia, Thom told Advertising Week APAC attendees that the local restaurant chain spends 40 per cent of its marketing budget on influencer marketing and it drives sales.

Admittedly, Guzman Y Gomez’s reach and marketing budget are worlds apart from those of Samsung, but it says a lot about the divisiveness of influencer marketing – which is no doubt the reason the Advertising Week APAC session was called Influencer Marketing for Marketers who Hate Influencer Marketing.

Thom was on stage with Jules Lund, founder of micro-influencer marketplace Tribe, who has a vested interest in talking up influencer marketing. Nevertheless, Lund made some compelling points. Instagram’s new feature allowing influencers to tag products in their posts for their followers to buy could see influencer marketing woo even the most cynical of marketers.

“Creators tag your products in their posts so their followers can buy them using Instagram Checkout, without leaving the app,” Lund said. “So you would effectively tap on the creator’s post, whatever product they’re spruiking, and you would purchase it.”

Could Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency, Libra, have a role to play? Lund thinks so.

“With [users buying through Instagram], I supposed there’s a lot of lost revenue in all the currencies. So imagine if Facebook released their own cryptocurrency – coming out next year. The idea behind [Libra] is mainly to service the micropayments within Messenger and Whatsapp … but you can also imagine that you would be paying creators on Instagram through Libra, and you can also imagine that very quickly it becomes commission based, because it’s like any affiliate marketing, now it’s based on sales.”

Even on a more basic level, what marketers like Guzman Y Gomez are doing is using Instagram for branded content ads – they work with influencers who tag them in photos at their restaurants or with their product, which gives the brand access to the post’s metrics. “You can see which ones are working and you can even boost them to those followers, to followers like them, or you can turn those into ads. Either way, you get click-through,” Lund said.

Referring in passing to Instagram’s recent move to do away with likes, Lund said: “We don’t care about likes, it’s all about the impressions and exactly who [is viewing] – so the demographics, the gender, the location and the age, which are the most important.”

Lund argued that the advertising industry is still set up to create high-quality, low-volume production work, which is why influencers can solve the problem for marketers needing high-volume content, and fast.

“Your customer is the solution – they can craft the variety, the volume and generate thumb-stopping content,” he said. “That content performs better in social advertising because it features real people in it.”

Agencies are arguably more adaptive and agile than Lund gives them credit, but many marketers believe the future is looking bright for influencer marketing. That may explain why former Unilever CMO Keith Weed recently became an angel investor in Tribe.

In Lara Thom’s words: “The biggest thing for me is, be brave and believe in storytelling. I’m a journalist by trade. Journalists tell stories and that’s our role as marketers now – we’re storytellers.”