Services — Creative, Content & Advertising
Influencer Marketing Agency
Ellington & Vale is an influencer marketing agency working with Indian brands on creator partnerships — selection, negotiation, campaign management and measurement. We are measured on what the work produces, not on the combined follower count of everyone who posted.
Follower count is the worst metric in this channel
It is also the one almost every proposal leads with, because it is the easiest number to make large.
Reach is not attention, and attention is not intent. A creator with two million followers in a category unrelated to your product delivers a large number and no customers. A creator with forty thousand followers whose audience genuinely trusts them on your category can outperform them at a fraction of the cost.
The number that matters is what happened — traffic, sign-ups, sales, or genuine shifts in what people say about the brand. Everything upstream of that is an input.
Creator selection, which is most of the job
Getting this wrong cannot be fixed downstream. A brief, a budget and a good creative idea handed to the wrong creator produces a well-made post nobody relevant sees.
Audience over follower count. Who actually follows this person, where are they, and do they overlap with your buyer at all.
Engagement quality over engagement rate. Comments that are conversations rather than emoji, and an audience that returns rather than passes through.
Fraud screening, which is not optional. Follower fraud and engagement pods are a real and persistent problem in Indian influencer marketing. Audience quality has to be checked before money moves, not explained afterwards.
Category fit and history. A creator who promoted a direct competitor last month is a weaker partner regardless of their numbers.
Disclosure is a legal requirement, not a style choice
India has specific, enforceable rules here, and a great deal of influencer marketing in the market is not compliant with them.
The ASCI Guidelines for Influencer Advertising in Digital Media require that promotional content carrying a material connection between advertiser and creator is clearly disclosed — a label that is prominent, in the same language as the content, and impossible to miss. Buried hashtags at the end of a caption do not satisfy it. The Consumer Protection Act framework and the CCPA's endorsement guidelines add real enforcement weight, with liability that can sit with the advertiser, not only the creator.
We build disclosure into the brief and the contract rather than hoping the creator handles it. An undisclosed paid post is a compliance exposure for your brand, and the argument that everyone does it is not a defence.
⚠️ Guidance in this area is updated periodically — confirm current requirements before a campaign ships.
YouTube, and why long-form behaves differently
`youtube influencer marketing` is one of the cheapest real terms in this category, and the platform genuinely warrants separate treatment.
A ten-minute review is a fundamentally different asset from a fifteen-second reel. It gets watched by people actively researching, it ranks in search, and it keeps producing views for years rather than for days. The cost per view is usually higher and the cost per considered buyer is often much lower.
For products that need explaining — anything technical, expensive or unfamiliar — long-form is frequently the only format that can do the job. Short-form builds awareness; long-form closes the consideration gap.
Campaign management and contracts
The unglamorous part that determines whether a campaign ships on time and intact: briefing that leaves room for the creator's own voice while protecting what the brand needs said, negotiation, contracting with clear usage rights, approval workflow, and delivery tracking.
Usage rights are where brands most often lose money. A post you paid for but cannot run as an ad, or repost after ninety days, is an asset you rented without realising. Get the terms right at contract stage; renegotiating afterwards costs multiples.
Measurement
Trackable links and codes per creator wherever the funnel allows it. Landing pages built for the traffic rather than the homepage. Post-level performance against cost. And where the objective is genuinely awareness rather than acquisition, saying so up front and measuring it as awareness — rather than inventing an attribution model that makes it look like performance.
We cover the wider measurement discipline on our performance marketing page.
What determines the cost
No published rates, and here there are two costs that must stay separate: creator fees, paid to the creators, and our fee for strategy, selection, negotiation, management and measurement.
Any agency quoting one blended number is hiding the split, and the split is the thing you most need to see — because a blended figure lets an agency place your budget with cheaper creators and keep the difference.
Our side is driven by campaign scale, number of creators, whether content production sits with us or with them, and whether this is a one-off campaign or an ongoing programme.
FAQ
- What does an influencer marketing agency do?
- Finds and vets the right creators, negotiates and contracts them, manages the campaign, and measures what it produced. The selection and vetting are the parts that decide whether the rest is worth doing.
- How much does influencer marketing cost in India?
- Creator fees vary enormously — by platform, audience size, category and exclusivity — and are paid to the creators. Our fee for running the programme is separate, and we keep the two visible rather than blending them. Treat any single all-in number with suspicion.
- Do influencers have to disclose paid posts in India?
- Yes. ASCI's influencer guidelines require clear, prominent disclosure of any material connection, in the same language as the content, and consumer protection law adds enforcement weight — with liability that can reach the advertiser. Buried hashtags do not comply.
- Are micro-influencers better than large ones?
- Often, though not automatically. Smaller creators typically have higher trust and lower cost per engaged follower; larger ones deliver scale. The right answer depends on whether you are buying awareness or action, and the wrong question is which has more followers.
- How do you check an influencer's audience is real?
- Audience quality screening before contracting — follower authenticity, engagement patterns, geography and demographic match. Follower fraud is common enough in this market that skipping the check is a genuine risk to the budget.
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