“Everyone was playing the same game,” says Afşın Avcı about people setting up influencer marketing agencies in the early days of the creator economy almost a decade ago.

“When they first saw this opportunity, everyone decided to set up an influencer agency. And so everybody was competing for the same clients. But we decided to take a different path,” recalls Afşın, who co-founded INFLOW Network in 2016. Today, his platform connects creators, brands, and agencies across 30 countries, transforming knowledge sharing in the creator economy.

Understanding Market Needs

Afşın distinctly remembers how brands in those days were so frightened of influencer marketing. According to Afşın, brands certainly wanted to try but didn’t know how to do it. He adds, “They didn’t know how to select influencers, how much money to spend, how many times to repeat it, etc.”

INFLOW emerged as a platform where creators, agencies, and brands can come together. Afşın envisioned it as something that would support the nascent influencer marketing industry with higher-value services, more than just commercial transactions.

At that time, as far as Afşın can recall, it was challenging to explain the idea for INFLOW. But he sums it up simply and quite ingeniously by saying, “INFLOW as TED Talks for the influencer marketing industry.”

Building a Knowledge Exchange Platform

And so since then, INFLOW has found its niche in the industry by organizing events, particularly the Global Summit, that facilitate direct knowledge sharing between creators, as well as agencies and brands. Since 2016, the platform has hosted over 20 gatherings across multiple countries, including Turkey, Russia, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Qatar.

“If you talk to any influencer who attended INFLOW events in the past, they would say that the know-how transfer is amazing,” Afşın notes. “Think about influencers coming from 30 different countries, backgrounds, and niches, and they all share their experiences with each other. You can get a one-year lecture about the industry in just three days at an INFLOW event.”

The events maintain fresh perspectives yearly. “We often get asked whether our events feature the same influencers every year. The answer is no,” Afşın explains. “80% of influencers attending the Global Summit are new, while the remaining 20% attended past events. We call them ‘INFLOW alumni’ because it’s like a school for them.”

Impact Through Numbers and Connections

At their most recent summit, attending creators reached over 250 million followers worldwide. “When influencers come to an INFLOW event, they only think about their numbers, profile, account, etc,” Afşın explains. “But when I start talking about giving the macro numbers to all of them and when they realize the true power… they are shocked.”

The connections formed at INFLOW events create lasting relationships. “When influencers meet each other, they become more human,” Afşın observes. “If you put influencers in a meeting room with brands, agencies, or industrial professionals, they will act like influencers… But if you put 10 of them together, they will act like normal people. This is the magic of INFLOW events.”

These relationships extend beyond professional networking. “In the last nine years, influencers have come to our events like close friends,” Afşın shares. “They visited each other in their countries and attended their weddings. As a person who enabled this community, it creates a feeling I can’t explain easily because this is the true magic of INFLOW.”

This community serves a crucial purpose for content creators who often work independently. As Afşın notes, “People all have expectations from influencers, and living with that is not easy. But influencers don’t have expectations for one another. They’re super cool about this, and they are happier.”

Strategic Brand Integration

INFLOW’s approach to brand partnerships showcases its unique methodology. “Brands attend our events because they need [influencers’] content and power,” Afşın explains. “And this is how we keep going. Frankly, we couldn’t keep it going for years now without friends.”

INFLOW’s partnership with Turkish Airlines since 2016 demonstrates effective brand collaboration. At its 2024 summit, INFLOW introduced a new workshop format in which creators participated directly in campaign development. “We randomly split influencers into eight groups. We gave them the creative brand brief related to the Turkish Airlines campaign,” Afşın explains. “That whole day, they worked with their colleagues from another part of the world that they had never seen before.”

The workshop concluded with significant incentives: “At the end, we listened to their campaigns and selected a winning team,” Afşın shares. “And the winning team won the business class tickets from Turkish Airlines whenever they wanted, wherever they wanted, for two persons each member. Amazing gift. Everyone wanted to sit at that table, be part of the process, and be part of the winning team.”

This format revealed key insights about creator marketing: “One of our partners recently asked us why these influencers are so passionate about this workshop that they couldn’t eat,” Afşın shares. “My answer is because they are rarely asked about their opinion regarding creative campaign ideas… When agencies or brands go to influencers, they already know what they need… They don’t ask the creator about their creative perspective. When we asked influences about their opinion and creative perspective, they got super excited.”

Creating Meaningful Brand Experiences

Brand integration at INFLOW focuses on authentic participation. “If you look at the content our creators shared during their travel, you all see these brands, but in a very authentic and a native way, not in a promotional way,” Afşın emphasizes. “That is the right way of working with influencers.”

Each partnership serves a specific purpose in the creator experience. “If you ask about the common point between these brands, the answer is they are part of the influencer’s experience and not some brand out of nowhere unrelated to it.”

Afşın notes that long-term partnerships create lasting value, citing INFLOW’s multi-year-long collaboration with Turkish Airlines, the main sponsor of all events and the “hallmark for influences.”

Innovative Event Experiences

During the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, INFLOW coordinated creator collaborations across 23 countries. “We managed the World Cup’s influencer collaboration in 23 countries for three years,” Afşın explains. “We invited the influencers we worked with in the previous three years to the World Cup and hosted some of them for each game to give them this experience.

For the 2023 UEFA Champions League final in Istanbul, INFLOW created a unique experience: “We rented a massive boat and turned it into a small football pitch… The boat sailed between two continents, Asia and Europe, through the Bosphorus strait… We invited around 14-15 influences and had a football match between two continents on the boat. I think it was the first football match of its kind.”

Technology and Human Connection

Regarding artificial intelligence in creator marketing, INFLOW maintains a clear perspective. “AI influencers, although a hot topic, won’t be a big deal,” Afşın asserts. “If a person is following an AI influencer, there are two things. First, if we know that the account is AI, we probably lose interest in it until a certain time because we know it’s not human. If it’s not human, it’s predictable and thus not surprising.”

He elaborates on the limitations of AI creators: “AI influencers can’t get sick, fall into depression, get married, break up with his/her partner, etc. Even if we see all of this, we know that it’s not real; it’s fake. And if we know it’s fake, we have no interest in it.”

Instead, AI serves as a content creation tool. “AI itself will help a lot for creating content for influencers… It’s like using Microsoft Word to write text.”

Future Growth and Impact

With regional and global summits planned for 2025, INFLOW continues its mission. “INFLOW aims to bring all parties together to create a better and more sustainable influencer marketing economy and industry,” Afşın states.

The platform’s growth reflects the strength of creator marketing. “Eight to nine years ago, when we first started, PR agencies and brands were always challenging how long influencer marketing will last,” Afşın reflects. “They were challenging the whole influencer marketing field as if it would vanish someday.”

“Each year at INFLOW summits, I see new faces, creators, perspectives, approaches, and ideas. It will never end. It will keep getting bigger.”