Navigating the Future of Influencer Advertising: Consolidating What Is Known and Identifying New Research Directions

Social media influencers (hereafter referred to as influencers) have come to be central actors in an increasingly interconnected digital and social advertising system. In the following introduction, we briefly outline where the academic understanding of influencers currently stands, how the articles included in this issue section add to this knowledge, and where we believe opportunities for further contributions exist. Table 1 summarizes this discussion by sorting it into four key interconnected parts of the influencer advertising ecosystem: advertisers, influencers, consumers, and content. Due to the brevity of this editorial, we include only a limited number of citations and direct readers to excellent recent literature reviews (e.g., Hudders et al. 2021; Ye et al. 2021) for richer discussions of the literature.