As CEO of advertising giant WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell's pronouncements on the marketing world travel far and wide. Including his comments on influencer marketing, made at the ITP Live Conference in Dubai.

Sorrell suggested that some of the hype around social influencers is not reflected in their actual marketing clout.

"Are they reshaping the media landscape? I think the answer to that is, they are influencing it, but not reshaping it," he said, according to Arabian Business.

"They have become important, but it’s a variant of traditional celebrity endorsement and word of mouth," continued Sorrell, describing social stars as "influential and growing in influence, but to say that they’re totally reshaping it is a little bit of an exaggeration. They’re important at a significant level, but they have not gained the power or the influence that other forms of digital, social and traditional [media] still have".

Interestingly, Sorrell suggested that the rise of micro-influencers and campaigns using stars with less than 10,000 followers apiece may be more useful to brands than the biggest social stars.

He noted that the industry could be in the process of "switching away from the big to the more middle-sized influencers and even the smaller ones", while adding the caveat that influencer-marketing spend in 2017 remains a fraction of the overall digital advertising market.

"Google this year will make $100 billion in advertising. Facebook will make $40 billion. In context of those numbers, influencers are relatively small," said Sorrell.

While figures are hard to come by for projected influencer-marketing spend in 2017, eMarketer claimed that around $570m was spent globally in this sector in 2016.