The most telling marketing research of the summer may have been conducted not by Nielsen or Kantar, but by a handmade sign in the window of a craft shop on Nantucket.
"No influencers," read the placard at Four Winds Craft Guild, a message that the shop's owner, John Sylvia, told The New York Times was intended as a joke. The internet, which rarely requires an invitation to debate anything, treated it as something more like a Rorschach test. Was this a small business finally pushing back against the ring-lit hordes? A harmless gag? Discrimination?
(The influencers being mad in the comments, as one user observed to considerable approval, was the funniest part.)
The episode has become a minor landmark in what the trade press has taken to calling "influencer fatigue" — the notion that consumers have grown weary of watching attractive young people unbox free products in exotic locations. The evidence for this weariness is largely anecdotal, which has not stopped it from becoming a topic of considerable hand-wringing on the conference circuit.
The evidence against it is somewhat more concrete. Seventy-two percent of young consumers follow influencers on social media, according to industry surveys, and 58 percent report having purchased something because a creator recommended it. Spending on creator marketing is expected to reach $43.9 billion by 2026, according to the Association of National Advertisers.
"Influencer fatigue is very real," said Hew Loyd, the chief marketing officer of Whisker, maker of the Litter-Robot, who nonetheless continues to invest in the channel. The distinction, Mr. Loyd suggested, is between encountering an influencer in person — where, he noted, "they're making themselves the main character of your experience" — and encountering one in a feed, which remains, for most consumers, a reasonably tolerable experience.
The economics of the middle tier may be where the real friction lives. Creators without massive followings must, by necessity, post more branded content to make the math work — sometimes producing 30 to 60 pieces a month, according to Mathew Micheli, a co-founder of the social media agency Viral Nation. This creates what Mr. Micheli delicately described as "noise."
Mafe Anzures, a lifestyle creator with more than 600,000 TikTok followers, recalls accepting $30 for her early brand videos. Her fees now run to four or five figures. The fatigue she experiences is of a different variety: the occupational exhaustion of turning one's life into inventory.
"Numbers can consume you," Ms. Anzures said.
The question, then, is not whether influencer marketing is dying — the spending figures suggest it is not — but whether the industry can calibrate itself before the cheeky signs become sincere ones. Mr. Sylvia's placard was meant as a joke. Whether the next shop owner's will be is, perhaps, the only research that matters.
Original story published in Marketing Dive: "What influencer fatigue says about creator-driven marketing's next phase"