For years, the influencer occupied a peculiar position in the advertising firmament: part celebrity endorser, part media buy, part something that nobody could quite define but that seemed to work well enough. Brands paid; influencers posted; eyeballs accumulated. It was, as these arrangements go, reasonably tidy.
But tidiness, as Madison Avenue has learned repeatedly, is rarely permanent.
The shift began around 2014, when Meta — then still calling itself Facebook, in what now feels like a different geological era — started deprioritizing organic brand content in favor of advertisements that actually paid Meta. Influencers who had built their businesses on what might charitably be called "rented reach" found their audiences evaporating. (The platforms, it turned out, preferred to be paid directly. Imagine that.)
Into this void stepped a different species: the creator, a figure whose following derives not from lifestyle aspiration but from subject-matter authority. Whether the subject is beauty tutorials, anime discourse, or the proper maintenance of vintage automobiles, creators have built what Vineet Mehra, the chief marketing officer of the fintech company Chime, calls "vertically integrated media companies." Mr. Mehra compares the operations of creators like Dude Perfect to "a mini-Disney," which is the sort of comparison that would have seemed hyperbolic a decade ago and now seems merely descriptive.
The distinction matters to brands because it changes the nature of the transaction. Patrick O'Keefe, the chief integrated marketing officer at E.l.f. Beauty, illustrated the point with a recent campaign involving a man named Oliver Widger, who set sail from Oregon to Hawaii with his cat and a social media feed. When Mr. Widger mentioned needing Pringles and cat treats mid-Pacific, E.l.f. airdropped a care package. The resulting posts collected nearly 19 million views across platforms.
"We were a subplot," Mr. O'Keefe said. "We were not the main plot."
This is, of course, exactly the opposite of how advertising has traditionally conceived of itself. But the data suggests the approach works: according to Influencer Marketing Hub, long-term creator partnerships generate 70 percent higher engagement than one-off activations.
The infrastructure is evolving to match. Arthur Leopold, a former Cameo executive, founded a company called Agentio in 2023 that uses artificial intelligence to automate the matching of brands with creators. Mr. Leopold says brands can now move "from insight to action in a matter of minutes," clearing seven-figure budgets in hours. The greens-supplement company Gruns, which Unilever acquired in April for $1.2 billion, runs its entire social advertising program through the platform, managing over a thousand ads simultaneously.
Perhaps more consequentially, the rise of AI-powered search has changed what success looks like. Jonathan Mildenhall, the former chief marketing officer at Airbnb, noted that large language models care little about Super Bowl commercials but care quite a lot about what people say in YouTube comments.
"My measure of success with creators now is not the size of the audience," Mr. Mildenhall said. "It's the comments underneath it."
The influencer, in other words, has been disrupted — a word that Madison Avenue has deployed against others for so long that it was perhaps overdue to experience it firsthand.
Original story published in Fast Company: "The influencer bubble is finally popping"