Nobody Trusts the Guy Reading Off a Script

Fast Company ran a piece this week about the influencer bubble finally popping, and reading it felt like watching something everybody already knew get put into words. The framing that stuck with me: influencers as the Neanderthals of marketing, creators as the Homo sapiens. Same genus, different survival instincts, and only one of them made it to now.

Here’s the line that really landed for me. Rocket Companies CMO Jonathan Mildenhall told Fast Company he pulled his team together last year and said he was done working with influencers, people hawking products they had no real authority on. He called it the “boring predictability of influencers.” And honestly, that’s the whole argument in five words.

Think about how word of mouth actually works in real life. You don’t ask a stranger on the street what mortgage lender to use. You ask the buddy who just went through it, the one who actually knows what he’s talking about because he lived it, and you trust him because you know him and you know he’s not getting a check to tell you what he’s telling you. That’s the whole mechanism, right there. Knowledge plus relationship plus zero financial incentive to steer you wrong. Pull any one of those three out and the thing falls apart.

Influencers took the relationship piece, a parasocial one, but real enough to a lot of people, and tried to bolt commerce onto it without the knowledge or the disinterest. And for a stretch, on platforms that rewarded reach over everything else, that actually worked. But people aren’t dumb. At the end of the day everybody can feel the difference between somebody who genuinely loves a product and somebody who got paid Tuesday to post about it Wednesday.

What’s interesting is why this is surfacing again right now, and it’s not just brands getting tired of it. The article gets into how AI search is reshaping the whole model. Mildenhall’s point was that a Super Bowl spot means nothing to a large language model, but the comments underneath a YouTube video or a Reddit thread mean everything, because that’s what these systems are actually reading and citing back to people. Kind of funny that the machines ended up enforcing the same rule your grandma could’ve told you for free: people trust people who know what they’re talking about and have nothing to gain by lying to you.

E.l.f. Beauty’s move with the sailor, Oliver Widger, drifting across the Pacific is a good example of the other direction. They weren’t paying the guy to hold up a bottle of sunscreen and smile for the camera. They saw somebody on a real journey who needed real stuff, showed up for him, and the story sold itself because there was nothing being sold in the first place. That’s the difference between marketing at somebody and actually being part of their life.

This is the whole thing TheCollective is built on too, if I’m being honest. Nobody signs with a firm because a rep read a script well. They sign because somebody who actually knows the space, who’s done the work, who’s placed the people, tells them straight what’s real and what isn’t. You either know it or you don’t, and most people can tell the difference in about four seconds.

The bubble popping isn’t some tragedy for marketing. It’s just the market remembering what it always knew, that trust gets earned through knowledge and relationship, not bought with reach. Took a while to circle back around to it, but here we are.