> In terms of bang for your buck, influencers have quickly become the gold standard for marketing products and creating fast wealth.
I had a personal frustration with the moniker "influencer", because I am pretending I am not influenced. Harrumph.
But, indeed they influence and if I take step back, it is the most appropriate name for these marketers. Whatever they push, be it shampoo, bourbon, or politics, they are just advertisements; fancy billboards; placard (sandwich board) man; and now the "influencer".
The thing that bugs me about "influencers" is that it seems in a lot of cases the content is formulated as a host for ads and monetization, rather than the creator focusing on creating worthwhile content first with advertising as a secondary concern (in a lot of cases non-endemically.)
Obviously, what is considered "worthwhile" is entirely subjective - people wouldn't be following, say, Kylie Jenner on social media if they didn't see some sort of value in it. Also I'm pretty sure a lot of people just don't care about being advertised to, or even enjoy it, if it's in a niche that they follow.
To me, it feels more insidious, especially when the line blurs between what is and ad and what is not. I hate being marketed to in such a way that it is so interleaved with the "actual" content - it starts making me question the validity of the content. By example, I used to browse Pinterest every now and again (mostly as a time waster) - it was interesting to search certain keywords and save things that looked interesting or sparked my curiosity. There were ads spaced every several tiles, but in general they seemed more or less separated from user-submitted content. Now, there are ads seemingly every third or fourth tile, and many "normal" tiles are ads as well, submitted by corporate accounts. I've pretty much stopped using it entirely.
There's also the fact that many of these influencers are deliberately cultivating parasocial relationships - causing their fans to create false emotional attachments as a marketing strategy. It's wildly unethical and often quite harmful to their victims.
It works on all of us, doesn't it? I know I clicked this article because it was on page 2 of HN and not really because it was something that I actually wanted to read. I know it's not exactly the same as someone posting a picture of a pair of shoes on picture/shortmovie-app, but it's still driven by the social network algorithm of popularity = more popularity.
I had a personal frustration with the moniker "influencer", because I am pretending I am not influenced. Harrumph.
But, indeed they influence and if I take step back, it is the most appropriate name for these marketers. Whatever they push, be it shampoo, bourbon, or politics, they are just advertisements; fancy billboards; placard (sandwich board) man; and now the "influencer".