What the past reveals about the future of influencer marketing

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While influencers will continue to be a cultural romania b2b leads mainstay, how they build communities and forge brand partnerships will evolve. What can the past and present reveal about the future of influencer marketing? These takeaways from Lorenz’s event session explore what led to the influencer boom, why influencers received so much backlash in the early days and future trends that will inform the landscape.

The emergence of blogging software provided a platform for people and ideas left behind by traditional media. As Lorenz explains, “Blogs allowed people to self-publish their own content. For example, women were writing super candidly about their daily lives. These were moms struggling with breastfeeding or postpartum depression who went on to have thousands and millions of subscribers or followers. They were talking about topics excluded from women’s media at the time, and redefining motherhood. Really, women, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people built this industry.”

Despite their obvious influence and community-building expertise, these early influencers were harassed constantly, discredited for not having “real” jobs and dismissed as narcissists who took too many selfies (“Selfie even became the word of the year in 2013,” Lorenz points out).

A roundup of headlines from 2013 about influencers, social media and narcissism
“So many early people on these platforms were outcasts. They didn’t have a lot of social capital. They didn’t have a voice in traditional media. They built these revenue models that so many people have come to profit off of. Now influencer marketing has been mainstreamed, but those people have been pushed out. They faced too much online hate,” says Lorenz.

The state of influencer marketing today
Many of the negative stereotypes about influencers persisted and intensified through the 2010s. The pandemic era was a major turning point for influencer acceptance (though, creator harassment will never disappear). Everyone went online, causing many people to realize for the first time that influencers alchemize culture.