There was a time when being influenced felt almost accidental.
Your neighbour mentioned a moisturiser that actually worked. A friend told you the restaurant was worth the drive. Someone at work had tried the new thing and reckoned it was brilliant. You might have read a review, asked around or simply noticed what people you trusted were using.
We didn’t call them influencers. They were just people whose judgement we trusted.
And that, really, is what influence has always been. Someone knows something, tries something or believes something strongly enough to tell someone else about it.
Long before anyone had a follower count, the difference between a loyal customer and an advocate was pretty simple, one bought from you, the other told someone else they should too. It’s a distinction we’ve been interested in at Spinifex for a very long time.
Then social media arrived and gave those recommendations reach. Suddenly your neighbour wasn’t talking to three people over the fence. She could talk to 30,000 people from her kitchen.
And marketing thought: Well, this is interesting! 🤔 Brands moved in. Agencies followed. Affiliate links appeared. Gifting became strategy. Creators became businesses. Businesses became creators.
And somewhere along the way, something that had worked because it felt like a recommendation started looking suspiciously like advertising again. Not genuine just cash for comment or product for comment.
Influencer marketing isn’t dying. It’s changing as consumers become more sceptical of relentless recommendations and more selective about who they trust. Research into deinfluencing suggests creators who are prepared to recommend against products can actually become more persuasive when they later recommend something they genuinely rate. For brands, that shifts the conversation from simply buying reach to earning credible influence.
Which leaves us with a small mystery. Who killed the influencer? We have several suspects.
Suspect No. 1: The brands
They certainly had motive. Influencers were interesting to brands precisely because they didn’t feel much like brands. They were people talking to other people about things they liked, used or thought were worth knowing about.
It felt more like word of mouth than advertising, then it became monetised.
A few free products became gifting programs. Recommendations became affiliate links. Creators became brand ambassadors. Posts became deliverables. There were briefs, contracts, content calendars, usage rights and performance metrics.
None of that is inherently bad. Businesses need to sell things and creators deserve to be paid for their work. The trouble starts when we can see every cog in the machine.
When every hotel is incredible, every serum is life-changing and every new product is something you’ve been literally obsessed with, eventually we start wondering whether perhaps money has changed hands.
The recommendation hasn’t necessarily changed, our understanding of what’s behind it has.
Suspect No. 2: The algorithm
It was definitely at the scene of the crime. Algorithms need feeding. A lot. That means more reels, more posts, more recommendations, more opinions, more trends and more five things you absolutely need to know before breakfast, and it isn’t just professional influencers anymore.
Businesses need content. CEOs need personal brands. Employees are encouraged to become advocates. Customers create UGC. Experts become thought leaders. Ordinary people document their holidays, breakfasts, renovations and the dog’s emotional journey through puppy preschool. Everything has become potential content.
Vogue recently explored what happens when both sides of that equation start getting tired: consumers are experiencing influencer fatigue while creators themselves are dealing with the pressure of constantly producing content.
And there are signs this might be part of something bigger.
Dumbphones are back. Analogue hobbies are having a moment. People are ditching wearables, joining run clubs, going to trivia nights and looking for reasons to leave the feed and actually be somewhere.
The interesting signal isn’t that we’ve suddenly stopped wanting progress, products or technology. We’re becoming more selective about what deserves our attention and where constant optimisation belongs. Recent work from The Lab’s Australia Project has been tracking exactly that shift.
Maybe we’re not simply suffering from influencer fatigue.
Maybe we’re getting tired of being perpetually influenced.
Buy this. Improve that. Try this. Go here. Optimise your sleep. Fix your skin. Build your personal brand. Monetise your hobby. It’s exhausting just writing it.
Suspect No. 3: AI
An obvious suspect. We can now create virtual influencers who never sleep, age, have an off day or decide halfway through a campaign that they’re taking a break from social media to focus on themselves.
We can also produce enormous amounts of content very quickly. But I’m inclined to give AI at least a partial alibi. It didn’t create this problem, the cracks were already there. What AI may have done is make an existing question harder to ignore.
When images, people, reviews, recommendations and content can all be manufactured, we start paying more attention to where something came from.
Who said it? Why are they saying it? Do they actually know anything about it? And do I believe them?
Very old-fashioned questions. Increasingly useful ones.
Suspect No. 4: The influencers themselves
Could it have been an inside job? This is where the case gets interesting.
Researchers studying deinfluencing — creators actively telling people not to buy something — found that when influencers were prepared to recommend against products, audiences became less sceptical about their motives and judged them as more trustworthy.
That trust didn’t stop with the negative recommendation. It carried over to products those influencers subsequently did recommend, making those later recommendations more persuasive.
Think about that.
Telling someone not to buy something can make them more likely to listen when you eventually say something is worth buying.
When people saw only positive recommendations, they were more likely to think those recommendations were sponsored even when they weren’t. Apparently, if you tell us everything is wonderful for long enough, we start wondering who’s paying you, which seems entirely reasonable.
The researchers even tested whether criticism needed to be carefully softened. It didn’t make a significant difference to the trust effect. The willingness to say I don’t recommend this appears to be doing some of the work.
There was a catch. When an influencer criticised a product and later appeared in a paid partnership with that same brand, scepticism went back up and the trust advantage weakened. You can’t manufacture authenticity. Once people can see the strategy behind it, the whole thing starts to unravel.
Suspect # 5 Common Sense
Perhaps consumers have simply learnt how the trick works.
We understand #gifted, we recognise an affiliate link, we know a big following doesn’t automatically mean expertise, and that someone can genuinely love a product while also being paid to promote it. And when someone says, “You guys have been asking me about my skincare routine…” we’re now quite capable of wondering whether anyone actually has.
We’ve become better at reading what sits behind the recommendation.
Which brings us back to the thing that mattered before any of this had a name… do I trust this person’s judgement?
Judgement might be the important word here. Someone who tells you everything is fantastic isn’t terribly useful. Someone who tells you don’t waste your money on that, this one’s fine but probably overpriced, and this one genuinely does what it says is helping you make a decision. They’re demonstrating that their opinion has value because they’re prepared to have one, and perhaps that’s what influence was supposed to be all along.
Is influencer marketing actually dying?
Spoiler alert, NO! And that’s important, because otherwise we end up with a wonderfully dramatic headline and the wrong conclusion.
The commercial evidence tells a more interesting story. Analysis of five years of creator deal data suggests influencer marketing is maturing rather than imploding. Brands are developing more repeat relationships with creators, deal values have increased, and smaller creators can deliver considerable value without celebrity-sized audiences.
Influence isn’t dead. Some of the shortcuts to influence might be.
Reach isn’t automatically credibility, followers aren’t automatically community and visibility isn’t automatically authority. By the same measure a paid recommendation isn’t automatically worthless either. If the relationship makes sense and the audience trusts the person making the recommendation, it can still be enormously powerful.
There’s an interesting parallel in brand collaborations. Recent work from The Lab points to the partnerships that work being the ones where there is genuine alignment and a reason for the relationship beyond creating a bit of noise. Influencer marketing probably deserves the same test.
So what does this mean for brands?
Go back to the question we were asking before influencers had a name. Who would our customers actually listen to and why?
Maybe it is an influencer or a customer who has genuinely used the product. An employee who knows the subject backwards. A technician who has spent 20 years solving the problem. An industry expert. The founder. A niche creator followed by 4,000 people who genuinely care about what they think.
We used to call those people advocates. The platforms have changed, but the principle hasn’t: people who have genuine knowledge, experience or passion and are connected enough to share it with others can influence decisions.
The platforms and technology have changed, but the human behaviour underneath them really hasn’t.
Perhaps nobody killed the influencer
We haven’t stopped asking friends where they ate. We still read reviews before booking somewhere. We ask colleagues which software they use. We watch demonstrations. We listen to experts. We notice what people we respect buy and recommend.
We are influenced every day, but what appears to be changing is who earns the right to influence us.
And in a world of more content, more creators, more commercial relationships and more AI-generated everything, that right may be getting harder to earn.
For brands, that could mean becoming a little more comfortable with honesty. Let experts have opinions instead of handing them scripts. Let customers tell the whole story, not just the approved bits. Choose someone with genuine knowledge over someone with enormous reach. Admit when your product isn’t right for everyone.
Occasionally be prepared to say, Don’t buy it.
You might lose a sale today, but if the research is right, you may gain something considerably more valuable, the right to be believed next time.
So perhaps common sense didn’t kill the influencer after all, it just reminded us what influence was supposed to be.
Who do your customers actually listen to?
It might be an influencer. It might be an employee, an expert, a customer or someone with a small but very engaged community. If you’re trying to work out who can genuinely influence your audience and what they need to hear that’s exactly the sort of problem we like getting our teeth into.
