The number that stuck with me from the Times investigation in January was not the ninety-five thousand fake accounts. It was the price. Somebody sold a reality television personality a quarter million followers for less than the cost of a used Civic.
A brand paid that person to hold a bottle.
I sat in a media plan review two weeks ago where a fifty thousand dollar line item was defended entirely with the word reach. Reach to whom was not a question anyone asked, because the deck had a number in it and numbers end conversations.
Nobody in that room was lying. They were using a metric that quietly stopped meaning anything around 2016, and nobody wanted to be the person who said so out loud in front of the client.
Influence was never about audience size. It was about whether a recommendation costs the person making it anything.
That is the whole mechanic. A recommendation from someone with eleven million followers costs them nothing, because you will never meet them and they will never see your face if the thing turns out to be bad. A recommendation from a woman with nine thousand followers who runs the ceramics account you actually read costs her standing with people whose names she knows.
Three things follow from that, and brands keep getting all three wrong.
One. Stop pricing by follower count and start pricing by comment quality. Go read the comments. If they are fire emoji and accounts with four posts, you have bought a billboard in a field.
Two. Stop writing the caption. Brands that hand over approved copy get posts that read like approved copy, and the audience clocks it in half a second. Glossier worked this out early by treating customers as the talent and letting them sound like themselves.
Three. Stop running one-off posts. Trust is repetition. One sponsored post is an ad. Six months of someone visibly using the thing is evidence.
One sponsored post is an ad. Six months of someone visibly using the thing is evidence.
None of this is cheaper. It is more work per dollar, more relationships to manage, more people who might say something nobody pre-approved. Agencies dislike it for exactly that reason. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where one celebrity deal is easier to sell up the chain than forty small ones, even when everybody at the table knows which option moves product.
I sing at a sticky-floored bar in Southeast Portland twice a month, badly, and the host calls everyone baby. When she tells the room somebody is good, the room believes her, because she has to stand there afterward. That is the entire model. Everything else is renting a number.