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When I First Discovered the Power of Influencers

I will never forget the first time I saw someone playing slot machines on their own television. It was about five years ago, during Covid. I asked her if the site she was using was affiliated with a major casino, and if she knew what percentage of the money gambled was paid out in winnings.

My friend said that it was an offshore company that she didn’t know anything about and she wasn’t sure what the payoff rates were. I was flabbergasted that anyone would use their credit card to gamble when they had no assurance that it was a legitimate operation.

I tried to conceal my incredulity as I asked: “What reason do you have to believe that you have any chance of actually winning money?”

She said: “An influencer that me and my friends like recommended this site.” Apparently, that was good enough for her.

So What’s an Influencer?

According to my friend Gemini, an influencer is “an individual with the power to affect the purchasing decisions, opinions, or behaviors of others due to their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with their audience.”

For marketers, finding the right influencer to endorse your product can be extremely lucrative. It’s common to hear people boast about ROIs of over $5 for every $1 spent.

Many influencers initially gained notoriety as actors, musicians, athletes, models, and television personalities like Selana Gomez, The Kardashians, Cardi B, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Amber Rose, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lionel Messi.

Another group of influencers came into prominence as creators, people who develop high-quality content, such as blogs, memes, and videos.

Targeting Is the Key to Influencer Marketing

There are two main strategies for marketers when it comes to finding people who may be interested in purchasing the goods and services you have to offer:

1. Casting a wide net through traditional forms of media such as billboards and tv ads and hoping to entice a small percentage of that audience to buy your product.
2. Targeting people who may already be inclined to buy what you’re selling or people who are actively seeking what you have to offer through strategies like direct mail, inbound marketing, and influencer marketing.

Because targeting is a major component of influencer marketing, audience size is much less important than other factors, such as trust, connectedness, expertise, and authenticity.  

For example, Ronaldo and Messi each have over half a billion Instagram followers, but they probably wouldn’t be a marketer’s first choice for endorsing beauty and skin care products.

In the early days of internet marketing, many marketers who were looking to cast a wide net became infatuated with the notion of going viral. The limited efficacy of this strategy became widely apparent after Evian launched its hugely popular Roller Babies campaign in 2009.  

As marketer Luke Sullivan notes:

It’s no surprise their online video featuring diaper-wearing babies on rollerblades might produce 80 million views. But…Evian sales plummeted by 25 percent…Apparently, roller-skating babies have nothing to do with selling water (1).

According to author and fitness influencer Amanda Russell, viral “is a wildly empty metric….A social post can rack up huge numbers and still not drive any sort of meaningful action. A bunch of eyeballs does not equate to impact, and being the hot topic of conversation isn’t the same as being trustworthy” (2).

Amanda goes on to say: “People assume 10,000 followers are better than 1,000 followers…but it’s just not the case. It’s the loyalty, support and engagement of that following that matters most” (3).

According to Nate Jones, an executive for the Nex Gen practice of UTA Entertainment marketing, “zeroing in on micro-communities can be a more cost-effective and targeted strategy,” than “working with attention-grabbing social media stars such as Alix Earle, MrBeast or Kai Cenat” (4).

What Are People Looking for in an Influencer?

There are influencers for just about any type of interest or activity you can think of, including mommy bloggers, NASCAR dads, fishing aficionados, and beauty product vloggers. What people are looking for when they choose an influencer is:

• Knowledge
• Authenticity
• Engaging content

Being an influencer doesn’t require credentialed authority in a particular field. That’s why “an influencer does not have to be an expert like a dermatologist to give skincare advice, as long as they are a consistent content creator about the topic of skincare.” (5)

Video Content Rules

Although blogging, making personal appearances, books sales, and other activities can all be an important part of the influencer’s toolkit, we’ve come to an age where video content rules, whether it appears on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or any other social media channel.  

According to Atlantic Monthly contributor Derek Thompson, these days Everything Is Television.

By “television,” I am referring to something bigger than broadcast TV, the cable bundle, or Netflix….Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. (6)

by Richard W. Bray

1. Luke Sullivan. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads, p 191
2. Amanda Russell. The Influencer Code: How to Unlock the Power of Influencer Marketing, p 41,
3. Amanda Russell. The Influencer Code: How to Unlock the Power of Influencer Marketing, p 4
4. Gillian Follet. Why brands are turning to local leaders–not just social stars–the to build trust and connection, AdAge, August 1, 2025.
5. Holly Frew. New Research Unveils Key Strategies for influencer authenticity, Georgia State News Hub, February 20,2025
6. Derek Thompson. Everything Is Television. Derek Thompson dot org, October 10,2025