The Influencer Show

The Coup

At the beginning of this season, we looked at the advertising industry’s coup from my perspective. To bring it full circle, today I’m looking at it from a different angle: Yours.

Content — editorial, entertainment, what have you — and advertising have been unified to the point — where often — it’s hard to see the line between them. And while that blurring has inspired high-quality and entertaining branded work… it has also spawned, what I call, the largest breach of trust in consumer marketing, in decades.

What was once the work of the Infomercial Man and the Celebrity endorser, influence is now embedded within our daily world of online living. Thousands of people, every day, take to social media to post photos and videos that attempt to humanize the brands paying them — and some of them are making a killing doing it… Meanwhile, authenticity is still the world of the day.

So — how did influencing go from being a side-hustle to the hustle? What role have our social media overlords played in creating this controversial industry? And is a new generation of Influencers on its way… or is this business a bubble ready to burst?

In our season finale, we’re stepping into the murky, billion-dollar business of online influence, to find out.

Welcome to The Influencer Show.