Recent headlines would have us believe that influencer marketing is dead. The reality is an industry reporting exponential growth.

“Is this the end of influencing as we knew it?”, wondered Vanity Fair on April 3. “Could the coronavirus kill influencer culture?” asked Wired on April 14. A day later the Metro contemplated: “Does the coronavirus pandemic spell the end of the influencer?” On 16 April it was Vice’s turn to wade in with a piece titled: “Coronavirus killed the influencer market – maybe for good”.

These headlines all point to a grave and finite future for influencer marketing. But are the articles all founded on objective opinion? Or could something else be at play here? Let’s not forget that established media mastheads and influencers now chase the same advertising revenue. There's both a degree of schadenfreude and financial incentive for the media to knock the influencer discipline.

Zenith, the media data house, has calculated That magazine advertising spending worldwide will decrease from $24.5 billion in 2019 to $19 billion in 2022. The decline in magazine ad expenditures has been constant since 2006.

Source: The Metro. Spoiler: No it doesn’t.

We don’t much care for paying for our news. Asked by Reuters to choose between subscribing to video services such as Netflix, online music platforms like Spotify, or online news, eg. the New York Times, 37% of under 45-year-olds responded with video, 15% with music, and just opting for news.

It is against this backdrop that Condé Nast, the publisher of Vanity Fair, is currently “rolling out a series of pay cuts and furloughs”, with layoffs rumoured to be as high as 300 employees in the near horizon, according to a recent Digiday article.

Vice Media laid off 250 people in 2019 (10% of its workforce) in an earlier blow to a new generation of media companies that previously rapidly expanded, only to run into an uncertain advertising environment. Metro newspaper staff were offered shares this month in parent company DMGT, in exchange for wage cuts to avoid being furloughed, according to the Press Gazette.

Mindsets murder nuance

The media tend to treat the subject of influencers as one amorphous blob. A standardised, commoditised, one-size-fits-all entity. Celebrities, subject-matter experts, creators, reviewers, gaming influencers, food influencers, micro-influencers, nano influencers, bloggers, Instagrammers, TikTok influencers, YouTube influencers... all are clumped together; heaped into a single pile. They are given one catch-all title, no matter their chosen platform or style of content, audience, or the size of community they influence. No matter where their value lies within the customer journey, or what higher calling their skills bring in demonstrating an organisation' s purpose, or helping during a crisis.

It is human nature to see the world in relatively fixed ways. It is human to look for a shorthand way to impose order on chaos. In doing so we oversimplify the complex. Events, facts and figures that do not fit our understanding - or the status quo - may be ignored. Mindsets murder nuance. This is what mainstream media is attempting to do with influencer marketing - an industry with revenue ballooning from $500m to $8.2billion in the last five years.

Above: Arielle Charnas. One influencer does not an entire industry make.

Arielle Charnas, the New York City–based influencer and fashion designer, plays the pantomime villain of the piece - or pieces - here. The Vanity Fair article’s SEO headline even reads: ‘influencers-coronavirus-arielle-charnas-escape-new-york’. Presumably, the subeditors changed the main headline to ‘Is this the end of influencing as we knew it?’ to make it more clickbait-y and generic.

Charnas provoked accusations of privilege by seeming to jump queues and get tested for coronavirus ahead of front-line workers. She tested positive. She then set about trying to ‘break the internet’ by revealing that - rather than following guidelines and sheltering in place, she, her family, and the family nanny had travelled from their home in New York to self isolate in the Hamptons.

Charnas does not speak for the entire influencer marketing ecosystem. Not even close. For every Arielle Charanas, there are a hundred more content creators undertaking pro bono work for The United Nations, or the World Health Organisation, or instilling the importance of active life to our children. Or helping our kids become better spellers.

That’s why Finland has classified influencers as 'key workers' in its fight against fake news.

Provide better alternatives

If media companies do not care for influencer marketing, they should put forward a better alternative for their communities. As consumers, we don’t like ads. We ignore them. We block them. We turn to Netflix to tune out ads on the telly. We pay Spotify to parse advertisements from our music stream. We set up adblockers to prevent us from seeing ads on our smartphones. 47% of internet users worldwide use an adblocking tool to prevent the display of advertising content, according to GlobalWebIndex data. This, of course, is bad news for traditional and digital-only media companies. Especially those who cannot convert readers into paid subscribers.

Traditional marketing communications are interruptive, and come from a marketing communications-centric point of view. Influencer marketing is customer-focused and helpful. Its content is useful to a select audience by dint of being informative, inspirational, educational, aspirational, or entertaining.

Above: Joe Wicks, the nation’s PE teacher. An online content content creator it’s impossible to demonise.

We enjoy near-infinite choice as consumers. Trouble is, we have a finite amount of attention to devote. Every day, as consumers, we are bombarded by more brand messages than we can hope to make sense of. We turn to influencers to help us cut through this content clutter; to help us make sense of what information should be important to us; to help us affect action.

In 1897 Mark Twain, American humourist and author of Huckleberry Finn, was forced to comment on his own mortality. A rumour had circulated that the writer had died. Frank Marshall White, a correspondent for the New York Journal, wrote to Twain for comment. “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” came the response. Twain went on to live a life of great success for many years to come. Influencer marketing is only just getting started.