Top influencers no longer primarily market products but sustain attention

Evidence

This also tells us something more about how the influencer, at least at the levels of people like MrBeast, Ryan Kaji, and Emma Chamberlain, has reinvented its past existence as an “influential” or “opinion leader.” As we mentioned in our introduction, influencers descend directly from a particular kind of person, one often identified in marketing and communications research, who was imagined as a holy grail of persuasion. Influentials, or opinion leaders, were important for brands, advertisers, and marketers of all stripes because they were more trusted by community members than ads were; influentials and opinion leaders could be more effective at moving messages and persuading everyday people than could the propagandistic mechanisms of the culture industries alone. This is, still, the logic behind most sponsored content on social media. Brands sponsor influencers because they seem more “personal” and more “intimate” than ads alone. But the spectacle of excess here indicates that the point is often not to market specific products—even though this marketing role cannot be completely discounted—but to keep people watching through infinitely more images, more objects, more waste. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 230

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: influencer excess as entertainment commodity, not persuasion — attention as the real product.
• XREF: Connects to the framing task of who realizes the surplus in the labor theory of value reading — here surplus shifts to attention.