Influencers are starting to feel like recycled characters at this point. Same morning routine, same pink smoothie bowl, same personality copy pasted everywhere. And honestly, people (me) are over it. Everyone wants creators who feel real again, not the “I’m so relatable” performance. You can feel the algorithm losing its grip on the polished persona era. Having an actual personality is the flex now and the end times are here.

- abdel khalil, influencer fatigue victim #3248976

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Remember WrappedGate 2024? When users flooded socials calling their Wrapped "boring" and "inaccurate"? Yeah, Spotify remembers too. And lo and behold, this time around, they've actually listened to us. According to Business Insider, the team spent the year revamping Wrapped. The result? A much warmer reception this year.

What's interesting here is Spotify didn't just tweak last year's strategy and call it good. They did a complete overhaul (one welcome change was getting rid of that horrific AI podcast feature). The brand's also encouraging listeners to share their Wrapped with their friends on the platform (rather than just on their Stories). They've introduced Wrapped Parties, which let friend groups combine their listening data in app. Spotify's also going big on IRL experiences this year. They've created 50 pop-ups worldwide, including Spotify-green Ferraris in Paris and an 800-foot cascade of Chappell Roan's red hair in Union Square.

The takeaway? Sometimes the best brand strategy is just... listening. Crazy, I know.

AI content isn't just taking over your social feeds anymore—it's coming for your TV screen too. Throughout 2025, a bunch of AI-powered ad platforms have launched to help brands create ads for CTV (think streaming services like Hulu, Roku, and Paramount+). Some of these platforms include Comcast's Universal Ads, which launched in January, and Mntn's QuickFrame AI, which debuted last month. These tools are designed to make CTV advertising accessible to small and medium-sized businesses that have never advertised on TV before.

And they're fast. According to Marketing Brew, QuickFrame AI can build a "ready to run" ad in an average of 12 minutes. The speed and accessibility here could be a game-changer for SMBs who've been priced out of this kind of advertising up until now. CTV ad spend is expected to hit almost $46 billion by 2028, so clearly, there's huge potential here. But one has to wonder what the quality of these ads is like. I'd assume it's a classic case of garbage in, garbage out, where it all comes down to knowing how to brief the self-service tool properly.

Move over, girls. Because the bathroom mirror isn't just for us anymore. Because Gen Z men are like really into skincare. They're checking ingredients, budgeting for serums, and sending product links to their mates, just like their female counterparts. According to Vogue, male grooming sales in the UK surged 77% year-on-year. Globally, the men's skincare market hit $16.9 billion in 2024 and is expected to more than double by 2035.

But these guys aren't into the 7-in-1 "for men" products of the 90s and 00s. They want transparency, science-backed claims, and brands that treat them like informed consumers. In fact, brands like Salt & Stone and DS Durga are ditching gendered marketing altogether, letting customers decide what works based on performance, not packaging colour. It's clear that, for Gen Z guys, macho marketing is out. Brands winning in this space are the ones speaking to men the same way they'd speak to any informed beauty consumer.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

The chic corporate girlboss who just keeps getting Birkin bags. The Pilates pastel wellness queen with a non-existent waistline. The cosplaying twitch streamer with 1m subs on OF. The cropped tee, tote wearing fashion boy who is so clearly on T it’s impossible to ignore. All different costumes, one shared truth: they were performing the same algorithmically optimised template.

That template is now collapsing in real time. Audiences are bored. And have developed a kind of cultural vertigo.

After a decade of watching strangers behave like NPC versions of themselves, people want creators with a pulse again. I’m talking grounded identity. Something the default influencer archetype was never built to carry.

Influencer fatigue is not just “ugh, too many ads.” It’s deeper. It's psychological.

It's the exhaustion of watching people flatten themselves into marketable fragments. It’s the discomfort of endless self-surveillance: perform your breakfast, perform your skincare, your yoga class, your catch up with your best friend.

There’s also something insanely unsettling watching someone perform their grief, or even their joy. And I sure as hell don’t need you to perform your relationship breakdown in 4K with a caption about growth and “moving on.”

And the audience stopped relating because formatting leaves no negative space. There are no contradictions, no human texture, no real boundaries.

Post pandemic, everyone experienced the weirdest emotional collapse of their lives. Hybrid work blurred the lines between worker-self, personal-self, online-self, and audience-self. People started craving creators who felt like they existed when the camera is off.

Which brings us to the rise of the multi-hyphenate. The grounded creator. The person who has a life offline and refuses to contort themselves into a single monetisable trait.

Many of the creators today who break through do so because they’re unformateable.

They are chefs who are also fashion baddies. Stylists who lecture about textile ethics. Architects who do chaotic apartment tours but also unpack structural failures. Paramedics who teach first-aid between night shifts. Ceramicists who make pottery while giving advice on heartbreak. Curators who drop museum-level cultural analysis into their GRWM.

Their lives don’t fit into a single hook or aesthetic lane. And that is precisely what makes them trustworthy.

People don’t want characters anymore. They want context. Context builds credibility. Credibility builds trust. Trust builds influence, not the other way around.

Here are the kinds of creator’s brands are gravitating toward, not because they’re polished, but because they’re anchored:

1. The chef-educator hybrids. Think the wave of chefs who popped on TikTok not for dance trends but for technique explanation, knife skills, behind-the-pass realness. Their endorsements hit harder because you know they’ve actually burned themselves on a real stove.

2. The fashion insiders who don’t aestheticise their entire freaking life. Stylists, textile nerds, pattern makers, fashion historians. They’re tired, messy, opinionated, and can explain why a hem matters. These people are shaping taste far more than any lifestyle vlogger with a skincare fridge.

3. The blue-collar influencers. Electricians, carpenters, mechanics, builders, gardeners. Creators whose expertise is so specific, it’s almost soothing. They’re the antidote to glamorised hustle culture, and audiences love them for it.

4. The multi-hyphenate art girls. Designers who also rant about cultural theory. Curators who thrift like archaeologists. Ceramists who unpack the politics of craft. They attract brand deals because they make culture feel accessible, not elite.

5. The “accidental influencers.” People who never intended to go viral: school teachers, nurses, librarians, archivists, baristas, museum educators. They show up online deeply rooted in something other than content. Audiences feel the difference immediately.

And look, I want to be clear. I’m not shading the OG influencer archetype. Get your bag girl, or boy, or however you may choose to identify. I’m merely pointing out that as the internet fragments and audiences grow tired of the circus that is currently the entire world stage, having a more realistic and multi-faceted muse on the web just makes sense. 

People are increasingly searching for comfort, relatability, and a way to make sense of the world. Real humans help with that.

Stop buying personalities, start buying perspectives.

For years, brand partnership strategy was basically: Find biggest creator + attach logo = success. That model is beginning to fall short.

Brands have realised that visibility ≠ trust. Mass appeal ≠ cultural relevance. And format ≠ influence.

The new winning strategy:

At the end of the day, there’s a lot of struggles in the world right now.

We’re all burnt out, doing a million things at once, trying to maintain a job, a social life, a mediocre body and a reasonably tidy house. Not to mention afford things that we like, eat at the places we love, and remain happy and optimistic about the sinking ship we’re on.

Seeing creators that live in the same world we do is refreshing. It’s aspirational.

Nobody wants to see a 14-step skincare routine and a lifetime supply of Olipop when they’re scraping together coins for drugstore foundation or so sleep deprived from their 3 kids that the bags under their eyes have bags. Like, f*ck off.

This is what replaces the default influencer: a more human, more contradictory creator class. People who don’t exist solely to serve the algorithm. And who bring lived experience, work identities, hybrid skill sets, and taste to the table. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The audio comes from Emeli Sandé’s song "Next to Me" and features the line “You’ll find him, you’ll find him next to me.” Most videos start with a shot of the creator, then reveal the thing or person that’s always by their side. Some show pets or kids, while others get creative, like emotional support objects, addictions, best friends who refuse to leave, or that hoodie they’ve never taken off.

Some of my favourite examples:

Film a shot starting with yourself, then pan to whatever never leaves your side. Add the text “You’ll find him next to me,” include the audio, and post.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Paris Foskin, Intern

😂Yap’s funniest home videos Circus dog
✨Daily inspo Always grow
🎧Soooo tingly The most satisfying soap cut
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight Chicken Rendang

Hey Ross!

If you're starting out, think of this as your information gathering phase. You don't know what your audience wants to see from you, so there's no point spending days or weeks trying to create the perfect piece of content. Instead, you should go for quantity at this stage. Try stuff and figure out what content style resonates. Then pay attention to your engagement.

What kind of reach are you getting? Are those people turning into followers? Where do they drop off in watching your content? Use this data to refine what you're doing. Eventually, you'll want to make incremental changes to improve the overall quality of your content. But for now, you are trying to figure out what content style will work for your brand, so go for volume. As we like to say, quantity leads to quality.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.