They’re not the Instagram girlies with 2M followers. They’re not the YouTubers getting millions of views on every video. No, this new wave of alternative influencers are building audiences on Discord. In inboxes. On LinkedIn. In niche Facebook groups. Their audience might not seem impressive when you’re looking at numbers alone. Most never meant to become an “influencer.” But they’ve built a following that deeply trusts them. And their power to persuade is pretty dang hard to beat [here’s how brands can start tapping into this shift]

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Meanwhile other brands are going viral every week. Their secret? They're not working harder. They're using a system (and you need one, too).

At this workshop, Stanley Henry (1.4M followers, 1B+ views/year) teaches you that exact system live in just 90 minutes.

You'll learn:

✅The 1 thing you need to never run out of content ideas
✅How the biggest brands go viral on IG (plus what NOT to do)
✅How to create a repeatable content system (that doesn't take hours every day OR a creative team)

26 March | 11am NZDT | 9am AEDT | $79 NZD

Find out exactly how the biggest accounts are blowing up on IG (and how your brand can become one of them) 👇

It’s an even worse day to be in court if AI is involved, which according to these three stories, holds up f*cking terribly. Oh, you mean the technology that constantly repeats itself and hallucinates details? Go figure. Let’s dive in.

The first case involves the CEO of South Korean publisher Krafton trying to get out of a $250 million contract using ChatGPT. He started by ignoring his legal team and pushing out the head of the studio developer. Then, he failed miserably when the case reached court, where the judge ordered the fired developer reinstated. There’s something almost poetic about that. Not in a “haha AI is dumb” way, but in a “we are outsourcing judgment to tools that fundamentally do not understand consequence” way. The fantasy is that AI gives you leverage. The reality is that it gives you confidence without accountability.

Then we have a story about a witness in London caught being coached mid-testimony through smartglasses, with a literal voice feeding him answers in real time. Talk about confidence lol. When the voice of the coach started COMING THROUGH HIS CELLPHONE because the glasses were disconnected, he blamed it on ChatGPT. Which is becoming the modern equivalent of “the dog ate my homework,” except the stakes are… perjury. You cannot make this sh*t up. The judge threw out his entire testimony (duh) because it was clear he was being coached and lying about it.

This last story isn’t AI centred but definitely continues the theme of brazen male confidence in the lack of anything substantial. The DOGE bro testimony is absolutely fascinating to me. Maybe horrifying is the right word, taking a look into the minds of the men inside DOGE.

Over the course of a six-hour long deposition, of which the videos were released very publicly on YouTube, Justin Fox, a former investment banker turned DOGE bro, refused to define what he believes counts as DEI. He admitted he used ChatGPT to scan government contracts for terms such as “Black” and “homosexual” but not “white” or “Caucasian.”

DOGE is/was the Department of Government Efficiency btw – Musk's attempt to gamify the US government. Last Friday, A judge ordered the videos be taken down from YouTube. And within hours they were backed up, torrented, mirrored, and archived across the internet. This is what we like to call the “Streisand Effect” where trying to supress info results in it spreading further. It's an example of how even when the system does try to assert control, the internet just shrugs and routes around it. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Audiences are exhausted by polish. Brands are drowning in vanity metrics. And everyone's starting to realise that follower counts mean absolutely nothing if engagement is dead and trust is non-existent.

Enter the alternatively influential. These are people you've probably never heard of who are driving more value than influencers with millions of followers. Some of them have 60k+ followers, some have 3,000 followers and 20% engagement rates.

They live in newsletter subscriber lists, Discord servers, and private Facebook groups that don't show up in traditional influencer discovery tools. And perhaps for brands, these people matter more than the verified checkmarks they've been chasing for years.

The alternatively influential aren't trying to be influencers. Instead, they're experts in their fields, enthusiasts, community builders, newsletter writers, Discord moderators, subreddit leaders.

They have small but deeply engaged audiences who actually trust their recommendations.

They're the person in your running club who everyone asks for shoe recommendations. They’re the employee who posts about their work and gets genuine engagement from people who respect their expertise.

Traditional influencers built followings by being aspirational, polished, and broadly appealing. The alternatively influential built trust by being knowledgeable, authentic, and specifically valuable to a niche audience.

AI made polish cheap and authenticity expensive to fake. Anyone can generate perfect images, flawless copy, and polished content at scale (the very things that made influencers attractive). Now, professional-looking content, consistent aesthetics, scalable output have become what makes audiences distrust them.

Polish now often signals fake, while messiness signals human. The alternatively influential win because their content has human quirks that AI can't replicate and audiences can recognise as genuine.

CMOs are noticing, too. In 2025, 81% of surveyed CMOs believed customers would pay more for human-created content, up from 65% the year before. Now, the market is actively rewarding authenticity over production value.

Traditional influencer discovery tools probably won't help you here. These people rarely show up in things like hashtag monitoring, so you need to look in different places:

Monitor saves and shares, not just likes. The alternatively influential inspire action. People bookmark their recommendations, forward their newsletters, and actually click through to buy what they suggest.

Your own employees are likely already alternatively influential in their professional networks. Someone on your team posting about their work on LinkedIn to 4,000 connections in your industry could be more valuable than a lifestyle influencer with 400,000 random followers. My company is full of them.

Well, your employees are alternatively influential within their professional networks. When someone from your team posts about their work, their industry connections pay attention because it's a genuine insider perspective.

This isn't corporate social media with brand voice and approval workflows. This is individuals sharing what they're excited about, problems they're solving, or lessons they're learning. The authenticity comes from the lack of polish.

Employee-generated content works as a trust signal precisely because it's not marketing. It's someone with real expertise sharing genuine enthusiasm about their work. That credibility can't be manufactured through traditional influencer partnerships.

You can't scale it the way you scaled influencer campaigns. You can't automate discovery. And you def can't demand deliverables (which you shouldn’t be doing anyway).

But the payoff is audiences who actually trust recommendations. Conversions that actually happen. And relationships that last beyond a single campaign cycle.

Traditional influencer marketing optimised for reach and impressions. Working with the alternatively influential optimises for trust and action. Those are fundamentally different goals that require fundamentally different approaches.

Mega-influencers will still exist for broad awareness campaigns, of course. But for brands that want more localised influence, nuance, and deep trust, the alternatively influential are where the value lives.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

A great example of this comes from Wendy Williams, who in one episode of her namesake show dropped tidbits of "messy" pop culture gossip as her audience gasped and jeered between every bomb drop: "Beyoncé's baby brother may be homeless, that's messy! Selena Gomez fired her parents, that's messy…

Recently TikTokers have been using the audio from Wendy's spicy drama spillage to describe times they listed off some wild discoveries, like spilling serious tea with siblings or telling your long-distance bestie about the nutty things your former classmates are doing.

Take this sound, put the camera on yourself and lip-sync with the audio. Then, add on-screen text describing a time you founding yourself itemising one drama after another. For extra effect, take note of Wendy's expressions in the original video (and other lip-syncing videos) and see if you can pull those same sassy looks!

A few ideas to get you started:

-Devin Pike, Copywriter

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: We all start from somewhere
✨Daily inspo: Fear is a waste of time
😊Soooo satisfying: love a good fridge restock
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: 10-Minute Shakshuka Inspired Recipe 

Hey Charne,

If your content only speaks to people who are actively in the market for what you sell, you're always going to be limited because that's a tiny slice of people at any given moment. The smarter thing to do is to build an audience with content that entertains or connects with people even when they're not ready to buy from you. Then when they are ready, or when a friend gets engaged and asks for recommendations, they already know and trust you.

The right content series builds that trust slowly over time. And because you are building a relationship with a large audience, your brand will be the first one people think of when they do need your service.

- 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.