The Influencer is Getting a Rebrand

Last week, Arizona State University announced its new Content Creation major, promising to help students become "an influencer and strategic storyteller." 

If you read the actual curriculum, it sounds more like a journalism degree, featuring courses like "information gathering" and "developing media content" that teach research, source vetting, and how to spot bias.

The program is designed to manufacture the next generation of influencers based on where influence is heading—toward people whose authority comes from practice and provenance rather than personality, not the next MrBeast or Alix Earle. 

Influence is closely tied to the era's zeitgeist and is always changing. Who and what drives influence now isn't who drove it ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, and it won't be the same again in five, ten, or fifteen. Being an influencer means you just happen to be the right person saying the right thing at the right cultural moment.

We're in the middle of a pendulum swing on what influence actually means and who has it. Call it a recession indicator, oversaturation of the industry, or a knee-jerk reaction to AI dominance (probably some combination of all three), but the common thread is that we no longer care about lifestyle influencers who have nothing new to say, show us a life we no longer want to emulate, or who hand us information we could just as easily find with a Google search or an LLM. 

We're yearning to learn something real from the people with real expertise whom we've already built parasocial relationships with.

Part of why that yearning has curdled into resentment is that the word “influencer” has become a dirty word. 

Say "influencer" and most people picture the same archetype: Pilates-doing, matcha-drinking, alo-wearing twenty- or thirty-something woman monetizing a personality and lifestyle. Say the word about yourself and watch how fast you stop being taken seriously (just look at what happened with the Nantucket “No Influencers” sign drama). 

However, influencers were never just people getting paid for their personality. They're people who shape how the rest of us see and interact with the world. By that definition, people like Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Kim Kardashian, and Taylor Lorenz all qualify as influencers, all for entirely different reasons, but rooted in one of four traits that drive it: trust, credibility, relevance, and taste. 

That narrowing wasn't neutral either. Creator Levi Coralynn's recent viral video makes the case plainly: the label got assigned specifically to women who turned personal knowledge into public content and into thriving businesses. Beauty YouTubers were the original influencers, and you could argue that women built that entire credibility infrastructure from scratch. A man doing essentially the same thing rarely gets called an influencer. He gets called a “content creator,” an “expert,” a “consultant,” a “thought leader”—labels that sound like authority rather than vanity.

Lifestyle influencers were never actually selling content; they were selling access nobody else could get. PR packages from brands like Rhode Beauty, brand partnerships with companies like Claude and OpenAI, activations at Coachella and F1 races. 

That access was the entire value proposition. Content gave audiences a look at experiences they’d likely never have on their own. And it worked precisely because it was scarce. It isn't anymore, mostly because it’s easier than ever to be an influencer now, whether you have 5,000 followers or 5 million.

With that scarcity gone, what's left behind is an industry flattened and homogenized, where everyone receives the same PR packages, partners with the same brands, attends the same activations, and says the same things (even in the same voice). 

Once access is available to anyone, it stops signaling anything, and what's left is a landscape of interchangeable people saying interchangeable things about the same five products. The goods being sold no longer require a specific person to sell them, which means the person no longer matters.

Where the mark of a true influencer used to be reach, it's now trust, and we’re already seeing a difference in how brands are treating it. 

eMarketer notes that micro- and nano-influencers will claim 45.5% of influencer marketing spending in 2026, while 73% of brands now prefer working with micro- and mid-tier creators. 

Brands like Laura Mercier restructured its creator marketing function entirely, building a paid collective of tastemaker consultants it calls "women of influence," micro-creators with a real, traceable connection to the brand, rather than influencers chasing reach. 

Brands are finding that trust rises when the person recommending something feels like your sister or your best friend, not when they've got a five- or six-figure brand deal hanging in the valance. WSJ reported that the algorithm prioritizes attention over follower count, and smaller creators (some with as few as 500 followers) are deemed more trustworthy than their higher-follower counterparts. 

Translation: you no longer need a large audience to have influence, just a trusted one.

That hunger for trust is really a hunger to learn something, to have an experience that feels novel instead of recycled, driven by someone's actual lived expertise. And you can argue that this shift is the strongest indicator of a recession. 

When economic conditions tighten, whether economically or informationally, people don't pull back from learning; they lean into it, because education feels like the one investment that holds up no matter what happens next. That instinct is now aimed at people instead of institutions. 

Audiences aren't just tired of entitlement dressed as aspiration; they're actively hunting for someone who can teach them something real, and that's what's rewarding the creator with one foot in an actual practice and one foot in public content, over the creator whose full-time job is simply being visible. Coined by Workweek’s Adam Ryan, “practitioner media” is content rooted in expert practitioners who are both good at their jobs and at explaining their fields. It’s a credential you can only earn by doing.

The market's pivot toward practitioner-led, niche, high-trust voices is in part a very overdue acknowledgment of expertise that was already there, just never priced or positioned correctly. Brands aren't discovering a new kind of creator, but rather finally affording the ones who were doing the real work the entire time.

The people who actually become influencers rarely set out to become one. They get there by knowing themselves, sharing their experiences, and authentically living their story, so that an audience starts trusting them by default, which is a byproduct of doing the work.

Niche isn't a constraint anymore; it's the mechanism. The more specific the brand or creator, the more distinct the voice has to be to earn attention.

For the knowledge-driven creator, none of this is a trend to watch from the sidelines. Customers are becoming creators. Consultants are replacing influencers. Trust is outpricing reach in a measurable, budgeted, board-reported way. The people who spent years building something real instead of something visible aren't behind. They're finally the asset the market is short on, and it took a full decade for the market to notice what was right in front of it the whole time.