What Does the Next Generation of Influence Look Like?
An increasingly professionalised landscape, new production norms, changed audiences and demand for authentic ‘always on’ content has permanently shifted the creator landscape, according to a new report from global socially-led creative agency We Are Social.
The Next Gen Influence report - available to download on We Are Social’s website - sets out five trends defining a new era of brand and creator collaboration. It describes what’s driving them and the implications for brands, featuring examples from the likes of Booking.com, H&M, and more.
Within each trend, the agency has identified a cohort of fast-growing creators that represent the next generation of influence. These range from Kahlil Greene, a gen z Historian on TikTok who uses his platform to rewrite our understandings of history, to John Pork, an AI enhanced Travel Influencer who happens to be a pig.
The Next Gen Influence trends are:
The Right to Reinvention: Social loves a ‘journey’, but in today’s creator economy, this focus on the journey has complicated our idea of authenticity. Authenticity used to require consistency, but today – with child influencers growing up, and mainstays ageing out – audiences used to watching people change. In this context, creators are planning their evolutions to draw in new viewers.
Featured creator: Julie Vu, the first transgender houseguest on Big Brother Canada, is masterful for her glamour and her humour. But she’s really won the love of audiences for making content that narrativises and visualises ‘the journey’ of her trans evolution, as much as the destination.
Relatable Realism: Aspirational content is the bread and butter of influence. But today – with most people striving for stability, not luxury – aspiration is having to change shape to stay realistic. Now, creators peddling ‘the good life’ are having to reappraise what that life looks like to make it feel relevant for real people. This means lifestyle content that’s less about glamour and luxury, and more about calm and stability.
Featured creator: @hart_of_shetland – a former city-dweller now making ethical crafts on the Shetland Islands – shows off her enviable vistas and close-knit neighbourhood. But lifestyle content feels real and achievable to non-capital city audiences, offering alternative perspectives to urban-dominated social.
Influential Allies: In recent years we’ve seen creators engage in acts of altruism to demonstrate their ethical credentials – a trend embodied by Mr. Beast's loud charitable endeavours. But in this context, there’s increasing concern that philanthropy is being used for the purpose of online clout. As audiences become sceptical of moral posturing, creators are swapping work that claims values for work that actively disrupts or challenges the status quo.
Featured creator: Kahlil Greene, a gen z historian on TikTok, uses his platform to resurface and challenge obscure or forgotten historical truths – whether that’s Mexico’s having its first Black president 200 years before the US had Obama, or the Black history of cowboys. He encourages viewers to wield this knowledge to spur real change, like showing the precedent for reparations.
Credible Creativity: On today’s social channels, a new wave of culturally impactful creativity is thriving, driven forward by creators who’ve mastered ‘very online’ modes of communicating. These approaches – from making work inspired by fanfic to repackaging vulnerability as entertainment – are pushing the creative bar higher for everyone, but especially for brands, who have to be as entertaining as their human counterparts, but without the same licence for imperfection or human charm attributed to real people.
Featured creator: Subversive undertones are everywhere on social. While brands themselves might get side-eye for poking fun at topics like addiction, partnerships with playfully risqué creators – like Marc Jacobs’ work with @sylvaniandrama – gives brands more licence to participate in irreverent, ‘very online’ humour.
Extreme Influence: The ‘dead internet theory’ is one of many laments of how bots, trend cycles, and garbage content have thrust online creativity into crisis. For today’s creators – who find themselves wading through a sea of content that’s loud and fast-moving, but often lacking in creative merit – it’s difficult to stand out. As the next generation of creators navigate this space, they’re leaning into the unusual and extreme, trying to break the internet's unspoken rules to make an impact.
Featured creator: To combat this sea of sameness, creators like Max Webb are pushing the broad space of sports content to its furthest extreme, with lo-fi, high-octane adventure content showcasing elaborate feats of human achievement.
To identify the trends, We Are Social conducted a mixed-methodological approach to analysing influence, using quantitative, qualitative, and cultural analysis. Through contextual desk research, expert interviews, and using influencer identification platform Tagger to identify recent fastest-growth creators, its Cultural Insights department used thematic analysis to identify five emergent trends shaping the influencer marketing category.
Mobbie Nazir, global chief strategy officer at We Are Social commented, “The creator economy is growing rapidly, driven not only by platforms but by the individuals working in those spaces. They are finding ever more creative and distinct ways to engage audiences at scale. In this continuously evolving ecosystem, keeping up with the latest movements can be hard for brands. Our Next Gen Influence report maps out not just the surface-level shifts, but the deeper motivations impacting brand-creator collaborations in the long term."
Download the full report now. We Are Social will be presenting the report at the DMexco conference in Cologne, Germany on (18th September).
