Unilever drew attention when it announced that half of its media budget would go toward social channels—a move that’s part of its “influencer-first” strategy.
For Kellogg’s Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing, it’s a sign of the times. Brands need to consider how they might engage with the personalities on these platforms.
“If you don’t, what happens is people are going to talk about your product and your service, but you will not be part of that discussion,” Calkins said.
In this episode of The Insightful Leader: Influencer marketing isn’t just for deep-pocketed brands with general audiences. Smaller, more-niche businesses have a lot to gain.
Podcast Transcript
Laura PAVIN: It’s Sunday, January 22, 1984. Super Bowl Sunday.
(Crowd noise)
It’s the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII.
And something revolutionary is about to happen.
(whistle. crowd stops)
But not on the field. During a timeout. In a commercial break.
(Super Bowl Ad)
A blossoming computer company called Apple had hired legendary film director Ridley Scott to direct a new commercial that reportedly cost nearly half a million dollars. That wasn’t common at the time.
(background FX drop out)
This was a huge moment for advertising.
(Music)
The 60-second mini-film won prestigious awards, including Ad of the Decade.
In the decades since, advertising became about big, flashy ads and mass-market viewership. We got coordinated ad campaigns and tightly controlled narratives.
(Music stops)
But in the past few years, there’s been another big shift.
Tim CALKINS: TikTok changed everything.
PAVIN: That’s Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Kellogg. He says once again, we’re in a brave new world.
CALKINS: We’ve lost trust in a lot of the traditional institutions, the traditional media outlets. And when that platform opened up back in 2018, that was the start.
PAVIN: With TikTok, a new phenomenon in advertising and marketing was introduced.
Influencer marketing.
Clip 1: Things that should be left in 2025.
Clip 2: I’ve asked my husband now three times. Three times if he will take the kids to the jewelry store and buy a little jewelry for me.
Clip 3: Y’all ever listen to somebody talk, and you just know that their canon event is coming?
Clip 4: Some of you are not gonna like this, but as a couple’s therapist, I see this all the time.
Clip 5: Things you actually should bring into 2026.
CALKINS: What’s exciting about it is how fast it’s growing, how well it aligns to trends, and how different it is from marketing as we’ve always done.
PAVIN: Today, a primer on influencer marketing—the people’s marketing, as I like to think of it. Because frankly, the content is a far cry from the Ridley Scott–directed ads of yore. And it’s not exclusive to TikTok—it’s happening—been happening—on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. TikTok just accelerated the trend of this lower-budget kind of influence.
Even so, however un-polished it may seem, consumers tend to trust it more. You can pack a huge punch if you strike the right chord. And you don’t need a multimillion-dollar budget to do it.
On this episode of The Insightful Leader, Professor Calkins guides us through this new frontier and explains how organizations can take advantage of new trends in consumer trust and attention.
If you still think influencer marketing isn’t relevant for you or your business, you might be surprised. At the very least, Calkins says, you should consider dabbling in the space. The stakes are high.
CALKINS: If you don’t, what happens is people are going to talk about your product and your service, but you will not be part of that discussion. And when it becomes time to make choices, people are going to be influenced by a world that you’re not in.
PAVIN: That Apple ad you heard earlier? Its creation followed a process that brands still use today.
CALKINS: They will spend a lot of time developing the creative brief and trying to get that exactly right. They’ll do some testing; they go produce the ad. They might spend a million dollars or more creating this piece of content. They then run the spot for six months, eight months, and they track it. And they see how it goes.
PAVIN: Again, this is Tim Calkins, a marketing professor here at Kellogg.
CALKINS: And that’s a traditional campaign. It’s a process that’s worked for decades, and it’s a process that brands and companies are very comfortable with.
PAVIN: The traditional way gives brands tight control over messaging. But as a society, we’ve developed mixed feelings about messaging that feels engineered.
And it’s important to understand why—so you don’t try to use the old playbook in this new world.
CALKINS: A lot of this comes back to a discussion about trust and where we are with trust in our world. And coming out of the pandemic, the studies all say that people no longer trust a lot folks that maybe they used to. Government officials, public health officials, even physicians, people don’t trust. We’ve lost trust in a lot of the traditional institutions, the traditional media outlets.
PAVIN: The pandemic was a time where we saw, on a constant basis, public figures disagreeing about how to handle a worldwide crisis. Leaders, officials, experts loudly, publicly disagreed about messaging: what it should be, and what it should accomplish. That time—that crisis—did a lot to pull the curtain back on the MOTIVE behind messaging. And whom it was designed to benefit.
Meanwhile, during all of this, a new digital platform was gaining traction.
TikTok.
CALKINS: People say, “oh yeah, TikTok, that’s people dancing.” Yes, on TikTok, people are dancing, but there are people talking about very serious topics. They’re talking about news events. They’re talking about very specific industry groups, and the content on these platforms goes way beyond what people imagine.
(music starts)
Clip 6: This is my product review for cat.
Clip 7: If you have ADHD and you struggle with the hyper productivity and then the collapse, and then the hyper productivity, and then the burnout, and then the shame and the reset, restart pattern, then this is for you.
Clip 8: This is my product review for Human Baby.
CALKINS: People trust the influencers that they see on these platforms because they relate to them. The influencer seems credible and knowledgeable, and they can relate to them, and the trust leads to influence.
Clip 9: And one of the easiest fakes to spot is actually the Lady Dior. And I’m gonna teach you guys where to look.
Clip 10: How can you tell a real Labubu from a fake Labubu? First way to tell is the boxes; the first thing to look at is, does the box look kind off?
Clip 11: I just bought a car, and I am a retired saleswoman. I used to sell cars back in college, and I’m gonna tell you how to buy a car from a car salesperson, um, as fast as I can with as much information as I can.
CALKINS: What’s really interesting is that people seem to trust these creators that they see on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube. There’s a level of trust there that we don’t see in other areas.
PAVIN: Now, people had long been broadcasting their lives across various social-media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and the video platform YouTube as well before this moment—creating these trusting, parasocial relationships with digital friends and followers.
But TikTok kicked that into overdrive because its algorithm was so sophisticated that it could quickly deduce who you were and what you liked based on how you swiped through content. And then it would serve you more of that. And suddenly you found yourself in a subcommunity of people just like yourself.
This gave rise to influencers with these really specific, really interested followings. Which, of course, made it an incredibly powerful marketing tool.
CALKINS: That’s where people are spending their time. And that’s who they trust.
PAVIN: So influencers play an important role in modern marketing. But how do you get started?
You need to find the right fit.
When you think about where people have influence online, you likely imagine fashion, makeup, entertainment, and travel, right?
Clip 12: This is the place where flight attendants sleep on the 777 aircraft.
Clip 13: Everything’s ready for the flight. Come fly with me.
Clip 14: Here’s my 2025 Christmas haul.
CALKINS: But what’s really interesting is that influencer marketing is relevant far beyond that.
PAVIN: It can get pretty niche.
CALKINS: One of my favorite stories is I was talking with somebody who was selling lubricants for wind turbines, and I thought if there was one industry where surely that would not be a place you’d see a lot of influencer marketing…. But he explained: No, influencer marketing was actually incredibly important in that domain because there are a few influencers out there who talk all about wind turbines, and if you want to sell wind turbine lubricants? Well, you want to reach the people who are following wind turbines. You want to reach the people in the industry.
Find the people talking about your industry. They might have an audience with potential customers. And that’s the same whether you’re going into roofing contractors or whether you’re going into any other industry segment.
PAVIN: But what do these people look like in action? What should a marketer see and think, “there’s someone we could work with!” Calkins and I pulled up TikTok and found this one video.
PAVIN: Okay, there’s a guy who’s taking a tire off of a tractor. That looks like quite a bit of work. He’s yanking like a wrench, putting on a new tire, and wrenching it back on. He set something on fire, presumably to weld it. Hmm.
CALKINS: Who put that out? Clearly that’s a creator who does stuff around tires and clearly that’s the kind of content they put out, but who do you suppose follows that? Well, I suppose, you know, there’s quite a few people who are actually in that world, and interested in tires for tractors, and if I wanted to then sell a tire tractor, that would be an interesting person to sort of engage in the content.
PAVIN: When you check out this guy’s other content, you can see that, clearly, he’s on this beat. And from the comments on his videos, you can see that his audience is knowledgeable about tractors and tires, too. So if you’re trying to sell tires for tractors, this guy could be your man, Calkins says.
CALKINS: Like having him talk about the merits of my particular tire would be interesting. He’d probably do it in a creative way, and his content would probably reach people who are oriented towards tires. And it’s probably an interesting marketing angle depending on what my goal is. I mean, if my goal is to launch a new product, well, there’s no shortage of opportunities to try to get people to talk about my new product.
PAVIN: Professor Calkins says people have been underestimating platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook—and the power of influencer marketing—for a minute now. But that’s because they haven’t done the research, or they’ve resisted downloading or spending time on these apps in their own lives for understandable reasons. Like sanity.
But spend some time there and find the creators you want to work with, ones who speak to your audience and are knowledgeable about what that audience wants from you.
…
PAVIN: Actually working with a creator is an acquired skill. It’s fast-paced and requires a certain level of comfort with risk and a loss of control over the content.
CALKINS: So, there’s so many ways people can work with influencers. The simplest level is just trying to organically prompt. And you can do that through gifting. You can do that through experiences. You can do that even by just creating environments that might lead to posts.
For example, you put up a big display, and it is designed to encourage people to take pictures, to interact with it, and to get content. That’s all sort of unpaid organic content the simplest way.
PAVIN: At its most basic level, influencer marketing involves simply getting anyone and everyone to generate content involving your brand. Think about those pop-up events you find along Michigan Avenue in Chicago or in Central Park in New York. Big signage, interactive displays—things that people will post on social platforms.
Engagement like that is already faster, cheaper and more organic—but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Calkins says coordinated influencer campaigns contrast with the old ad strategies because the influencers are more streamlined.
You don’t need an agency; you don’t need a creative team. You need to find the right content creators to partner with and let them do their thing. You provide the product. They take it and run with it.
CALKINS: It is super fast. It involves dozens of different creators. You could have hundreds of pieces of communication out there working.
PAVIN: This is where Calkins refers to risk tolerance. Because the content is in the hands of the creators. You let them take the wheel.
CALKINS: In terms of review process? Very limited. Some influencers won’t let you do any review at all, and they just put it out into the world.
PAVIN: Consumers trust the creators because they maintain control over their content. You can maybe guide their messaging, but the influencer has an authentic persona and a relationship with their audience that brands struggle to achieve and maintain in this new world.
People value authentic reviews. That’s how these influencers are creating a trusting relationship.
Clip 15: They’re my top favorite bookish products that I own and use almost every single day.
Clip 16: I get a lot of requests from people wanting to know what I use to clean my home with. So here are my favorite products. Next is the Spin mop. This is my favorite mop of all my mops.
CALKINS: I can engage somebody like that, and what I can assure you is that the content is likely to be much more compelling than any piece of advertising you might put together, because his version is likely to feel authentic, and real, and credible.
It will also be rough. It won’t be polished, it won’t be perfect, but it’s probably much more motivating, at the end of the day, than a piece of carefully created advertising like we always used to.
PAVIN: Calkins says that, if you have enough pieces of content out there, you can strategize a little more.
CALKINS: Brands can then watch what’s happening with these different pieces of creative. They can see which ones are engaging, which ones have the right message, which ones are communicating the right way. Then brands can put money against and boost the most powerful of these creative ideas.
So, in just a matter of weeks, you create the campaign, you get all the creative done, you put it out there, you evaluate it, you boost it, you make the most of it, but the whole thing comes and goes in three or four weeks.
PAVIN: It’s faster, it’s more efficient—it’s more effective, even. Calkins says this is the future of marketing. He says companies need to learn to use this space to its fullest extent.
It’s a combination of trust and engagement that advertising has never been able to achieve before.
CALKINS: Authenticity is incredibly important in the world today.
PAVIN: And that’s why it works. Because it’s authentic. Influencers are relatable. It feels real because it’s personally tailored to the people who consume it because they have been carefully selected by the algorithm’s little sorting hat.
Calkins says it’s time to get real. And that’s your takeaway from this new world of shaping behaviors.
You build influence not with one gargantuan ad spend, not with a months-long carefully constructed ad campaign, but piece by piece with lots of moving parts that are authentic and relatable.
[Credits]
PAVIN: This episode of The Insightful Leader was written and mixed by Dalton Main. It was produced and edited by Laura Pavin, Rob Mitchum, Fred Schmalz, Abraham Kim, Maja Kos, and Blake Goble. Special thanks to Tim Calkins. Want more The Insightful Leader episodes? You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, or our website: insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode of The Insightful Leader.