Every few years the marketing industry rediscovers its favourite parlour game. Self-anointed experts declare that some shiny new channel has finally killed branding, and then the hard-of-thinking hordes follow through. First it was direct marketing, then search, then programmatic and retail media. Currently creators and influencers are having a moment. The script is always the same. The old guard dinosaurs cling to ‘traditional brand advertising’, while the new kids claim the future belongs to whatever platform is dominating conference stages and LinkedIn threads, using strawman/person arguments to make their case.
It’s such a tedious false dilemma.
New media channels emerge all the time. Some work, some don’t. But the ones that endure do so because they slot into the underlying mechanics of how advertising works, not because they replace them. Search didn’t overthrow advertising, it simply captured existing demand more efficiently. The recent excitement around ‘in-AI’ advertising looks suspiciously similar. It is essentially a new interface layered over search behaviour. People ask a system for recommendations, and brands try to appear in the answers. Useful, no doubt. But like search before it, it mostly harvests demand that already exists rather than creating new demand in the market.
In marketing discourse, creators and influencers are treated as if they represent a revolutionary new force in persuasion. Entire marketing strategies are now built around the assumption that a charismatic individual with a loyal following can persuade audiences to adopt products through personality alone. Yet if we examine the phenomenon through the lenses of established marketing theory and evolutionary psychology, the role of creators becomes both clearer and more realistic.
Creators are not magical persuasion engines nor are they irrelevant. They are MUTATION ENGINES IN THE CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF BRAND IDEAS (© Eaon 2026, that’s right motherf*ckers).
Understanding this reframes the entire influencer debate.
The anti-brand lobby won’t like these facts but the Ehrenberg-Bass worldview has demonstrated repeatedly that brands grow primarily through building mental and physical availability. Advertising works not because it persuades small groups of carefully targeted consumers but because it refreshes and reinforces memory structures across the entire category-buying population. And growth comes from increasing the probability that a brand is noticed and recalled when a buying situation arises.
So, in this framework, creators are not fundamentally different from any other media channel. Their value lies in whether what they bring has the ability to help encode brand memories and link brands to category entry points — those situations in which people might buy or consume a product (slight oversimplification, I know, but I want to get to the juice). When influencer marketing fails, which it frequently does, it is usually because brands treat the creator as the centre of the memory structure rather than the brand itself. Audiences remember the personality, the prank, or the aesthetic of the thing, but not the brand cues embedded within it.
This vampire-effect is the central danger of creator-led campaigns. The creator becomes the thing being advertised. The marketing department may celebrate the engagement metrics, but the brand itself remains cognitively invisible.
However, when we turn on the evolutionary psychology, then creators start to make a bit more sense.
Science bit
Humans evolved in small social groups where copying others was an adaptive learning strategy. Rather than figuring everything out from scratch, individuals relied on heuristics that allowed them to identify who was worth imitating. Two of the most important of these ancient heuristics are prestige bias and success bias. People are naturally inclined to copy individuals who appear admired, competent, or socially successful.
Creators occupy precisely this role in modern digital culture. They act as visible prestige figures within micro-communities. When they demonstrate products, rituals, or consumption behaviours, they are not persuading audiences through argument. They are performing behaviour that others may copy. The mechanism is imitation rather than persuasion.
This is why creators are particularly effective at demonstrating how a product fits into life. A creator showing off their water bottle skizzles (!), a what’s-in-my-bag thingy, or sneakers worn in a particular style or something is not making a rational case for the product. Instead, they are providing a behavioural script. They are showing the viewer what the product is for.
In evolutionary terms, they are providing a behavioural prototype.
This is where the evolutionary metaphor becomes useful. Biological evolution works through three processes: variation, selection, and replication. Mutations generate variation in a population, environmental pressures select which variations survive, successful traits replicate through reproduction.
Culture evolves in pretty much the same ways. Ideas mutate. The social environment selects which ones resonate, and the successful ideas replicate through imitation and repetition.
Creators as remix merchants
Creators are exceptionally good at generating the mutations, which are critical to selection.
They remix formats, aesthetics, humour, tone, and story. One might present a product as part of a ritual, another as a social celebration, another as a comedy prop, another as a status play. Each version represents a small mutation in how the brand appears within culture.
Of course, just as in biological evolution most of these mutations will fail. But occasionally one will resonate with audiences and begin to infect minds. The selection mechanism is straightforward. Attention, sharing, imitation, and algorithmic amplification. If an expression of the brand fits the cultural moment, it travels.
This is not planned persuasion. It is natural selection for brand ideas.
When you look at it this way, social/algorithmic platforms are not simply media channels; they are selection environments where cultural variants compete. Creators supply the mutations. The audience and the algorithms decide which ones survive.
The strategic implication is important. Creators are most valuable not as audience delivery systems but as experimental labs for brand expression. They generate variations that can reveal which versions of the brand resonate with people in real-world environments.
But once a successful variant emerges, traditional advertising mechanisms become essential. This is where Ehrenberg-Bass principles reassert themselves. The winning idea must be amplified through paid media in order to achieve the scale required for brand growth. Broad reach is still necessary. Mental availability must still be built. Distinctive brand assets must still be encoded and refreshed. Creators help discover the idea. Mass media builds the memory structure.
The temptation to invert this relationship and treat creators as the primary media channel, will most likely encounter diminishing returns (there’s always one or two that break this pattern, of course, but it’s a grave error to infer the general from the particular. Randomness happens from time to time). Creator audiences tend to be fragmented and overlapping, and the reach of individual creators is usually small relative to other media.
But when creators are used as mutation engines, the logic changes entirely. Their role is not to replace advertising but to help evolve it.
If brands test ideas through creator content, observe which expressions resonate, and then amplify the winning versions through broader media, they are effectively applying the scientific logic of cultural evolution to advertising strategy.
Instead of trying to guess the best creative idea in advance, allow it to emerge through a process of variation and selection.
The evolutionary mind learns through imitation.
Culture evolves through experimentation.
Brands grow through memory.
Creators sit at the intersection of those three forces, they are not some sort of fantastical future of marketing. But used properly, they can play a very specific role, generating the mutations from which successful brand ideas evolve.