Brand authenticity is the gold standard for product marketing. These days companies are increasingly relying on social media “influencers” for marketing in an effort to add credibility and authenticity. In 2017, influencer marketing was estimated to be worth $2 billion and it is set to reach $10 billion by 2020.

Influencers may be celebrities, artists, YouTube personalities, or anyone else with a social medial profile and a significant number or niche group of followers. Influencer marketing campaigns typically involve content (picture, video, text, etc.) that is created and posted by the individual influencer, but that pushes a company’s advertising message. This can be a product review video on YouTube or an arty Instagram photo of the product, for example. Most importantly, the content in effective influencer marketing campaigns appears to come from an impartial, trusted third-party (the influencer), rather than from the advertisers themselves, thus the authenticity.