My degree is in Information Sciences and E-Society, which is a fancy way of saying I learned to analyze and predict how media, the internet, and technology as a whole have shaped and will keep shaping the world. For years, I worked as a journalist, photographer, and videographer in the music and gaming industry, traveling around the U.S. to concerts, festivals, and gaming events to capture the moment and interview the artists and players who made them. Then COVID shut live events down overnight, and written media was already losing ground to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. So I did what any marketing professional worth their salt does: I pivoted.

Influencers are the future, whether brands are ready to admit it or not. Modern audiences reject traditional marketing, and good luck getting anyone under 25 to open an email newsletter. But marketing has a real inefficiency problem when it comes to influencers: slapping a creator's face on your socials and checking the ad-read box won't move the needle. Audiences can smell inauthenticity from a mile away. I've learned that the hard way, and every activation I run now comes down to two principles.