Influencers Before Influencers Existed

There was no Instagram. There was no TikTok. There was barely social media in the way we understand it today. The channels were still too weak to play a real role.

We still had influencers. We just didn’t call them that.

We called them testimonials. Athletes who wore the bracelet. Celebrities who were photographed with it. People whose face stood for something. For performance, for success, for a life that others wanted. They wore the bracelet and said nothing. Or they said one sentence. That was all it took.

The mechanics were simple. Show a face people recognize. Show the product on the wrist. Let imagination do the rest. Nobody asked whether the person actually used the bracelet. Nobody asked whether they were paid for it. Nobody asked whether they even knew what they were wearing. The face was enough.

We didn’t work with evidence. We worked with trust. And trust can’t be proven. Trust is transferred. From a person someone admires, onto a product that person wears. That’s not manipulation in the classical sense. It’s as old as commerce itself. But it’s not honest either.

No grassroots, no seeding, no slow build. We went straight for the mass market. Television, newspapers, testimonials. Euphoria, revenue, glamour. The media played along because the story was good. A small bracelet that makes athletes stronger. That sounds like a story that tells itself. And that’s exactly what it did.

I sat in meetings and watched the strategy work. The logic was simple: the bigger the name, the bigger the effect. The more visible the bracelet, the less we had to explain. The explanation came from the face. Not from science.

That was before social media. And yet it worked exactly the way it works today. The mechanism hasn’t changed. What changed is the speed.

Back then, the cycle was slower. An athlete wore the bracelet at an event. A photographer took a picture. The picture appeared in a newspaper or a magazine. Someone saw it, went to a store, bought the bracelet. That took days, sometimes weeks. There was time in between. Time when someone could have thought about it. Most didn’t, but the time was there.

Today that time is gone. Someone posts a picture, and within minutes thousands buy. There’s no in-between. No moment of pause. The click is instant. The credit card is saved. The purchase happens before the thought is finished.

That doesn’t make the mechanism different. But it makes it faster. And faster means less controllable. For the buyers, but also for the sellers. Back then we still had the illusion of steering the narrative. Today nobody steers the narrative. It takes on a life of its own. It mutates. It grows or shrinks depending on what the algorithm rewards.

I’ve seen how this worked in analog. The silent spokespeople who didn’t have to say anything because their face said it all. I’ve seen the invoices. I’ve seen the results. And I know that people didn’t buy the bracelet. They bought the feeling of being like the person who wore it.

That hasn’t changed. Only the stage has gotten bigger. And faster. And there’s no curtain anymore behind which you can prepare. Everything is live. Everything is instant. And the faces change faster than you can remember them.

We were influencers before the word existed. We just had less reach and more time. Whether that was better, I don’t know. It wasn’t more honest.