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. In my case mainly athletes who wore the bracelet that I sold and marketed. Celebrities who were photographed with it also worked very well. People whose face was supposed to lend credibility to my marketing story because they were famous and stood for something. For performance, for success, for a life that others wanted. They wore the bracelet and said nothing. Or they said one small sentence, that it helps them. That was all it took. Not even what it helps with.

The marketing craft was a simple one. 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 or wanted to. Nobody asked whether they were paid for it. Nobody asked whether they even knew what they were wearing. The face and the wrist were enough.

We didn’t work with evidence. Evidence was replaced by trust. Because 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.

But it solved the cold start problem. No grassroots, no seeding, no slow build. We went straight for the mass market. Television, newspapers and wall-to-wall visibility in brick-and-mortar retail. We showed scale through famous faces and at the same time we proved courage through these marketing investments. People had to take us seriously. The media played along because the story was good and big. A small bracelet that famous athletes wear to make them stronger. That sounds like a story that tells itself. And that’s exactly what it did. The marketing machine was a huge effort, but it paid off.

I sat in meetings with large retail chains 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. And I left enough margin for every level of the retail chain so that everyone stayed motivated and played along.

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. But also the competition for visibility on these channels. The budgets for a newcomer are no longer manageable.

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 identified it, went to a store, bought the bracelet. If they didn’t identify it right away, we helped out and informed the retailers where they and their customers needed to look. That took days, sometimes weeks. There was time in between. Enough time for someone to think about it. Most didn’t, but the time would have been 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 being able to steer 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. It becomes a matter of luck. And luck is a risky business.

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 sometimes received invoices for that and paid them. Because I saw the results. And I know that our customers didn’t always buy the bracelet. They often bought the feeling of being like the person who wore it.

That hasn’t changed. Only the stage has gotten bigger. More present, faster and more unpredictable. 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.