Sorry, influencers. We want real opinions.

The most expensive sentence in influencer marketing is "I'm obsessed".

It costs the brand a fee or a product. It costs the creator very little to say. And it costs the audience something harder to measure: a small withdrawal from the account of trust that made the creator worth paying in the first place. Spend from that account often enough with the same words, and you discover that the thing you were buying is gone.

This is not an argument against influencers. We work with creators, we commission them and we've gifted product for clients ourselves. It's an argument against a habit the industry has drifted into, where positivity is scripted, sincerity is a deliverable, and everybody involved knows exactly how little the review means.

Six things that get called the same thing

Part of the problem is vocabulary. "Influencer content" now covers at least six different kinds of speech, and they deserve different levels of trust.

• Editorial opinion. Someone says what they think, unpaid, and nobody approved it.
• A genuine customer review. Someone bought the thing and reports back.
• UGC. Content made in a customer's style, often commissioned by the brand and often never posted by the person who made it.
• A sponsored post. Paid placement, ideally labelled, where the creator's view may or may not be their own.
• A paid testimonial. The brand's message in someone else's mouth.
• A documented claim. Something checkable: a test result, a measurement, a comparison anyone could repeat.

These are all legitimate. What isn't legitimate is letting one pass for another: the paid testimonial dressed as an editorial opinion, the commissioned UGC presented as a stranger's review. Most of what feels hollow about the feed comes from that blur.

The law has caught up with disclosure, not with sincerity

Regulators have noticed. In February 2024, the European Commission and national consumer authorities published a sweep of 576 influencers across 22 member states, Norway and Iceland. Nearly all of them (97%) posted commercial content; only one in five consistently said so.

In the UK, the government's guidance for creators is blunt: a gifted product counts as payment, affiliate links and discount codes make a post an ad, and tags like "#gifted", "#collab" or "#spon" aren't enough. "#ad", up front, is. Since 6 April 2025, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, fake reviews and reviews that hide an incentive are banned outright, with fines that can reach 10% of a company's global turnover. In the United States, the FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials has applied since October 2024, AI-generated ones included.

All of this is good. None of it touches the actual problem. A post can be perfectly labelled #ad and still say nothing. The law can make a creator tell you they were paid. It can't make them tell you what they think.

Paid is not the same as fake

It's worth saying clearly, because the backlash against influencers tends to overshoot: being paid doesn't make an opinion worthless. Film critics are paid. Columnists are paid. Most of the writing you trust was written by someone on a salary. What makes their opinions worth reading is not that they're free. It's that the payment doesn't buy the verdict.

That's the line. A creator who is paid to try something and free to say it's mediocre is doing honest work, and their positive reviews mean more because the negative ones exist. A creator who is paid to be delighted is reading a script, however naturally they deliver it. Audiences are not stupid. They may not know which is which in a single post, but over months they learn whose enthusiasm is load-bearing.

Where brands go wrong

Most hollow creator content is not the creator's fault. It's the brief. Brands select by reach and then panic about control, so they send scripts, key messages, mandatory phrases and three rounds of approval. What comes back sounds like the brand, which is precisely what the brand didn't need. It already had a voice. It was paying for someone else's.

Three habits do most of the damage. Choosing creators by follower count instead of by whether their audience actually buys this sort of thing. Gifting widely and implicitly expecting a post, which turns a present into an obligation and a review into a thank-you note. And treating anything less than glowing as a failure, so that creators learn quickly what keeps the next box coming.

A better way to work with creators

None of this needs a new platform. It needs brands to want something different.

Choose people, not numbers. Start with taste and audience: where their followers actually live, what they already buy, whether the creator would plausibly use your product unpaid. Follower count should be the last filter, not the first.

Brief the question, not the answer. One page. What the product is, who it's for, what you're curious about. No script and no mandatory adjectives. We'd rather hear a creator's honest first reaction than a polished version of our own sentence.

Put honesty in writing. Say in the agreement that a mixed or negative verdict is acceptable and won't be edited out, only checked for factual accuracy. If you're not confident enough in the product to agree to that, you've learned something more useful than any campaign report.

Disclose like you mean it. "#ad" at the start, the platform's paid-partnership label switched on, and a plain sentence when something was gifted. Disclosure isn't a legal chore. It's the reason the rest of the post can be believed.

Ask for feedback, not just content. The most valuable thing a good creator can send you is often private: what confused them, what they'd change, what their audience asked in the comments. Pay for that, and use it.

What we'd say to creators

Your opinion is your stock. Every time you say something you don't believe, you dilute it. The creators who'll last are the ones who can say "this wasn't for me" on camera and keep the brand relationship anyway, because the brand understands that the "no" is what makes the "yes" worth paying for.

Turn down the work you can't be honest about. The best brands will notice, and they're the ones you want.

The point

The industry spent a decade learning to make sincerity scalable. It turns out sincerity doesn't scale; it compounds. A real opinion, given freely and occasionally unflattering, builds the kind of trust that makes the next recommendation work. A scripted one spends it.

Brands pay creators to borrow their audience's trust. The honest thing, and the commercially sensible one, is to give it back with interest.

This piece is general information on disclosure rules in the UK, EU and US, not legal advice. We help brands choose and brief creators under [creator marketing](/capabilities/influencer-marketing). Creators can also find brands through [The Lab](/lab/for/influencers).