McDonald's revealed a SpongeBob x One Piece Happy Meal with 15 collectible crossover toys.
Two of the biggest ocean-based franchises on earth, merged, in a cardboard box, for the price of a kids' meal.
Adults are going to walk into McDonald's, order a Happy Meal with a straight face, and do it 15 times.
Weโve drove 500 first-time deposits for one of the largest fintech companies in the world through influencer marketing.
One of the biggest things weโve learned:
People are losing trust in ads
People are outsourcing trust to people.
Think about how you actually discover products now.
- You see someone you follow using a new credit card.
- Your favorite founder talks about the software running their company.
- A fitness creator wears the same brand every day.
A finance creator uses the same trading platform in every video.
Eventually, you stop viewing it as an advertisement. It becomes part of how you understand what products people like you use.
This is why influencer marketing and personal brands are going to become significantly more valuable over the next decade.
Brands used to be able to manufacture trust themselves.
Buy enough TV commercials. Buy enough Facebook ads. Get enough impressions.
Now every company can buy impressions.
Trust is the scarce asset.
And increasingly, consumers are outsourcing who they trust to the people they choose to follow every day.
The companies that figure out how to embed themselves inside those relationships will own distribution.