Morning!

What a week it’s been. 

On Thursday, we hosted our biggest live event ever. 461 founders and marketers signed up, 307 tuned in live. 

It was absolutely massive for us. 

But while I’d love to take all of the credit for how well we marketed the event or the hard work our team put in to make it happen. There was another key reason that it worked… we invited a special guest, co-founder of SocialChain - Dom McGregor. 

He has 140,000+ followers across socials and is massively respected and well known with our target audience. 

He didn’t need to post about it, just him being involved had a massive influence on attendance. 

It got me thinking about influencer marketing and the impact it can have on marketing. When did it start? What do the best campaigns look like? And is this something we should be thinking about in B2B? 

Well, I’ve got some interesting things that you should know about… 

In 1765, a 34-year-old potter from Staffordshire called Josiah Wedgwood won a competition to make a tea set for Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III. A pretty cool achievement. Most potters would have been quietly chuffed about it. Maybe framed the letter. Told their mates down the pub. But Wedgewood saw it as a massive opportunity.

Rather than just accepting the win, he asked the Queen if he could publicly advertise her as a customer. It was a bit of a stretch, but he had this thesis that if he could tell the world that the Queen of England drank her tea from his pottery, more people would buy it.

To his surprise, she said yes.

Wedgwood immediately rebranded his entire product line to “Queen’s Ware” and started advertising it in London newspapers, naming specific pieces after individual members of the Royal Family.

Then he exhibited every piece he’d made for the Queen in showrooms around the country, so ordinary people could come and see what the Queen of England was drinking her tea from. Then he put “Potter to Her Majesty” on all his marketing materials and sent workers door to door through London neighbourhoods with hand-annotated catalogues showing exactly which nobles owned his pieces.

By the time Wedgwood died in 1795, he was selling his pottery in every city in Europe, and historians estimated he amassed a fortune equivalent to $3.4 billion in today's money. All from pottery.

Quite ironic if you think about it. Nothing changed with his pottery. Same clay, same designs, same process. The only thing that changed was who was seen using it.

People now credit Wedgwood as the first person to ever launch an influencer marketing campaign. And you can see why. But a queen endorsing your pottery isn't really influencer marketing as we'd understand it today. The Queen didn't build an audience or promote it on her socials. What Wedgwood did was borrow authority - similar to what we did this week with our LIVE event with Dom.

This is what makes modern influencer marketing so interesting to me. For so long, brands have viewed influencer strategies as merely a means to reach specific audiences. "Oh, that Love Island star is followed by lots of teenage girls, let's get them to promote our product." But today's audience can see straight through it. They know when someone is just posting to cash a cheque.

When influencer marketing works, it's never because you wrote a big enough cheque. It's because you borrowed someone's relationship with their audience. That's a completely different thing.

We got a small taste of this ourselves last week. We hosted a LinkedIn LIVE with Dom McGregor, co-founder of Social Chain. We didn't partner with Dom because of his follower count. We partnered with him because we’re close friends with him, we know he’d have value to give our audience, and he’s highly respected by your target audience. They've watched him build things, make mistakes, and talk honestly about both for years.

That's the thing most brands are missing.

I was listening to the new Diary of a CEO this week. Daniel Priestley sat down with Steven Bartlett and Bartlett made a point that reframes all of this.

He said that with AI flooding every platform with half-decent educational content, he's posting less than ever. And everything he does post is rooted in personal experience. Things only he can say. Because any AI tool can now write a perfectly decent post about skincare ingredients, how to structure a sales call, or how to build muscle after 40. Content is no longer the moat.

What AI cannot do is spend ten years building a relationship with an audience. It cannot manufacture the feeling that someone genuinely knows you, roots for you, and trusts your judgment. That takes a human. And it takes time.

Which means in a world where any brand can now produce infinite content across every platform, the only thing that's genuinely scarce is the parasocial relationship. The connection between a creator and their audience that no budget can build from scratch.

So the smartest thing a brand can do is attach itself to someone who already has one.

Pretty Little Thing understood this years ago when they appointed Molly Mae as Creative Director, rather than just paying her to wear their clothes. They weren't buying impressions, they were buying into a relationship she'd spent years building with her audience. Her followers didn't just see her promoting PLT. They saw her building it product lines, choosing the pieces and shaping the brand.

Rory Sutherland has a great way of explaining this at the top level of B2B business.

He talks about the old IBM sales culture, where buyers would choose IBM equipment not because it was objectively the best option on the market, but because “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. The value wasn't in the product alone. It was in the fact a product with the IBM name on it was a safer option.

The same way trying Logan Paul’s hydration drink is a safer option than an unknown brand. Or trying Emma Chamberlain’s coffee beans vs another brand at Walmart.

With the rise of AI, what Wedgwood figured out in 1765 with a tea set and a royal signature could become a priceless part of your marketing campaigns. Because in an age where any brand can create unlimited content, it will not lend you the authority that a clever influencer partnership would. At whatever level that is.

Whether it’s:

Right, that's all I've got for you today. Worth listening to that Diary of a CEO episode with Daniel Priestley if this one got you thinking.

Until next Sunday,

— Niall

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