People person from a small town. Working hard to better myself everyday and will take on every project I have time for.

Chris Cunningham

Head of Marketing: I'm fixing our attribution by asking customers how they found us.
CEO: No you're not. That's not scalable..

Head of Marketing: Neither is last click attribution... Dark social is 70% of our current pipeline and we're pretending it doesn't exist.

CEO: What are you on about... what's dark social?

Head of Marketing: Every untrackable share that actually drives decisions. Like screenshots shared in Slack, Discord or a text between two VPs.

CEO: We can't measure that... and we can't optimize what we can't measure.

Head of Marketing: We can't measure it because our attribution model is broken. Our tools only tell us "what did they click?". Instead we should just ask THEM "how did you actually find us?"

CEO: And people will just... tell us?

Head of Marketing: They already are. I added one question to our onboarding calls: "Walk me through how you discovered us."

Turns out our biggest deal this month came from a Reddit thread that got screenshot, shared in a private Discord, then forwarded to their team Slack.

CEO: Our attribution says "direct traffic."

Head of Marketing: Exactly my point.

CEO: The board wants dashboards.

Head of Marketing: The board wants revenue. I can show them a spreadsheet of "how we actually found you" from every customer. That's real attribution.

CEO: How do we scale this?

Head of Marketing: One question in every sales call that gets added to a field in the CRM. Actual insights that marketing can work off of.

CEO: If this doesn't work...

Head of Marketing: It's already working. We stopped tracking last-click nonsense and started listening. Turns out customers will tell you the truth if you just ask.

PS - Dark social drives more B2B pipeline than any channel you're tracking.

Thoughts?

I'm Chris Cunningham - I run social media at ClickUp.

Follow me for more actionable marketing tips & tricks.

Chris  Cunningham

li_at

JSESSIONID

Talks about #saas, #startup, #branding, #marketing, and #influencermarketing

Founding Member ClickUp / Marketing

Michelle Strom

When ClickUp launched, nobody wanted us. I was our first sales rep and nobody cared what I had to say. So I set a rule for myself...go for 50 no's before I quit.

I made call after call. Most people hung up, while others laughed. A few were polite but not interested.

Then I closed my first deal & that feeling was so sweet I'll never forget it.

I set the counter back to zero & went for 50 more no's.

But I never hit 50 again. I closed another one, then another, and the momentum built from there.

I took a lot of those early lessons from sales & still apply them to content/social media today.

I see the same patterns with content. Founders post 3 times, get no traction, and quit. They never make it to their first win because they aren't expecting all the "no's" or failed posts.

But content is the same game as sales. You're going to hear no most of the time and the algorithm will ignore you. Your first 20 posts will probably flop. Maybe even your first 100 posts.

That's not failure though...that's the process.

Set a number. 50 posts. 100 posts. Whatever keeps you going long enough to see what works.

Because the first win will feel so sweet that you'll want to keep going. You'll start to learn what your audience responds to. You'll build momentum, and eventually you'll stop guessing.

But you have to make it to that first win. Most people quit before post 15.

Thoughts?

It's Monday. Which means we're going to pitch 20 content ideas to create this week. Only 8 will survive. Here's exactly how it works (steal this framework):

I show up with 3 ideas that I usually find from tweets that went viral or something bizarre I saw over the weekend.

Like last week I saw a tweet asking "what would you do if the FBI showed up and you had 30 seconds to hide a thumb drive?" The replies were unhinged. That became a video.

Luke shows up with 3. Adam shows up with 3. Our guest writer - usually some comedian from the LA scene - shows up with 3-4 more.

We pitch them all, and then we vote blind. No one knows whose idea is whose.

The winners are whatever gets the most votes - pure democracy.

After we pick our 8-10 winners, I sort them into what I call the ABCD formula:

A = Stuff we know crushes. Like HR guys dancing. We'll remake 2-3 of these.
B = Concepts that worked elsewhere that we can steal and make our own.
C = Whatever trend is happening. Severance drops? We're making a Severance parody.
D = Complete wild card. Something so weird it might bomb or might get 100 million views.

By noon, we know exactly what we're shooting Thursday.

Tuesday we'll figure out props and locations.
Thursday we shoot all day.
Friday I color-code everything based on performance.

This system has generated over 1,000 videos & we've hit 200+ million monthly impressions with this strategy.

All because every Monday, a room full of comedians and actors who barely understand project management software vote on what makes them laugh.

Your content strategy probably took months to develop.

Ours takes 2 hours every Monday (and adapts to trends in real time).

Head of Marketing: We're done with the brand voice guide.
CEO: The 47-page document we spent $30K on? No way..
Head of Marketing: That's the one.

CEO: Why? It ensures consistency.

Head of Marketing: It ensures we sound like every other SaaS company in existence. I ran an experiment. Took our last 10 posts and 10 from our competitor. Removed logos. Our team couldn't tell the difference.

CEO: That's why we need guidelines.

Head of Marketing: Our customers don't want guidelines. They want to know who we actually are. I looked at every piece of feedback from last quarter. The word "generic" appeared 23 times.

CEO: So what's your plan?

Head of Marketing: Let the team sound like humans. Sarah in product has a sarcastic sense of humor. Let her write like that. Tom in sales tells incredible stories. Let him tell them.

CEO: We'll sound inconsistent. The brand team will hate this.

Head of Marketing: The brand team already agrees. They told me they're tired of writing "synergy" and "leverage" when they'd rather just say what we actually do.

CEO: Legal will have a field day.

Head of Marketing: Legal approved our last 5 posts that said "our competitors suck at onboarding." Got more positive replies than anything we've published in 6 months.

CEO: This could backfire.

Head of Marketing: You know what's backfiring? Our NPS dropped 12 points. Customers said we "lost our personality." We used to be scrappy. Now we sound like IBM.

CEO: One quarter.

Head of Marketing: When our engagement rate triples and customers start saying "this actually sounds like you guys," I want to burn that brand guide.

CEO: Deal.

P.S. - Nobody ever bought software because it "leveraged synergies." Stop using corporate jargon, and start telling stories that are actually authentic.

I'm Chris Cunningham - I run social media at ClickUp.

Follow me for marketing that sounds like it was written by a human.

I analyzed our last 1,000 videos at ClickUp. Here are 7 things that actually move the needle on our social media content:
(1) Instagram Trial Reels

Trial Reels are free A/B testing that nobody uses to test 3-5 different hooks. They don't show on your feed, so you can pick the winner for your "real" post. We tested 3 hooks - one got 13k views, another got 1M. That's a 77x difference.

(2) Actors cost less than your agency retainer

LA actors: $60-80k/year. They show up on time, take direction, and don't have ego. The social media gurus recycle the same 5 hooks everyone uses.

(3) Your social media "best practices" are why you're failing

I was told to always show the product, always use UTM links, make people argue in comments... I ignored all of it and now we generate 200M+ impressions/month now...the board loves it.

(4) Stop creating new content - recreate winners

Our HR guys dancing video hit 30M views. So we made finance guys dancing, then IT guys dancing, then Sales guys dancing. 100M+ views total that all stemmed from one winning idea.

(5) Weekly brainstorm meetings > Strategy decks

20 ideas go in every Monday, then 8-10 of the best ones survive after the team votes blindly. The winners get turned into content. This 2-hour meeting generates more pipeline than any strategy deck I've ever seen.

(6) Pattern interrupts that actually work

Opening a banana backwards, someone bursting out of a car trunk, literally circling someone's back when saying "circling back." Subtle confusion from visuals works just as well (if not better) than the words you actually say.

(7) Color-code your best/worst creative

Green = 20k+ views (recreate it)
Yellow = 5-20k (tweak the hook)
Red = under 5k (don't reuse)

This system turned random viral hits into predictable viral hits.

What else would you add to the list?

POV: You thought making a rap about ClickUp was a good marketing decision...

It was.

We spent $50K on a bunch of expensive Sony cameras at ClickUp, but our iPhone videos get 10x more views. This is just the tip of the iceberg on a bigger trend I'm noticing...

People scroll past overproduced content now because it signals corporate ad, not authentic insight. Raw content from a phone feels like you're letting them in behind the scenes, and that's what makes them stop.

I see founders all the time that wait to start creating content because they think they need the perfect setup.

They're shopping for cameras, researching lighting setups, and building out entire studios when they haven't even posted their first video yet.

It's absolutely insane because your audience doesn't care about your gear. Especially when you don't have an audience to begin with.

Whether you're just getting started, or you've been in marketing for 30+ years it's good to be reminded of the basics that actually matter.

The hook matters. The message matters. Authenticity matters. Production quality? Dead last.

tldr; If you can't make good content on your iPhone, your $5K camera won't fix that.

Set your phone up. Hit record. Say something worth hearing. Rinse & Repeat until it works. That's it.

That's the whole playbook.

Agree?

I’ve generated more than 1.8 BILLION views for ClickUp in the last year but NOTHING compares to my first taste of virality - when I FAKED winning the lottery in 2012.

Yep. Long before B2B memes, actors, and 300M-impression goals… I was a broke college kid at Virginia Tech with three friends, Photoshop, and a dumb idea that fooled the entire country.

Here’s what happened:
The Mega Millions jackpot was $640M.

Less than an hour after the drawing, with the help of Zeb Evans ClickUp CEO, I tweeted a Photoshopped “winning” ticket with nothing but:

👉 “My life has forever changed.”
That was it and the internet lost its mind.

Within hours I was trending globally. Journalists, fans, haters - even Good Morning America and CNN - flooded in.

People I’d never met proposed to me.
The DMs were… unhinged. Let’s just say some invitations were not PG-13.
My parents had to unplug their home phone because my small hometown Martinsville was convinced their son had just become a millionaire.

Meanwhile… we were goofing around in our apartment debating:
“Should we go out drinking tonight… or should we fool the world again?”

We chose the world - and it worked. Our entire goal with this prank was to get onto Comedy Central’s Tosh.0 - and it nearly worked.

That moment taught me my first real lesson in content:
When you understand attention, the world reacts. When you manufacture a moment, the world amplifies. 

When you break the pattern, people stop scrolling.

Fast forward to today, and the same principles drive everything we do at ClickUp:
• Make people feel something.
• Break the “B2B is boring” mindset.
• Be the cool brand in a boring industry.
• Study people harder than you study algorithms.

Because virality isn’t luck - it’s psychology, timing, and understanding humans.

Last click attribution misses 95% of the story which is why your LinkedIn campaigns are probably performing 10x better than your dashboard shows. 

We solved this...By using Dreamdata to connect pipeline data directly to LinkedIn. Now our algorithm optimizes for revenue, not vanity metrics.

Want the same visibility? Comment "DREAM" below.

I've written 4,000+ posts for ClickUp's social accounts, and cut my teeth on more failed posts than I'd like to admit. Now, every post I make needs to do at least 1 of these 3 things, or I don't post it at all (share this with your team):

Somewhere along the line B2B marketing got so far away from B2C marketing that it's become out of tune with what actually works on human beings.

That gives the saavy B2B marketer a huge opportunity to fill this gap for their audience. Try one of these angles out for your next post:

(1) Make your audience FEEL something

Anger, hope, or relief. The feeling "that someone finally gets it" is what I'm going for here.

We posted about pretending to understand what your boss said in that meeting while frantically DMing your coworker for translation. It blew up because we said what everyone was thinking but nobody talks about.

(2) TEACH them something they can use today

I'm talking about something they can implement before their 3pm meeting. That's the good stuff people will come back for more of.

Not just another framework or theory.

(3) ENTERTAIN them

Yeah, even in B2B you can entertain your audience.

We had our actors dress up as different departments and dance to old songs. Dumb? Maybe. But it got more than 30 million views while our product demos got 800.

Team leads and VPs are real people who doom-scroll at midnight & laugh at the same stuff everyone else does. Lean into that while the rest of the market is clueless.

If your next post doesn't do at least one of these, edit it until it does.

1 out of 3? Solid post.
2 out of 3? Now you're onto something.
3 out of 3? This is where things compound.

Thoughts?

PS - Let me know why you think B2B marketing has become so...boring. When did things first start to go wrong?

I'm Chris Cunningham - I run social media at ClickUp.

Follow me for more actionable marketing tips & tricks.

Every week I interview project managers using tools like ClickUp to learn about the content they actually watch. Their answers almost never match what "thought leaders" tell you to post about. Here's 3 questions you can steal to figure out what content your ICP wants you to create:

Most marketers live in a bubble talking to other marketers… which is great if your ICP is marketers. But if you're selling to anyone else, you have to escape the echo chamber and figure out what they actually consume.

So I started interviewing actual users. Share these questions with your team:

(Question 1) What content do you actually watch?

They never say LinkedIn thought leadership content. They say comedy sketches, TikToks, and YouTube videos about literally anything except productivity hacks.

That's when I realized that after 10 hours of actual project management, they don't want more project management content. They want to decompress.

(Question 2) What's something cool you learned last week?

Not one person has ever mentioned a framework from a carousel. It's always some random thing that stuck because it was entertaining first, educational second.

This told me to stop leading with value props and start leading with entertainment.

(Question 3) What would genuinely help you?

They don't want another "5 tips" post. They want to feel seen. They want someone to acknowledge that work is absurd sometimes. They want to laugh at the same corporate buzzwords that drive them insane.

So we created exactly that. We started making content that makes them laugh about their reality instead of lecturing them about it.

Project Managers spend 8 hours a day in meetings about workflows and optimization. When they open their phone, they don't want more of that. They just want to chill for a second.

A lot of these execs you're trying to reach - they're still regular people & they like to laugh..

15 minutes talking to actual users taught me more than 3 years of marketing conferences.

You're guessing what your audience wants based on what other marketers tell you. I'm asking them directly and creating exactly that.

One of us is getting 100M views from dancing videos.

Maybe try asking your audience what they want instead of telling them what they need.

We doubled our content performance in 90 days at ClickUp using a color-coded system. Here's how it works so you can steal it (bookmark this for later):

Most teams create content, then move on and never analyze what actually worked.

At ClickUp, we test everything so we can double down on the winners and ditch the losers. Here's the exact process:

Step 1: Create content for at least a full week

Don't analyze results daily, you need to give yourself enough data to spot patterns.

Step 2: Put all your videos/posts into a table

Links in one column, impressions in another, likes, comments, and so on. 

We use ClickUp for this (and you should too!)

Step 3: Color code everything - keep it stupidly simple

Green = Winner. It performed well.
Yellow = Potential. Needs tweaking.
Red = Miss. Don't repeat this.

Step 4: Make decisions

Reds: Stop making this type of content.
Yellows: Change the hook or format, try again.
Greens: Remake it. Your audience already proved they like it.

Most marketing teams try reinventing the wheel every week. This allows you to have an ongoing system. Then when trends happen, you can hop on them without breaking your entire process.

When something works, double down on it. Make more versions of it.

Your greens show you what your audience wants so give them more of it.

Do this every week and your numbers will climb because you're learning what works instead of guessing.

In App analytics are great, but there is something to having all your channels + posts in a single location to analyze and share with your team. It makes things more accessible.

Thoughts?

The most interesting distribution channel in 2025 isn't TikTok or LinkedIn.

It's AI model training data.

Let me explain:

Warner Music Group just partnered with Suno.

They went from suing to partnering.

Why?

Because they realized something:

If AI models train on your content...

Your brand becomes part of AI's worldview.

When someone asks ChatGPT for music recommendations?

The models trained on Warner content will recommend Warner artists.

This is distribution at the infrastructure level.

Not on the platform.

IN the platform.

And most brands are still thinking about this wrong.

They're trying to block AI from their content.

When they should be negotiating to be OVER-represented.

Because here's what happens:

AI becomes the default discovery layer.

The brands in the training data win.

The brands blocking it become invisible.

Same pattern playing out in:

Recruiting (AI resume screeners)

Sales (AI research tools)

Marketing (AI content generators)

If AI can't learn about you...

It can't recommend you.

Are you optimizing to be AI-discoverable or AI-invisible?

Huge move from the Replit team, Fast Mode is a real step up - and I don't even code haha! 5x faster workflows, and it’s free to try. Highly recommend checking it out if you haven't yet.

Replit is free for the first time ever! 
  
We’re introducing Fast Mode, a 5x faster way to build with AI. Complete tasks in under 30 seconds. 
  
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Try it out today at https://Replit.com

Andreea Moise

Hype Maven

Helping startups and midsize businesses build winning Youtube first influencer marketing programs:

- Kickstarting and scaling influencer programs from 0 to 100% using over a decade of experience

- Acting as an in-house influencer department working closely with any existing growth and marketing functions 

- Influencer marketing strategy & planning - using insights from 10k+ influencer collaborations 

- End-to-end influencer program management - using custom  and personally developed frameworks and systems

Influencer Marketing Strategist & Founder

Modash

Helping spread the word about my dream influencer all-in - one CRM🙌

Advisor & Ambassador

Aggero

Helping DTC brands from startup level to enterprise create predictable video performance frameworks for their influencer programs.

Advisor

From time to time I help brands and founders get unstuck with influencer marketing.

Influencer Marketing Advisor

VEED.IO

- Scaled Veed's influencer program from 0 to working with 90+ creators across YT, Tik-Tok and IG with 200+ videos live to date
- 15mil+ targeted video views generated across platforms for the brand (CPMs ranging from 0.3 to 11)
- Supported AI features launches with creator content > 1mil+ views generated in 30 days for Magic Cut alone
- 2mil video views generated from YT long-form content to date with an avg 1.02% tracked CTR

Influencer Marketing Lead

Beducated

- Took over the company’s influencer marketing and implemented processes
that drastically reduced discovery, outreach and negotiation times
- Lead the team to hit monthly performance targets with direct impact in revenue ( % increase in signups each month)
- Grew the internal database from 4k to 8k highly niched creators across
IG,YT,Tik Tok and podcast channels
- Achieved a 50% increase in the number of creators signed each month by end of the year with 600+ creators signed across platforms
- Supported with launching the brand’s Tik-Tok ad hit 2 million views in 3
months

Influencer Marketing Coordinator

PR Hacker

- Revamped the influencer marketing capability with new processes, strategies
and more efficient frameworks
- Increased the internal roster by 1000+ creators across different verticals
- Worked on accounts for different sized clients: Dabur, Bowflex, Birmingham
World Games, Garden Remedies etc.

Influencer Marketing Manager

Dossier Perfumes

The fair alternative to luxury perfumes.

- Worked closely with the founder to conceptualize, develop, and design the
product&brand, and the main marketing and content strategy
- Recruited and trained the first core team across various departments: marketing, design,
customer care etc.
- 5 figures a month generated first year just from first-tier influencer attribution (UTMs and coupons)
- Developed agile and efficient frameworks that allowed the brand to scale and
budget for the best ROI/ per post
- Created and implemented the brand’s ambassador program resulting in a
20-40% cumulative increase in signed creators each month and the generation
of 15k content pieces in 2020 alone
- Recruited and trained 8+ high-performing influencer specialists that helped
build an internal creator database of 20k contacts and sign 1500+ creators for
the brand

Social Media and Influencer Marketing Lead

Charlotte Lacroix

Took over the company’s marketing capability and all channels and grew the
creator database from 3200 > 6000
- Achieved 30% increase in the number of creators signed and up to 50%
increase in posting rates in the first 4 months
- Created specialized creator-focused email campaigns that led to a 16%
bump in OR and increased CTR

Marketing Project Manager

Madam Glam

- Signed 400+ creators for the brand and grew/managed a portfolio of 2000 creators across YT and IG
- Implemented the company’s first CRM and developed frameworks with direct
impact in acc management and campaign management efficiency
- Proposed and executed social media strategies that lead to up 50% increase in
engagement

Influencer Marketing Specialist

🚀🚀 Currently accepting new clients!🚀🚀


If you're out there thinking:

" influencer marketing doesn't work 😞 "

" hard to measure any ROI from influencers 😫 "

" influencer marketing is too expensive 😳 "

" it's hard to vet influencers and find the right ones 😕 " 

" it's too complicated and time consuming 😵 "


>>> I'm here to DEBUNK EVERY SINGLE ONE of those thoughts.


Here are some of the things I've done for my clients&brands I've worked with:

- Got to positive influencer ROI in 90 days on 4 fig budgets

- Got started with 0 budget and scaled to spending 5 fig a month

- Generated 6 and 7 figures in direct revenue from influencers within various programs

- Got up to 90% posting rates in seeding campaigns ( even for newly launched brands)

- Generated 40+ millions views from long form content on Youtube to date for brands

- Managed 100s of influencers/month both as a single influencer manager and leading teams up to 10 influencer specialists in-house

- Developed simple and efficient frameworks that allow ANYONE to get started with influencer marketing in just 7 days and build a fully functional in-house program

🏆To date, I have coordinated and managed over 10.000 end to end influencer collaborations.

Are these guaranteed results for you too? 

🙅‍♀️ NO, and I'll never make any promises or plans 1. before understanding what your goals actually are and 2. understanding what your 5-years-from now vision is for your brand.

⏭ What I focus on primarily are LONG-TERM results (that's why I'm YOUTUBE first), because while quick wins are definitely a tasty treat, they won't help build a sustainable and scalable influencer model that truly supports your success.

🔃 I prioritise doing work that keeps on giving, for YEARS to come, regardless if you're still working with me or not.

So if you're ready to start with influencer marketing or need help scaling your existent program >>>

📲DM me the word INFLUENCERS with a few words on what you need and I'll get back to you asap

OR send me a quick email at andreea@thehypemaven.com

Influencer Marketing Consultant

- I help you start your influencer marketing from scratch, the right way
- I identify, untangle, and help you solve any bottlenecks or challenges in your current influencer marketing approach
- I use my almost 10 years of marketing and influencer marketing experience combined to help you set realistic and achievable goals that are aligned with your business to the core
- I teach you how to look for, recruit and train the best influencer marketing specialists for your team
- I create the the most streamlined custom Influencer marketing framework for your business and teach you how to use it to the max
- I teach you how to build relationships and influencer communities that truly love, support and advocate for your brand

The heightened emotions any influencer marketer feels during Black Friday are no joke. #AD

Activating everybody on a deadline, navigating all the relationship building, sending products to influencers, yesterday, paying everybody on time.

Juggling everything can very quickly become overwhelming.

It’s an all hands on deck situation, and it’s SERIOUS.

So serious, that even the supernatural started paying attention.

So what happens when an influencer marketer gets an unexpected visit in the middle of the night?

Let’s watch and see 👀 🔮 

#modashpartner Modash

Brand partnership • Start → Scale → Succeed | DTC&SaaS Influencer Programs

The big problem of the next 5 years in influencer marketing won't be performance or influence or spend.

There’s the old debate: some influencers have influence and some don’t. Some have built trust and community and have created their own rules of traction online.
 
And to some degree, I agree, there are people that can move their viewers with just one piece of content.
 
However, people don’t get influenced by just one person no matter their pull. 

They get influenced by everything they see online within varying degrees.
 
Something a lot of people still don’t accept - everything you consume online gets absorbed at a subconscious level.
 
That’s why volume plays in influencer marketing still work.
 
But there’s a shift happening, and it’s been happening for a while > platforms say they want to empower creators and users to foster community, but every single move they do is against that.
 
All algorithms are heading towards purely interest based distribution. 

Meaning they‘ll decide what the users see 24/7 (it’s already halfway there).
 
Finding the right influencer with the right audience is going to become a thing of the past >
 
because content will go where content is needed.
 
or where the platform decides it’s best.
 
So the things I’ve been repeating the past years like a broken wheel are going to become essential to survive in the algorithmic apocalypse:
 
if you don’t know what your customers consume online and where, you won’t exist for them.
 
If you don’t understand how to cater for their interest curiosity and behaviour outside of your product category, you’re invisible.
 
It’s no longer about selecting the best influencers. It’s about understanding how to work with creators to produce content that speaks to the right person, at the right time.
 
Your program is no longer working with ambassadors, but creating story beats memorable enough for your brand to punch through everything else out there.
 
Your precious bottom of the funnel, high performance content?
 
the platform decides if the user is ready to see it

or even worse if they decide they’re ready, they can serve an ad instead to pocket the money.
 
You’re not part of the decision loop anymore, and playing entirely by someone else’s rules is dangerous.

So start building your own interest infrastructure now.

Start → Scale → Succeed | DTC&SaaS Influencer Programs

BTS influencer marketing stuff we should talk about more openly:


1. REBRANDING TACTICS

Taking tactics and strategies from 10-12 years ago and rebranding them with a new word. 

It's the same stuff as always just with better tech and insights, that's all.


2. CREATOR ENTITELEMENT

There is a lot of entitlement in the creator space - unprofessionalism, lack of tact and diplomacy, shady behavior.

I've had to chase influencers for months to deliver 2 story slides, had people disappear after thousands of $$$ in down payments, their manager/agent lie their behalf, my fair share of insane emails, and ppl trying to blackmail a higher rate after posting.

And the big problem is that usually creators (esp big ones) have a layer of protection around them that brands and marketers do not have.

Think of all the cases where influencers created uncalled backlash upon a brand over some minor inconvenience. 

There's also significantly more safe spaces for creators than there are for influencer marketers and brands to share their bad experiences working with creators.

3. PREDATORY BRANDS

There are a LOT of predatory brands out there that treat influencers like numbers on paper and do not want to pay for anything AT all. 

Some of them wear the "not paying influencers" as a badge of honour and think that if you have to pay, you're prob a sucker.

A founder once told me in a discovery call that "paying for anything influencers do is a waste of money because they have to create content anyways, so they might as well do it for me".

There's more of them out there than you think and some are the "cool" raved about ones, that just label this as being "performance driven".

4. MARKETER EXPLOITATION

There's a lot of exploitation in the space that nobody wants to talk about.
 
Low salaries, high turnaround, burnout not being addressed in high performance teams. 

There's still salaries of $3-400 offered to peers in non-western countries, that have to do the exact thing their counterpart US teams do for 10x times that.

The incessant push for sales that's leaving no time to do what they're actually supposed to do.

Performance IM is a high-pressure environment where marketers and specialists are subjected to justifying the results of their work WEEKLY.

When their work is 50% dependant on external factors and highly incremental.

IM specialists are also a lot more exposed to layoffs than regular marketers - because it's still seen as a highly expendable channel.

5. JUMPING ON THE SAAS WAGON

Everyone and their grandmother is now creating tech for influencer marketing - and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

BUT what I see is a lot of tech created without a proper understanding of the actual problems of the brands and people running influencer programs.

I get at least 4-5 messages a week from people that found "THE SOLUTION" when it's just another copy paste influencer platform with different UX.

 share some tea you don't see being talked about that much 👀

One of the reasons I’m so grateful to be a part of the Modash journey is that they really are one of the few companies that…genuinely care.

Not just in the way they show up for customers but within their team, for creators and for partners alike.

And this shows in the product from A-Z.

Thank you so much for all you’re doing and looking forward to 2026 ✨

The chocolate is obv dissapearing while writing this all under the careful supervision of the cats

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Being a marketer for over a decade means weekly googling stuff like ABM, GTM, DAU, PCG, CPG, MER +"marketing meaning" just to double check I still know what they mean

Sometimes I even do it in meetings, I live to live dangerously

taplio

The Battle

Chris Cunningham

Andreea Moise

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Performance ScoreChris Cunningham's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAndreea Moise's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Chris Cunningham

Andreea Moise

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Chris Cunningham's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAndreea Moise's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreChris Cunningham's LinkedIn Performance