UC Press Blog

By Sophie Bishop, author of Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture

When my book Influencer Creep was about to be published, my publicist suggested I set up a Google alert for topics related to the book, to help us make timely ‘newsy’ pitches. The Google alert for ‘influencer’ received dozens of pings a day, perhaps unsurprisingly because influencers are professional creators who garner audience attention for a living. I was fascinated with the picture of influencer culture being painted through these pings. The Daily Mail reported that influencers were now banned from London’s foodie Borough Market, colourfully describing scenes of creators being dragged out of the market by security for reviewing viral pastries without permission. In another Daily Mail article, it was reported that an Australian influencer strapped himself to the roof of a commuter subway by cellophane in a stunt intended to sell clothes. The Mail reports that this incident left commuters “confused”.  A Buzzfeed article documented ‘bizarre’ influencer behaviour, including one creator trying to get his ER bill covered by doing a ‘collab’ (to which the doctor responds “look around – do you think this ER needs advertising’). 

In these articles, influencer culture is derided and dismissed. Most of these pieces represent influencers as, at best, annoying and at worse dangerous – there are multiple stories about influencers involved in crimes like drug trafficking or fraud. The tone of the pieces evokes the parody Instagram account ‘Influencers in the Wild’, which reposts humorous ‘backstage’ images of influencers trying to capture their content in public space. There are multiple images on this account of influencers falling face first into the ocean’s swell as they attempt to capture an image of them frolicking against a beautiful sunset. 

But what do we lose when we laugh at influencers? We know that influencer culture goes far beyond being niche or exceptional – influencer marketing will reach $266.92 billion dollars by the end of 2025, and in the UK (where I live) influencers contributed £2.2 billion to the UK economy in 2024 and created 45,000 jobs. I have been studying influencer culture for ten years now – and in my experience, influencers are impactful, serious and smart. I have studied how professional influencers undertake creative work in spite of the challenges brought by social media platforms – how they experience working with algorithms that are difficult to predict and navigate, how they portray their ‘real lives’ and garner their audience trust, how they build a pithy self brand that is attractive to audiences while remaining safe for commercial brands to attach them too. They navigate the pressures of low pay, discrimination and minimal workplace protections. 

I have tracked the strategies and pressures that influencers must navigate – and how these pressures have spilled out beyond the confines of influencer culture into creative work more broadly, using the example of artists and art worlds.

In my book, I have tracked the strategies and pressures that influencers must navigate – how these pressures have spilled out beyond the confines of influencer culture into creative work more broadly, using the example of artists and art worlds. Influencer Creep captures the way that influencing (and its pressures) extends beyond a small subset of online power users and becomes central to more forms of work, and more deeply into the lives and psyche of workers. 

In Influencer Creep, I outline the way that artists borrow from strategies developed by influencers to navigate social media platforms – showing influencers as canaries in the coalmine who experience the challenges and pressures of ‘platformized’ cultural production first.