For instance, there are 135,000 entries with the Outdoor Voices #doingthings hashtag on Instagram. Outdoor Voices often reposts the user images they like as advertisements.

As Jia Tolentino put it in The New Yorker, “Outdoor Voices advertises non-famous people who mostly do not get paid but whose lives, thanks to social media, are refracted through the usual mechanisms of celebrity.”

This is where Berger, the Wharton marketing professor, said the industry might be heading. “I think eventually, hopefully, we’ll get to a model that’s a little bit more organic. Rather than paying people to talk about something, we’ll give out samples of things, allow people to experience those things and talk about them if they like them.”

In other words, everyone will become an influencer.

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