When I started hosting a podcast this year, I assumed the guests whose message would travel furthest would be the ones with the biggest followings. That’s how I’d been taught to think about talent for 20 years, since the MySpace days, but it turned out to be the other way round.
One clip of the Irish Nigerian author Emma Dabiri, explaining with care how the language of race was invented, passed a million views on its own. Another of the most shared conversations was with Clare Rewcastle Brown, an unassuming British journalist who broke the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia from a spare room with a blog and a shortwave radio and watched the prime minister at the center of it end up in prison.
Neither woman is trying to be famous, and that seems to be the point. After a decade of feeds tuned to whoever is best at being watched, audiences are hungry for people who actually know things. I think it’s a direct reaction to how much of what we scroll past now is confident, polished, and empty. The people who have spent decades on the slow work are suddenly the ones traveling fastest, and that should change who brands pay to speak for them.
None of this is an argument against the creator economy, which has become the engine room of modern marketing . Unilever’s chief executive talks about building an “army of creators,” and the company now works with close to 300,000 of them, up from around 10,000 two years ago. Coca-Cola took 10,000 to the Paris Olympics, and well over 200 million people now describe themselves as one. At Cannes Lions this June you couldn’t move along the Croisette without someone pushing a little furry mic into a stranger’s face.
15 minutes of fame
Andy Warhol promised everyone 15 minutes of fame, but our feed went one better and made everyone a creator for 15 seconds, which sounds wonderfully democratic until you try to tell any of them apart. A decade ago a face talking to camera was the antidote to corporate advertising, the human touch that made a brand feel like a friend’s recommendation. Multiply that by a few hundred thousand, add AI presenters who never age, never sleep, and never fluff a line, and the human face starts to blur into its own kind of slop, the same beige vanilla texture that has already swallowed most of the timeline.
What cuts through is a story told by somebody who was actually there, which is the one thing a machine can’t claim.
We describe the show I host as extraordinary stories, told by the people who lived, or found them, and the more episodes we make, the more that second half matters. Trust in news fell to 37% this year, the lowest the Reuters Institute has recorded since it began measuring in 2015. In a post-truth climate, the qualities audiences reward are the old reporter’s virtues: knowing where a fact came from and having a proper answer to why anyone should care. Two middle-aged historians talking for an hour at a time on The Rest Is History now pull around 30 million downloads and streams a month, and seven in 10 of their listeners are under 40. That’s about as far from what we assumed Insta culture wanted as it’s possible to get.
The expert economy
If we have to give it a name I’d call it the expert economy, where the experts become the new rock stars and we have never needed them more. When anybody can generate a convincing explanation of anything in a few seconds, the people who actually know become the most valuable voices. Truth is starting to behave like a premium tier the way you pay Spotify to make the ads go away, and the only people who can supply it are the ones who’ve spent their lives checking.
This also brings back a figure some spent 15 years trying to automate away, the editor. The feed was supposed to make taste redundant, like a sort of algorithm of last resort choosing on our behalf. Our time-poor lives and continual quest for convenience meant most of us went along with whatever our algorithmic overlords served up.
But now the dam is breaking, and as we tire of these little screen dictators people are going back to a human editor of choice, someone whose judgment they’ve learned to trust over years of receipts and first-hand evidence. Brands have spent fortunes renting audiences from influencers, and very few have thought to back the judgment itself.
Some of the best voices around right now are really double acts. One half has spent 40 years on a single subject and is well past the age when the industry usually stops calling them, while the other half is a 25-year-old producer who knows how to cut one clip so it moves round the world at the speed of a meme. Together I think these new creative duos will make age more irrelevant, because the person who knows the most no longer has to be the person who understands the format.
What to look for
So here are four things I’d look for when backing an expert voice.
Look for the obsession that came before the audience. Clare Rewcastle Brown was writing about Borneo’s disappearing rainforest long before anyone was listening.
Ask for the whole hour. Almost anyone can hold your attention for 15 seconds but the people worth backing get more interesting the longer they’re allowed to talk, so maybe judge them on their longest conversation rather than their best clip.
Footnotes are king now. Sources, caveats, and the balls to say “I don’t know” have become some of the strongest trust triggers in media today and audiences are seeking this.
Book the people who’ll argue with your brief, not say yes to everything. An expert who agrees with everything you said has stopped being an expert and become an influencer again.
If a government can lose to one woman with a blog and a shortwave radio, every marketer should think for a moment. Reach these days can be bought by the yard but belief is earned by the decade. The people who’ve already put the decades in are sitting right there and many of them are mostly unbooked.
The new expert economy might just be about to explode.
