Brands can buy attention; they cannot buy trust

Brands are expected to spend nearly $44 billion on creator marketing in 2026 alone. Billions chasing something that creators figured out for free, years ago, with no budget and no guarantee it would work.

But before I tell you what that is — answer this honestly: when you see a sponsored post from an influencer, do you trust their recommendation?

Think about it for a second.

3853 people in my community did. And here is what they said.

Only 1.3% said yes unconditionally. Another 16.4% said they scroll straight past sponsored content entirely. And the majority — 77.8% — said it depends on the influencer.

Someone is getting this very wrong. And it isn’t the audience.

What brands think they are buying

When a brand pays a creator for sponsored content, the assumption is straightforward: the creator has an audience, the brand needs exposure, money changes hands, and influence follows.

It sounds logical. It isn’t.

What brands are actually paying for is access — access to a community that someone else spent years building. The mistake is assuming that access comes with trust attached. It doesn’t. Trust

belongs to the creator. It is personal and earned over time. The moment money enters the equation, audiences sense it — and as my poll shows, they react accordingly.

Brands are paying billions to borrow something that cannot be borrowed. Inconvenient, but true.

What the data is actually saying

The dominant response — “depends on the influencer” — might sound like good news for brands. If audiences trust the right influencer, surely you just need to pick better ones?

But that’s missing the point entirely.

“Depends on the influencer” means the trust lives with the creator, not the product. The moment that creator promotes too many brands, or one they don’t genuinely believe in, that conditional trust evaporates — and it takes the brand’s investment with it.

People haven’t stopped trusting creators completely. They have just become better at reading intention. 

Audiences know the difference between a creator who actually uses something and a creator completing a campaign deliverable. That difference is hard to fake — especially online. People know when someone is overselling. They know when enthusiasm feels rehearsed. And they definitely know when a creator would never go near a product if money wasn’t involved.

What creators actually figured out

This isn’t an argument against influencer marketing entirely. It is an argument against treating it as a trust shortcut rather than a reach tool. And it is not about dismissing smaller, more focused creators whose communities genuinely trust them — it is about the assumption that throwing money at reach automatically produces results, regardless of who you’re paying.

The creators with the strongest communities figured something out early that most brands still haven’t: loyalty cannot be bought or accelerated. There is no express lane.

It is built through showing up when something happens in your community and being the person who responds first, who understands what they need, who fills the gap nobody else has filled yet. It is built through thousands of small moments that compound over years into something no campaign budget can replicate.

The creators who convert audiences into genuine communities aren’t doing anything complicated. They are simply behaving like people — present, consistent, and honest. That’s why

some creators with smaller audiences convert better than creators with millions of followers. Because trust and reach are not the same thing.

What this means for Sri Lankan businesses

These numbers are global, but the psychology behind them isn’t. Sri Lankan audiences are scrolling the same feeds, developing the same instincts, and making the same judgments about authenticity.

This isn’t about global brands that have spent decades earning trust through product quality and cultural presence. This is about the thousands of businesses trying to shortcut that process by paying creators — and wondering why it isn’t working.

You might argue that people still buy things even when they don’t fully trust the recommendation. Maybe. But a customer acquired through distrust is not a loyal one. And loyalty is the only metric that compounds over time.

The businesses that will actually win online over the next few years are not the ones spending the most on influencers. They will be the ones behaving more like creators — posting consistently, responding quickly, understanding internet culture, and having an actual personality online.

The person managing your online presence needs to understand internet culture and trends from the inside. That means knowing what your audience is already talking about before you try to join the conversation — not what you want to say, but what they actually want to hear. That gap is where most content strategies fail.

And before you pay any influencer for any promotion, ask yourself one question: does their audience actually trust them, or do they just follow them?

There is a significant difference.

The one thing money cannot buy

The most valuable moment in any creator’s relationship with their community is when a follower defends them unprompted — in a comment section, in a group chat, in a conversation the creator never even sees.

Nobody paid for that. Nobody can. No budget line exists for it.

And that’s what brands are really chasing when they spend billions on creator marketing.

Not reach. Not impressions. Trust.

The problem is that trust is slow, personal, and impossible to manufacture. Creators figured that out years ago.

Most brands still haven’t.

(The author is an 18-year-old content creator and digital marketer from Sri Lanka. She has built an audience of over 119,000 on YouTube and writes at bysadiya.substack.com and can be reached via email [email protected])