Last week I watched Ogilvy Social.Lab present its 2026 Social Trends Report. If I had to sum up the insights in one sentence, I'd say this: social media is deeply, profoundly tired.

If we date the first social media platform to MySpace, launched in 2003, then social media turns 23 this year. You might not know this, but in internet years, 23 is basically 46. 

Social media is middle-aged.

Not quite at "get off my lawn" territory, but firmly in "been there, seen that, don't have the energy to care anymore" territory.

Ogilvy calls the current trends the "Five Rules of Realness." I'm going to focus on the four I found most interesting for influencer marketing.

(The fifth one was basically “use creators to sell stuff” and like this is what this whole newsletter is about!)

According to Deloitte, 50% of users have turned off notifications for at least one app, and 20% have deleted a social media app in the past year. We're fried. We're exhausted by the infinite scroll.

Ogilvy argues that we're moving from an attention economy to an intention economy. People aren't leaving social en masse, but they're becoming more selective about what they consume.

What this means for your creator campaigns

If you aren't already, optimize for saves, shares, comments, and watch time. These are the metrics that tell you someone actually chose the content. When you're briefing creators, ask yourself: who will share this with their friends, and why?

Give them reasons to keep watching, to share, to care. Think serialized formats, recurring segments, or episodic storytelling with creators.

Audiences are moving away from broadcast-style social and toward smaller, interest-driven communities. Ogilvy calls it "lots of little" – many small, meaningful interactions instead of one big moment.

We see this in rising trends like watch parties, run clubs, no-phone parties, and cosy hobbies. People want to belong somewhere, not just see something.

What this means for your creator campaigns

Micro and nano creators have never been more relevant. (We say this every year!) But this year, it's not just about cost efficiency. It’s because these creators are more likely to have built the kind of intimate, high-trust communities this trend describes. They're more likely to be deep in a sub-niche where their word actually carries weight.

Think about how your brand can show up authentically in those spaces. And use of “lots of littles” to get the reach you’d ordinarily get with creators with more views or followers.

Getty Images found that 98% of people say authentic visuals are critical to building trust. The problem is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for most of us to tell the difference between AI-generated and human-made content. (Did you see the 6-finger Ariana Grande debacle in Vogue?)

So how do we decide what's trustworthy?

We look for signs of human effort. With the rise of AI, we can't always believe what we see online, so we’re starting to rely on our other senses.

I've seen this play out in my own TikTok algorithm. I'm seeing more snail mail subscriptions popping up. Elsewhere, junk journaling and wabi-sabi are on the rise – a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that celebrates the beauty in imperfection.

What this means for your creator campaigns

Many audiences are tired of the classic "influencer" trope. What they respond to instead is a visible process: content that shows the human effort behind it. 

For some brands, it could mean partnering with creators who make things by hand (embroidery, cake decorating, ceramics), where the craft is the content. For others, it could mean inviting creators behind the scenes to show how your product is actually made. Either way, the principle is the same: show the work, not just the result.

In a recent Modash Live, Rugile from Burga showed us how partnering with craft-focused creators helped them reach a broader audience and produce content that audiences genuinely wanted to watch.

According to KPMG, 54% of people distrust AI recommendations. As trust drops, people are turning to human curators instead.

This isn’t surprising. One of the reasons influencer marketing took off in the first place was because we could finally get recommendations from people "just like me." Not a celebrity. Not a Sephora associate.

Just someone who knew a little more than we did about skincare or running shoes, and who we trusted because of that.

Somewhere along the way, the industry moved away from that. Maybe we forgot. Maybe we optimized for the wrong thing. Maybe we had to start proving ROI. 

I view this trend as a course correction. People want to follow a person whose taste they trust.

What this means for your creator campaigns

It changes who you recruit. Instead of asking "what's their reach?", ask "does their audience trust their taste?" You want creators who are genuine curators in their space – people whose recommendations carry weight because they've been consistently honest.

It also changes how you value creator partnerships. With AI reshaping search, tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are pulling recommendations from human sources, like creator content, Reddit threads, and newsletters. Creator mentions could become a key part of discoverability.

See you next time!
Eleni Zoe xx
Brand @ Modash. Say hi on LinkedIn