Jennifer Neeley

Strategic Marketing Advisor for Trust-Sensitive Growth

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The Influence Project

The Ring Light Wasn’t the Problem. The Strategy Was.

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A debate about influencer behavior at the US Open debate exposed a broader influencer-marketing problem: access can generate attention while making the activation itself more visible than the event.

On September 4, Yahoo reporter Kelsey Weekman quoted me about influencer fatigue at the US Open. The line that made the article was that fatigue begins “when creator access starts to feel more visible than the event itself.”

I stand by it. But the easiest version of this story is also the least useful: influencers showed up, behaved badly and ruined something people love.

That is satisfying. It is also much too simple. This is not a complaint about creators. It is a question about the strategy built around them.

The backlash is not really about influencers

The US Open is a natural creator environment. Fashion, celebrity, luxury hospitality, sports fandom and spectacle already overlap there. Inviting people who can translate the experience for audiences who may not follow tennis is not inherently cynical. Done well, it is smart audience development.

The expansion had a stated purpose. The USTA told Front Office Sports that it approved close to 100 creator credentials in 2026, up from 54 in 2025, to broaden coverage of the tournament. It also said the first credentialed cohort generated more than 5.5 million social engagements. Players quoted by the Associated Press recognized the value of reaching new audiences even as they objected to behavior that interrupted play.

Reach was measurable. Meaning was the harder question.

The AP reported that a chair umpire stopped play while people in a suite recorded a video and that a bright ring light was used during another incident. Yet the accountability was more complicated than much of the backlash suggested. Forbes reported that the guests involved in the widely circulated suite incident were not part of the official creator-credential program.

That distinction does not weaken the strategic lesson. It strengthens it. This was not simply an influencer problem. It was an experience-design, access and governance problem.

Promotional sameness is a strategy problem

When every invited person films the same entrance, holds the same drink, photographs the same sandwich and poses against the same recognizable backdrop, the result may produce enormous volume without adding much meaning.

That is promotional sameness: different people producing versions of the same advertisement.

The creators may be doing exactly what they were invited to do. If the brief rewards recognizable repetition, access display and immediate posting, it is strange to blame them when the output feels repetitive, transactional and detached from the event.

The strategic question is not whether creators belong at the US Open. It is whether the program gives them a reason to notice, understand and contribute something an ordinary sponsorship placement cannot.

Access changes the meaning of content

Scarcity changes the calculation. When fans see the best seats and hospitality spaces as expensive or out of reach, creator access is not judged as content alone. It becomes a story about fairness, status and who the institution appears to value.

A courtside photo is no longer only a courtside photo. It becomes evidence of who got in, who did not and whether the person with access seems to understand what that access was for.

Brands often treat access as a distribution asset. Audiences experience it as a social signal.

That gap is where resentment grows.

We often apply a different test to celebrities

Two years earlier, Travis Kelce arrived at the US Open in head-to-toe Gucci, generated headlines about his clothes and later acknowledged watching football on his phone during the match. He was certainly part of the spectacle. Yet celebrity performance is often treated as charming, while creator performance is treated as proof of cultural decline.

Why? Is celebrity distraction more legitimate because the fame came first? Or did the same behavior look charming because it fit the celebrity we already thought we knew?

I do not raise this to criticize Kelce. I raise it because “influencers ruin everything” often disguises a less comfortable conversation about status. We tolerate performance from people whose access already feels culturally authorized. We resent it from people whose access feels newly manufactured.

What a better program would do

A stronger creator or hospitality strategy begins before anyone enters the suite.

Define the guest’s role. Are they there to explain the sport, interpret its culture, reach a new audience, document hospitality or merely produce recognizable proof that the event is desirable? Those are different assignments.

Brief for difference. Give people access to angles, experts and stories that allow them to make something other than the same post everyone else is making.

Make the norms explicit. If silence during play matters, explain why, reinforce it in the environment and make hosts responsible for the conduct of invited guests. Etiquette cannot remain an assumption when audience expansion is the strategy.

Measure beyond reach. Did new audiences understand more about tennis? Did the activation improve affinity? Did it attract people the sport wants to retain? Did fans feel invited into the experience, or reminded that the best parts were reserved for someone else?

Millions of impressions cannot answer those questions by themselves.

Reach can grow while trust shrinks

The US Open did not create influencer fatigue. It gave the problem a stadium.

The answer is not fewer creators by default. It is better judgment about access, context, difference and the audience on the other side of the post.

Attention can expand while trust contracts. A campaign can travel farther while making the institution feel smaller. A marketing program can hit its numbers while quietly teaching people to resent the people carrying the message.

The ring light was the easiest thing to blame. The strategy deserves the harder look.

Before you add more attention

If your organization is planning a creator program, sponsorship, high-visibility launch or public repositioning, start with the Strategic Advisory Diagnostic.

If the issue is larger than a campaign and touches positioning, reputation or stakeholder trust, explore Strategic Advisory.

Sources and further reading

AI Can Find the Pattern. It Still Can’t Tell You What Matters.

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Ten years ago, I called the useful output of marketing data contextual intelligence. The phrase came from a frustration I kept encountering in client work: organizations had more numbers than they knew what to do with, yet the numbers rarely answered the question leadership was actually asking.

That problem has not disappeared. We have simply made it faster.

AI can now summarize customer conversations, classify sentiment, surface anomalies, compare competitors and generate a plausible explanation before a team has finished its first cup of coffee. That is useful. It is also easy to mistake speed for understanding.

AI can find a pattern. It cannot decide, by itself, whether the pattern matters to your business.

The dashboard is not the decision

A dashboard can show that engagement rose. It cannot tell you whether the audience became more qualified, whether the message attracted the wrong expectations or whether the activity moved anyone closer to a consequential decision.

A sentiment model can label a conversation positive. It may not recognize that the praise is sarcastic, that the loudest voices are not representative or that the same words carry different stakes in healthcare, financial services and entertainment.

A generative AI system can produce a confident narrative from incomplete evidence. Confidence is part of the interface. It is not proof that the explanation is correct.

This is why current guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology treats trustworthy AI as an organizational risk-management problem, not merely a model-performance problem. The people deploying a system still have to define the context, evaluate the output and decide what consequences they are willing to accept.

Marketing needs the same discipline.

What contextual intelligence actually requires

Contextual intelligence begins before the analysis. It starts with a sharper question.

  • What decision are we trying to make? A report built to defend last quarter’s activity is different from an analysis designed to determine what should change next.
  • Whose behavior matters? More attention from an irrelevant audience can make a dashboard look healthier while weakening the business case.
  • What is the comparison? A rising metric can still represent lost ground if the market, competitor or cost moved faster.
  • What is missing? Customer-support records, sales objections, referral patterns and frontline observations may explain what platform data cannot.
  • What would change our mind? If no plausible evidence could alter the recommendation, the analysis may be decoration for a decision already made.

This is the point where professional judgment enters. Judgment does not replace evidence. It determines how evidence should be interpreted when definitions are imperfect, incentives conflict and the consequences are not evenly distributed.

Three places marketing analysis still loses the plot

1. Share of voice without share of relevance

In the original 2016 article, I described using social-listening and competitive-analysis tools to compare share of voice. That work was valuable, but the metric was never sufficient on its own.

A brand can dominate conversation because it is trusted, because it is controversial or because it has become the subject of a joke. The volume is real. The strategic meaning is not contained in the volume.

The useful questions are more specific: Who is talking? What do they believe? Which claims are traveling? Where is the evidence coming from? Does the conversation affect consideration, confidence or action?

2. Influencer reach without decision influence

The same distinction applies to influencer analysis. Follower count and engagement can describe visibility. They do not establish whether the creator changes a decision that matters to the organization.

An influence map should connect the person, the audience, the subject, the stage of the decision and the evidence of movement. Otherwise, it is a popularity map wearing business clothes.

This is the gap I continue to examine through The Influence Project: attention is visible, but the change produced by attention is often harder to see.

3. Crisis signals without operating context

Monitoring systems can surface a spike in negative conversation. They cannot know whether the organization should respond publicly, correct an operational failure, contact a small affected group or wait for an inaccurate story to lose momentum.

The wrong intervention can amplify the very narrative a team hoped to contain. Context includes the source of the claim, the credibility of the people carrying it, the organization’s evidence, the affected stakeholders and the cost of acting too quickly or too slowly.

AI raises the value of judgment

The more efficiently technology produces analysis, the more important it becomes to know what the analysis is for.

That is not an argument against AI. I use AI because it can reduce administrative work, help organize large bodies of material and make patterns easier to inspect. But I do not ask it to assume responsibility for the decision. It has no client history, institutional memory or personal stake in the outcome unless people deliberately provide and govern that context.

The competitive advantage is not simply having more data or a newer model. It is building an organization that can connect evidence to a real decision without losing sight of the people, incentives and risks behind the numbers.

What leaders should ask before accepting an AI-generated answer

  • What data was included, and what important evidence was unavailable?
  • Which definitions or proxies are doing the most work in this conclusion?
  • Is the system describing correlation, or are we treating it as an explanation?
  • Who could be misread or disadvantaged by this interpretation?
  • What human observation supports or contradicts the output?
  • What decision will this answer change?

In 2016, I argued that content without context wastes time and resources. In 2026, the warning applies to intelligence itself.

More output is not more understanding. The work is turning evidence into judgment people can act on.

Sources

Originally published February 29, 2016. Materially updated August 31, 2026.

If your dashboards are multiplying but the decisions are not getting clearer, explore Strategic Advisory.

Related: Your Metrics Say It’s Working. Your Business Says It’s Not. Here’s Why. | Fractional & Interim Marketing Leadership | About Jennifer Neeley

When Influence Outpaces Authority: The Trust Gap Holding Expert-Led Brands Back

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In The Quiet Merger of Power and Influence, I wrote about how attention is no longer neutral terrain. What we see, read, and react to is shaped before most of us consciously choose it.

There’s another shift unfolding beneath that one.

Influence now moves faster than authority can respond, and judgments often form before expertise has a chance to enter the room.

Authority comes from role, training, institution. Influence forms through perception—through tone, visibility, repetition, and the subtle cues that signal credibility within a community. When authority and influence align, decisions feel stable. When influence outruns authority, interpretation hardens early, and correction becomes harder.

I’ve seen this across industries that rarely think of themselves as connected.

In fertility healthcare, physicians with decades of clinical experience often meet patients who arrive confident in conclusions shaped by TikTok creators or online forums. The doctor’s authority hasn’t changed. But the patient’s judgment has already been formed. The consultation begins not with diagnosis, but with reframing.

In growth-stage tech companies, founders assume product strength will establish credibility. But investors and customers respond as much to narrative coherence as to technical merit. A company can have strong data and still struggle if leadership signals feel misaligned. Decisions are rarely made on facts alone; they are made on perceived trust.

In consumer brands, I’ve been brought in when influencer programs were generating reach but not results. On paper, everything looked successful. In practice, audiences sensed inauthenticity. The mismatch was subtle – values didn’t quite align, messaging drifted, the partnership felt transactional. Engagement numbers rose while credibility slipped.

Even in media and podcast building, influence compounds through consistency more than volume. A show doesn’t grow because of a single viral moment. It grows because listeners begin to trust how the host thinks – not just what they say.

These are not isolated marketing missteps. They reflect something larger: influence behaves like a form of currency, but its value depends on shared perception. It builds through reliability and erodes through inconsistency. Visibility can accelerate it, but visibility cannot manufacture it.

Part of this shift is generational. Those who grew up before digital saturation were trained to look for institutional authority. Younger cohorts are more likely to evaluate credibility through networks, creators, and the signals surfaced in their feeds. This isn’t about attention spans. It’s about where judgment forms.

In conversations about my developing concept of Generationisms – including on the Empathy Unbound podcast—I describe this as a difference in how cohorts learn to assess trust. Generations aren’t simply divided by age; they’re shaped by the information systems that trained their early instincts. What reads as expertise to one group may read as branding to another. What feels transparent to one may feel curated to someone else.

 

When organizations don’t recognize that influence is moving ahead of them, they miscalculate. They rely on title when perception has already settled. They communicate from authority while influence circulates elsewhere, shaping how that authority will be received.

Influence without authority destabilizes expertise. Authority without influence leaves expertise unheard.

The challenge now is not simply to communicate more clearly. It is to understand how credibility is judged before authority ever enters the frame.

And increasingly, that judgment is shaped by systems as much as by people.

Before an audience encounters a message, it has already been filtered, ranked, and prioritized. Some signals surface. Others quietly fade. What feels like organic visibility is often the result of invisible sorting.

That shift matters.

If influence is the currency, artificial intelligence is becoming the screening layer. It determines which signals appear coherent, consistent, and credible enough to surface at scale. By the time human trust forms, a preliminary judgment may already have been made.

Which raises a harder question: when machines participate in deciding what counts as credible, do they recognize the kind of authority we believe we hold?

That question sits at the center of another piece of mine, AI Is the Gatekeeper. It Screens for Credibility. Does It Recognize Yours? Because if influence now moves faster than authority – and AI increasingly shapes which influence is seen – then judgment itself is changing.

 

And that shift is not theoretical. It is structural. It’s up to each of us to get ahead of it.

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Explore Strategic Advisory →Read The Influence Project →

When Engagement Does Not Convert: Why Expert-Led Brands Need an Influence Strategy

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Illustration about expert-led brands needing trust and influence strategy, not engagement alone.A campaign can look successful and still fail where it matters.

I have seen this happen in everyday marketing conversations. The engagement numbers look strong, so the campaign gets treated as proof that the strategy is working. More likes. More comments. More shares. More views. More people talking about it. That may be useful. It is not the same thing as influence. Engagement tells us that something happened. It does not tell us whether the right people became more likely to trust, refer, book, buy, invest, recommend, or choose. That is the distinction too many organizations blur. Digital platforms are very good at rewarding reaction. Research has found that social media design can amplify moral outrage, and engagement-based ranking systems can favor emotionally charged content. That does not mean every high-performing post is shallow or manipulative. It means engagement alone is not enough evidence that a strategy is working. Outrage engages. Confusion engages. Spectacle engages. Conflict engages. Manufactured intimacy engages. Parasocial attachment engages. But reaction is not strategy. A post performs well. A creator campaign generates activity. A video gets comments. A media moment travels. And suddenly the assumption becomes: The strategy is working. Maybe. But maybe not. In healthcare, law, financial services, consulting, and other expert-led fields, that mistake can get expensive. A physician can have a popular post and still fail to make a prospective patient feel safe enough to book a consultation. A lawyer can get views on a sharp legal take and still make a potential client question their judgment. A financial advisor can publish constantly and still fail to create the confidence required for someone to trust them with intimate, consequential decisions. A specialist practice can generate consults and still lose money if the strategy does not account for what happens after the consult: procedure conversion, treatment acceptance, referral quality, partner credibility, and long-term patient value. That is where the marketing read often gets too shallow. The visible conversion point is not always the real business conversion point. For years, many professionals could rely more heavily on credentials, referrals, location, institutional affiliation, or reputation by default. Those signals still matter. But they no longer operate alone. Search results, online reviews, social proof, media visibility, social content, and AI-mediated discovery now shape first impressions before a prospective patient, client, buyer, investor, or referral partner ever reaches out. Recent healthcare survey coverage, for example, reports that patients are using online reviews, AI tools, and social media when researching physicians. Pew has also found that users are less likely to click traditional search results when Google AI summaries appear, which matters for any organization still assuming search visibility works the way it used to. But attention alone does not carry the decision. Professionals do not just need to be seen. They need to be believed. They need to be understood. They need to be credible before the consult, sales call, referral conversation, board discussion, or treatment decision ever happens. This is where I see many organizations get stuck. They have activity. They have visibility. They may even have engagement. But they do not have a clear influence strategy. The audience is too broadly defined. The expert is visible, but not clearly positioned. The content is performing, but not qualifying. The message is active, but not tied tightly enough to trust. The campaign is moving, but not moving people toward a decision. That is when more content is not the answer. Better strategic architecture is. The same issue shows up outside professional services. A founder can become highly visible without becoming more trusted. A brand can dominate a conversation without becoming more differentiated. A campaign can generate interaction without moving anyone closer to choosing the organization. That is why I care less about engagement in isolation and more about what kind of engagement it is creating. From whom? In what context? Driven by what emotion? Connected to what business goal? At what reputational cost? Most importantly: Does this attention make the brand more credible – or merely more visible? I see this tension often in my Digital Marketing and Influencer Marketing courses at UC San Diego Extended Studies. Many younger, digital-native students understand attention manipulation faster than some organizations expect. They know when something is bait. They know when a creator feels scripted. They know when a brand is trying too hard to manufacture intimacy. They have grown up inside these systems. Activity alone does not impress them. That is the part many organizations still underestimate. A post can spread widely and still weaken trust. An influencer can generate attention without changing anyone’s decision. A brand can dominate a conversation and still fail to build authority. Engagement is a signal. It is not strategy. The real work is building the strategy that turns attention into trust, trust into confidence, and confidence into action. Otherwise, engagement is just noise with better metrics.

Sources and Further Reading

This article draws on research and reporting about engagement-based amplification, online trust signals, patient decision-making, and AI-mediated search, including:
  • Brady et al., “Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks,” PNAS. Useful for understanding why emotionally charged content can travel farther online. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1618923114
  • Brady et al., “How Social Learning Amplifies Moral Outrage Expression in Online Social Networks,”
  • Science Advances. Useful for understanding how social reinforcement can encourage outrage expression online. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641
  • Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, “Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media.” Useful for understanding why engagement-based ranking does not always align with user value or satisfaction. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/engagement-user-satisfaction-and-the-amplification-of-divisive-content-on-social-media
  • Pew Research Center, “Google Users Are Less Likely to Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears in the Results.” Useful for understanding how AI summaries are changing search behavior. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
  • Medical Economics, “Patients Turn to AI, Social Media When Choosing Doctors, Survey Finds.” Useful as healthcare industry context on patients using reviews, AI tools, and social media when researching doctors. https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/patients-turn-to-ai-social-media-when-choosing-doctors-survey-finds
  • rater8, “The Next Evolution of Patient Choice.” Useful as directional industry context on patient choice, online reviews, AI, and social media. https://rater8.com/the-next-evolution-of-patient-choice-2025-report/

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The Content Gap Isn’t What You Haven’t Published. It’s What Your Buyer Still Can’t Understand.

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Most content-gap reports begin with a competitor.

What do they rank for that we do not? Which keywords have they captured? What pages should we create to close the distance?

Those are useful questions. They are not the first question.

The most expensive content gap is not what your competitor published. It is what your buyer still cannot understand about you.

That gap may sit between a service page and the decision someone is trying to make. It may be an unanswered objection, an unexplained method, a claim without evidence or expertise that is obvious inside the organization and nearly invisible outside it.

In 2015, I wrote that organizations needed to understand the language customers used, listen for recurring questions and create relevant answers instead of aiming blindly. Search has changed considerably since then. The underlying discipline has not.

AI search did not eliminate the content gap

Search no longer presents every user with a simple list of ten blue links. People ask longer questions, compare answers across platforms and encounter summaries assembled by generative systems before they visit a website.

That makes it tempting to create more pages for more possible prompts. Google’s current guidance points in a different direction. Its guide to generative AI features in Search emphasizes unique, useful, non-commodity content grounded in first-hand experience. It also warns against manufacturing separate pages for every query variation.

In other words: the answer is not a bigger pile of interchangeable content.

The work is to identify the missing information that helps a real person decide what to trust, compare or do next.

Five gaps that keyword tools do not fully reveal

1. The decision gap

A page can rank for a relevant term and still fail the person who arrives.

A healthcare executive may understand what a consulting firm offers but not when to bring it in. A founder may recognize the phrase fractional marketing leadership but not know whether the organization needs senior interim judgment, an agency or a permanent hire. An editor may see expertise without finding a concise, usable point of view.

The missing content is not another definition. It is decision support.

Ask: What choice is the reader trying to make? What would make one option more appropriate than another? What risk are they trying to avoid?

2. The evidence gap

Many organizations make claims that sound reasonable and leave the proof scattered across biographies, press pages, old case studies, interviews and internal presentations.

AI systems and human readers both benefit when authorship, sources, experience and dates are clear. That does not mean forcing credentials into every paragraph. It means making the evidence behind an assertion easy to locate and interpret.

If a page says an organization understands a market, show what that understanding is built on. If an expert offers a framework, explain where it came from, what it helps diagnose and what it does not prove.

3. The language gap

Teams often describe their work in the language of internal structure. Buyers describe the problem in the language of consequences.

The organization says integrated omnichannel strategy. The buyer says, “Our audience sees a different company everywhere they look.”

The organization says attribution maturity. The buyer says, “The dashboard says marketing worked, but revenue did not move.”

The organization says reputation management. The buyer says, “People can find the accusation faster than they can find the evidence.”

The best source for this language is rarely a brainstorming session. It is sales calls, support questions, search data, interview transcripts, classroom discussion, media inquiries and the sentences people use when they are not trying to sound strategic.

4. The journey gap

A strong article can still underperform if it sits alone.

Someone discovers the idea but cannot reach the relevant service, supporting analysis, author biography or next step. The content earns attention and then abandons it.

Internal linking is not merely a search tactic. It is editorial guidance. It tells the reader how one idea connects to another and where the analysis becomes useful.

This is why durable articles on a canonical website should connect naturally to related Insights, the appropriate advisory pathway and the author’s body of work. Distribution on LinkedIn, Substack or Medium can then introduce a different angle without creating competing copies of the same article.

5. The judgment gap

Commodity content explains what everyone already knows. Useful expert content shows how to decide when the obvious rule does not fit.

The gap is often the sentence an experienced person almost removes because it feels too opinionated: the warning, distinction or exception learned through practice.

That judgment is difficult to discover through keyword volume because it may not yet have a standard phrase. It is also the part most likely to make the work worth finding.

A practical content-gap review

Before commissioning another batch of articles, review the current system in this order:

  1. List the decisions your priority audiences are trying to make. Use actual inquiries, conversations and search behavior where possible.
  2. Map the evidence they need. Identify the claims, qualifications, sources, examples and limitations that make an answer credible.
  3. Find the unanswered questions. Include questions answered verbally by sales, leadership or instructors but absent from the public site.
  4. Trace the path after discovery. Confirm that each useful article leads to relevant analysis, author context and an appropriate next step.
  5. Compare competitors last. Use competitive tools to locate opportunities, not to outsource the editorial agenda.

Tools can show where demand and competition exist. They cannot decide which unanswered question best expresses your expertise or which answer will help the right person act.

The point is not to fill every gap

Some gaps should remain empty. A topic may attract traffic without strengthening authority, serving the intended audience or supporting a meaningful decision.

The goal is not comprehensive coverage of everything adjacent to your field. It is a coherent body of work that makes your most useful judgment findable.

That was true when Hummingbird was changing search behavior in 2015. It matters even more when an AI-generated answer may become the first interpretation of your work.

Do not begin with what the internet is missing. Begin with what the people you want to help still cannot understand.

Originally published October 28, 2015. Materially updated August 17, 2026.

Sources

If your buyers still have to assemble your credibility for themselves, explore Strategic Advisory.

Related: When Engagement Does Not Convert | The Influence Project | About Jennifer Neeley

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