Super Bowl. According to influencer marketing expert Sarah Walsh, Poppi got caught up in vanity metrics and lost sight of the people that purchase its products.  “Your average consumer is cutting back on their spending and feeling concerned about the cost of groceries,” Walsh, founder and strategist of Next Era Influence, told Inside Retail. “Shipping an influencer a customised vending machine for a one-off Super Bowl campaign seems out-of-touch at best and eat-the-rich at worst,” she added. Despite Poppi’s public clarification that “influencers don’t get to keep the vending machines”, the backlash to the brand’s Super Bowl campaign points at consumers’ growing realisation that influencer marketing campaigns rarely have them in mind.  Appropriately addressing the backlash For Walsh, it’s obvious where Poppi went wrong when planning the rollout of its Super Bowl influencer campaign but the brand’s response to the backlash may be the most concerning part. According to her, there are two major lessons brands can take away from Poppi’s out of touch campaign. “First, stop investing your marketing dollars into vanity metrics and big-name influencers. The prestige only gets you so far before the engagement stops converting or having real impact,” Walsh elaborated. “Second, learn to apologise. Poppi’s founder took to their TikTok and didn’t take accountability for the misstep,” she continued. “Responding effectively to feedback is a key component to brand success, especially when something inevitably falls flat – if you miss the mark, you risk permanent damage to your brand image.” However, the consumer pushback to Poppi’s Super Bowl campaign doesn’t mean the end of influencer marketing, instead it signals the importance of brands aligning their marketing strategies with consumer expectations and values. The future of marketing Poppi built its prebiotic soda empire off the back of a community of engaged consumers who enthusiastically produced user-generated content to promote the brand – but as Poppi grew so did its budget for big content creators. “I think Poppi started working with macro influencers because of the prestige it gives your brand,” Walsh speculated.  “To say that Alix Earle is both an investor and spokesperson for your brand means a lot to investors and partners when you consider the reach that one post from Alix gets,” she added. Influencer marketing is not redundant but brands will need to evolve their approach with the times. “With AI becoming integrated into our daily lives, brands and influencers will need to figure out how to effectively incorporate AI while also creating AI-free zones,” Walsh explained. “At our core, we all want to use technology to feel connected as humans and influencers help us do that,” she added. Walsh predicts that the future of influencer marketing is in what she refers to as “comfort creators”: influencers who post content that is soothing and relatable and creates the opposite feeling of doomscrolling. “Instead, these creators are experts at telling stories that feel like the best version of your current life,” she explained.  That is, “not the future version of you that’s a multi-millionaire, but the one who you’re living right now in a rented apartment, worrying about the cost of eggs while trying to make life as beautiful as possible.” Brands can design influencer campaigns that are still attainable without promoting a lifestyle that feels entirely out of reach for the average consumer. “Influencer marketing is absolutely still the future, but not how we currently know it,” Walsh concluded.