Do you feel like everyone’s cheating their way to success right now?
Faking followers, buying engagement, making up luxury, client wins and all that?
Well, you’re not alone.
And today we’re exposing why joining them will cost you more than you think and how to win without actually selling your soul.
And because this episode, I don’t know, I feel a bit like a reality check and a pep talk all hold into one.
So prepare for a bit of tough love, but also some real actions you can put into place if you’re feeling the temptation to get involved with the unethical marketing strategies that are now rife everywhere.
Hello and welcome to Sniffing Out the Bullshit, a podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs who want help wading their way through the bullshit jungle of entrepreneurship and then the tools, skills, and mindsets that are actually required for success.
I’m your host, Sabrina Chevannes, the no bullshit entrepreneur, right, So let’s start with the state of what’s happening in entrepreneurship at the moment and why people are even thinking of going down this room in the 1st place.
And first of all, I’m going to preface by saying that when we’re talking about marketing, we’re generally talking about digital marketing and concept marketing about because that’s just how it is these days.
Everything revolves around content.
And even though marketing is so much more than that and can be done offline through events, through public speaking, etcetera, the focus is still mainly on content marketing.
And even these offline activities, right, are only considered important if you can capture the content of them and stick them online to grow your following.
So that’s why there’s this temptation to buy followers because people look you up and immediately judge you on your following.
It’s ridiculous, I know, but the amount of people who come up to me and say, Oh my God, you have like 22 K followers.
That’s incredible.
I don’t know where the American accent comes from when I do that.
I feel like this when you and you was put on American accent voice when you do it.
But no, they didn’t have to sound like that.
But I just making a point that those people come up to me and say that that sort of thing is impressive and I don’t even realize how many followers I have all the time.
Right?
And is it even incredible?
Like what did I even do to get like there are now people with million followers who have faked absolutely everything they’ve done and essentially calling people out of their money.
Is that something to be part of?
So this is what I’m saying.
The first thing to realize is that this is all vanity metrics and it’s bullshit and we need to get that out of our heads.
The problem is we are all actually wired this way.
And so it’s going to take some serious rewiring for us to like rethink this little thing through.
And I get it, organic reaches down and I mean severely down.
Like even when I see these like big names screenshots in their pages, their numbers are low and, and like they have a silly number of followers, right?
And although again, if they’ve actually purchased their followers and they’re not real, then that will also explain there’s no numbers.
But OK, regardless, the reach is down.
The algorithms feel like they’re punishing us.
Authentic content is drowned out by the polished fake hype, right?
We constantly see low likes and crickets on real posts while all the fake gurus pop off with their made-up stories.
And of course, this is going to make us feel like crab.
So what does this ’cause people to do?
Well, they fake it in every way possible.
They join engagement parts, which are often masqueraded as communities.
They fake brand deals, they tag brands and they’ve ever worked with, they screenshot fake DMS, social proof, etcetera.
And all the hope that people buy it and they think they’re good at what they do.
So eventually they will earn real money from deals, right?
I mean, there’s even chat on Reddit I’ve seen about the White House buying followers.
Like I don’t think you can get more crazy than that, but you know this bullshit is being cracked down upon.
I don’t know if you saw the Rantic Daboomi case a while ago.
These click farms sold 10s of millions of fake followers, likes and views right?
Daboomi alone sold over 200 million fake Twitter followers before the FTC fined them $2.5 million in 2019, making them the first enforcement action against fake social media metrics, which was great because it set a precedent, right?
So it will show other brands what will happen if they keep up this nonsense.
And there’s been studies about this, there’s been a recent study of about 7000 UK influencers which found that nearly half of them has significant low quality followers which were bots or ghost accounts.
So that’s crazy.
And of these influences, actually 12% in the study even admitted to buying followers like straight up, with 24% of them showing abnormal growth patterns.
So, you know, these guys are not even hiding it, they’re admitting it.
And that’s only the ones that I’ve admitted it.
Like think what percentage are out there?
It’s nuts.
Now we know that the FTC has been cracking down those people who have not like disclosed their pay partnerships and you know, always influencers that haven’t said they’re doing paid ads, but like promoting brands and like, and they’re starting to make examples of some like big names of the business, like even the UK.
Stephen Bartner has been, you know, made an example of he’s put into a lot of scrutiny recently.
And there’s also like negativity around this podcast, a result because they were saying that he wasn’t declaring like fuel and all like Zoe and all the products that he’s like already invested in and he was advertising them.
There’s a whole thing like read about it.
But you know, there, there’s there’s a lot of people that are cracking down on that, which is good because we do want to know, you know, when there’s a financial benefit involved.
And even if it’s like affiliation or like sponsored ads, we want to know whether it’s genuine because obviously there’s money behind it.
It’s not always going to be genuine.
So, you know, if you’re fine trying to find ways to promote your brand, but you’re thinking about not disclosing paid relationships, don’t do it because it’s so ripe at the moment and people are really cracking down on it and you know, it’s just not worth the massive fine that you can get.
But on the other hand, people now doing the opposite.
So influencers of faking brand deals online and they’re putting that sponsored content there on posts which aren’t even sponsored.
So think about this.
It’s kind of crazy.
Well, I take it to spiggle my water.
So why would anyone do that?
Makes no sense.
Well, the idea is to look as though they’re getting paid for the deals and they’re like, you know, working with all these cool brands and it basically legitimises what they do, right?
And they suddenly look like they’re landing on those big brand deals and, and they look popular.
But this has been massively backfiring on influencers.
And Business Insider just did an article on this recently exposing all the influencers doing this and like interviewing them and saying, actually, it’s shot themselves in a foot because the competitors of those brands then don’t want to work with them because it looks they’re looking at, they’re working with the competitors.
Why would they work with them, Right?
But The funny thing is they lied about it in order to impress them.
They thought, oh, if I want to work with Mercedes, I will then say I’ve, you know, landed a brand deal with Audi because, you know, like they will think, oh, if I can work with Audi, then I can, you know, but and then Mercedes are like, why would I take a Audi influencer?
It makes no sense. So they actually screwed themselves over.
It’s so silly.
And some brands are not even like openly disclaimed.
They have nothing to do with these influencers, which makes it even more embarrassing.
And I’ve found this piece of research by this company called Juniper Research, and they estimated the fraud like that’s been accrued.
This is like from 2023, but it’s only a couple of years ago.
They estimated that across ad networks and influencer star content, it accounted for around $84 billion in wasted digital ad spend. 84 billion.
Like those are crazy numbers.
It’s nuts, right?
How much money is being wasted and all the like.
This is not just influence, but it’s like, you know, ad networks, all these sort of things, but fraud.
And there was also another study from the influencer marketing hub, They reported that nearly 60% of brands, I think it was like 59.8% encountered fraud with influencers back in 2023, again, which discovered of numerous things like fake and fake followers, engagement bots and phrase and metrics, 60% of brands had Ford.
That’s wild.
So naturally brands are cracking down on there and exposing the bullshit that they see in influencer marketing.
So it’s harder to do, but it’s still going on because obviously, like if you’re a smaller name brand, they, they think it’s worth the risk.
You’re not going to get exposed as much.
But do you really want to risk your entire reputation on looking popular?
Because remember, it takes years to build a reputation and only seconds to destroy it.
I know the bullshit is so tempting, especially right now when you feel like it’s just not going well and you need to do things and like, you know, the economy sucks and everything sucks.
Like. And there’s also actual psychology behind this too, right?
So for example, humans are hard wired to compare themselves with those who seem more successful as a good comparison and social social media just turbocharges in this way.
We see endless highlight wheels with like no behind the scenes reality, even though those BTS videos are made all the time which are fake BTS and actually just staged as well.
So it’s just so dumb and it builds this whole if they did it then I should be able to too attitude.
And then then if you can’t do it, then you’re sort of like, well, then, So what am I doing wrong?
And it’s, it’s causing this problem.
And everyone is sound desperate to keep up with the Joneses, as my parents used to say.
But now all of these Joneses have millions of followers on social media and their lives just got a whole lot more fake.
And so the fear of falling behind is so real and it’s raw.
And there is this like real illusion being created here, like fake success signals make people look more credible, right?
And so you think that you need to get this to to get clients.
It feels real and bomo and scarcity triggers are like a classic marketing strategy and influence.
Know this the classic like only 10 spots left or enrollment closes tonight.
They they fake this urgency to push people into making decisions.
And even smart people panic by because of the fear of missing out because it feels worse than overpaying or getting scammed sometimes.
It’s crazy. And the problem is there’s also something called validation addiction, like those likes and shares and praise or light up your brains reward centre and give us that dopamine hit that we all love.
So when like your reach drops or likes dip and then people start to panic, they’re like, oh, am I irrelevant now?
Am I failing?
And so they turn to quick hacks, bots, pods, ballot, big followers, all that stuff to get that fixed back.
And this is what’s happening because after all, right now, many small business owners are in survival mode.
They are financially stretched, even if people don’t admit it.
But I don’t know many small businesses who don’t feel this in some way.
They see people with fake followers pulling in sponsors, or so it appears.
So they feel if I don’t do the same, I’ll get left behind.
And it’s not cheating, it’s just surviving.
And this is what’s going on.
And there’s this very real stress loop that’s happening.
It’s like 1 moment.
You’re not going.
If I don’t fake it, then no one’s going to take me seriously.
But then you’re like, but I feel sick doing it and it’s just you don’t know what to do.
So I’m going to give you a little bit of a reality check here and let you realize that people spend more time looking successful than actually being successful.
And most people are actually broke behind the scenes.
So if you just remember that, hopefully we’ll hold you off from doing anything unethical and we know who the biggest culprits are, right?
I don’t even need to mention names.
You’ve seen them on every platform on LinkedIn.
They’re dressed up as those 6 figure a month community leaders, right?
But really they’re just running engagement pods to fake the morality on every single post.
And they’re on TikTok teaching you overnight success techniques.
And they’re on Instagram as a luxury lifestyle consultant, like helping you achieve your dream car, home, holiday lifestyle and all that stuff, all by not really doing any work or perhaps just manifesting it.
So they’re everywhere.
But do you know what?
If you want me to name names, there’s one that I think about a lot because she obviously like, you know, became a big deal.
And I don’t even think she’s done anything different to what other people are doing apart from maybe she’s like doesn’t even hide the fact that she’s a bit scammy.
In fact, she’s embracing it.



