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YOUR MARKETING. Communities Make It Last.

Be More Phil

September 2022. Within weeks of the queue controversy, WeBuyAnyCar’s tagline had been rewritten by the internet. The five-year, seven-figure partnership was over.

Phillip Schofield was the kind of presenter brands once considered bulletproof. A familiar, reassuring face that carried decades of public goodwill. He even had a show built around this very idea — How to Spend It Well at Christmas — where his trusted recommendation carried real weight. When he endorsed a product, it felt safe. It felt credible. It felt like a shortcut to consumer trust.

Then came September 2022. Schofield and co-host Holly Willoughby were accused of skipping the queue to see the Queen lying in state — a charge ITV denied, insisting they were there as accredited press. The public didn’t care. Memes flooded social media rebranding the WeBuyAnyCar tagline as “we jump any queue.” Within weeks, Yahoo News UK reported that his five-year, seven-figure partnership with WeBuyAnyCar had ended.

But that was just the beginning. In May 2023, Schofield admitted to an affair with a young ITV co-worker. He resigned from This Morning, was removed as a Prince’s Trust ambassador and was dropped by the talent agency that had represented him for over 35 years. The brand that had built a campaign around the instruction to “Be More Phil” was now watching the concept blow up in real time.

“Be More Phil” — a five-year, seven-figure campaign built on a single face. When that face became the story, there was nothing underneath to hold onto.

While some other brands were already experimenting with creator deals, WeBuyAnyCar had revived an older play: the dependable, nationally recognised celebrity endorsement. It felt safe. It looked smart. Until it didn’t.

Phillip Schofield represented the classic celebrity model: a nationally recognised face whose fame came from traditional television, not from daily conversation with an audience. Brands borrowed his established trustworthiness. When perception shifted, there was no underlying relationship with the people who saw the ads — only with Phil himself.

Creators operate in a fundamentally different way. They build their followings from scratch by sharing perspectives, expertise and everyday life on social platforms. Their trust is earned through ongoing interaction, not inherited from mainstream fame. Many creators spark conversations, inside jokes and shared ways of seeing the world. In doing so, they have already moved marketing closer to something far more resilient: genuine community.

The Shift That Took Us Closer

The shift away from the traditional model has been building for years. Television’s own casting decisions tell the story as clearly as any media plan. I’m a Celebrity — a show that for two decades was defined by household names, now routinely casts TikTok stars and podcast creators alongside its traditional celebrities. When ITV cast TikTokker GK Barry in its 2024 line-up, the answer was straightforward: the audience was already there. By 2025, social media creators were no longer novelty casting, but part of the talent mix mainstream TV now actively wanted. The celebrity era didn’t end, but it got diluted when the influencer stepped into the spotlight.

Authentic voices instead of polished performances. Genuine trust instead of borrowed fame. Metrics got better, targeting got sharper, the tone got more human.

But the architecture underneath it? That never changed.

Think about what both models share. The risk is concentrated. One person. One reputation. Willis Towers Watson’s research on managing the financial risks of working with social media influencers identifies this as one of the most underplanned exposures in modern marketing. Brands routinely lack any strategy to assess or mitigate the financial damage when an influencer makes headlines for the wrong reasons.

Creators didn’t create the dependency risk; they inherited a century-old advertising habit of putting one face in front of everything. What they did do was democratise influence and prove that real voices convert better than polished ones. That was massive progress.

The Schofield story is a classic cautionary tale about dependency on a single distant voice. The brand had no relationship with the audience, only with the face. When the face became toxic, there was nothing underneath to hold onto. Even strong creators can face this challenge — which is exactly why community architecture adds such resilience. The creator’s standing matters enormously; the community’s identity mattering independently of any one person matters more.

A creator should be a powerful, relatable bridge — not a single point of failure. A celebrity has no other choice.

What Creators Delivered — and the Opportunity They Unlocked

Creators gave brands access to niche audiences that didn’t exist in broadcast media and, in the right categories, creator partnerships still represent some of the most efficient media spend available. The shift from celebrity to creator was more than cosmetic. It was structural. Trust became earned rather than borrowed. Conversations replaced broadcasts. The distance between brand and audience shrank measurably.

What creators revealed, though, was something even bigger than metrics — the existence of genuine communities just beneath the surface. Engaged audiences with shared language, inside knowledge and real identity. The creators who built those communities were proving that belonging converts better than exposure.

The brands winning today aren’t stopping at creator reach — they’re using it as the entry point into communities where the brand can earn its own standing. The creator gets them through the door. The community is what they’re building toward.

The brands winning today aren’t stopping at creator reach — they’re using it as the entry point into communities where the brand can earn its own standing. The creator gets them through the door. The community is what they’re building toward.

Creators weren’t a dead end. They were the necessary evolution. They proved that trust scales when it feels personal. The brands winning today aren’t abandoning creators — they’re partnering with the creators who already think like community architects.

The Real Asset: The Community That Forms

When a creator builds an audience over time, something emerges that’s more valuable than the audience itself. A shared identity forms. People develop a common vocabulary, a way of seeing certain topics that feels distinctly theirs. They start to recognise each other.

That’s a community. And the academic groundwork on what makes one real has been around longer than most marketing departments would care to admit. Muniz and O’Guinn’s foundational 2001 study on brand community in the Journal of Consumer Research identified three markers that distinguish a genuine brand community from a mere audience: shared consciousness, shared rituals and traditions and a sense of moral responsibility to other members. An audience watches. A community acts.

Not every creator gets there. Some audiences never cohere into something with a shared identity. They remain followers, not members. The difference is whether the community could function, argue, organise and self-identify without the creator in the room. When it can, the creator has built something that outlasts them. When it can’t, they’ve built a following and there’s an important distinction between the two.

The best creators already understand this instinctively. They do more than just broadcast — they create shared consciousness, rituals and mutual responsibility. When a creator does that, they don’t have fans. They have members. And that’s where the real magic happens.

Creators attract attention. Communities hold it.

The Most Powerful Endorsement Isn’t External

Think about how endorsement actually works across these three models.

A celebrity says something is good. You know they’re paid to say it. The trust is real but borrowed and the interest rate is high.

A creator recommends something. They’ve built a relationship with you over time. The distance between “they said it” and “I believe it” genuinely shrinks.

A community uses something. Now the mechanism changes entirely. You’re not watching someone external endorse a product, you’re observing the people you already identify with choosing it. The inference shifts from “they get paid to say this” to “people like me do this.” That’s a different psychological category altogether.

In the celebrity and creator model, social proof is external. Someone outside the group is pointing inward. In the community model, social proof is internal. The group generates it and it becomes self-reinforcing.

Why Communities Survive What Creators Can’t

Think about what WeBuyAnyCar actually lost when Schofield fell. They lost their entire relationship with the audience. Because there was no relationship with the audience, only with Phil. He was the bridge and they never crossed it. When the bridge came down, they were still standing on the wrong side.

That’s the structural vulnerability the creator model can help address — especially when brands use it as a bridge into genuine community participation.

When a brand works with a creator to genuinely embed itself in a community, the creator is still a bridge, but the brand is actively crossing it. Building familiarity. Earning its own standing. Becoming part of the culture rather than renting access to someone else’s.

The strategic advantage of this shift is structural resilience. In traditional celebrity endorsements, the brand’s fate is tethered to the individual’s reputation. But when a brand is genuinely embedded in a community’s identity, that identity no longer depends on the individual who facilitated the introduction.

If a creator loses their alignment with the group, the brand and the community are capable of moving forward together. The creator’s “cultural license” may be revoked, but the brand’s relationship remains intact. The bridge may fall, but the brand is already safely across.

Controversy kills individuals. Misalignment kills systems. You can design around misalignment. You can’t design around a strategy that puts all its cultural equity into a single human basket.

The smartest brands aren’t replacing creators. They’re choosing creators who already have genuine standing inside a community — and then crossing the bridge together to become part of it.

This Is Why Personas Don’t Work

The standard fix for not understanding your audience is to build a persona. Marketing Mike. The 32-year-old urban professional with stated interests and predicted behaviours, assembled from data points and designed to give strategy sessions a human face to aim at.

The problem is that personas try to predict belonging when belonging isn’t predictable, it’s observable. A community has already told you what it cares about. You don’t need to model that. You just need to look at it. Marketing Mike is a stereotype with a spreadsheet behind him. The community already defined itself for you. Read the full argument on why targeting personas fail structurally — and why a target isn’t an audience.

You don’t need to define people when they’ve already defined themselves.

Brand Fit Becomes Visible, Not Engineered

In a traditional creator or celebrity model, a brand can force a partnership through sheer spend. The creator takes the contract. The content goes out. The audience may sense something’s off — sceptical comments, thin engagement — but the impression count goes up, the metrics get reported and somewhere in a quarterly review, someone calls it a success.

Communities have different immune systems. They’re not passive. A community runs on an implicit understanding of what belongs and that knowledge isn’t written down anywhere. It lives in the way members talk to each other, the jokes that land and the things that get called out. When a brand enters that space without understanding it, the community doesn’t ignore the intrusion. It mocks it and in most cases, rejects it. The rejection represents a culture crisis — and it’s irreversible. You don’t get a second first impression with a community that’s already decided what you are.

It’s also worth addressing the instinct that some categories are simply off the table for this approach. The assumption is usually that community thinking is for “cool brands” — trainers, energy drinks, streetwear. That assumption is wrong. Communities form around shared problems, shared obsessions, shared unglamorous realities. Sysadmins have communities. Home-brewers have communities. Farmers, steelworkers, junior doctors, night-shift logistics managers — all of them have language, shared grievances, inside knowledge and a finely tuned sense of who does and doesn’t understand their world. The “boring” category brands that find those communities are finding an audience that nobody else has thought to talk to properly, in a space where the competition for attention is almost nonexistent.

What Most Influencer Marketing Still Gets Wrong

Most brands are still operating with a distribution mindset dressed up as a strategy. The process goes: identify target audience → find creator with overlapping audience → brief content → track engagement → repeat. The old model, iteratively improved, not fundamentally reconsidered.

The first question is about interruption. The second is about integration. Most influencer marketing is just PPC with a face. Brands still often insist on over-engineering the message, choking the authentic narrative that the creator has spent years building with their community.

But marketing is moving from attention arbitrage — buying reach and hoping for relevance — to identity alignment. Finding where a brand already fits in the world and building from there. The brands figuring this out are operating in a different system entirely.

The standard objection here is measurement. Most marketing teams are rewarded on impressions and cost-per-acquisition. Cultural longevity doesn’t fit neatly into a monthly dashboard. That’s a real friction but it’s an argument against the current measurement infrastructure rather than the model. Community participation rates, earned media value, organic share of conversation, content recirculation — none of these are exotic metrics. They exist. The problem is that most dashboards weren’t designed to capture them and most marketing teams aren’t rewarded for changing their dashboards.

The brands winning on cultural longevity decided what they were trying to build and then found ways to evidence it. They didn’t wait for the infrastructure to catch up. KFC’s Anything for the Taste campaign canonised a myth the community was already carrying — the brand arrived to co-sign something people had built without them. And when 413,000 KitKats were stolen in transit, the internet decided it was joyful before the brand said a word because the permission to engage had been earned already. In each case, the brand didn’t manufacture the cultural moment themselves. None of the outcomes showed up in a report, or if they did, the reports were rewritten.

How We Build It

Every campaign we build at The Real LOL Club starts with the same question: where does this already belong?

Not a persona. A real community — people who already share something, already have a culture that’s navigable.

From that, we find the hook. Something so native to that community’s world that it feels like it was already theirs. A format, a tension, a moment they’d have recognised without us.

The creator comes in as the conduit. They already have genuine standing inside the community. They’re how the community gets reached. The brand crosses the bridge with them.

The brand enters as a participant. It funds the moment and becomes part of it. Not a logo in the corner of something the community would have made anyway — something the community couldn’t have made without it and wouldn’t want to remove.

And then there’s the moment itself. Something real. An event, a spectacle, a culmination that the community generates and the brand is genuinely part of. The kind of moment that gets referenced long after the campaign debrief. See the full Real LOL campaign architecture and how each component works together.

This is the structure that resolves the dependency risk at its root. Every other approach optimises distribution — this one builds something that lasts.

The Strategic Reframe

The old question in a briefing room is: who should promote this?

It’s a distribution question. It assumes the message is fixed and the job is to find the best vehicle.

It’s an architecture question. It asks whether the thing you’re trying to say has a natural home in the world. A community where it fits, a culture where it’s credible, a space where people will encounter it as participation.

That question is harder to answer. It requires honesty about what the brand actually stands for. It also requires a willingness to face an uncomfortable truth: that some brands can’t answer yet — because they haven’t built anything that’s worth belonging.

But for the brands that can answer it, the result is something no amount of creator spend can buy: a relationship with an audience that doesn’t depend on any single person to survive.