The most popular influencers on social media all have a distinct shtick.  The silly, outrageous, raunchy, bizarre, and often just plain stupid create acts that have 10 of millions of online followers – and that are the envy of major brand advertisers.

If you are 30 years of age or older, it’s likely you don’t know Logan Paul.  But if you want to advertise to people 30 and younger, you might want to learn about him.

Logan is what’s known as a social media influencer.  Basically, he’s a comedian who makes short, slapstick-level videos he posts on social media.  He’s one of a group of influencers recently featured on 60 Minutes.

Logan and his contemporaries represent the power of the internet in its purist form.  They are individuals with no backing and no resources who build-up enormous audiences based on nothing more than an original shtick and the power of social media content sharing.

In case this is new to you, here is a sample of Logan’s work (warning, some risqué material):

Why do Logan, King Bach and others have advertisers knocking down the door with loads of cash?  Because they have 20-40 million followers online, which is a number no brand channel can match.

A Personal Shtick

Since Facebook and Twitter first emerged, brands and advertisers salivated over the audiences they could potentially reach.  Many businesses created their own channels and looked to create a branded story that would gain popularity on social media.  Most failed.

They couldn’t understand why.  They paid expensive marketing companies to create concepts.  They had professional production values.  All put the entertainment and informational value of the content first, then slipped in the brand message.

Their failure can be understood when you look at Logan and other multi-million follower influencers on social channels.

These entertainers and storytellers are all individuals.  They have a personal, unique voice that their followers identify with on a level a brand can’t emulate.  The key with social media influence is to have a unique voice that connects with others in the one-to-one way the platforms allow for.  Simply put, people don’t want to connect with brands or institutions.  They want to connect with other people.

And they follow and share the voices of people who have a shtick.  Like all comedians, storytellers and entertainers, influencers have a routine, style, or gimmick that gets associated with them personally.  Despite the haphazard feel of this content, there is structure here that gives their message impact.  For all intents and purposes, Logan Paul is a stand-up comedian who does his bits on video then promotes them to massive social media audiences.

Imagine a business brand, with a committee sitting around a conference table, trying to create this kind of shtick.  Imagine someone trying to represent a brand doing a truly funny comedy act.

An authentic, unique voice doesn’t happen by committee.

The Opera and the Soap

A watershed moment in advertising history was television soap-operas.

These daytime dramas got their name because soap-companies produced them to run their advertisements during the commercial breaks.

Note something important.  The entertainment had nothing to do with the soap product.  They didn’t try to integrate dish soap or the brand name into the story itself (except for some product placement, perhaps).

Imagine, for example, The Walking Dead brought to you by Geico insurance, where Geico insurance was actually a pivotal aspect of the story itself.  All the “walkers” were people who had been under-insured.  It would be an absurd intrusion into the plot.

Yet this is what many brands developing social media marketing campaigns try to do.  They want to turn their brand into an entertaining storyline with the personalized qualities people connect with and share on social, while at the same time conveying their advertising message.

In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too.

It has not worked.  Even big brands with a major social media presence, like Red Bull, only win because their content has nothing directly to do with advertising their product.  They are a brand, like the old soap companies, that produces entertainment as a vehicle to create awareness.

From this you can see the difficulty SMBs have making content that goes viral.  You have an office and people who go to work Monday to Friday.  It’s a real trick to transform that banality into something interesting enough people will share it on their personal profiles.

Marketers Find a Way

Not so fast.  Don’t count marketers out just yet.

Marketers are notorious for understanding where their target audience is.  Notorious, that is, for taking over popular entertainment mediums and turning them into advertising channels.

Logan Paul:  Cheerios.  King Bach:  Jimmy Johns.

If can’t beat’m, join’m.  Today, brands place their products into influencer channels, gaining exposure they never could on their own.  It’s becoming yet another type of native advertising, where the ad gets blended-in to look like part of the platform it appears on.

Advertising creeps in, Logan Paul sells out, losing what made him popular in the first place.  It’s a cycle as old as advertising itself.

But somebody will be there to take his place, on some new social media channel.  And for a time, it will exist as pure storytelling, pure entertainment.

But then again, maybe the brands will break-through and find a way to become their own influencer.  In the past, the brand has always come first, with its revenue needs, searching for where its target audience goes to for fun and connection.

The internet makes it possible for someone to create the entertainment channel first, then find a way to build in the marketing.  Given how much the millennial generation dislikes advertising, we may get to a point where that’s how brands begin their campaigns.

It will take a very clever shtick and a seamless marketing message.  Yet it’s the ultimate achievement in marketing.  To be where your audience is before they know that’s where they want to be.