Reading Marketing Dive’s piece today on “How rising retail brands use influencers to combat digital overload” gave me that familiar “we’ve done this before” feeling. The article frames creator relationships as the adaptive layer brands need when platforms keep shifting formats, algorithms, and attention, and most of all, it points to growing consumer fatigue with nonstop marketing content.
Here’s the blunt truth, from someone who has lived this cycle in the field: none of this is new. The packaging is new. The playbook isn’t.
I didn’t “discover” the creator community. I built a program around it in 2005
In spring 2005, a Skype call with Martin Geddes sparked the framework I created and later operationalized at scale. By November 2005, that work became the Nokia Blogger Relations Program, and yes, I created it, and I ran it for Nokia across the heart of the N-series era. Some say it was the first Fortune 100 company-branded social media program. Others call it seminal. It’s been called the “archetype of influencer relations.” And yes, those are all truisms.
I wrote the origin story and what it meant in real time in “A Present Of Sorts”, including the part that matters: this wasn’t theory, it was execution, and it worked because it was built on trust, not transactions.
And years later, when I saw other brands fumbling with blogger outreach, I put the contrast in black and white in “How Not To Work With Bloggers” describing how we seeded devices, expanded access (including Nokia World and MWC), and treated creators like partners rather than targets.
The “secret sauce” was operational discipline. Remove friction, remove coercion
Many modern influencer programs talk about “community,” but they run it like a media buy with nicer language. The Nokia program was different because we engineered it to be frictionless and voluntary.
That meant:
- creators could opt in or opt out without pressure
- there were no coverage requirements
- we made logistics easy (including return handling with a FedEx Airbill, not “good luck getting it back to us”)
- we treated dialogue as the point, even when the feedback wasn’t flattering
- and we didn’t pay a single blogger anything
I was again fully transparent about my role in that work in “Will Microsoft Buy Nokia? They Should”, where I stated directly that I devised the program and my agency managed it.
The part everyone forgets: the validation didn’t come from me. It came from the people watching it happen
What’s missing from much of the 2026 “we’ve discovered creators” coverage is the contemporaneous context: people who lived in that world recognized the Nokia program as the model while it was happening.
Jeremy Pepper: “this is what blogger relations actually is”
In December 2005, Jeremy Pepper wrote one of the clearest early takes on what “real” blogger relations meant — not “start a blog,” but build relationships, communicate directly, reduce friction, and don’t demand coverage. That piece wasn’t praising buzzwords; it was praising behavior. (@jspepper)
John Cass: Nokia as a case study in doing it right
John Cass went further and documented Nokia’s approach as a formal case study in Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging, describing how Nokia (and I) blended traditional media relations with blogger relations, engaged critics in public, and used dialogue and linking to address both positive and negative references instead of trying to suppress them.
That’s an important detail in 2026, because “community” without the willingness to engage critics is just content production with comments turned on.
ZD Net’s Matt Miller once said the program created committed advocates because it created real users. He didn’t just receive devices; he became the kind of power user every brand claims it wants. In his own writing, he explicitly ties his increased adoption to being invited into the Nokia Nseries Blogger Relations program in 2005.
There was also his widely-circulated piece headlined “Nokia Nseries Blogger Relations program is a success” attributed to him during that era — the exact kind of third-party “this works” signal brands spend millions trying to manufacture today.
So what is new in 2026?
Marketing Dive gets two things right:
- The pace of change is faster—brands are building while the ground moves beneath them.
- AI content is going to flood feeds — and when the cost of “content” drops to near-zero, authenticity becomes the scarce resource. Marketing Dive points directly to that tension (including AI-generated “personalities” that land brand deals).
That’s why I keep coming back to the same conclusion: the future belongs to brands that treat creators as a long-term communications channel with governance and respect, not a disposable line item in a campaign plan.
Because if you want to combat overload, you don’t win by shouting louder.
You win by being worth listening to, and that still starts today the same way it did in 2005: trust, transparency, and real relationships.