The shift to creators, but who do communities actually trust?

Bukelwa Monqo, founder and managing director, Old Boys Club PR examines the shift to Creators at Cannes and what this means for trust (Image source: © 123rf 123rf)

For years, marketers have mistaken visibility for trust.

We've measured followers, impressions and engagement as though they were reliable indicators of influence. They aren't. They're indicators of attention, and attention has never been the same thing as trust.

That distinction matters everywhere. In South Africa, it matters even more.

This year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity didn't create that realisation, but it did confirm that the industry is beginning to catch up.

Right question, wrong answer

But while asking who communities actually trust is the right question, I'm not convinced we're answering it correctly.

Much of the conversation at Cannes positioned creators as strategic business partners rather than simply content producers. That's an important evolution. But it still assumes that influence begins with the creator.

In South Africa, that's rarely how influence works. Influence here has never been primarily individual. It has always been communal.

The deeper infrastructure of trust

The architecture of trust in this country wasn't built by social media. It was built through stokvels, burial societies, churches, school governing bodies, street committees, sports clubs and neighbourhood WhatsApp groups.

These are networks where credibility is earned over years, where accountability matters and where reputation travels faster than advertising ever could.

Social media didn't create those communities. It simply made parts of them visible.

The deeper infrastructure of trust remains largely invisible to every influencer dashboard and campaign report.

A completely different model of influence

Think about the organiser of a stokvel responsible for the financial decisions of 20 households.

She may have very few followers online. She may never appear on an agency's influencer database.

But when she recommends a product, that recommendation doesn't stop with 20 people. It moves through families, workplaces, school gates and friendship circles.

It reaches people with no media plan identified, and no analytics dashboard will ever count.

That's more than a blind spot in the data. It's a completely different model of influence.

At Cannes, Rachel Zoe remarked during the New Entertainment Era: Women Driving Influencepanel that brands are discovering it's "not necessarily about the followers, it's who converts the most”.

She's right. But I think there's another layer to that conversation.

Who converts the most

Asking who converts the most still frames influences the transaction. It tells us who drives action.

It doesn't explain why some people consistently influence behaviour while others, with much larger audiences, struggle to do the same.
The answer isn't simply the creator. It's the community.

More specifically, it's the trust that already exists within that community before any brand enters the conversation.

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Community Capital

I've started calling this Community Capital.

Community Capital is the accumulated trust and relational equity that exists within a community, and the ability of trusted voices within that community to activate it.

That's different from the long-standing conversation around micro-influencers. Smaller audiences with stronger engagement can certainly be valuable, but Community Capital is measuring something else entirely.

It asks us to stop viewing influence as something a creator owns and start recognising it as something a community grants.

The creator is simply the person trusted enough to carry that influence.

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Changing questions

Once you look at influence through that lens, the questions brands should ask begin to change.

• Instead of asking how many people someone can reach, ask which community they genuinely belong to.

• Instead of asking about engagement rates, ask whether people trust that person's judgement enough to change their behaviour.

• Instead of looking only at demographics, ask who sits inside that audience. Are they people who influence others in their own right? Teachers. Nurses. HR practitioners. Coaches. Faith leaders. Community organisers. Small business owners.

Influence compounds

Those networks matter because influence compounds.

A recommendation made by a trusted voice doesn't end with the person who hears it first.

It moves through conversations at home, at work, at school and within communities.

A social media post becomes a recommendation. A recommendation becomes a conversation. Over time, that conversation becomes behaviour.

No algorithm measures that journey particularly well. Most influencer strategies still focus on the size of an audience.

I think they should focus on the quality of the relationships that sit behind it.

A creator with 5,000 followers who is deeply trusted within a professional or community network may create more lasting commercial value than someone with ten times the reach but very little credibility.

The reach isn't in their audience. It's in what their audience is able to move.

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From creator to community

One of the most important outcomes from Cannes this year was that the industry acknowledged influence deserves to be treated as a discipline rather than simply another media channel.

South African brands have an opportunity to take that thinking one step further. The real shift isn't from channel to creator. It's from creator to community.

The most influential people in this country will never describe themselves as influencers. They'll never have rate cards or media kits. Many won't even have public profiles worth mentioning.

They've built something far more valuable. Trust. When they speak, people listen because experience has taught them they can be believed.

Brands that learn to identify those people, understand the communities they belong to and earn the right to participate in those relationships won't simply run better influencer campaigns. They'll build something much harder to replicate.

Trust.

And in South Africa, trust has always been our most valuable form of influence.