Meet Sydney Nicole Gifford, a 24-year-old influencer based in Minnesota. She is a professional content creator and Amazon affiliate, known for her minimal “natural beige and cream aesthetic” which she proliferates to 308,000 followers on Instagram and 611,500 followers on TikTok. Her link-in-bio redirects users to a dark oatmeal-colored landing page where you can shop the products in her home through her personalized Amazon storefront. When someone makes a purchase, she receives a commission. Her life looks clean, polished, and most importantly, beige. Now meet Alyssa Sheil, a 22-year-old influencer from Austin, Texas, who, like Gifford, makes a living as a content creator and Amazon affiliate. Her 141,000 Instagram followers can also shop her life on a similarly beige landing page via the link in her bio. Scroll quick enough through both of their feeds and the untrained eye might mistake Gifford and Sheil for one another. As reported in The Verge, some among Gifford’s own dedicated consumer base—ahem, I mean followers—confused some of Sheil’s posts for her own. Two girls, one color. This isn’t the beginning of a porno in poor taste, but a landmark lawsuit that has the potential to reshape copyright law as we know it.

In a legal complaint from April 2024, Gifford and her associates brought federal charges of copyright infringement, trade dress infringement, and misappropriation against Sheil for copying her “natural beige and cream aesthetic,” citing near identical outfits, hair-color changes, and tattoos as evidence against the accused. Gifford says she spent five years creating her aesthetic, having turned it into a “multi-thousand dollar operation” that Sheil’s popularity threatens by siphoning followers she so rightfully earned away from her accounts, and therefore her live shopping links that help grow those thousands of dollars. Gifford and her team also cited decreased sales commissions and downward-trending user engagement reports to support her case against Sheil, who in June of 2024, moved to dismiss the accusations. Her attorneys summarize the situation best in a court response reported in The Verge: “Gifford’s ‘look’ is not original. For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.” However, just this past November, the judge ruled that Gifford’s complaints should advance to the US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

At this point, I jokingly curse Executive Editor Drew Zeiba for bringing this case to my attention, because it is the distinct kind of white-girl bullshit that makes me want to start unnecessary fights with strangers on Reddit regarding the tenuousness of copyright law and the swaglessness of the shopping affiliate link youth. He reminds me that Sheil is Black. I reinterpret her beige as racial and decide to go full #TeamAlyssa.

From a 1973 short film by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman called Television Delivers People (1973) comes a famous quote: “If something is free, then you are the product.” The film itself reads like a pre-PowerPoint slideshow of text from the two thinkers, whose central thesis is that television delivers television-watchers to advertisers; neutral viewers who seek entertainment or education from televised media become consumers to be targeted via the TV commercial. To adapt the film’s title to our contemporary moment, social media like TikTok and Instagram reels deliver people via the influencer who is also a person. People deliver people, where the influencer becomes an agent of advertising. The typical interpretation of this quote in social media contexts is that we are all content creators regardless of being an influencer like Gifford or Sheil, post for free to social media platforms which then sell that user data to advertisers to earn revenue. The influencer, then, is a tool of that strategy in that they act as online endorsers. My expansion on this interpretation is that when influencers become an integrated part of company’s advertising strategies, they don’t just condition consumers to buy using GRWM videos or unboxings or hauls, they condition them to conflate buying a product with a level of human closeness, of being let into the influencers life. “I’m not being sold to, I’m just hanging out with my e-friend aka watching a video they pre-filmed months ago who happens to be really into Tatcha, and really knowledgeable about all the skincare benefits the Exfoliating Rice Powder has, and they even shared me an affiliate link because they’re thoughtful like that.” The content creator assumes the role of a corporation, we buy from them because we trust them, but we trust them because they obscure buying tangible goods with some sort of interpersonal connection.

“Where the targeted ad fails to sell a product, the influencer succeeds on a person-to-person level.”

If the influencer is a human corporation in this sense, then consumers consume people. As an ad agency would sell a product, influencers sell themselves to these hungry consumers: An influencer, as an entity, is its own PR, talent, product, and advertiser contained in one person. When did advertising move in-house, so to speak? Consumers got bored and couldn’t relate to traditional advertising rhetoric. Lee Eisenberg predicted this in Shoptimism with his four types of ad consumers: Advangelists, Adbashers, Agnostics, and Ambivalents. On the polar ends of Eisenberg’s spectrum are Advangelists, who think advertising is important, effective, and beneficial to buyer and seller, and Adbashers, who believe that advertising is important, effective, and a pure evil to society. More nuanced are the Agnostics, a group who contests the necessity and efficacy of advertising yet still considers ads a “culturally interesting and significant” part of the zeitgeist, and the Ambivalents, who consider ads too pervasive and ubiquitous to care about and don’t think anyone need pay much attention to them. In 2009, the year Eisenberg published Shoptimism, he cited that more and more people were trending toward the Ambivalent side, where consumers no longer took advertisements “remotely seriously” because they’ve been overwhelmed with so many. He brings up a mid-aughts study in which a focus group was presented with individualized ads for a fictional face cream. The model featured in the ad was a digitally morphed composite of each group member’s face with the advertisement model’s face to see if consumers were more likely to buy an ad they felt represented them. Near unanimously, every member was neither more or less likely to buy the fictional face cream even when given highly personalized ads.

This study showed that in the mid-aughts, people were starting to not care about advertising anymore, even when it directly catered to what they found most intimately familiar, their own face. In 1960, known as the beginning of the “Golden Age of Advertising,” US ad agencies brought in $212 million, a $159-million increase from the $53 million earned in 1945. Adjusted for 2024 inflation, that $212 million is actually more like $2.3 billion, and accounts for billboards, posters, radio, newspaper, and radio ads. Between then and 2009, when Shoptimism was published, advertisement media expanded to include the internet in addition to billboards, posters, radio, newspaper, and radio. Ads were inescapable, breeding a generation of Ambivalents, says Eisenberg, who could essentially outsmart the attempts from companies to mine user-driven data through algorithmically targeted ads. In 2008, total ad revenue in the US was $270.7 billion with $23.4 billion of those dollars coming from internet advertisements. That clocks in at about $419 billion for total ad revenue and $36.2 billion dollars for internet ad revenue adjusted for inflation. And while these numbers reflect a highly profitable time for internet advertisements, for perspective, today, experts at Goldman Sachs anticipate a $480-billion valuation of the influencer economy alone by 2027—a mere segment of all internet advertising. Following the money, ad agencies are far less effective at generating revenue for companies than “real people.” According to Sam Kriss in a Substack post from 2022 called “The internet is already over,” a series of weird investments in the tech sector from private firms like Vision Lab put billions into data mining to boost targeted advertising, but it was humiliatingly ineffective. “Now, large companies are cutting out their online advertising budgets entirely, and seeing no change whatsoever to their bottom line,” writes Kriss, citing an article about the ineffectiveness of digital ads from Marketing Insider Group. “One study found that algorithmically targeted advertising performed worse than ads selected at random. This is what sustains the entire media, provides 80 percent of Google’s income and 99 percent of Facebook’s, and it’s made of magic beans.”

Where the targeted ad fails to sell a product, the influencer succeeds on a person-to-person level. Creators like Sydney Nicole Gifford and Alyssa Sheil become human stand-ins for ad agencies; they’re not just modern day Don Drapers, they’re living, breathing Sterling Cooper Draper Pryces. In other words, they’re not just the guy, they’re the whole company.

Gifford v. Sheil proves that the content-creator industry survives on packaging, mass producing, and proliferating personality; instead of selling us the thing, influencers sell us the aspiration to be like the person that sells us the thing. Distinct from historical advertising, influencers also cause consumers to aspire to be influencers too: it’s a cycle that breeds more commerce by inspiring new people to turn themselves into human advertisements. In an age of the post-Ambivalent, people will buy a lumpy gray sweatsuit not just because they see it on a smiling blonde, but because they want to be the smiling blonde—because the smiling blonde has built a relationship with her audiences by talking to them like a best friend in a chit-chat GRWM makeup video. Referring back to Sheil’s attorneys, her and Gifford’s looks aren’t original. If they were, they wouldn’t have jobs, at least as influencers. But who, what, when, where, how did influencing begin?

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Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the first Olympic athlete on a Wheaties box, was the first influencer. In 1935, the cereal company put the world-record-breaking track star on the front of their cereal box as the inaugural member of their “Breakfast of Champions” marketing campaign, a revolutionary take on the Aristotle’s ideas of rhetoric using the triangle of persuasion: ethos (credibility of an ad, typically through endorsements), pathos (emotional attachment), and logos (logic and reasoning). Babe Didrikson is an Olympian, therefore a noted celebrity and a credible endorsement. Logically, Wheaties must be a healthy product, because if a gold medalist in track and field from the 1932 Olympics starts her day with this cereal, it must somehow enhance her performance. Emotionally, there’s a subtle promise to all the little boys and girls out there who want to go to the Olympics just like Didrikson: eat your Wheaties, grow big and strong, and you can win gold too.

Other ads at the time used similar tactics (see: these early 20th-century Lucky Strike ads that rather vividly illustrate how these physician-approved cigarettes can make you thin). However, what makes Wheaties’ strategy so revolutionary is how they blended ethos, pathos, and logos to not just create a narrative showing how their cereal can take you to the Olympics one day, but to build a legion of those athletes as living, breathing endorsements. Their very being become examples of Wheaties’ credibility, whether they’re hawking the cereal or not. Their personality gave the campaign power beyond the cereal box. Ninety years later, the Wheaties “Breakfast of Champions” remains strong. Its Olympians are able not just to sell, but to influence. They didn’t just get people to believe in rhetoric on the box, they got them to buy into a Wheaties-branded cult of athlete personality.

Athletes still covet the Wheaties box spot and the lifetime supply of cereal that comes along with it, and now, influence—or the personality-driven commerce of Aristotelian persuasive rhetoric—is one of the fastest growing market segments in recent history. In 2021, the influencer market economy went from a two to $13.8-billion industry. Today, it’s valued at about $250 billion.

What we see here is the evolution of advertising, from sales strategies that used to try really hard to woo consumers with rhetoric, to the adoption of the influencer personality as a new sales strategy: relate to the consumer on a personal level, using aspiration as its own form of persuasive rhetoric. This shift is so novel because want could once be manufactured through a delicate balance of ethos, pathos, and logos, now exists the shapeless “vibe” of the creator. Rather than building an appeal around a product, influencers convince someone to access a lifestyle. With the influencer, whether it be Didrikson or Gifford or Sheil, we want the products they sell us because there is an implicit promise that if we buy, we can be them. No longer are we Advengelists, Adbashers, Agnostics, or Ambivalents. We consume through parasocial relationships with influencer where any feeling towards ads—positive, negative, or neutral—is rendered moot when the advertisement is a person.

“Would we feel as protective over our aesthetics if there wasn’t a highly lucrative and rapidly growing industry behind them?”

Influencing is such a lucrative industry for companies like Amazon, and the sheer amount of money in this business is enough to inspire any Minnesota-based member of the Amazon affiliates program to get litigious (once again, #TeamAlyssa). You don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to be an influencer today, you just have to be able to make people think you’re cool on the internet, or at least a trustworthy source of shopping information. Ironically, Gifford only makes a living because people copy her—her ire against Sheil particularly feels more high-school-mean-girl-jealous-of-hot-new-girl than anything. But, considering the fact that Gifford’s content is ostensibly the same and features the same products as Sheil’s—by the way, the two once met up in Texas for a shopping day, and Sheil blocked Gifford afterward complaining that she was not being nice to her—caginess is somewhat understandable, if not expected. There are 162 million content creators in the US alone, with roughly 47 percent of them identifying as full-time. We’re not just talking about someone stealing your look, we’re talking about someone stealing your look and making money on it—money that people could have given to you.

Would we feel as protective over our aesthetics if there wasn’t a highly lucrative and rapidly growing industry behind them? Would we feel the need to be protective over any idea if intellectual property couldn’t be quantified with a dollar amount?

To me, the most interesting aspect of the Gifford v. Sheil lawsuit is how a ruling in favor of the plaintiff would open the door for creators to sue each other on the basis of swacking if the complainant could prove that they hit it first and were followed by someone with a comparable following and similar aesthetic. It’s ironic that here is a case based on justifying copyright for original content whose creator bases her aesthetic on the generic. The whole point of the “natural beige and cream aesthetic” Gifford claims as her own—the vibe is two-thirds clean girl, one third a cheap version of my girl Dakota’s old tumblr posts—is to be simple, treat navy as a statement color, pull your hair back to show off your “no makeup” makeup-ed face, and decorate your home with knockoff Danish modern furniture in various shades of yeast-infection greige. If the court rules in favor of Gifford, Dakota could sue at least half of Margiela Tabi wearers in the Western world. I could sue my “friends” for hundreds of thousands of dollars for putting them onto Alexandre Herchcovitch and Lieve Van Gorp in 2017 and watching them develop entire careers for having such unique taste. I could get sued by anyone who bleached their eyebrows before 2017 and was jealous of me. Though the case is going to court, I think Gifford and Sheil would best settle their beef with a good old-fashioned fist fight.

This legal feud reminds me of writers. There’s a large network of people who write, at least in New York, who cheek-kiss and double-tap their asses off in public, and in private are talking shit and gatekeeping their high-powered friends. Why? A perceived sense of competition where someone else’s W somehow necessitates your L. While I do find this behavior deeply and spiritually weird, there’s an acknowledgement implicit within this grindset that we’re all trying to get the same limited resources in an industry based on optics as much as talent as much as the luck of the draw (it’s never really that your pitch is you-should-quit bad, so much as it is timing or private interests). What this mindset misses, however, is an understanding of how being the one to seize those limited resources doesn’t land you on top of anything. Congratulations, your ability to survive in an industry that doesn’t want anyone to win is acknowledged and here are 50 new followers. And you have to do it all over again, and again, and again, and maybe you get lucky enough and all of those instances pile up into what looks like a career.

The point is: if writers will sneak-dis each other for a byline and prime fashion week seat real estate, it only makes sense that influencers will sue each other when there’s actual cash at stake. Where there is money, there will be people trying to make it, hoard it, and make sure others can’t make it. Considering the history of advertising, it’s clear that the influencer economy marks a shift in what consumers best respond to: no longer is it persuasive rhetoric from a brand, it’s a cult of personality.

When influencers actually influence, not only do customers buy, they get inspired to try and do the same thing—this is really how the Gifford-Sheil dilemma reads to me. When writers actually publish (as in provide an original point of view with a distinct voice, not the physical act of putting pen to paper), not only do people—some of them fellow writers—read and click and buy the print issue and boost your cache, they get inspired, whether it’s to riff on the original writer’s idea in their own way, or try and cash in on it as their own so they may advance themselves. The hard thing to parse is the line between social and professional ascendance. When someone swacks a one-liner you dropped at a party once for the sake of a funny caption on an Instagram story, it’s socially meaningless because, who cares? When someone uses that one-liner as the framework for a thinkpiece that goes viral, it becomes a bit of a bitter pill to swallow, because suddenly a lot of people care about someone who not only platformed themselves with swacked humor, but someone who isn’t you. This exact situation has never happened to me before so I can only speculate on what I would actually do if faced with this dilemma, but the point is that situations like these hardly ever feel impersonal. Even non-influencers internalize that logic of selling ourselves at the high price of our most valuable ideas, and it’s hard to let go of feelings of ownership in an economy that values a constant flow of newer, more original content—whether it be a take or a tweet or a piece of influencer content. To quote De La Soul, “Stakes Is High.”