Boundaries: Political Speech Versus Brand Contracts

What began as scrappy self-publishing has become a finely tuned industry machine. Influencing is now big business. Four of the industry’s most influential creators came together at BoF VOICES 2025 to take a hard look at what influencing has become — and where it should go in the future. 

Susanna Lau opens the conversation by ditching the earnest tropes and asking a harder question: how can creators keep their integrity as agencies, briefs and budgets multiply?

Bryan Yambao reflects on the pre-iPhone “wild west” — scanning magazines, posting affiliate links from his bedroom in Manila, and the shock of realising that the people he wrote about were suddenly reading him.

Camille Charrière charts the shift from “do your thing” freedom to 30-page briefs and layered gatekeepers, arguing that creators must push back to preserve the audience trust that made them valuable in the first place.

And through the lens of satire, Gstaad Guy challenges brands to confront what their communities are already saying — before they say it out loud.

Together, they interrogate luxury’s malaise — and the need to recalibrate the industry around craft, community and credibility.

Key Insights: 

• Even with industry recognition, Yambao still feels like an outsider and uses that distance to stay candid. “I still feel like I’m an outsider,” he says, recalling the early days: “There was no roadmap. All I knew was that I had a voice.” The monetisation that followed, from early affiliate cheques to today’s industrialised commerce media, only reinforced his responsibility. “Since I kind of have a seat [at] the table, I want to say things with meaning and hold people to a higher standard,” he says.

• Charrière argues creators aren’t brand billboards — they’re people with convictions, and audience trust depends on that. After a year of speaking out, she recalls a major house “got me on a call with seven lawyers saying that now in my contract it was going to be written that I had to be neutral politically because I’d gone to a protest.” She continues, “I said, absolutely not.I’m not a brand. I’m an ambassador for you, but we are people, we are not brands … my online self is an extension of my offline self.”

• Gstaad Guy argues that credibility now depends on pre-empting audience scepticism. “Consumers are getting smarter, products are getting dumber,” he says. The remedy is to meet somewhere in between and let creators use their own language to test narratives honestly: “Have someone like [me] say something first so you can tell the story … the language of comedy and satire allows for that to be more digestible,” he says.

Additional Resources:

• Susanna Lau, Bryan Yambao, Camille Charrière and Gstaad Guy: Twenty Years of the Influencer Economy in Fashion | BoF 
• Gstaad Guy | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry 
• Camille Charrière | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry 
• Bryan Grey Yambao | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.