Canadian comedy creator Stewart Reynolds jokingly admits he is jealous of the brand deals his son gets, deals he says he would not get himself because, at fifty-six, he is not young and fit. Yet according to a new marketing study, a creator's credibility grows with age, and credibility is exactly what boomers grant influencers far less than younger generations do. In a September 2026 survey by research firm Morning Consult, 31% of US boomers trust influencer recommendations at least somewhat, against 62% of Gen Z and 64% of millennials.
Influencer content annoys 26% of boomers, people born between 1946 and 1964, the highest share of any generation. Morning Consult surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,003 US adults for Business Insider. Among boomers, 43% have never bought anything on an influencer's recommendation.
A buyer who only purchases on a recommendation after months of following someone is hard to fit into a campaign measured by clicks. For brands accustomed to measuring influencer marketing success in clicks and immediate sales, such an audience may require a rethink. According to Lucy Kruszynski of influencer agency Buttermilk, some boomers follow creators for months, sometimes up to a year, before feeling comfortable buying something the creator has recommended.
Older people on social media in Czechia and the EU
In 2025, a quarter of Czechs aged 65 to 74 were on the social networks where people follow creators. Across the EU it was roughly a third of people the same age, and the share rose compared with 2024. The Czech share did not increase over the same period. Among Czechs ten years younger, half are on social networks.
Plenty of people become set in their ways and harder to persuade as they age, Business Insider concedes. But advertising pros also see a possible cause of boomers' distrust in the brands themselves, which continue to overlook the older generation. According to Jennifer Meehan, an executive vice president at communications agency Edelman, brands are terrified of moving even a single dollar away from speaking to young people. Yet in a November 2025 analysis by Visa, boomers make up 12% of affluent US households and account for 42% of their spending.
When choosing creators for brands, influencer marketing managers say age is rarely the deciding factor, but that older influencers often sell better. The study's authors interviewed managers. One of the authors is Florian Dost, professor of marketing at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg. Speaking about agencies and clients, Dost told Business Insider: “Agencies may know that. They certainly sometimes try to put it forth because they also see the numbers. But clients don't want to hear.”
According to the study, middle-aged creators perform best
In a field experiment on TikTok, according to the study Dost co-authored, AI personas aged between their late forties and mid-fifties got the most views, and all the models converged on this peak. According to the models, they got 70 to 90% more views than a twenty-year-old persona. The authors draw on four pre-registered studies. Writing in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science in 2026, they described the relationship between creator age and results as an inverted U, in which results first rise and then fall. Credibility rises with age, attractiveness declines, and together the two determine the result.
On real Instagram accounts, however, engagement peaked among younger creators, at around twenty-seven. Engagement then fell until roughly forty. In an online experiment in a LinkedIn setting, older respondents perceived influencers as less credible. In an Instagram-like setting, by contrast, they perceived them as more credible. One of the statistical models also found a further peak on real accounts at around fifty-six, which is Reynolds's age, and another at around eighty-eight.
According to Reynolds, older consumers rarely see themselves reflected in influencer marketing, which usually favours young, attractive creators, yet his own audience under the Brittlestar name is, by his account, 45% over the age of forty-five. Brittlestar is a family production. His wife and sons film for it, and so does Reynolds's mother, Bette. And he has landed a good number of brand deals himself, including with Yorkshire Tea, even though by his own account he is not young and fit.
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