Cara Norris.
Cara Norris, Head of Growth and Partnerships, Social Soup
The ACCC recently fined Hismile $138,600 for product claims the regulator considered misleading and for posting social media videos in which employees posed as random shoppers. It’s understandable that the temptation is for headlines to focus on the punishment itself or the brand trust Hismile has destroyed, but this would obscure the biggest thing Hismile got wrong. The fine won’t move the needle for a brand of their size, but faking community endorsement is bad marketing strategy even before the regulator or your customers find out.
Hismile’s employees performing as strangers on camera might have added a veneer of authenticity on their own platforms, but every one of those videos was a missed opportunity to do the thing that actually builds brands on social platforms. Real creators bring real communities with them. They carry reach and trust into niches at a scale, speed and efficacy that most brands’ own channels can ever achieve. When Hismile worked with real creators in its early days, it was tapping into hundreds of trusted voices reaching their own unique, trusted communities to start a flywheel of influence that built a $20,000 startup into a global brand.
This is the same mistake showing up across the industry in different forms, think fake AI-generated product reviews or brands creating synthetic podcast episodes to game search rankings. All of it comes from the same misunderstanding: that the value of social and creator marketing is what appears on the platform and in the brand’s owned channels. The value is the real people and real communities behind the content: people who have their own audiences, credibility and reasons for recommending something. Strip all that away and you’re left with content that might look right but travels nowhere: a tempting shortcut that delivers less than doing it properly would have.
The creator economy in Australia is heading past $1 billion in spend this year. Brands are reallocating budgets into creator programs because the evidence says those programs drive awareness, consideration and conversion. To be clear, there is still an exchange of money when creators are approached to work with brands, but the disclosure of this has become common practice and the communities built around influencers are not deterred. This is because creators carefully build trust with their audience over time and carefully curate the deals they accept.
Creators depend on this trust to grow and protect their brand, it’s also what makes real creators so effective at delivering content that moves units. Social Soup's own research shows that 51% of creators have walked away from a brand deal they felt was inauthentic. The ACCC has been building toward policing authenticity on social platforms for three years, but audiences are better at sensing when something feels off than any regulator.
It’s easy to let the pressure to produce more content at greater volume override the discipline that makes the content valuable. This is the pressure every brand working in creator marketing is facing as the category grows. The temptation to take shortcuts will only get stronger as budgets increase and expectations rise. The key is to remember the shortcut costs more than it saves, well before the brand damage of breaking trust with your audience.
Hismile's growth remains one of the best arguments for the commercial power of working with real people. Their ACCC action is an own goal on top of a strategy that was already underperforming compared what could have been. Every video featuring an employee pretending to be a stranger could have featured a real creator reaching a real audience. The fine will pass and the headlines will fade. The reach, advocacy and community creators would have delivered is value Hismile will never collect.