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The best influencer marketing advice never comes from a report
Think about the last thing that got you fired up about your job this year. Odds are it didn't come from a report. It came from someone who does the job, saying what happened when they tried it.
So we've filled a day with people like that.
Maya Shaff, ŌURA. Leah Walker, Adobe. Georgia Humphries, Stanley 1913. Enara Roy, Halfday. Tyler Vaught, Edelman. Josh Rangel, Ogilvy. Sarah Whittle, ex-Crocs and Duolingo.
And that's just the first wave of speakers.
Return on Influence Festival '26 is a free, virtual day dedicated to influencer marketing. Like any good festival, there are stages. But no mud, no queues, and absolutely no porta-potties.
Sign up today, and the rest of the lineup lands in your inbox first.
Dear Sentinels
Back in 2020, the New York Times let the cat out of the bag: Clearview AI had quietly hoovered up over 3 billion photos from the internet to build a facial recognition system that could pick you out from a single snap. No consent, no opt-out, just a lot of surprised faces. Suddenly, the old worry that our online photos might be used for surveillance was no longer just for the tinfoil hat brigade. Enter the University of Chicago's SAND Lab, who decided to fight fire with pixels. Their tool, Fawkes, doesn't bother hiding your face. Instead, it tweaks your photos in ways you can't see, but which send machine learning models into a tailspin. The result? Any facial recognition system trained on your 'cloaked' images ends up with a rather confused idea of what you look like. It's a bit of digital judo, using the quirks of deep learning against itself, and it gives ordinary internet users a fighting chance at privacy. In this edition, I'll walk you through how Fawkes works, what it can and can't do, and what it all means for the ongoing tug-of-war over facial recognition and consent.
