Athletes Instead Of Influencers - We're Back Here Again

Elemis spent last season in the Aston Martin garage. Three-year agreement, the first Official Skincare Partner any Formula One team has had, activated at Albert Park in March 2025.

Within weeks of that announcement my phone started going. Skincare brands, more than one, wanting to know how it had been done and who you talk to, what the objective was, what the outcome looked like and how anyone would measure it, and what it cost. None of them had been thinking about sport a year earlier, and all of them wanted in.

Since then the pattern has kept going. First Aid Beauty put Ultra Repair Cream in the kit of every Team USA athlete at Milano Cortina in January and signed snowboarder Jamie Anderson and Para skier Sydney Jo Peterson to front it. Paula's Choice took the FIFA World Cup in May, and the 2027 Women's World Cup with it. Mecca is back at the Australian Open with a three-storey hub in The Village, and Sephora has bought into the WNBL for 2026/27.

So here are the answers to the questions I keep being asked, in the order they usually arrive.

Why it works

An athlete comes with a public record. She did the thing, and there is footage and a scoreboard that was indifferent to whether any of it suited a brand. When she talks about recovery or barrier repair, the claim sits on a body that visibly does hard things. A creator sells reach, which is real and which works, but it was assembled by an algorithm and the same algorithm can take it back inside a quarter.

The numbers have caught up. OpenSponsorship looked at 14.9 million posts for its 2026 report and found athlete content running at 10.97 per cent engagement against 4.92 per cent for creators. Average deal size doubled between 2024 and 2025 to just over USD 5,000, so brands are turning up with more money rather than hunting a discount.

Elemis is the one to study if you want the logic rather than the glamour. Nielsen research cited at the announcement put women at 41 per cent of Formula One's audience, with women aged 16 to 24 the fastest-growing group in the sport. A spa brand in a paddock stopped being a strange idea the moment somebody read that number.

It would be neat to add that consumer trust in influencers has collapsed, and it has not, quite. The Influencer Trust Index from BBB National Programs' National Advertising Division, run with The Benchmarking Company across 3,720 American consumers, found 87 per cent trusting company advertising against 74 per cent for influencer advertising, and only 5 per cent trusting influencer content completely.

Yet 58 per cent had still bought something because of an influencer. People are buying from voices they do not believe. What has actually happened is a sorting. The paid macro-creator, whose business model is visible to everyone watching, has lost ground, and the person with a reason to be listened to has gained it.

What it costs

This is where most of the calls end. Bondi Sands' founder has put the entry point for an Australian Open partnership at around a million dollars. Elemis has not disclosed its F1 numbers, and I would not expect it to, but nothing in that paddock is cheap and the activation cost sits on top of the rights fee. For almost every brand in the professional channel, this is the wrong question to be asking.

Who counts as influential keeps rotating

The mistake is reading this as beauty rediscovering sport. What moves is the answer to a different question, which is who a category agrees to treat as influential, and that answer has been going round in a circle for sixty years.

Models held it first, when the face was the product and the job was to embody an aesthetic. Film and music took it next, and Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds has sold more than USD 1.5 billion since 1991. Athletes had a turn, which is what Nike bought when it signed Michael Jordan in 1984. Then television, and a reality era that made a family famous for being watched and converted that into cosmetics companies. Then influencers took the turn off all of them.

Each group has collapsed the same way, and that matters more than the order they came in. J.Lo's Glow landed in 2002, and by 2004 the wider J.Lo line was turning over USD 325 million a year. By 2012, one count puts 85 celebrity fragrances launching in a single year against roughly 10 a decade earlier. Oversupply compressed the margins and the attention together, and the category has been pronounced dead several times since. Influencers ran the same arc in about half the time.

What separates the current turn is the qualification underneath. A model could hold an aesthetic on camera, a musician had songs people chose to listen to, an actor had a body of work, and an athlete had a record. In every case the influence was a by-product of having done something. With influencers the influence was the whole qualification, with nothing sitting under it, and audiences worked that out.

Which is why role model is the better word for where we have landed. Someone worth wanting to be like, for a reason that survives being said out loud.

The Australian answer

For anyone selling into aesthetics here, this stopped being a marketing preference in September 2025, when AHPRA's cosmetic procedure guidelines came into force across every profession and banned influencer testimonials outright. The practitioner has to be identifiable in the advertising. The TGA has named cosmetic injectables a compliance priority through to 2027 and treats paid, organic, educational, and user-generated content as advertising without distinction. The regulator has already made the decision the consumer market is only now arriving at.

Which brings me to the example I actually point people towards, and it is not an eight-figure global sponsorship.

O Cosmedics is Australian made, Australian owned, founded by Maria Enna-Cocciolone and sold only through the professional channel. It announced a partnership with Matildas defender Alanna Kennedy ahead of the 2023 Women's World Cup. Ellie Carpenter has also carried the brand.

The detail sits in the announcement. Kennedy had been using O Cosmedics for more than seven years before any commercial arrangement existed. Nobody went shopping for a face that fitted a media plan. A customer who had already chosen the product, in private, with her own money, for the better part of a decade, happened also to be one of the most watched athletes in the country, and the brand formalised what was already true.

The usage came first and the contract came second. That is the inversion of how creator deals get assembled, and it is the only part of any of this that a brand without a million dollars can copy.

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Where your credibility already lives

The instinct after reading about Elemis is to go and find an athlete. For a handful of brands with the budget and the category logic, fair enough. For most of the businesses ringing me, it is an expensive answer to a problem they have already solved without noticing.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, across 34,000 respondents in 28 countries, found people trusting their employer at 78 per cent and their neighbour at 64 per cent, against 53 per cent for national government. A salon owner or clinic principal is both of those things at once, to a client base that has been sitting in her chair for years.

So the highest-credibility voices available to a professional brand are its own educators, its top accounts, its BDMs, and the practitioners who have run the product on paying clients for five years and can tell you exactly what happened. None of them need discovering. They need resourcing, briefing, filming properly, and something worth saying.

What to do on Monday

Go through the ambassador list and ask one thing of each name. Has this person done the thing we are paying them to talk about? Anyone who fails is selling reach, and reach should be bought and measured as media rather than dressed up as endorsement.

Then run the O Cosmedics test over everyone left. Who is already using this without being paid? That list is longer than most brands assume, and it is where credibility is cheapest and hardest to dislodge.

Then take the money that comes back and spend it on the people who passed. Fund the educator's content properly instead of asking her to shoot it on a Sunday. Put a camera on a real treatment in a real clinic and go back at twelve weeks. Pay a practitioner for the hours it takes to document a case series, which costs more than a creator post and holds up in front of a sceptical buyer and a regulator, which the creator post does not.

We spent a decade learning that attention can be bought. What this turn is teaching is older and less convenient, which is that somebody has to earn the credibility before anyone else is able to borrow it. The brands getting this right are backing people who already deserve to be listened to, and most of those people sit a good deal closer to hand than an F1 paddock.