Letter from the Editor

There is a Super Bowl happening every single minute simultaneously on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube shorts: over 300 million views a minute. This staggering rate of consumption yields over 500 billion views on social content every day, a number of such incomprehensible scale, our feeble lizard brains can’t really understand it.

If the vast scale didn’t make navigation hard enough, the internet is also not fixed; it’s breathing and expanding and changing under our very feet. Yet, faced with these geospatial challenges, brands almost uniformly set out to “make an impact” with no particular destination, no understanding of the landscape, no map, nary a compass. Maybe, if they’re particularly well-prepared, there’s a sad, shallow “strategy” document. What good will that do when one is lost in the proverbial woods?

If never-ending convulsive change is the prevailing condition, is it any wonder so many brands stay lost? There is, however, a simple solution. At Fohr, we believe a good map is an essential part of any successful journey, and a great map not only guides you into new, unexplored places but also grants the privilege of seeing the familiar with new eyes. It’s why this edition of the Fohr Almanac of Influence takes the form of a vintage road atlas and represents, in its content, our fascination with and devotion to mapping.

This follows a larger shift at Fohr: we started the company to be a kind of directory or phone book to the internet - a helpful tool when you knew exactly what you were looking for - but, increasingly, we see ourselves as cartographers, drawing maps driven by data that help brands navigate the cosmos of culture.

In this edition we tour Africa’s creator constellations, trace the rise of seed oil discourse from forums to the mainstream, and explore how NIL athletes are redrawing the playbook for cultural capital. There’s a talent map of queer creators, a word search through the lexicon of the chronically online, and a state-of-taste survey charting Gen Z archetypes. We make the case for hi-fi beauty in an age of lo-fi aesthetics, ruminate on friendship as the peak conduit of influence, and hear about the creators your favorite creators follow.

So unfold this edition, trace the lines, see where you end up.

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JAMES NORD
FOUNDER + CEO

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CREDITS

Every effort has been made to trace accurate ownership of copyrighted materials used in this publication. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions, provided notification is sent to the publisher.

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ABOUT FOHR

Fohr is the influencer advertising agency and platform for category-leading brands needing breakthrough creative and impact. While others chase trends, we create and predict them through the industry’s deepest cultural mapping and proprietary platform technology. Our team lives in emerging culture and identifies rising niche creators before they break mainstream. With the industry’s largest knowledge base—12 years and 6,000 campaigns of data, 300,000+ opt-in creators, and platform tools with prescriptive benchmarking—we transform creators from tactical add-ons into strategic business drivers across your entire marketing funnel. In today’s attention economy where AI creates average, our cultural intelligence delivers breakthrough results from awareness to conversion. Click here to learn more.