Strategy

The Suspicion Economy Is Eating Brand Marketing From the Inside

Fake fan pages, algorithm slot machines, and 100 million unpaid views later — consumers have stopped believing anything is real. Some brands are doubling down. Others are betting on the opposite.

Written by Rachel Sloane · Bureau Business · Jun 18, 2026

The Slot Machine Model

Arby's Boys looks like a TikTok account run by a few guys with too much time and a curly-fry obsession. Cars stuffed with Arby's food. Cashiers playing with finger skateboards mid-transaction. Absurdist captions. Thirty-three thousand likes on a single post.

It is not a fan account. It is Cousin Labs, an agency hired by Arby's to produce content engineered to move through interest-based algorithms. According to Cousin Labs, the account has accumulated more than 100 million unpaid views in six months with roughly 45,000 followers — a ratio that only makes sense if the content is being surfaced to non-followers at scale.

That is the point. TikTok's For You feed, and the interest-based systems that followed it on Instagram and YouTube, broke the old constraint: you no longer need an audience to reach one. For brands, that changed the calculus entirely. Build something that the algorithm rewards, and follower count becomes irrelevant.

The problem is that everyone figured this out at once.

What Happens When Nothing Feels Real

University of Michigan marketing professor Marcus Collins traces the trust deficit back decades — lead paint, cigarette marketing to children, a long record of brands saying one thing and doing another. But the algorithmic shift accelerated the damage.

When follower counts mattered, brands had an incentive to manage posting frequency carefully. Flood your followers and they leave. Under interest-based distribution, that friction disappears. Volume becomes a strategy. And the content that performs best often looks least like advertising.

Social media marketing consultant Rachel Karten, who writes the Link in Bio newsletter, puts it plainly: the FTC still instructs brands to make disclosures clear and prominent, but enforcement has dropped sharply. "It feels like a free for all," she says, "and it's on marketing teams to decide where they find their line, which is not a good thing."

The Arby's Boys account carries the hashtag #arbyspartner on each post. Its Instagram bio describes it as the "largest Arby's fanpage." Whether that combination clears the disclosure bar is, at minimum, an open question.

The Cost Shows Up in Behavior, Not Surveys

The suspicion economy's most measurable consequence is where trust has relocated. Brand consultancy Iconic's James Kirkham describes a migration toward dark social — group chats, trusted newsletters, small podcasts with engaged comment sections. Private channels where brand mediation is low and the signal-to-noise ratio feels higher.

"Private is real to most people," Kirkham says, "but big public is now seen by so many as performative, and therefore something to doubt."

That behavioral shift has a dollar figure attached to it. PQ Media data shows experiential marketing spending grew 8.3% to $138.94 billion in 2025, with another 10.3% projected for 2026. Brands are paying to put people in physical proximity to products because digital impressions have become too cheap and too suspect to carry the weight they once did.

Burger King's move earlier this year — routing customer calls directly to brand president Tom Curtis for two weeks, nights and weekends included — was an explicit attempt to counter that skepticism with something harder to fake: access and accountability.

The Bifurcation That Matters

Two strategies are now running in parallel. One treats the algorithm as infrastructure to be exploited, prioritizing reach over relationship. The other treats earned trust as a scarce asset worth protecting, even at the cost of short-term impressions.

Collins frames the choice in terms that any operator should recognize: attention is a commodity, connection is not. "Likes, attention, buzz — these things are fleeting," he says. "If I were a CMO, I'm asking how do we connect with audiences based on the way that we see the world?"

For brands with long replacement cycles or high customer acquisition costs, the answer to that question has direct margin implications. A view from someone who doesn't believe you is worth less than it looks on a dashboard.

Key takeaways

Arby's Boys, a social account with 100 million unpaid views in six months, is run by a hired agency — not fans — illustrating how brands now manufacture the appearance of organic enthusiasm.
The shift from follower-based to interest-based algorithms removed the natural brake on brand content volume, enabling a 'slot machine' approach that floods feeds and deepens consumer skepticism.
FTC disclosure enforcement has weakened, leaving individual marketing teams to self-police the line between labeled advertising and disguised brand content.
Experiential marketing spending grew 8.3% to $138.94 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow another 10.3% in 2026, as brands chase the trust that digital channels can no longer reliably deliver.
Trust has migrated to private channels — group chats, newsletters, small podcasts — where brand mediation is minimal and audiences apply less automatic skepticism.

FAQ

What is the 'suspicion economy' and why does it matter for brand operators?

The suspicion economy describes a consumer environment where audiences default to assuming brand intent is adversarial — that any piece of content, viral moment, or cultural event is probably an ad. For operators, it means that impressions and views are increasingly poor proxies for actual brand equity, and that content strategies optimized purely for algorithmic reach may be actively eroding the trust needed to convert attention into sales.

Is the Arby's Boys account disclosing its brand relationship?

Cousin Labs, the agency behind the account, says every post carries the hashtag #arbyspartner and that all disclosures meet FTC requirements. Critics note that the account's bio describes it as a fan page, which creates ambiguity about whether the disclosure is prominent enough to meet the spirit of FTC guidelines — particularly as enforcement has weakened.

Why are brands spending more on experiential marketing?

PQ Media data shows experiential marketing grew 8.3% to $138.94 billion in 2025, with further growth projected. The driver is straightforward: physical experiences are harder to fake and harder for consumers to dismiss as manufactured. As digital trust has eroded, brands are paying a premium for the credibility that comes from putting people in direct contact with a product or environment.

How did the shift from follower-based to interest-based algorithms change brand behavior?

Under follower-based systems, brands had to manage posting frequency carefully to avoid alienating their existing audience. Interest-based algorithms — pioneered by TikTok's For You feed — removed that constraint. Brands can now post at high volume without risking follower attrition, and content that mimics user-generated posts tends to outperform clearly labeled advertising, creating a structural incentive to blur the line.

Where are consumers going when they stop trusting public social feeds?

Research and practitioner observation both point to private or semi-private channels: group chats, curated newsletters, small podcasts with tight community engagement. These environments have lower brand mediation and higher perceived authenticity, which is why some marketers are now prioritizing presence in those spaces over traditional social reach metrics.

Citations

'I hope this isn't a marketing stunt.' The destructive art of hacking attention — and what comes afterArby's Boys accumulated more than 100 million unpaid views in six months with approximately 45,000 followers, according to Cousin Labs.
'I hope this isn't a marketing stunt.' The destructive art of hacking attention — and what comes afterExperiential marketing spending grew 8.3% to $138.94 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow 10.3% in 2026, per PQ Media data cited in the piece.
'I hope this isn't a marketing stunt.' The destructive art of hacking attention — and what comes afterSocial media marketing consultant Rachel Karten says FTC disclosure vigilance has significantly waned as enforcement has dropped, creating what she describes as 'a free for all.'
'I hope this isn't a marketing stunt.' The destructive art of hacking attention — and what comes afterJames Kirkham of Iconic describes trust migrating to dark social and private channels, where 'private is real to most people, but big public is now seen by so many as performative.'