UTA Marketing’s Shaina Zafar asks brands whether social media is still social

Shaina Zafar, who works as an executive in the Next Gen Practice at UTA Marketing, has a question that often stops chief marketing officers short. It is not about TikTok, creator fees or which demographic scores best on brand recall, but something more basic: “Is social media still social?”

Her argument is that the platforms around which brands have built their digital strategies are being reshaped by their heaviest users. Instagram, she says, has shifted from curated feeds to casual photo dumps, and younger people increasingly post to close friends lists rather than performing in public.

She notes that 10% of users produce 90% of content. The public side of social, which brands can see, measure and target, therefore reflects less and less of where real engagement happens. That has moved into DMs, group chats and close friends lists. “The funniest part of any video is the comment section more than the content itself.”

Zafar was speaking at Possible in Miami. Next Gen Practice was formed in 2024 when talent agency UTA bought JUV Consulting, a Gen Z strategy business she had co-founded aged 17. The purchase showed how much Gen Z spending appealed to UTA, an agency more often associated with sports stars and Hollywood names.

Reading the signals

Brands often approach Zafar wanting a translator for a hard-to-reach generation. Her message is that young consumers already show what they want, provided marketers look in the right places.

“Sometimes, brands are reverse-engineering the product to then be the campaign,” she said, “when in reality, people are telling you in real time, unlike ever before, what they’re craving.”

That insight, she argues, sits in plain view in comment sections and other social behaviour. Brands often lack the fluency to interpret it, or the internal pace to respond, without reducing it to a campaign deck. Next Gen Practice’s job is to explain the cultural signals behind why things become popular, not just to identify which creators are in demand.

Zafar sees two forces shaping media that appear to conflict but do not. One is the rise of absurd, darkly comic content, such as a TikTok account whose millions of devoted followers come for one dance, set to one song, repeated endlessly. The other is a move towards private, high-trust spaces: close friends lists, group chats and run clubs that are arranged online but meet with phones put away.

Both, she says, respond to the same underlying mood. She describes people using TikTok for emotional relief. “The comments will say, ‘I came here to feel better, to feel happier, to feel lighter.’”

Brands that barge into this carelessly risk ridicule or irrelevance. But Zafar rejects the idea that brands should just pursue authenticity, a term she regards as close to meaningless in marketing. What matters is whether a brand knows clearly enough what it stands for to recognise which cultural moments are genuinely close to it. “You don’t have to engage with every single trend or every single type of creator.”

She cited skincare brand Eos, which moved fast after a creator stuck in Egypt with his pet made a public appeal, sending him a package with the supplies he needed. “To have the dexterity and the ability to work that quickly and to react to what’s happening in culture in real time is incredibly difficult for brands to do, particularly legacy ones,” she said.

Giving up control

To get the best from creators, Zafar argues, brands must accept a loss of control they will probably find uncomfortable. Prescriptive briefs of the kind long used in advertising do not work with influencers, and policing brand guidelines will not help. “No one cares that the bottle’s 90 degrees left or right. It is about the way they tell a story and the way they’re integrating the product into the content they’re making.”

The strongest influencer content, she says, comes from relationships grounded in immersion in culture, not analytics dashboards. Her team runs a Slack channel where staff share creators they personally like. “We’re not going on a tech platform searching for which creators have which demographic following,” she said. “We’ll just DM them and be like, ‘We like your content.’ There’s no agenda. We’re just saying we’re fans of what you’re doing.”

Long-term partnerships work better than one-off deals, she said, because creators who genuinely like a brand will tell their followers without being asked. “That’s the best advertising you can get,” she said. “People love working with good people.” Reducing the hierarchy between brand and creator, she added, consistently delivers more than the brief requested.

Engagement over followers

Zafar sees follower numbers as a lagging indicator at best. “I honestly think it’s all about the engagement ratio,” she said.

A harder thing to measure is whether a creator has moved from being someone people follow to someone who feels like a friend, even to strangers. She cited a creator called Pookie as an example of this “parasocial” bond, saying he is recognised in public more often than more conventionally famous people around him because followers feel invested in his life.

Brands that are succeeding with younger audiences, she argues, have adopted a different outlook. “It’s a fundamental reimagination of what we think marketing is meant to do.”

She pointed to Yahoo as an example of a legacy brand repositioning itself through sustained community building rather than one-off youth stunts. That has included dinners at which people from business, culture and tech talk about where the internet is heading, and a search engine called Scout that is still in beta. The approach, she said, is “much less flashy and a lot more thoughtfully done.”

Every brand risks turning into the Steve Buscemi meme in which he greets ‘fellow kids’. Zafar says success depends on storytelling and on brands rethinking where their job starts. “It’s not even Gen Z native, it’s culture native,” she said. “If we are choosing to tell the stories that no one else is saying before they actually become mainstream, that, to me, is the insight that marketers can lean into to get Gen Z affinity and get Gen Z loyalty.”