This article was published in 2025 and references a historical event from 2013, included here for context and accuracy.
- Tension: Brands invest heavily in crafting perfect messages while customers ignore them in favor of imperfect recommendations from people they know.
- Noise: The obsession with content quality, ad targeting precision, and creative execution distracts from the fundamental question of who’s delivering the message.
- Direct message: Trust doesn’t scale through better advertising—it scales through the people who already believe in what you’re selling.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
In 2013, Rob Fuggetta posed a question that should have made every CMO uncomfortable: who would customers trust more at the moment of purchase, your brand’s carefully crafted promise or their mom’s offhand recommendation?
“The research is compellingly clear on this point: 92% of people trust word-of-mouth recommendations and recommendations from their peers,” said Fuggetta, CEO of brand advocacy platform Zuberance, citing numbers from Nielsen. “But only 33% of people trust online ads.”
That gap (92% versus 33%) wasn’t a marginal difference requiring optimization. It was a structural problem with how marketing worked. Brands were pouring resources into the least trusted channel while largely ignoring the most trusted one.
A decade later, that gap hasn’t closed. If anything, it’s widened as ad fatigue increases and algorithmic feeds make paid content even more suspect.
The woman who named her daughter after fish tacos
Fuggetta’s client Rubio’s, a West Coast Mexican restaurant chain, ran an experiment that illustrated the depth of brand advocacy most companies never tap into. They asked advocates a simple question: “Tell us about when you had your first Rubio’s fish taco.”
More than 20,000 people responded. One woman shared that she craved Rubio’s fish tacos so intensely during pregnancy that she ate them morning, noon, and night at 38 weeks. She named her daughter Ruby. She went into labor while eating one.
This wasn’t content a marketing team could write. It wasn’t something you could pay an influencer to manufacture. It was genuine, specific, and memorable in ways that professional creative rarely achieves. But here’s what mattered more: it existed without prompting. The woman already felt this way. Rubio’s just gave her a platform to express it.
That’s the insight most brands miss. They assume advocacy needs to be created through incentives, campaigns, or gamification. In reality, advocacy already exists. The challenge isn’t manufacturing enthusiasm. It’s identifying who has it and making it easy for them to share.
Why we keep choosing the expensive, ineffective option
If word-of-mouth is twelve times more trusted than advertising, why do marketing budgets still tilt heavily toward paid media?
Partly because paid media is controllable. You write the script, choose the timing, select the audience, measure the impressions. Advocacy is messier. You can’t dictate what people say or when they say it. You can’t guarantee they’ll stay on message.
But control is expensive and increasingly ineffective. Forrester projected 500 billion impressions on the social web in 2013 alone, a number that’s only grown. Most of those impressions came from people sharing content with people they knew, not from brands broadcasting to strangers. Yet marketing infrastructure (agencies, ad tech, attribution models) remained built around the paid model because that’s where the revenue lived.
Fuggetta described advocacy as an extension of your marketing department “but with more authentic street cred.” One client with 100,000 advocates in his network said his marketing department had “100,005 people—100,000 brand advocates and five paid marketers.” That ratio should terrify traditional marketing organizations. It suggests most of what they do could be replaced by making it easier for customers to share what they already think.
The Direct Message
The brands that win don’t necessarily have better products. They have customers willing to vouch for them when it matters most.
This distinction matters because purchase decisions rarely happen in the moment you see an ad. They happen later, in different contexts, often triggered by conversations. Someone mentions they’re looking for a new restaurant. You remember the fish taco story. That’s the moment advocacy converts, not when the brand tweet appeared in your feed three weeks ago.
Fuggetta noted that you might encounter 3,000 advertising messages in a day but struggle to name a single one if asked. Meanwhile, if a friend recommended something yesterday, you’ll remember it. That’s not because friend recommendations are more frequent or more visible. It’s because they arrive with built-in credibility and relevance. Your friend knows you, knows your preferences, and has no financial incentive to mislead you.
What kills advocacy before it starts
The instinct when discovering advocacy’s power is to monetize it immediately. Offer advocates discounts for referrals. Create tiered reward programs. Turn enthusiasm into a transaction. Fuggetta warned explicitly against this. The first incentivized referral might work. By the second or third, results “fall off the table.”
Why? Because payment transforms the relationship. An unpaid recommendation signals genuine belief. A paid one signals self-interest. Your friends tolerate your enthusiasm. They resent being turned into your sales funnel. “It’s sort of like pimping out your customers and giving them a T-shirt or a fiver in return,” Fuggetta said.
This matters more in 2025 than 2013. Referral schemes, affiliate links, and creator partnerships have made people more skeptical of recommendations generally. We’ve learned to ask “are they getting paid for this?” before trusting what we hear. Brands that incentivize advocacy risk contaminating the one channel that still carries genuine trust.
The alternative Fuggetta proposed was simpler: identify people who already recommend you (Zuberance used the Net Promoter “ultimate question”: “Would you recommend us?”), give them tools to share easily (templates, images, shareable content), and track what happens without paying for it.
About 50% of customers said they’d recommend companies they do business with. Of those, roughly 30% would actually advocate if you made it easy. That’s a 15% conversion rate from total customers to active advocates, requiring no payment.
Why this still matters
A decade after Fuggetta’s observations, the fundamental dynamics haven’t changed. Trust in advertising has declined further. Word-of-mouth remains the most influential channel. Yet marketing budgets and organizational structures still prioritize paid media because it’s measurable, controllable, and supports entire industries built around it.
The lesson isn’t that paid media is worthless. It’s that most brands are underinvesting in the channel that actually drives decisions. They’re not asking who their advocates are. They’re not making it easier for enthusiastic customers to share. They’re not tracking which personal recommendations convert. They’re certainly not thinking of their customer base as an extension of their marketing team.
The woman who named her daughter after fish tacos did more for Rubio’s brand than any billboard or Instagram ad could. Not because her story reached millions of people, but because it reached the right people with a level of credibility no paid content can match.
That’s what earned media means: trust you didn’t have to manufacture because someone else is lending you theirs. The brands that figure out how to systematically enable that won’t just save on ad spend. They’ll win conversations happening in contexts they can’t access any other way.
