You Can't See Me, But I Can Make You Rich

The rise of Faceless Accounts on Instagram

French manicured hands type away on an Apple keyboard. A perfectly brewed latte sits on a perfectly organized desk. A thin woman with straight hair wrapped in a tight bun twirls, wearing what is almost certainly an oversized Zara blazer. Sometimes she's in front of the Eiffel Tower. Other times she's sitting in front of a mid-century modern chair. The light is always natural and yet the videos are almost always dim, which makes it easy to read the bold text and Stan store screenshots overlaid on top.

This would all be normal, par for the course on Instagram, were it not also for the underlying eerie truth: None of the women in these videos are the ones speaking. They're stock models, aesthetic B-Roll.

Their bodies are being used to sell a dream of financial freedom.

via Tinna’s Faceless Method

They call it a "Faceless Account." Search for the keyword on Instagram and I can guarantee your feed will be dominated by income claims and bold promises within 24 hours.

The premise is simple: You no longer need to get "camera ready" to grow an audience. Instead, you can purchase a subscription to a stock video service and choose from hundreds of luxury That Girl clean girl old money aesthetic clips of other women's bodies, offices, kitchens, hands, and vacations.

The promise isn't just that you'll gain more followers—as always, it's also that you'll make more money. The rise in Faceless Accounts on Instagram is directly tied to the popularity of "Master Resell Rights," or MRR, a growing trend in the online course industry.

Now, not only do you not need to show your face to build a “personal brand," you also don't even need to put in the labor to create and sell a digital marketing course of your own. You don't have to practice or study for years, experimenting with tools and strategies to figure out what works and how to understand it well enough to teach it. Now, you can simply buy a course from someone else, then resell it on your own platform to your own customers, who'll then retain the "rights" to do the same.

If it sounds MLM-y, well. Be careful how loudly you say it. Fans of the MRR model are quick to remind the critics and naysayers that they definitely do not retain a portion of sales for the people who resell after them, a practice at odds with the "downline" structure of Multi-Level Marketing schemes.

Still, the popularity of the Faceless Account and MRR course trend reeks of network marketing. In both, the core business model is at odds with the concept of supply and demand. If all of your customers inevitably become your competition, selling the same courses and using the same video clips, isn't it still true that the only ones who will truly profit are the ones who "get in early?"

I've been thinking about writing this for the last few weeks, after posting a Thread (I know) about how strange it is to see these accounts speaking in first-person while using an array of different women to tell their story. In some, the hands typing on the keyboard or writing down the to-do list change skin colors from one video to the next. The digital avatar is blonde, then brunette, then blonde and blonde and blonde again. She is almost always thin, conventionally beautiful in an "IYKYK" kind of way: You can almost never see her entire face, but you can see her perfectly blown out hair, the sliver of skin suggesting a flat stomach, the manicured nails implying expendable income. She is disembodied, separated from her true thoughts or feelings, a stand-in for other people's income claims. I find myself wanting to scream through the screen, to grab her by the shoulders and ask her: Is this what you really wanted?

via Kelly’s Faceless Marketing Collective

The poster, on the other hand, reveals almost nothing about herself, other than perhaps how much money she’s making and how dramatically her life has been transformed by starting a Faceless Account. Her caption space is dedicated instead to what are often genuinely helpful tidbits of advice or digital marketing strategy. Still, it does not feel like a reach to wonder whether soon we'll see these profiles powered entirely by AI, nor to question whether any of the stories they're telling in the captions or stories are true.

For an audience already somewhat aware of how easy it is to Photoshop a Stripe screenshot and make it look like you've made more money than you have, it does in some ways feel like a dangerous gamble to take with the most important asset a business has:

Trust.

Really this is all Instagram's fault.

The platform, which has always prioritized aesthetics, is now more than ever prioritizing short, easily loopable clips of beauty. There are few "hooks" more engaging than those that claim to have made a great deal of money in a short period of time, which is why the Stan store screenshots work so well. A part of me is curious whether the app's latest policy update cracking down on reposts will affect the Faceless Account trend, or if perhaps the "10 Irresistible Hook Ideas To Make A Lot Of Money Really Fast" text overlaid on top will qualify the stock videos as original.

When I posted to Threads questioning the trend, someone with a Faceless Account replied within minutes to passionately defend the strategy. (No doubt the algorithm dropped it right on their digital doorstep as engagement bait.) We went back and forth for a while, me interacting with an anonymous avatar of a woman (not them) laying on the grass, her interacting with a black and white photo of my face.

She told me that her Faceless Account is a way for her to fulfill her mission. Specifically, it's a way for her to reach busy, overwhelmed moms—her target audience.

All that’s left of the exchange.

If we choose to see these accounts for what they are, small businesses, then it makes some sense that they might use stock images and videos. In that sense, it's not unlike an advertising agency or a web designer finding appropriate assets to reflect a particular idea. I use stock video on some of my own sales pages, clips of artist studios and dolphins and old computers and cannabis plants stitched together to tell a story about the kind of community a potential customer might find inside.

I guess my question, then, is what ideal is really being sold?

Does a busy, overwhelmed mother who doesn't have time to get "camera ready" but desperately wants to make more money to support her family relate to the video of the 20-something twirling in front of the Eiffel Tower? Or is she instead being sold a dream, an ideal, a projection of what and who she is supposed to be?

What's more, is she being sold that dream by someone who's ever even come close to actually living it?

Of course, there's also always the chance that I'm just bitter because I've spent the last 10 years working in the entrepreneurship industry making and developing digital marketing resources, and it takes a shit ton of effort to do it well. I spend anywhere from 1-4 hours a week teaching classes live, answering questions and offering support to very real people who are struggling to market their small business. I know from experience that no matter how many step-by-step guides I make, what people always really need is a human. A teacher. Someone who sees their effort and can offer genuine feedback on how to keep moving forward.

I also refuse to buy one of these MRR courses, which means I can't answer the one question that's really plaguing me:

Who is teaching?

Whose brand are they actually building? Whose authority are they cementing with each and every resell? Are they solely text-based courses, or is there someone there on the inside, saying hello, and serving as the true expert of the whole charade? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure in posting this someone will pop up to tell me.

At the end of the day, I do empathize with and fully understand how overwhelming it is to feel like you constantly need to be generating high-quality, Pinterest-level "aesthetic" content in order to be seen. I recognize how challenging it is to fight against an algorithm that seems to prioritize beauty over substance. I also don't believe that every business needs to be "face-first," or an extension of the owner's personal brand, or reliant on lifestyle marketing.

I guess I just can't help but wonder: Who, at the end of the day, is really profiting from the dream?