Not that long ago, a campaign in this country meant writing a press release, calling a few newsrooms, and then waiting. You waited to see if it ran. You waited to see where they put it. Somebody in the office would go through the papers the next morning and cut out whatever appeared. That was the report. By the time you knew if it had worked, the moment was usually gone.

I have watched that whole system fall apart, piece by piece.

The first crack was Facebook. Dawn and Tribune were shifting their newsrooms online; people had started reading the news on a screen, and Facebook had a feature nobody really talks about anymore. Events. Closed group events. A lot of our early work happened there. Nobody was calling anyone an influencer at that point. The word did not exist here. There were people with a following, there were pages, and some of them could fill a room.

Pakistan had close to 80 million social media user identities by late 2025, and TikTok on its own now reaches more than half the adults in this country.

Pakistan had close to 80 million social media user identities by late 2025, and TikTok on its own now reaches more than half the adults in this country.

Then Instagram came, and what we now call the influencer economy actually started taking shape.

I want to be honest about those early years, because the version........

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