Countering Crypto Hype With Influencer Literacy

• In the age of social media, financial decision-making among young people is shaped as much by emotional and social cues as by factual knowledge.
• Given the power now wielded by online influencers, our students need to understand the impact of persuasion, not just information.
• When students deconstruct and recreate influencer tactics in their own creative outputs, they gain a deeper understanding of how risk is framed, how trust is created, and how persuasion is now a matter of ethics.

 
Online content creators exploit methods of persuasion to convince their followers to buy trendy products or pursue risky fads. The danger is especially real when influencers perpetuate hype about cryptocurrency and other speculative investments. When an influencer’s followers fall for that hype, they can suffer financial harm: They misjudge risk, misplace trust, and make costly decisions.

At Nottingham Business School, we wanted to teach our undergraduates to be more savvy consumers of online financial content. With that in mind, we created a studio-based exercise. Supported by artificial intelligence (AI), the task was straightforward:  Undergraduate students learned influencer persuasion tactics and then reverse-engineered those tactics as they produced youth-facing videos designed to promote financial literacy.

Changing Financial Education

In the social media era, many young people’s financial decision-making is increasingly shaped by emotionally persuasive digital cultures. Social media influencers post messages encouraging teenagers and young adults to invest in questionable financial schemes, with the promise of easy gains.

These content creators—often referred to as “finfluencers”—use tactics that blur boundaries between entertainment, advice, and promotion. What’s worse, many of their followers are susceptible after years of exposure to the gambling-like mechanics embedded in online video games and similar platforms, which normalize risk-taking and minimize perceived harm.

Research suggests this content is engaging because it is social and aspirational, rather than informational. But although young people are increasingly influenced by these messages, formal financial education still focuses largely on delivering facts and warnings, paying little attention to how people respond to influencer tactics.

Financial education needs to change. Specifically, learners need practice recognizing how influencers make high-risk financial propositions feel safe, inevitable, or identity-affirming, as well as how these representations can distort people’s judgments about volatility, losses, time horizons, and credibility.

Financial education also must help students understand how persuasion works in the digital environments they inhabit daily. Our challenge is not simply to provide them with better information, but to shift their perspectives so that they recognize how narratives, emotions, and social cues shape judgment.

The Art of Persuasion—The Immersive Studio

We can meet this challenge by asking students to appropriate and repurpose these narratives and social cues as tools for social outreach and financial literacy.  They can do so using one of Gen Z’s most familiar persuasive formats: short-form music video. This format compresses identity, emotion, and social proof into seconds, making persuasion tactics visible.

With that in mind, we recently asked students in a core course in our MSc in International Business program to form intercultural Gen Z teams. Their assignment: Use AI tools to create 60-second music videos to be consumed on social media by others in their generation. To support their work, we created a physical immersive studio configured for flipped learning, featuring clustered team tables, shared screens, and wall space to accommodate whiteboards and Post-it notes.

Students can learn how persuasion works in digital environments by repurposing influencer tactics as tools for social outreach and financial literacy.

Much like an art studio, this space supports co-presence among teams, rapid peer critiques, and simultaneous social interaction and narrative construction. Teams can disagree with each other about what counts as manipulation versus legitimate persuasion, and those disagreements are where knowledge is formed.

As students worked on our influencer assignment, they decided what mood, imagery, slogan, and “community cue” to use to carry the messages of their videos. This agency made the usually hidden mechanics of influence discussable, contestable, and ethically examinable in ways that standard financial warnings do not.

They designed their videos for social feeds, with each team focusing on different financial literacy targets. For instance, the teams designed videos that showed viewers how to spot misleading promises of certainty, hidden incentives and affiliations, unrealistic return narratives, and  status signals that substitute for evidence.

The students became investigative storytellers. They appropriated the web of meanings by which the deceit unfolds but with the reverse aim: to show viewers how to recognize, resist, and counter it.

Learning the Tricks of the Influencer Trade

The teams began by watching crypto-influencer clips and posts and mapping the persuasion moves the influencers adopted. They primarily looked at three such moves: aspirational framing (lifestyle promise, identity upgrade); community signaling (insider language, belonging cues); and FOMO/urgency (“fear of missing out,” scarcity, countdowns).

The teams deconstructed these posts to identify the persuasive tactics used by the creators. They then wrote ethical counter-scripts that named different financial risks such as volatility, loss likelihood, and false promises of “guaranteed returns.” They pointed out signals of low credibility (such as the failure to disclose sponsorship).

Finally, they used generative AI to mimic influencer aesthetics, prototyping lyrics and scripts, generating draft audio (for creating hooks and song choruses), and creating visual concepts (scene prompts). They then assembled these elements to produce coherent 60-second videos, from storyboard to scripts and lyrics to audiovisual generation to final edit.

The students worked to translate influencer tactics into ethical warnings, being careful not to lose emotional force. The objective was not to achieve technical proficiency in video production but to make persuasive narratives inspectable. Students learned how a hook, caption, visual trope, or community cue works affectively, rather than just informationally.

The Missing Layer of Education

This assignment developed our students’ influencer literacy, which we believe is the missing layer of contemporary financial literacy. And it is a critical layer: It enables students to understand how high-risk propositions become believable in the first place.

Students debated the intentions and ethical implications embedded in influencer-style financial messaging, as well as the audiences targeted by those messages. They saw firsthand how financial decisions are socially shaped by platform conventions, performative authenticity, and community-based credibility.

Once students recognized when influencers were using certain tactics to bypass viewers’ risk reasoning, many realized that they, too, had been manipulated by influencer content.

Moreover, once students learned to recognize when influencers were using identity cues, social proof, and urgency to bypass viewers’ risk reasoning, many realized that they, too, had been manipulated by influencer content that they had previously consumed uncritically.

As they created their counter-messages, students learned that financial decision-making is not driven overtly by dry facts, but covertly by narrative power, emotional persuasion, cultural meaning, and social influence. They gained agency through authorship, so that creative production became a form of resistance to digital manipulation.

AI Can Turn Literacy Into Agency

Under normal circumstances, AI in education is often framed around efficiency, personalization, and automation. The problem is that AI use can encourage students to practice in isolation, so that their new skills fail to carry over into their everyday behaviors. The technology also can inadvertently reduce opportunities for students to engage in critical exchanges with their peers.

Our immersive studio offered a radically different model: AI became a collective, creative resource that prompted disagreement, negotiation, and shared scrutiny. As students explored different influencer methods, they used AI to collectively interpret AI-generated drafts: What is this implying? Who does it position as “us”? Where is the urgency cue?

What made this pedagogical approach work was that students were not told what to think about scams. Instead, together they investigated how scams are designed before creating counter-messages with equal attention to aesthetics, emotion, and platform logic. That reversal turned literacy into agency.

Wider Policy Implications

Policymakers increasingly recognize that persuasion operates through culture, identity, and belonging, and they no longer assume that digital financial harm is caused by ignorance alone. They are engaging in debates about passing relevant regulations to address influencers who present advertising in the guise of social legitimacy. Some government agencies and professional bodies have also published requirements and recommendations for finfluencers offering investment information on social media.

The growing challenge is how to support the efforts of policymakers through education. By integrating creative collective production, dialogue, and cultural analysis in a themed immersive experience, we offer a way to bridge this gap between influence and information.

In a digital culture where algorithms are tailored to each person’s preferences, collective digital authorship offers one way to counter deceptive appeals. When students are empowered to discern influencer methods of persuasion and learn the nuances of digital authorship, they are no longer passive content consumers. Instead, they become interpreters and producers of meaning.

Embedding Immersions in Business Curricula

For business schools, the implication is strategic. Our graduates will work in (and sometimes design) the systems that govern digital influence. They will work in areas such as fintech, compliance, analytics, and marketing, as well as with environmental, social, and governance policies. In each of these areas, they must understand the mechanics of persuasion in business messaging, not just the technical characteristics of products.

Teaching students to recognize manipulation and to build ethical counter-narratives is part of leadership formation, not just consumer education. If we want to teach responsible management education (RME), we can no longer treat persuasion, both online and offline, as a side topic. We must teach it as part of the ethical environment in which business is done.

Using our framework, business schools can integrate societal impact into core teaching while retaining disciplinary depth, meeting local priorities, and remaining committed to RME. Moreover, they can adapt the framework across subjects and contexts.

Teaching students to recognize manipulation and to build ethical counter-narratives is part of leadership formation, not just consumer education.

What travels to other disciplines is not the specific case, but the pedagogical sequence. Students begin with collective inquiry and move on to creative reconstruction. They then engage in ethical reflection on intent, impact, and audience, before translating their insights into outward-facing messages.

From an accreditation and assurance-of-learning perspective, this matters because it renders abstract commitments tangible. Students are not only exposed to discussions of ethics and sustainability, but also required to demonstrate how they recognize ethical tensions, justify decisions, and anticipate consequences for different stakeholders.

This learning experience makes graduates’ capabilities—such as ethical judgment, reflexivity, and the responsible use of digital tools—visible and assessable. It also allows instructors to strengthen the link between curriculum design and societal impact.

Signaling Student Agency, Not Just Skill Sets

By positioning learners as the producers of informational content rather than the passive recipients of influencer messaging, this approach affirms their agency as emerging professionals. As Suzanne Tietze and her co-authors emphasize in their book Understanding Organizations Through Language, organizational behavior is driven by influence, communication, and technology. Our assignment invites students to view all three as domains where they must take responsibility, not as instruments they use for competitive advantage.

In creating these videos, students engage with an ethical challenge that mirrors those they will encounter in business, where clear rules are rare and judgment must be exercised in situ. Such assignments also are innovative and effective ways for business schools to respond meaningfully to calls for innovation in RME—and help improve public financial literacy in the digital age.