Kate Middleton, Prince William and Meghan Markle reveal how the Royal Family became the ultimate influencers

Late last year, Kate Middleton twisted her hair into a bun on a royal visit. The Princess of Wales didn’t have any clips or ties, so coiled a ponytail under itself to carry off the hairstyle — a classic trick beloved by many a former netball girl.

The internet’s response was perhaps disproportionate.

“Kate Middleton ASTONISHES fans,” bellowed Yahoo News, resharing an amateur edit of the incident with 17 million views. This was tonally representative of much of the media coverage, echoing the ebullience of the Daily Mail (“Kate leaves fans ‘stunned’,”) and Cosmopolitan (“Kate Middleton has left fans speechless”).

“IS ANYONE DOING IT LIKE KATE MIDDLETON?” bellowed one particularly enraptured admirer on Facebook, having evidently recovered the powers of speech. For the avoidance of doubt, said fan then answered herself: “NO ONE IS DOING IT LIKE KATE MIDDLETON!”

Passing without comment from Her Royal Highness, the incident generated the sort of organic reach influencers would kill for. But few people inspire breathless mania like the royals.

The House of Windsor shapes trends and dominates newsfeeds. Whenever the Princess of Wales wears a dress, it sells out immediately — a phenomenon fashion experts have dubbed “the Kate effect”.

The Nightly On wanted to know: how do they do it?

Andrew Lownie is a good place to start. As a royal biographer, he has spent a lot of time digging into the royal machine. But he is no obsequious courtier. In 2025, he published Entitled: The Rise And Fall Of The House Of York, a damning Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor biography exposing the former Duke’s friendship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

His book painted a searing picture of how entitlement begets exploitation at the heart of British royalty. Yet for all the scandals, millions of people are still watching Kate put her hair up — and according to Ipsos, “core support” for the monarchy has remained stable at roughly 64 per cent.

To understand this, Lownie explains, you need to understand the successful royals as a very specific type of influencer.

“The royals are absolutely influencers,” he told The Nightly On. “They have huge brand power, and they attempt to push a very particular version of their brand through social media.”

But unlike normal influencers, he continued, we’re already looking at them, simply by virtue of who they are. That means their strategy partly depends on withholding information.

“There is a sort of compact between the people and the royals,” Lownie said.

“In order to maintain trust and respect, we feel they need to be open.

“But we also don’t want them to be too open. The operation depends partly on that sense of distance and awe.”

Most influencers cultivate the impression that they share everything, posting a constant stream of candid confessionals, get-ready-with-me videos, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and branded partnerships.

But with Kate and William, there are no sponsored posts or running commentary on their daily lives. To provide these would breach the unwritten rules about how royal influence is supposed to look.

These rules only become apparent when they’re breached. Take Meghan Markle, Lownie says.

“Meghan, with her jams and whatnot, is trying to use her royal status to become a sort of Martha Stewart,” Lownie says. “And people do not like that”.

Two-thirds of the public (68 per cent) have an unfavourable view of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, compared with just one in five (21 per cent) who see her favourably. Kate, meanwhile, has an approval rating of 74 per cent.

Meghan is often mocked for “wanting to be an influencer”. Her latest venture, As Ever, is a luxury lifestyle and pantry brand, selling items like raspberry spread, herbal teas, crepe mix, shortbread cookie mix, and decorative flower sprinkles.

She recently released an “anniversary candle” to celebrate eight years of marriage to Harry, “housed in a beautiful ceramic vessel”. At $64, it’s a steal.

In the media, such overt monetisation of royal status is often contrasted with Kate’s approach.

“Kate showed the spotlight-loving Meghan how a real princess behaves,” a typical 2025 Sun headline read.

In August, Harry and Meghan announced they were moving back to the UK after six years in California. Amid the speculation over their reasons, one thread stood out: unconfirmed reports that Meghan had been offered an acting role in a UK production – a story sources close to the couple haven’t denied at time of writing, but haven’t confirmed either.

While there was positive reporting on the potential incoming reconciliation between the Sussexes and the rest of the family, coverage of the acting rumour followed a familiar script: criticising Meghan for courting the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Kate is praised for her apparent nonchalance towards it.

That’s not to say the Prince and Princess of Wales are really so different from Meghan, says Cindy McCreery, an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney.

“Those couples are playing roles that feed off each other,” she says.

“You need Harry and Meghan to be seen as the kind of outrageous, commercially inappropriate Americans to sort of shore up this vision of William and Catherine as the ideal heir and spouse.”

Kate’s brand, in other words, is partly that she doesn’t appear to have a brand. She is, objectively, an extraordinarily effective influencer. But favourable coverage often constructs that influence as incidental or unintentional.

In other words, she plays hard to get.

That appetite for glimpses of royal life extends well beyond the UK. Australia has its own version of the preoccupation, of course. While support for the monarchy has waned over time — particularly among young people, for whom it can represent a vestige of colonial power — a quick scan of the supermarket magazine aisle reveals the continuing fascination. Just count the royal faces gracing the glossy mags.

There is, of course, the republic question. Depending on the question and the poll, support for a republic has recently ranged from 41 per cent to 54 per cent. This is relatively unchanged from the “yes” vote in the 1999 referendum, when Australians voted against becoming a republic. Then, as now, the proposed model, which would have seen a president appointed by Parliament, was itself a major point of contention.

But Australians are mostly just “focused on other things,” McCreery says. After the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said a republic was unlikely to be put to voters during his government, and in 2024 he scrapped the assistant minister portfolio with responsibility for the issue.

Even if Australia is still technically a constitutional monarchy, Australians aren’t tied to the royals in the same way the Brits are.

“When we talk about Australians, we shouldn’t lump them all together,” McCreery said. “It’s going to vary very much on demographic, on age, gender, possibly ethnic background, time in Australia”

“But overall … I don’t think it’s the obsession in the way that maybe you’re getting obsession in the UK. I think that there’s interest. I think that there’s a great deal of appetite, but I would say that the public in Australia see ourselves as basically a republic — even though that’s constitutionally incorrect.”

Somewhat counterintuitively, this self-identity — as “basically a Republic” — has fortified the idea that the royals are just another set of influencers.

“We see interest in the royals as being somehow a choice that we are free to make, and we are free to give, and we’re free to take away. Whereas I think in Britain it is much more connected with a sense of history,” McCreery said.

“And that’s where I think they are just one of a group of potential influencers that people pay attention to … albeit very powerful influencers, with different techniques.”

Australians can regard royal fascination as something they have chosen to participate in, rather than something woven into the national story. But those who do choose to pay attention are still engaging with the royals as a source of celebrity, entertainment and influence.

When it comes to wielding this influence, the royals’ technique is scarcity. It is not an easy line to walk. Royals toe a line between too much revelation — as Meghan has been accused of — and too much secrecy.

The line isn’t always theirs to draw. Diana, Princess of Wales was subjected to endless attention by the paparazzi, a level of intrusion Prince Harry later said “destroyed” his childhood.

When the Princess of Wales disappeared from the public eye for a period in 2024, social media erupted with theories and speculation. This was fuelled by the release of a photograph she had edited, which was later retracted by news photo agencies over concerns it had been digitally altered. Speculation only ceased when she posted a video revealing her cancer diagnosis.

The episode demonstrated the other side of the royal publicity problem: if you give people too little, they will fill in the gaps themselves.

Carefully calibrated media posts and appearances, then, aren’t only a tool for generating desire, but a form of pre-emptive damage limitation. Give the press and the public just enough to satiate them.

The public does expect a degree of “openness” from the royals, Lownie says.

“The modern royals are being more open about private matters, their families, their views, their football teams,” Lownie said. “They’re always trying to find ways to link in with the public … they’re always trying to pretend they watch (British soap opera) Emmerdale.

“I would argue in some ways it’s a manufactured bonhomie. It’s still curated. It’s carefully organised.”

Historically, the royal family controlled this narrative via the Royal Rota, a strictly managed rolodex of “trusted journalists” and media outlets.

But the digital age has changed the mechanics of royal publicity. Social media has allowed the royals to bypass some of those traditional gatekeepers, McCreery explains, meaning they are “becoming their own production companies”.

Take Prince William’s appearance in July on Jason and Travis Kelce’s podcast, New Heights. It appears relaxed and open. But in reality, it’s tightly controlled — after all, there’s no one who knows better how to master a narrative than one half of the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce public relations machine.

Indeed, the output of the Wales’ “production company” strikes a different tone from your average influencer video.

It is not conducted in the confessional mode, and there is rarely a genuine behind-the-scenes glimpse. Rather, their videos concern public engagements, meetings with foreign dignitaries and — crucially — the occasional tightly calibrated glimpse behind the curtain.

Take Prince George’s recent birthday video, featuring the 13-year-old sprinting across a rocky outcrop, smiling at the camera in sunglasses, swinging a cricket bat, and ruffling the fur of a dog.

The video bears the aesthetic hallmarks of influencing: ambient, lightly textured filters, a lens flare effect, and a vaguely aspirational holiday location.

But it isn’t really a typical influencer post. It merely gestures at some unseen family life for 30 seconds before closing the door to the public.

This glimpse is a two-pronged PR strategy. Firstly, it intimates that the royals are “just like us”.

“They’re always trying to strike the balance between formality and relatability, and I think the Prince and Princess of Wales do that pretty well,” Lownie says. “People can relate to them as a normal family with kids … Andrew is the other end of that spectrum, and his affect is very pompous and out of touch.”

At the same time, the Prince George video shows very little. This lack of access is precisely the hook on which millions of fans dangle. The royals are “just like us”, and nothing like us at all.

This leaves fans to pore over the relatively limited public appearances. A typical example of such forensic analysis is the hugely popular “Kate Middleton Style” blog, a sartorial archive entreating its readers to “look Inside Kate’s wardrobe!”

The blog is the type of place you should definitely check out if you’ve ever wondered, for example, how many times the Princess of Wales has attended Wimbledon (30), what she wore during the recent men’s final (a bespoke green dress with an elegant draped cape detail) and whether a retail version of that dress is available for purchase (yes).

The royals are the subject of an entire ecosystem of fan accounts, fashion blogs, newspaper galleries and social media posts. That influence doesn’t require them to constantly produce content, just that they give us enough of it to keep us looking.

Kate doesn’t really have to ask us to look — she puts her hair up in a bun, and we do the rest.