VIRAL INFLUENCERS

As brands tighten budgets, social media influencers are reinventing themselves

FFor the first few weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, Karuna Ezara Parikh barely posted anything on her Instagram account. She didn’t feel like creating content about things that did not resonate with her. But then she started writing about poetry and books. “With the news reaching a fresh heaving pitch of insanity, death count and injustice recently, I felt the need to jump into something otherworldly,” she posted one day to her 75,000 followers. The text accompanied a photograph of her collector’s set of The Lord of the Rings. “We may not roam with elves and dwarves, but we do know a thing or two about fighting doom,” the caption read.

Parikh is a writer who posts about poetry, literature and activism. She is also an influencer. This means she endorses brands on social media; in her case, sustainable and homegrown. But now, the collaborations have slumped: “I have taken this moment to reassess the influencing industry. It is based on consumerism and shallow practices. I want to look deeper.”

Used to drawing likes and hits in the thousands, Indian influencers like Parikh have all been forced to change their goal posts and adapt to the new world order. As investments in products have plummeted, their work too has dried up. If work comes at all, rates are lower than usual. Like many professionals, they too have had to reinvent themselves.

At the beginning of the lockdown, Roxanne Bamboat, 34, observed the panic and fear trickle from real life into social media feeds. Where to buy vegetables and fruits? How to access groceries? Bamboat, a food and travel influencer, thought it callous to post food and travel pictures on Instagram, where she has about 12,000 followers. “Putting up throwbacks seemed too insensitive. Travel is literally the last thing on anyone’s mind right now,” says Bamboat. And with no travel on the anvil, Bamboat’s work has come to a grinding halt. Food collaborations are still happening, she says, but not as frequently as before. These days, she has been posting recipes and photos of food she prepares at home.

Influencing as a viable and sustained profession has only recently entered our new-age lexicon. The term was unheard of until Instagram launched in India. If it was heard, it was something that people in the United States did. Like everything else, the trend swam across from American shores and made it to India. Many of today’s influencers trace their roots to blogging, but as they took to social media, platforms like Instagram and Facebook were also becoming more shopping-friendly. Companies and brands found in the popularity of some social media accounts a ready stage on which to market their products. Influencers are now not just messengers. They are also helping design advertising campaigns for food, fashion, makeup, travel and so on.

Natasha Noel, 27, a fitness influencer with 250,000 followers on Instagram and 500,000 on YouTube, does campaigns for sportswear, athleisure, electronics and health food. Though the brands she’s already associated with are still around, newer collaborations have been far fewer

Collaborations with fashion and luxury brands have shrunk, but those with utilitarian ones have gone up during the lockdown

since the pandemic. Earlier, she would get offers for at least one every week; now she gets one a month. “I teach yoga, so am grateful that I have other means of income. I have also started doing virtual classes and I now have students from as far as the US, Netherlands, Australia,” she says.

Shreeya Khade, 28, a plus size model, says she is picky about who she works with. So far, she has collaborated with Humans of Bombay, We Were Equal and Shein, among others. “The brand has to do some kind of activism in women’s empowerment, feminism or mental health,” she says. But since the lockdown, no such work has come her way. “Brands that talk about all these important things should, in fact, be investing now more than ever,” she says. In the absence of those, she has taken it upon herself to host live chats with people on mental health.

If collaborations with fashion and luxury brands have shrunk, those with utilitarian ones such as food items, FMCG and women’s products are having their moment. “I have experienced 10-20 per cent income cuts overall. But utility-based collaborations have increased,” says Kusha Kapila, a comedian who calls herself a creator, not an influencer. She has 1.1 million followers on Instagram. She has worked every single day of the lockdown for brands such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Ola and Slice. Given the situation at hand, she has laid out strict boundaries about what she will and will not promote during the pandemic: “I am not going to do anything that is insensitive. I won’t promote a mask company, for instance, and if I do, I will not take money for it.”

This year was supposed to be yielding in terms of opportunities, says Kapila, but things have completely changed now. She hasn’t been doing any shows. She has been shooting alone at home. “I have no complaints, though. This is the least that creators can do. If we have a home to shoot in, we are privileged.”

—Sukhada Tatke