Influencers struggle in a world of brutal reality
It’s been a rough few weeks for influencers. Which is not a sentence that’s going to inspire sympathy in the hearts of many, given that the best part of influencer culture is the sweet, sweet schadenfreude we all get when we watch their digital downfall. But still, it has been.
Globally two of the big guns, YouTube-made millionaires Jeffree Star and James Dawson, are facing backlashes for allegations of racism, sexualising minors and more generalised blackmailing and backstabbing. They’ve been haemorrhaging followers and dollars all week as they find themselves cancelled by the cultures they helped create.
And here in New Zealand, hot on last week’s heels of Colgate’s ‘‘White Night In’’ influencer event debacle, our feeds were aflutter with the news that the Advertising Standards Authority had upheld complaints against Kiwi heavyweight influencer Simone Anderson. The ASA ruled that Anderson hadn’t made the commercial nature of the relationship behind recent posts clear enough, and this followed speculation already swirling over the transparency of her Facebook page donating its sales proceeds to charity.
Now what’s interesting in this case isn’t actually the specific detail of what’s happened. What’s fascinating is the level of vitriol with which we devoured this not-exactly-earth-shattering news. I’m sure the words Advertising Standards Authority have never even previously been uttered over millennial brunch dates, let alone with any passion. And yet this week my friends and I have been discussing this with the fervour usually reserved for gold ornamental pineapples.
It wasn’t the same schadenfreude of previous years. Something’s shifted in the way we see influencers. Before they were just a bit ridiculous, but we were still envious and enthralled.
Now, not only do they seem increasingly irrelevant but their whole world seems deeply out of step with the public mood. It feels as though we are all slowly falling out of love with the digital high-school-popular clique.
Before I go on, if you’re still baffled by what an influencer actually is, a working definition is someone who’s paid by a brand (either in product or cash) to post about the company on social media. If you’ve got more than about 10,000 followers then you’ll start getting paid for posts; crack around 100k and you’ll hit good money.
The dethroning has been coming for a while now. For a start, coronavirus decimated the market and destroyed the fast money that the influencer industry is based upon. What with the worldwide lockdown, events dried up, a recession loomed and companies cut marketing budgets, resulting in an estimated loss of 33 per cent of income (about on average US$3100 a week) for influencers in April. And, shorn of the glamour of the high life, it became increasingly obvious to us how empty most influencers’ worlds really were.
Not to mention that coronavirus ushered in an increasingly reflective public mood. It suddenly became almost obscene to be posting about anything except the global struggle against the virus. Influencers who couldn’t talk in a realistic way about their lives under lockdown lost out hard to people who could.
YPre-Covid ... all influencers had to do was post a beach snap and play on our desire for escapism. But the mood has changed.
ou could be funny about it, like your aunty taking snaps of her cat in various workingfrom-home costumes, but there was a shared need to address this strange hell we were all going through. And that was a deadly blow for an industry steeped in selling fantasy.
This shift was further doubled down upon by the Black Lives Matter movement, which again reinforced that social media feeds can be a place for political protest and discussion. If you’re someone who lives online, it seems tasteless to post about laxative teas when people are dying because of police brutality. And influencers, clearly used to being told what to say in the captions, struggled to address these issues in a way that was meaningful and not simply overt virtue signalling or blinding insensitivity.
The problem is that, at its heart, influence comes down to being able to understand and speak to what people want to hear at a given moment. Pre-Covid, that was easy. All influencers had to do was post a beach snap and play on our desire for escapism. But the mood has changed.
We’ve sobered up. Now we want people who engage with the increasingly difficult and complicated issues that we are all struggling to reckon with worldwide. And that’s going to be a tall order for people used to making bank off tasteful butt shots.