Sold on social media
This month, Scott Disick, the professionally reckless, on-again, offagain beau of Kourtney Kardashian (sister of Kim, spawn of Kris), made a social media blunder that signalled, to some, the end of an era.
Disick, a so-called “influencer” — one of thousands of well-known people who get paid to promote products on social media — posted a photo to Instagram endorsing a diet shake called “Bootea.”
(I’m not an “influencer” — but I highly do not recommend it). So what went wrong? Well, instead of writing his own original caption alongside the photo, Disick appears to have copied and pasted, verbatim, Bootea’s corporate instructions from an email.
This is what he wrote — or rather, pasted to his Instagram feed:
“Here you go, at 4pm est, write the below. Caption: Keeping up with the summer workout routine with my morning @booteauk protein shake!”
The Internet had a field day with the error (the post has since been amended to sound like something an actual human being wrote) and many of Disick’s 16 million followers wondered how a literate person of moderate intelligence could fail to write a single original sentence about a diet shake.
In the words of GQ’s Andrew Goble, berating Disick, “Dude, you had one job.”
But that job, some argue, is on the decline — and lazy posts like Disick’s are to blame.
“The ‘influencer’ economy,” Gawker declared recently “is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.”
This theory is propelled by people who believe it is and has forever been foolish for brands to pay popular millennials big bucks to endorse their products on the Internet.
Take, for example, the disgruntled social media executive who recently spoke to tech site Digiday, anonymously, in a now-viral interview.
“Influencers are going to start disappearing,” the executive told Digiday. “Brands are going to start realizing the amount of followers you have doesn’t mean sh--.”
But the truth is that it does mean sh--.
In fact, it means a great deal of sh-in an age when consumers aren’t merely cutting the cord on traditional marketing outlets like cable TV, but declining to sign up for cable in the first place.
“The content that people most want to consume isn’t brand content,” says Rannie Turingan, influence manager at J. Walter Thomson, Canada.
“It’s content from individuals who have gained followings because what they are saying and the manner in which they say it is either useful, or entertaining to an audience segment. For young kids, this content replaces TV.”
Yes a professional influence manager has a horse in this race, but it also happens to be the right horse.
We may want the influencer econ- omy to crumble — and with it, dietshake endorsements and obnoxious FOMO-inducing photos of young people getting paid to have a great time in great clothes — but as long as we flock to YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram in equal or greater numbers than we do to our TVs, it is here to stay. This doesn’t mean, however, that it’s perfect.
What the influencer economy should do, not merely for the sake of brands who want to benefit their bottom line, but for everyone’s sake — is downsize.
The market is oversaturated not with people who got their start in social media creating interesting content for kicks, but with lessthan-talented opportunists happy to profit from the naivety of ad executives who equate attractive millennials with moneybags. Not all influencers, in other words, are created equal.
Andrew Gunadie, a.k.a. Gunnarolla, a musician, YouTube star and brand influencer who makes his own offbeat, and very funny content (he once made a music video devoted exclusively to the font Comic Sans) says he started making videos online “for fun and for free” with the intention of getting “a real job” later.
That is, until he built a following and eventually a career out of his pastime. “Definitely people who have a talent and who are authentic are going to be in a better position,” he says, especially when it comes to earning viewers’ trust.
He points to “Chewbacca Mom,” the woman who single-handedly drove up sales of a discounted mask at an American department store by posting a video of herself to YouTube, trying the mask on in a parking lot, and immediately cracking up.
“I don’t know if she’s going to parlay that into a career,” says Gunadie. But she could.
The influencer economy is mocked as vapid and needlessly expensive (see Scott Disick).
But is it really so much worse than what preceded it?
After all, why is traditional advertising — in recent years, a rotation of tacky TV spots pushing putrid body sprays for teenage boys and probiotic yogurt for women — preferable?
Frankly, I would rather be shamelessly marketed to by a regular Joe who struck gold on YouTube making weird videos in his bedroom. Or for that matter: a Texan mom in a Chewbacca mask. Emma Teitel is a national columnist.