AN INFLUENCER WITH INFLUENCE
Bryan Yambao, the man behind Bryanboy remains on
top of his game as a social media maven
Bryan Yambao, now more commonly known as Bryanboy, started writing a blog at the age of 22. It started as a hobby for the one-time web designer. “I made websites for a living,” he shares, sipping his coke at the rooftop bar of Discovery Hotel in Makati. “At the time the only reason I created a blog was because I wanted to tell a story.” Today, Bryan is a multi-hyphenate internet presence, working with brands like Gucci, Prada, and Valentino, and is a consistent, trusted front-row presence at fashion shows. Recently in Manila for his Belo beautification ritual, he has had quite the travel schedule.
“When I started blogging, the way I communicated back then was very different to how I communicate today at the age of 36,” says Bryan. Less concerned with political correctness, the biggest names in today’s digital media scene came of age in the pre-social platforms era. “Back then, the platforms we used gave us anonymity. Whereas nowadays in order to have your opinion validated, you need to be front facing, you need to show your face, and you need to identify yourself because otherwise you’re not considered credible,” he says. “To be anonymous doesn’t really make sense, even if I think anonymity is a luxury.”
What has made him last this long in the digital scene is that he developed an authentic point of view long before social media dictated the way aspiring influencers do their jobs. A few days ago, Instagram went down, causing a rash of panic online. Bryan took to it with his signature wit, posting on Twitter (his preferred online platform): “Oh everyone’s modeling career has ended.” According to Bryan, if Instagram disappeared tomorrow, he’d be fine. “For me its another platform, like the blogs, like community websites,” he says. “If you have a voice or point of view, platforms come and go but your point of view stays forever.”
DIGITAL CURRENCY
Today, influencers make their money in different ways, the most commonly known being the sponsored content system, where a brand gets in touch with the individual, asks them to provide public content using the brand’s products and pays them with either the product in question or in monetary value. When social media was a rising enterprise, it was unregulated, with certain people taking advantage of unclear rules for their benefit. Today, both official regulators strictly watch branded content, along with eagle-eyed viewers who are more discerning when they feel products are being hawked at them without any disclosure.
“I’m very transparent with my sponsorships,” says Bryan. “I think it’s very important to disclose your relationships with brands, whether you’re sponsored or not, and I don’t want to mislead anyone. I don’t want to pretend I’m not being paid when I am being paid. It’s my livelihood.” With Bryan’s status as an original digital star, he can afford to be more selective with the brands he chooses to work with.
“The most valuable thing is for me to create that trust with my audiences,” he says. “I’m not going to work with anyone I really don’t believe in. You have to have a personal standard.” That selectivity can mean a number of different things: do they share the same ethos, the same belief system? All too often an influencer falls into the pitfalls of working with a brand that operates in the opposite way they do, and when that happens, viewers are quick to call them out. In Bryan’s case, viewers can sometimes be a highly respected American fashion critic like Cathy Horyn. “At some point, Cathy Horyn threw shade at me in the New York Times, after I announced on Twitter that I’d been given a free Dolce & Gabbana coat. But I was declaring it. It was a free gift.” he says.
After years in the industry, Bryan is no longer bothered by any negative comments about him. “The way I see it, opinions are like butts, everyone has one,” he says. “We live in an age where people have what I call 'recreational outrage' where people just want to be mad over nothing. It’s a hobby now to find every little petty thing that’s wrong about a picture, or a situation, or about a post, and feast on it.”
This sort of thinking extends beyond fashion, making its way into social and political commentary online, and while healthy discourse is an important thing that propels society forward, it also becomes an excuse for people to react in ostensibly “woke” ways. “People love drama on the internet.
It’s entertaining to a degree, and people always complain about the slightest thing online, you can’t stop that,” he says. How Bryan deals with it is by welcoming the barrage of reactions, thinking of it pragmatically: “If people comment positively, amazing. If people comment negatively, that’s amazing too. It creates engagement. It’s a win-win thing that people don’t realize,” he says. “People comment hateful comments but its still part of the system. The more hate comments you get, the more the algorithm improves.”
A PERSONAL VOICE
“When I first started, there was no agenda of 'I want to make money on Instagram,' obviously because Instagram didn’t exist, but even on the blog it never occurred to me that it could be a source of livelihood,” Bryan reflects. Nowadays, he is cognizant that the market is saturated, pointing out how he and his cohort of social media stars first paved the way. “If people want to start doing this, you now have a template of how to replicate it,” he says. “The path was set for them.”
Today’s rising social media stars always seem to be surrounded by a so-called “team”, a far cry from the days when it was just a person with a camera and a blog. While Bryan has an assistant that helps with his emails and a manager that helps negotiate his business deals, it remains a mostly one-man operation for him. “I make my friends or my husband take my pictures,” he says, laughing. “I think for a lot of people, they feel like they have to find the right image, find a photographer, and look perfect all the time. But the whole point of having social media is lost in that. Anybody can literally manufacture a picture. I like the idea of using my voice and creating content myself because it’s my voice, it’s my currency. If I had someone do it for me, it’s not me.”
Once a while, an article will pop up with the usual traditional editorial heads making patronizing statements about today’s current digital media landscape, and its effect on the state of fashion. Bryan pays them no mind. “The media landscape started changing about ten years ago, and is continuously changing,” he says. “It’s like the music industry. First, there was vinyl, then cassette, and then CDs, followed by MP3s, and now we’re all streaming. Hvolution is part of life.” He points out that traditional editors have learned to adapt to the times, with all of them having social media platforms and doing sponsored advertorial content with brands. “The only difference is I guess they still write from an institutional point of view, rather than a personal point of view which influencers are known for.” Has he ever wished for a more traditional media job? The answer has always been a firm no. “I’ve been offered, over the years to write for magazines and I always say no, because that means I have to write for an institution. I don’t want to lose my personal voice.”
CREATIVE CHALLENGES AHEAD
A question Bryan is always asked in interviews is what he thinks the future of social media will be, and how long he thinks he’ll be doing this. “Maybe I’ll start thinking about how if I still want my photograph constantly taken, or if I still want to travel 310 days a year. Maybe the answer will be no,” he says. But for now, Bryan is content to continually challenge himself creatively. “I’ve started getting into short films, and then I have two other directing projects down the line. I’m very flexible. So I want to challenge myself creatively and work with brands in a smarter way, rather than just posting a picture online.”
The biggest joy for Bryan nowadays when he works with brands is getting to see and be with people he’s known for as long as he’s been in the industry. “These are people I’ve known for many years and to see them and work with them especially when they’re launching a product or they have an event somewhere in the world, it’s a godsend,” he says. “Going to shows is still exciting. Every day is very different from the next, and the fact that I don’t consider my job as work kind of speaks for itself because I’m still having fun doing the things I do.”