Bad Influence
Marketers are sounding the death knell of the influencer
THE INFLUENCER IS DEAD, long live the Influencer. If what’s circulating in the grapevine is true, it would seem like a lot of people who have been reaping rich rewards for taking pictures of themselves and chucking them onto social media sites will be needing to find some other way to make their money.
To be fair, it does require effort and skill to curate a feed and make it coherent in terms of style, design or visual appeal. And those all-in campaigns actually require the whole process of pitching and storyboarding followed by execution from production crews. It gets intense. In essence, influencer networks were the guerilla advertising agencies that compete with the big four of advertising. And they are leaner, faster, bolder. Or so it seemed.
Then, like everything else on the Internet, it degenerated into a frenzy of sexual exploitation. Cool and independent quickly gave way to a frisson of “show the most amount of skin in the most tasteful manner in order to garner the most attention and therefore become the biggest influencer”.
Say what you like about Jenna Jameson and her ilk, but at least they’re honest about selling sex as a commodity. If you don’t trust me, browse through any of your friends’ Instagram and see who they are really following.
About 10 or 20 per cent of stuff will be work-related, another 30 per cent could be friends, 10 or 20 per cent more with family and loved ones, and the remainder will most likely feature a variety of stylishly and tastefully clad or unclad stream of beautiful people.
I don’t hold a grudge against goodlooking people. It’s always enjoyable to look at them. But their success in the field has turned the race for marketing dollars on social media into a flesh fight. And that’s not good because the following that marketers are trying to reach becomes not only diluted but also off target.
That isn’t to say that all social media marketing cannot be effective. It depends on how it is carried it out. I may not normally invite a fitness model onto the runway show of a high fashion label, but if the label made high-end fashionable sportswear, the association is sensible. It’s a matter of being savvy in any situation.
The funny thing is, influencers have always existed for centuries, even millennia. Only we didn’t call them influencers or measure them by how many people clicked on a thumbs-up icon on a social media page related to them. We used to call them experts and brought them in to speak about various matters so we could learn something from them. They became famous and successful because they were experts who knew more than others on a given subject, not just because they were popular or brash or photographed well. They became spokespersons because of their knowledge and skill. Then we decided to abandon knowledge and take up trolling for the superficial. Look where we are now.