'I'm sick of influencers asking for free cake'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
My brother works for a brewery - they often get influencers asking for free beer. They respond - "yeah absolutely, of course. Pay for this order, here's a code to give to your followers. When we've covered the costs of your order we'll refund it and send you some extra stuff."
Some people take them up on it, others don't. Which I assume separates the wheat from the chaff.
Of the people who take them up on that offer, how many manage to generate sales? How many generate enough sales to actually cover the costs?
Are you saying something specifically relevant to the deal above where the influencer doesn't receive any freebies until they've brought in some sales?
Would love to see HMRC come down on these jobsworths.
I suppose the difference is that traditional advertisers are looking to be paid in money, while influencers are often looking to be paid in free goods and services. Also, while I have never dealt with an influencer personally, it sounds like many of them may come across as unprofessional or lacking courteousness (to be fair, many traditional salespeople do too). It's a seemingly glamorous career with a low bar to entry, which probably attracts a fair amount of hacks.
I would have to imagine that the most successful influencers out there do tend to favor monetary transactions, and can afford to hire dedicated sales people to handle their business dealings.
The strongest areas where they can make a difference is in makeup, styling products, and some fashion brands, but you really have to look hard at the demographics in order to figure out if your products are going to fit in the market that the "influencer" is catering to.
Influencers can have significant impact on sales in every area, if they wield their fame rightful. The real problem is that most influencers are only fame for themself, their personality, the entertainment they offer, but hardly for their expertise in any specific area. So the crowd they gather is to diversified to be useful for a specific product, outside of generic stuff.
But you see the effects more clearly when you look at tech, gaming or weeb-stuff, where people who are fame for their general expertise or specific expertise in some game, tech or weeb-area.
Edit to add: Walking into a store and asking for free stuff because you're So Important is a power trip. It's a small chance to act like a celebrity. But just think of all the kids pinning their hopes on the slim chance of being Influencers because they don't have more promising opportunities. It's sad.
If being internet famous is the same as being irl famous, then you would probably have to say the same about actors, TV presenters , musicians, street performers, radio djs etc.
I don't think it's a cry.
I think it ties in with Instagram travel posts, hiring grounded private jets for 10 minutes to take selfies in, etc. For Gen-Y/Z, it's like you have to pretend to be rich and famous, or else you're nothing.
And from the other end, their parents see them as daycare units while they go about their jobs. There's no on-ramp to society anymore, just fake it til you make it.
How is a young person who isn't in tech or finance supposed to be appreciated these days? I'll tell you how: they offer to advertise for local businesses to their friends ("followers"). There isn't even a major war for them to die in.
And the education and affluency of the family has no bearing on this, which scares me even more. That this need for wide audience social acceptance is so ingrained in humans that no matter the nurturing environment that the kids grow up in, they will still heavily latch onto this as anything worth aspiring for.
Obviously they will not all (or even any) attempt to go this route when they grow up, yet I can't help wonder if this is closing off some part of their minds to all the other paths in life which wont get them direct public audience appreciation.
Er, isn't this a common childhood cliche? Aspiring to be a pop/rock star, pro athlete, famous actor/actress, etc.?
I guess I fail to see how this is meaningfully different from any of those things.
The meaningful difference is the changed morality. The main goal seems to be shifting. Before it was: principled, ethical, decent, proper, just, honorable, honest, good. The goal would be to serve your team as a principled, ethical, decent, proper, just, honorable, honest, good leader always raising the bar, first for yourself and then others.
Now the main goals seem to be exploitation, spammy link building, dishonest marketing, the me-first principle.
First and foremost, I doubt many children who aspire to be Fortnite pros would have ever considered being a professional athlete in a past life. Aside from some very notable exceptions (e.g. Tyler1), those don't seem to be intersecting circles very often.
Secondly, they're just lofty aspirations. Most children have no more chance of being Fortnite pros than they do of being professional athletes. Does it really matter what childhood fantasy they choose to chase, outside of obvious exceptions (e.g. serial killer)?
I assume your counterpoint here will be about physical fitness, so I'll just say: It's obviously possible to be a healthy and fit professional gamer (see: well, I already said, Tyler1). It's also obviously possible to be a pretty unhealthy professional athlete (see: The numerous ex-pros past and present suffering from CTE).
> Before it was: principled, ethical, decent, proper, just, honorable, honest, good.
I don't know where this is coming from. Professional sports has always been full of people like Mike Tyson and the Boz. Hollywood obviously has/had people like Harvey Weinstein. Do I really need to name any "unprincipled" rock stars?
> Now the main goals seem to be exploitation
The entertainment industry is just so incredibly rife with this since basically inception that I don't really think I need to even list an example here.
> spammy link building
Hollywood, of course, has been infamous for the IRL equivalent of this for quite some time.
> dishonest marketing
Milli Vanilli, or any number of artists that don't actually write their songs
> the me-first principle.
Eli Manning famously said he would go to law school before playing for the Chargers, the team that drafted him, because he didn't think it would be good for his career.
Child me had no concept that milkmen don't earn as much money as engineers
There'd certainly be a lot more paleontologists and crane operators if we followed our passions as children to fruition.
All of which require time and dedication to the craft to get good at. Being a internet celebrity (in the sense of being Instagram famous), while something that needs to be worked on to get there, does not in most cases involve as much work and creativity. That is what I am getting at.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am not talking about the scores of people that create on the internet and become famous for it (art, engineering, interesting youtube vids etc). Only the "hey look at me posing on a private beach while sipping this Champagne and oh look a sponsor" types.
Those are sadly the ones my sibling's kids are looking at and hoping to mirror.
I don't mean to be cynical about it, but I think you're looking at this through rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. There are plenty of examples of famous entertainment personalities both present and historical that don't exactly espouse "dedication to the craft".
Not to the throw anyone under the bus in particular, but the entire "pop punk" wave of the early 2000s wasn't really about exceptional music talent as much as it was about selling an image. I think we can all also name an actor/actress or two (or five) whose primary qualifications seem to be family connections or, well, being exceptionally attractive.
And that's not anything new, obviously. I mean hell, they made a whole movie about it back in the day: "Singing in the Rain". Ghostwriters for songs have been a thing since, I dunno, at least the 60s (and probably much longer, I'm just thinking of Carole King in particular and how she got her start).
> Being a internet celebrity (in the sense of being Instagram famous), while something that needs to be worked on to get there, does not in most cases involve as much work and creativity.
I think you're vastly underselling how much work it is to be an internet celebrity. Twitch streamers often talk about the fact that even a three day vacation sets them back considerably in terms of viewership. Differentiating yourself in a sea of sameness is creativity. Public sentiment is extremely fickle and difficult to tame.
Ultimately internet celebrities are just entertainment personalities. If you want to dismiss entertainment personalities in general that's fine, but the idea of an entertainment personality certainly isn't anything new.
There's probably already serious efforts to weed out such people.
[0] https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/05/16/buying-twitter...
So unless "influencers" can drive sales (and show they can) we will see more of this :-)
Just imagine a world where you only see an advert that you are extremely likely to buy. That might be nice :-)
That sounds awful.
Also I might like to get ads from other companies than Amazon, maybe it should be other companies doing the buying then....
Also of course it would have to have your understanding of your personal finances baked in so that it would make the absolutely correct decision as to what you would like to buy, but are not sure if you can afford right at the moment.
I mean I would like to get an ad for something I might like to get for my birthday and not buy it, you know the more I think about it I don't think the logical conclusion that you claim follows at all from what I stated...
(then again, I'm pretty sure soma overdosing means saving for retirement is not a thing.)
If I tell you there's a home burglary every second, and home CCTV can keep you safe - have I improved your life? Or have I created fear in you, then charged you $$$ to feel like you did before you saw my advert?
Products like security cameras do a certain thing, and advertisements inform you of that thing. If that thing is risk avoidance, then you need to judge for yourself if its worth it.
For example, consider advertisements for flu shots and other immunizations. They create fear, by informing people about legitimate risks. Then is it wrong to advertise optional immunizations?
As an aside, I recently bought a Ring camera and later had an attempted burglary. The camera did its job, and woke us up for suspicious activity so our car wasn't stolen as a result.
Think back to the advertisements (I'm thinking about the ones in Byte magazine in particular right now [not sure if it was ever distributed internationally, but you can definitely find issues in the Internet Archive.] They showed maybe a picture of a product and paragraphs and paragraphs extolling the product's virtues.
I despise the modern adtech industry, but I have zero problem with that old type of ad. They helped fund a magazine I liked; I was informed about a product I may not have known existed, and most of all, no one knew if I read the ad or not or how many words of the copy I read, how long I was looking at it, my sentiment while reading the ad... It was a win-win scenario. In fact, every now and then I even like to look at old back issues of those types of magazines, sometimes to just read the ads.
That's not the type of advertisement I despise now. My main point is that the entire 'Oh, well ads on (e.g.) Facebook, they simply inform you about a new product for sale' argument people toss around in defence of ads now falls flat to me now. At its core, it's essentially a motte-and-bailey argument (if you haven't heard of that before, look it up; you'll see it everywhere.)
The entire ad-tech industry is rife with click fraud, which begets endless and invisible tracking, data brokers, databases everywhere, analytics, ad auctions where they bid upon your eyeballs. That's when the media companies, the advertisers, and Google and Facebook frolic about the bailey.
As soon as you accuse them of their secretive tracking and data collection, they run right up to the motte and tell you, "Well, hey! We're just trying to give you relevant and useful information about products you might not know about!"
Well, that sounds reasonable. You acquiesce, and they run back into the bailey and continue to monetize your eyeballs. That's what I find most dishonest about modern ads. They claim to be performing a social good, but behind our backs they go back to collecting every piece of our being that they can measure.
--
EDIT: I'd never install a Ring device, but I'd be being way too ideological to not have the empathy to say I wasn't glad your car was stolen. That's good to hear. :)
One way in which that scenario could arise is if advertising can effectively get you to buy whatever it's peddling, even if it's not in your interest to do so.
I fear we're somewhat there already, and that it may only get worse.
Wouldn't it be easier if they shipped it directly to your place and debited your credit card automatically? /s
But you'd have to have either a very good model or a very good way of handling returns.
Firstly, the entire Web of the past 20 years is a failed experiment for that (or success, depends on your perspective). Secondly, to really reach this goal, imagine a web with 10x more invasive tracking than today's web...
That might be nicer.
Only for the vendor, personally I don't want to see adverts that are more likely to influence my behaviour.
If you've only got a few thousand followers, most of whom would also be begging for free stuff, or don't live near the restaurant you're claiming to advertise, then you're not an influencer.
That said, the difficulty to funnel someone into clicking a link is insane and unpredictable.
Influencers may have 1M followers, but the visitors are not there for the human. They are there for the eye candy, the comment section, or information.
An advertisement is none of these. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to funnel someone who is barely interested in the content they are subscribed to, to buy something from an Ad.
But hey Nike figures out a way to turn this into profit.
The "professional" influencers likely isn't the issue, I suspect. If you're doing social media for a living, you don't care about free cake, you want money. The problem is more likely to be the wanna be influencers, with a few followers, who just want free stuff and forget that they need to pay taxes on their free stuff, and correctly label it as an ad.
The big view counts are because the viewers like the individual, not really because they care what product they're talking about.
When was the last time you or anybody you know turned on the tv or went to the cinema to view ads?
I don't believe you can - that was the point I was making, if you missed it.
The point of the article was not about the quality of the product (cakes) but about a model of small-time abuse in which she has first-time experience. She is allowed to state the situation and give an opinion.
Secondly - comparing BBC journalists to people selling personal lifestyle as a product is insulting. Journalists are in obligation do declare "opinion pieces" if they're writing them, while influencers are basically only doing opinion pieces, and have a business model of convincing manufacturers that their opinions is worth paying for. Their positive opinion is probably worth just a bit more money (yes, that's also an unsubstantiated insult, I just like to blend in with the crowd here).
Be that as it may, the BBC has become exactly that. It used to be the place to get news - now it's a magazine selling stuff instead - and you can spot those particular 'articles' a mile off.
A sad but true reflection of what the BBC has become. :(
On a tangent, maybe worth it's own thread - can you propose a good European news site, in English? There's plenty of aggregators and crap-generators out there, but quality reporting is getting harder to find, and I'm grateful for any recommendation.
So what are the product photos there for? How does that add to the facts of the story?
I guess some people might. Whatever, that's up to them.
I suppose you have to decide who is giving who the favour.
No.
The influencers ask for free cake in return to make an advertisement.
I have heard this before from a befriended (fairly new and "hip") restaurant owner in Amsterdam. Weekly requests come in from influencers for free diner (Approximately €150,- per person). But they wont come alone of course.
I have a friend that has a Piadina[1] restaurant. I have seen the emails first hand. They even have a big sign in the front door in the lines of "Influencers: no free meals". Edit: Yes, they also show off in person.
As for why the 150 euro pp place in amsterdam gets targeted, it is extraordinarily expensive for the area (most places there are like 30 pp). The influencers likely want in on this exclusivity. maybe the margins are potentially wide enough to afford a few freebies, as well.