What issues do influencers face as the role becomes increasingly professionalised? What does the industry look like for ‘kidfluencers’ and the next generation of talent? And what place does a union have in the influencer world?

We watched the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s panels for answers. With experts including The Creator Union Co-Founder Nicole Ocran, Ex-Love Island contestant and influencer Amy Hart, SocialDay speaker and Influencer.com Co-Founder Ben Jeffries, Professor Brooke Erin Duffy of Cornell University, and Gleam Futures’ Amy Bryant-Jeffries, there was plenty to get stuck into.

Here are our 7 take-homes about what influencer culture looks like in 2021 from these panels.

1. The role of influencers/creators is an important and credible one

Despite many existing preconceptions about influencers, one thing the committee highlighted was their significant and important role in mainstream culture, advertising, and more. The experts acknowledged that influencer marketing had only become a fully fledged industry (aka the creator economy) in the last decade or so, but that now a career in influencing is essentially as valuable as a career in advertising.

.@AmyHart1707 tells @AlexDaviesJones there is a lot of stigma around influencing as a job whereas "if your child said 'I want to work in advertising', you'd say, 'great, that's amazing'". Many influencers are very creative & have tech skills.
— Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsDCMS) September 14, 2021

Nicole Ocran, Co-Founder of The Creator Union, also pointed out that influencers hold a lot of power amongst the social media users who follow them. Thus, users, creators, brands, and the social media platforms themselves all rely on one another to support this cultural ecosystem, so it’s in everyone’s best interests to support and value all sides.

“To not recognise the impact content creators have as a kind of cultural zeitgeist...is doing them a disservice.”

2. Brands may be taking advantage of creators

In the evidence given by influencer Amy Hart and Nicole Ocran, the imbalanced power dynamic between brands and creators became clear. Both Hart and Ocran suggested brands know they can get away with not paying creators, and that smaller creators in particular lack the tools and support to accurately and fairly price themselves when working with brands. This is often difficult to spot among creators’ communities, as Ocran pointed out, because the role of an influencer is often heavily reliant on positive and aspirational aesthetics. Despite this perception, the majority of creators aren’t being paid fairly, consistently or even at all, instead often promoting ‘gifted’ products for free.

“There’s a lot of things in the industry that you can’t Google...things that are heavily implied but not said…”

Could this gap be filled by The Creator Union? Perhaps so, Ocran suggested. The Creator Union - or an organisation like it - could advocate for fair and consistent pay for creators, helping them to build a stable livelihood off the back of this new career path and providing tools for their own and their audience’s education and empowerment.

3. There is an issue with diversity and representation in influencer marketing

It’s clear that there needs to be significantly more research into representation and inequality in the influencer marketing space. Professor Brooke Erin Duffy of Cornell University highlighted that, despite the notion of the internet and social media democratising advertising, the underrepresentation of minority groups and perpetuation of longstanding stereotypes and inequalities remain very real issues in the influencer space.

Asked about the diversity of creators on the @GleamFutures roster, @AmyBryantJeff tells @MrJohnNicolson just 14% are BAME or LGBT+ and that none of the 60 influencers currently working with Gleam are disabled. Gleam have a target of 21% from these underrepresented communities.
— Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsDCMS) September 14, 2021

In terms of the influencer pay gap, CEO and Co-Founder of Influencer.com Ben Jeffries suggested that pricing influencer campaigns and partnerships is complex and involves many variables, such as where the campaign will be featured, creators’ follower counts, engagement rates, whether the campaign will be reused, and more - all of which don’t necessarily get seen by users outside the industry. Ben also stressed that the way the creator economy currently works ultimately allows creators to charge what they want to, so there isn’t really a ‘one size fits all’ in terms of pricing. For that reason, he says it would be difficult to have a pricing system that could be rolled out across the industry.

The Creator Union’s Nicole Ocran, however, argued for the importance of pricing guidelines for creators, particularly minority ethnic and LGBTQ+ influencers. Nicole also said the Creator Union would prioritise these ‘minority’ creators because, as with other industries, they are the ones that “typically lose out the most”.

As part of the @CommonsDCMS inquiry into influencer culture, I asked our witnesses if there was a reinforcement of stereotypical standards of glamour and beauty. @nicoleocran told me that 'anyone who looks different is subject to trolling' with 'little no brand/platform support'. pic.twitter.com/e2J1MUtNgU
— JOHN NICOLSON M.P. (@MrJohnNicolson) September 14, 2021

4. There is pressure on influencers, brands and their audiences to police themselves

Professor Brooke Erin Duffy suggested that most of the policing of influencers’ content comes from their audiences and the brands they work with. Professor Duffy said creators often feel pressure to have a view on significant cultural and political movements due to their audience coming to them for news and opinions. However, if creators stray too far in one way or another when voicing their views and offering information, their audience will be the first to criticise them and ‘hold them accountable’. This often then limits their opportunities with brands, meaning creators often find themselves in a ‘catch-22’ scenario.

Chair @JulianKnight15 asks @Cornell's @BrookeErinDuffy about misinformation. She says audiences often police influencers but accountability can be fraught with negative blowback; many influencers think politics outside their wheelhouse but audiences expect them to take a view.
— Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsDCMS) September 14, 2021

5. Creators have to deal with trolling on a huge scale, and the platforms need to do more to help

Ex-Love Islander Amy Hart gave her experience of excessive trolling after her following jumped from 3000 to more than 1 million following her appearance on the reality TV show. Despite having an agent and friends logged into her social media accounts to help monitor abusive content, Amy said she still struggled - and continues to struggle to this day - with trolling online.

“Nothing can prepare you for it… nobody deserves abuse, and death threats don’t come with any territory.”

Although social media platforms have recently introduced tools to help influencers filter comments and block users more easily, Hart said the process for reporting abusive content is too time consuming and too often the platform takes no action. After reporting many abusive comments in the past, Hart said she has stopped reporting comments altogether now due to this lack of action.

Nicole Ocran said that from The Creator Union’s perspective, the social media platforms have not been doing enough or moving quickly enough in terms of helping creators deal with trolling and take control of their audiences. She said Pinterest had been the most open and transparent with the union when it came to talking about working with creators, but that the other platforms hadn’t even responded to the union’s request for comment and discussion.

6. More needs to be done to protect children

All of the panellists agreed that more needs to be done to protect children on social media, particularly the new generation of influencers (‘kidfluencers’). Professor Brooke Erin Duffy highlighted that unlike traditional media industries, which have strict broadcasting regulations and a robust union system, the influencer space is rapidly growing and largely unregulated, putting not only child creators at risk, but also their young followers. She touched on the issue of influencer ‘camps’ in the US, where families send their children to become ‘kidfluencers’ without necessarily any real consent or understanding on the children’s parts, and speculated on the long-term mental health impacts of this.

With many children now aspiring to be influencers and creators themselves, it’s crucial that both the social media platforms and governments do more to protect them from the issues raised by the committee. Ben Jeffries stated that social media platforms had already started introducing measures such as banning under 13s and not allowing under 16s to have public profiles or receive messages from people they don’t know, however they can only commit a certain amount of resources to these kinds of measures. Rather, Ben said he would welcome government legislation such as the kind seen in France, which would ensure children are better protected online.

7. Creators should always read their contracts

One take-home message from the committee was this: if you’re a creator, always read your contracts. Emerging unions like The Creator Union will look to offer support in terms of contracts, and if you’re a member of any existing union then you have access to legal aid, so utilise this if you’re unsure or need support looking over contracts.