How the Pandemic Changed and Divided the Influencer Marketing Industry
The influencer marketing industry has previously been portrayed as some kind of a fairytale for both influencers and brands. Making a living from promoting a lifestyle and products you love? Having a social media personality with a huge audience of invested potential consumers willing to promote your brand? It’s a win win, right? Well, sometimes it is.
Ever since 2009, the year widely recognised as the dawn of the influencer era, influencer marketing has been growing in popularity and potential. Market analysts predict that the influencer marketing industry will be worth more than $15 billion by 2022. Both the new and the ‘original’ influencers like YouTube’s Zoella and PewDiePie, who remain some of the highest paid influencers in their respective fields, have shown brands and everyday people alike just how much money and power there is to be had.
That is, when ‘influencing’ is done right.
Of course, in the social media marketing industry we see both sides of the coin...literally. Influencer marketing provides a wealth of opportunities for brands and is a hugely important factor in how many brands make money (cue Gymshark stans). There have been countless collaborations between brands and influencers in the past that have been mutually beneficial and contributed positively to the industry. And we certainly need to be careful we aren’t tarring all influencers with the same brush.
But we’ve also bore witness to the dark side of influencer marketing. What happens in any emerging industry when it booms incredibly quickly and without significant regulation? Well in this case, the dark side rears its perfectly filtered head from the white sands of a private island in the middle of the Bahamas.
You only have to google the word ‘influencer’ right now and you’ll find a page littered with the words ‘tone deaf’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘Dubai’. The latter, of course, has become synonymous with influencers throughout the pandemic as our feeds became saturated with bikini-perfect beach photos, as the criticism of social media personalities’ ‘essential’ trips gathered momentum. The now-infamous interview on This Morning with 'fitness blogger' Sheridan Mordew is the go-to example.
Cast your minds back just a few years earlier and you’ll probably remember the Fyre festival scandal, which saw some of the biggest celebrities and influencers including Kendall Jenner and Emily Ratajkowski promoting an over-hyped, under-researched and what turned out to be outright fraudulent event. And to make a bad situation worse, Kendall Jenner allegedly netted $275,000 for the endorsement, yet agreed to a lawsuit settlement worth just $90,000. This certainly isn’t a problem that’s happened overnight; rather, it’s one that’s been brewing slowly and toxically for some time.
What’s different now though is that, well, everything’s different.
The pandemic has forced whole countries of people to stay indoors, with travel banned and priorities shifted. The deeply-rooted inequality in our society has been rife for some time, of course, but it hasn’t felt quite as blatantly obvious until recently - thanks to the help of social media influencers. While the majority of us have pivoted our lives and businesses, whether that be through working from home, campaigning for the survival of our NHS or finding new and innovative ways to keep businesses afloat, the same cannot be said for many of social media’s high-fliers.
And while the divide between the top percentile of society and the rest of us has become clear, so too has the two types of ‘influencer’. The first, who we’ll call ‘influencers’, once famous and loved for their perfectly curated feeds and escapist appeal, now uniting the nation in their feelings of distrust and anger towards their irresponsible and quite frankly insulting parade of privilege. On the other side, we have those who are increasingly being dubbed as ‘creators’, ‘bloggers’ and even ‘activists’ (a whole other debate in and of itself) in a rejection of the now seemingly dirty word, ‘influencer’.
These are the people on social media who are using their platform for good. Take Sasha Pallari (@sashalouisepallari), whose #FilterDrop campaign, which drew attention to and criticised the use of filters to promote paid content, resulted in the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) recent ruling against using exaggerated and misleading filters in the promotion of products. Or Adwoa Aboah (@adwoaaboah), Founder of Gurls Talk, a community-led non-profit organisation and podcast dedicated to “promoting mental health and wellbeing of adolescent gxrls and young womxn.” Or Dr Alex (@dralexgeorge), the ex-Love Island contestant who used his platform to deliver information on COVID-19 and document his work as an NHS doctor in the midst of the pandemic. Student news site The Tab even went as far as to describe Dr Alex as “the only influencer worth following right now”.
Of course, the list of creators doing incredible things with their platforms is endless. What’s key is that these creators are realising what some of the biggest ‘influencers’ are refusing to: that there’s an inherent responsibility that comes with being in a position of influence, privilege and power.
Unsurprisingly, reports are increasingly showing this demand in social media users. A recent report by Influencer found that 37% of consumers follow influencers to get news updates and, while 30% follow influencers to learn about new brands/products, 37% want them to ‘stand for something/be purposeful’, and this is actually considered the most desirable feature among Gen Z (46%).
Following on from this trend, we’ll likely continue to see this negative shift in public perception towards the ‘influencer’ industry as we move out of lockdown (*touches wood*) and into a post-Covid world. And while that will most definitely involve further regulation and greater accountability for influencers (*touches wood again*), perhaps the most interesting question is this:
Has the influencer era as we know it already come to an end?
