Uncovering the Influencer Pay Gap: What Does the Research Show and How Can We Tackle It?
Pay gaps have remained one of the many sticking points in the ongoing fight for equality. Look at almost every industry and at every level you’ll see pay inequality dependent on factors including race, gender and disability. Now, recent data shows that influencer marketing, and the marketing sector more generally, are no exception.
Following recent reports, including SevenSix Agency’s Lifting the Lid: The Influencer Pricing Report and Marketing Week’s Career and Salary Survey, it’s clear that inequality, lack of diversity and lack of standardisation are industry-wide trends affecting both the marketers within brands and agencies as well as the influencers they work with. And with brands set to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022 (according to Business Insider), the critical role influencers play in many successful campaigns and strategies is only going to increase.
So that leaves us with 3 key questions about what’s the ‘influencer pay gap’: What does the research show about it? What are the reasons the pay gap exists? And how can we tackle it to ensure equality and transparency across the industry?
What does the research show?
Since January 2020, there have been a number of reports looking into the pay gap in influencer marketing, and marketing more generally, most notably focusing on gender and race. These include research by HypeAuditor, Klear, SevenSix Agency, Marketing Week and more. We’ve also seen the rise of @influencerpaygap, an Instagram account set up by Adesuwa Ajayi, which provides a platform for influencers to anonymously share stories about their experiences of collaborating with brands. In an interview with Bustle last year, Ajayi says she made the page “out of frustration” and “wanted to strip everything back and put everyone in the same pool. I know Black influencers are being underpaid. I feel there’s a definite pay gap between Black and non-Black influencers.”
All of the research that has been done has supported the accounts of an influencer pay gap and found that pay gaps exist across the industry based on gender, race and disability. Not only are black influencers getting paid less than white influencers, but a 2020 study by HypeAuditor found that men also get paid more than women in the sector, with the gap continuing to grow into the higher audience tiers. This followed a 2019 study by Klear into influencer marketing rates, which also reported that female influencers were being paid 33% less than their male counterparts, despite making up 77% of the industry. Though there’s currently little research into the pay gap among other groups, LGBTQ+ and disabled influencers have taken to @influencerpaygap to share stories of being unfairly paid, or of brands not paying them at all for campaigns and partnerships.
Earlier this month, SevenSix Agency also released its findings on the influencer pay gap and how race plays an impact on influencer pricing in its Lifting the Lid: The Influencer Pricing Report. The report gathered data from more than 275 influencers, brands and agencies in the UK and beyond, and found that 57% of influencers who responded believed that their ethnicity played a role in either increasing (20%) or decreasing (37%) the price they were offered for campaigns. 99% of the influencers who believed their prices decreased due to their ethnicity identified as people of colour.
Why does the pay gap exist?
The reasons for why pay gaps still exist across industries are many and wide-ranging, and often a result of multiple, interwoven factors. From the research published so far in the influencer marketing industry, there seems to be 3 stand-out factors that play a role in the existence of the influencer pay gap: lack of transparency, lack of standardisation and inequality in the wider marketing industry.
A significant contributor to the pay inequality in influencer marketing is the industry’s lack of transparency over influencer pay. SevenSix Agency says it received over 3.9x more responses from influencers than brands and agencies in its Lifting the Lid: The Influencer Pricing Report, and noted that the lack of transparency from brands may be attributed to a fear of being exposed (despite assurance of full anonymity). With consumers increasingly demanding more transparency and inclusivity, the emergence of accounts like @influencerpaygap on Instagram have emerged to offer more transparency and provide a platform for where influencers’ stories to be seen and heard.
The lack of transparency can also be linked to another contributor to the influencer pay gap, as noted in both Klear’s (2019) and SevenSix Agency’s (2021) reports, which is the lack of standardisation of pay in the industry. Unlike many industries (where, it’s worth noting, pay inequality is often still an issue), influencer marketing is largely reliant on influencers acting as ‘freelancers’, being approached by brands, setting their own fees and negotiating based on their perceived worth. However, there are few resources and this lack of transparency around what these rates should be. This leads to a lack of clarity among both brands and influencers on what they should be offering/charging for marketing campaigns, with brands often struggling with budgeting and influencers unsure of their monetary value. SevenSix Agency reported that just 22% of influencers said they felt confident pricing themselves for paid brand partnerships, with the remaining 78% saying they felt unconfident (47%) or only ‘sometimes’ confident (31%) pricing themselves.
It’s also worth remembering that, like with many societal problems, the issue is indicative of what is happening ‘at the top’. In the case of influencer marketing, influencers are one ‘tool’, for want of a better word, for brands to market products with, and so the way brands treat and pay influencers are somewhat a reflection of their owners and of the marketing industry as a whole. It therefore comes as no surprise that the marketing sector too has a major problem with equality and diversity: a survey by Marketing Week found that 88% of marketers identify as white, while just 4% identify as mixed race and 2% as black.
And race is not the only area of concern when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Marketing Week (2020) reported that an overwhelming 82% of all marketers define themselves as coming from either an upper middle, middle or lower middle class background. This indicates a distinct lack of accessibility for working class people and those coming from underprivileged and underrepresented families and backgrounds. The same survey reported the gender pay gap in the marketing industry as 28% - that’s more than 3x the UK’s national gender pay gap of 8.9% for full-time workers (calculated by the UK Office for National Statistics in 2019).
How can we tackle the influencer pay gap?
Tackling any pay gap is no mean feat; it takes huge amounts of research and pulling together of resources by brands, organisations and individuals - the fact that the UK’s gender pay gap still stands at 8.9% for full-time workers speaks volumes. But looking at the data and insights of industry experts, there are some key areas to focus on if the industry is to start addressing its pay gap problems.
The first is through increased awareness and transparency. The demand for greater transparency from brands is already increasing amongst consumers, and this is encouraging many to invest in tackling inequality and addressing bad practice when it comes to influencer marketing. A range of platforms and agencies have also taken it upon themselves to shine a light on the influencer pay gap and offer support to underrepresented creators. The most notable platform, as highlighted in this article, is @influencerpaygap, which has allowed influencers to share insights into how the influencer marketing space operates and raise awareness of unequal and unfair treatment of influencers. Influencer marketing agency SevenSix Agency, which represents POC in the industry and works with brands to promote inclusivity and diversity in marketing campaigns, has also been using its platform to raise awareness of issues affecting black, asian and minority ethnic influencers, including the influencer pay gap.
As also previously noted, as a relatively young industry, influencer marketing has not seen a huge amount of research, resources or regulation in comparison to the marketing sector more broadly. In the last year or so, the tide has begun to change, with new data and greater transparency about the influencer pay gap and inequalities in the industry. With continued media coverage and research, the exact problems and the roles particular factors play in facilitating the influencer pay gap can be more widely understood, which makes the necessary measures that need to be taken to tackle it easier to identify. Major research is already underway in the advertising and marketing industry; the Advertising Association, ISBA and IPA (aka The Inclusion Group) are looking to assess the extent of the problem and address its diversity and inclusion problem with a major census (FYI: if you work in marketing and advertising, you have until 19th March to contribute to this census).
The marketing industry as a whole clearly has a real issue with a lack of diversity and accessibility, and the need for greater support and resources for individuals, including influencers, is significant. For influencers specifically, it’s clear that there is a need for greater guidance and support when it comes to setting and negotiating rates and entering into partnerships with brands. While there has been fantastic work on this front, it’s ultimately an issue that still needs to see greater industry-wide support and awareness. One area in which SevenSix Agency have taken great first steps is the standardisation of influencer rates, tackling this issue in their 2021 report by speaking with industry experts to define factors involved in the collaboration process. These factors include what a good engagement rate is actually defined as (and how this differs for individuals with a smaller following), as well as appropriate pricing brackets based on a good engagement rate, which range from £100-£250 for influencers with 1k-5k followers, all the way up to £3000+ for influencers with 100k+ followers. You can see the full list of pricing brackets by downloading the Lifting the Lid: The Influencer Pricing Report.
Find out more
You can find out more about the influencer pay gap and the issues covered in this article by visiting any of the links included above. In the spirit of promoting awareness and transparency, we’d also encourage you to have conversations about these issues with your co-workers and your wider communities. SocialDay’s Social Media Marketing Facebook Group is a great place to go to to have these discussions, connect and network with other industry professionals - you can join us here.
For this year’s Social Media Marketing Awards, we’ve also been lucky enough to secure Founder of SevenSix Agency Charlotte Williams as one of our esteemed judges. Head to the Social Media Marketing Awards site to find out more.
