Julian Dorey Podcast - #11 - Influencers Part 1: COMPARISON CULTURE

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

SOLO POD - Becoming an influencer quickly became a modern-day gold rush over the past decade. The earliest adopters had success and then everyone else wanted a piece. Platforms like YouTube & Facebook got the party started—but Instagram quickly became influencer marketing’s main focus.    In Part 1 of a 3-Part series on influencer culture, Julian discusses the early origins and evolution of social platforms, the gigantic influencer industry they created, and our "comparison culture" that enabled them. ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  YouTube CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  ~ Show Notes: https://www.trendifier.com/podcastnotes  TRENDIFIER Website: https://www.trendifier.com  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io  Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side, or B-side, or Bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. What's crazy is social media was invented to connect us, but all we seem to do is use it to compare us. And the farther along we've gotten as one platforms evolved into another the more and more the content has become based around competition one of the many things that our dear friend coronavirus took from us this past year was the Coachella Music Festival.

Now, for those of you who don't know, in case you live under a rock, the Coachella Music Festival is one of the largest music events in the world every year and it's three days out in california where the biggest artists from around the world come to play and i don't know how many fans go but a lot of people go and it's it's wild in recent years though the coachella music festival has taken on a second layer so to speak of what the experience is and what it's all about. And that is, it's become, I guess, must-go-to TV, or however you want to say it, for Instagram influencers far and wide. And yes, I'm being a little sarcastic there, but it's entirely true. What I mean by that is every year, all these influencers, and I say that in air quotes because a lot of these people

are among the ones who maybe shouldn't be influencers and are really just clout chasers. But they descend upon Coachella and for three days wear these way over the top outfits and take these ridiculous ass pictures and post it to their feed with some bullshit caption to their following to show everyone, oh my god, I went to Coachella, and probably get paid for it by some brands along the way. Now, that's a negative view of influencers, and it does not reflect, obviously, what all influencers are like and what they're about. But that is a stereotype that has completely grown out of Coachella and many other places too but Coachella is just one good example the reason I bring up Coachella specifically is because the last time it happened in 2019 there was a YouTube creator named Gabby Hanna who was starting to see over the years that there was certainly some negative connotations with these influencers who were going to Coachella. And she decided that she was going to do a case study.

Now, Gabby came up on YouTube. I think she's like a singer as well. And she's really big there. That's where her biggest audience is. But she's technically now on other platforms like Instagram, an influencer as well. so what she wanted to do was make her following on Instagram believe that she went to Coachella for three days and was having the time of her life and you say how did she do that well in Photoshop it's been done before there's been some influencers who get caught doing things like this but for three days she bought all these crazy over-the-top outfits, even like some wigs and stuff.

She recreated the wristband for the 2019 Coachella Festival and enlisted the help of some friends and took three different pictures that she posted each day in a different outfit, photoshopped it into a backdrop of famous scenes at Coachella, and posted it to Instagram. The entire time she was doing this, she was vlogging. So she was building a behind-the-scenes vlog because the entire point was to show her following after Coachella was over

that they believed she was at Coachella when in reality she was just living at home. And I guess her biggest point, well, actually, I'll let Gabby say her biggest point because she posted this entire thing to YouTube. It's a 23-minute video, so obviously I'm not playing that. And it's a YouTube video, so I can't even play it. But really great content. Shows you how ridiculous some of this stuff is. But I love what she said at the close of the video when she went, social media for the most part is just a very curated and manipulated version of reality. Just don't base your life off of the few posts a week from your favorite influencer living this glamorous, colorful, saturated, hip, trendy, amazing life. Because

the whole time I was living my best life at Coachella, I was really sitting in this editing chair. That was why she did this. She did this to try to expose some of these people who just constantly live to show their following how great their life is, when in reality, that's not always the case. I really liked this case study and that's why I led with it here but I found it and watched the video when I was doing research to do an episode on some of the negative connotations that we've now seen come out of Instagram influencer culture now similarly to when I sat down to do one episode on the college debt crisis and it very quickly turned into three when i sat down to do this episode on influencers it also very quickly turned into three so this first episode is going to be the one where we set the stage at the beginning we'll talk about the evolution of social media and the culture created among us. And we'll talk about how that

then created the influencer industry. And the majority of the episode will be on the size, scope, power, and context of that industry. So let's not waste any more time. Let's get to it. I'm Julian Dorey, and this is Trending Fire.

Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where is the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this but few seem to do it.

If you don't like the status quo start asking questions. In order to talk about influencers, we got to talk about what created them first. And that's social media. Now, where I draw the line in the sand or what I consider to be the first true social media platform is MySpace. And some people argue and they'll say, oh, no, there were all these other platforms or whatever i'm sure there were but myspace was the first place where you could go on and build your own web page that was called a profile

that showed pictures of yourself your interests And then also allowed you to connect. With other people who built this web page. And profile. Who you knew. And therefore be able to show your friends. And then interact on this platform with friends. It's the first place you could do all this stuff. But MySpace had some problems.

I was young when I was using this. I was like 4th or 5th grade. But even I saw some issues with MySpace. For one thing, I don't remember there ever being a news feed. They may have eventually gotten one, but there wasn't a central place to see what everyone else was doing or what the latest news was. For another thing, the profiles were all over the place. Yes, you knew when you were on a MySpace profile, but one profile to the next profile could look way different, especially on the eyes. And what I mean by that is the color patterns were completely different. Like you could have one profile that was black and blue

and the next one be red and white. The layouts were completely different. The type of content you put in there was completely different. Where you put certain common feeds on pages on your actual page versus where someone else put it could be completely different. It had a lot of moving parts. And it was also harder to find other people on the site. Again, no newsfeed, no central place to really search for people and figure out what's what. if i'm wrong on the news feed part correct me but when i used it i don't remember there ever being a news feed anyway a year or two later i had a distant relative visiting from the west coast so i was like maybe 12 years old this is like 06 and she was older than I was and heading into college. And she said, have you ever heard of Facebook? And I said, what's the Facebook? And she goes, oh my God, it had been a platform created for college students to connect,

and now it was open to the public, and she had known about it because she was going to college, but everyone who wasn't going to college or was, I should say, was still in high school back home had one. She had had one, and it was just exploding. So she shows it to me, and and immediately even like the young me saw the problems from myspace that this thing solved first of all facebook had a news feed it had a central place where you could go and see what your friends were doing that day and most importantly search for friends and easily be able to find them on the website itself to connect in a way easier quicker manner secondly the color pattern was consistent

it used white space which looked a lot nicer and blue is a secondary color and that's what you saw everywhere you went thirdly i won't give Facebook all the credit at day one and say that the profiles were all uniform. They weren't. You could make a lot of clutter and make things a lot different from other people's pages. But when you first click the profile and went there and went to that person's page, the top of the page and the key parts right there all look the same from profile to profile as far as their layout it was just a lot easier and so even though i was young it was it was very easy to see exactly how this was going to change the game for how society communicated i mean fuck the

corporate control it was gone this was a platform where people could literally share whatever they wanted and have it discoverable on a feed at all times whatever it may be you started with the facebook statuses which used to be like your name and is so it'd be like julian is which are hilarious to go back and look at now but you know it could be something as simple as that or you could share i think day one you could share links and stuff that that you liked either way that was early on and i knew that this was also going to be something where people could share their opinions, ideas, and talents very easily. I mean, YouTube had already come up in 2006, 2007, and we were seeing the power of video for being able to

discover people and share those things, ideas, thoughts, and talents. But now Facebook was a place where people were going to live because it showed what was going on in your life specifically. It was easy to share photos and therefore experiences. What also became clear though, very quickly, was some of the downsides to that. It was easy to see that this was addictive and people were going to be spending a lot of time in each other's feeds or in the feed looking at each other's shit and figuring out who's doing what and whether or not it's better than them. I mean, it was immediately, I can remember,

through photo albums. That was the first big thing. But immediately through things like photo albums, it became this rat race for attention, validation, and like friend group comparison. Now let's think about today because a lot's happened since facebook but those downsides i just mentioned noticing on facebook right away as a young kid they're exactly what built out the next platforms to happen i mean look at some of the examples we see regularly now instagram's going to be a heavy focus here so i don't want to touch that too much right now.

But just out front, it's a filter vanity platform where people compete for the number of likes they get. It's not even about sharing what's you. It's about sharing what you think other people are going to like the best. And then did I share it better than other people did keep that in mind keep that comparison thing in mind i'm coming to that in a second i look at twitter on twitter now people are just constantly trying to go viral with 280 characters and on the off chance that they actually do suddenly these tweets will become threads and you hit thread and it'll say oh

let's run it up or oh follow my page this is trending great just searching for other people to be able to say they have more likes and follows than other people and tiktok tiktok i saw early when it was all the 14 yearyear-olds on there, and I was not 14, put it that way. But I saw the power of this because I had been so curious for a platform to replace Vine since Vine had died. I thought Vine really had an entire market and just completely failed as a company and blew a huge opportunity. And TikTok integrated a lot of the vanity, in my opinion, that we saw from Instagram, now on a video platform that was in a way replacing Vine. But one of the things I saw right away on TikTok was that all these kids would hashtag everything with viral or make me TikTok famous or I want to go viral or like for like or all this shit. And it was all about just trying to get the most

attention possible regardless of what they posted or how stupid it might be or look. And that's a trend that's kind of continued with that platform. What's crazy is social media was invented to connect us, but all we seem to do is use it to compare us. And the farther along we've gotten, as one platform's evolved into another, the more and more the content has become based around competition. I found a great article about this in Stylist by, I'm going to mess up her name, I'm sorry, but Lauren Jall. I hope I got that right, probably didn't. It's spelled G-E-A-L-L. And as usual, this link and all the notes from the show will be in the show notes on trendofire.com when I post this episode. Anyway, I found this article. I thought Lauren did a great job describing this comparison culture we live in,

so I want to read a little snippet of it. And she says, we now live in a comparison culture, meaning we are constantly, both consciously and subconsciously, comparing our lives to the highlight reels of people we haven't seen in years and in many cases whom we've never actually met at our fingertips we are bombarded with an endless scroll of other people's accomplishments collecting likes and shares and spreading FOMO and feelings of inadequacy into our commutes our moments waiting in line for coffee and even our beds at 2 a.m and it doesn't feel good first of all she nailed it with that we are so interested in what everyone else is doing and we constantly draw it back to ourselves to assume that whatever we're doing is not as good and our life therefore is not as good and our purpose therefore is not as good and our purpose therefore is not as good

and it then affects our mood our opinion of ourselves and our outlook on the world so lauren did a great job putting that together there in that paragraph maybe the worst part of the whole thing is that because we are constantly trying to compare ourselves, the attention we give to that on a daily basis throughout the day, we're going to talk more about this in a second, but throughout the day, the attention we give to that

draws away from all the other things we could be doing to make our lives better. And it fucks with something called flow. How can you get into flow when you're so worried about checking the latest news on your social media every half hour or every 15 minutes or whatever? How can you focus when you're worried about what everyone else is doing that has nothing to do with what you're doing in front of you? I'm saying things a lot of us can relate to at least at some point in our lives i mean i know at the beginning i wasn't terrible about that but at the beginning of corona quarantine i just took the instagram app off my phone i took the twitter app off my phone too because they're very easy to get on the computer and you spend a lot less time there and you're much less likely to go to it. And it's been great. I mean, it's like

it's like Decompression City. And you don't do that inane, let me just go look for it because I haven't checked it in a while type thing. It gets you out of the habit. And it's a habit that we form throughout all these platforms using them over the years and getting more and more used to it as a part of our day. And the thing is, all of this, I mean, it affects every demographic at this point. We all know grandma or aunt, whatever the fuck, who's on Facebook all goddamn day. But all of this affects Gen Zs and millennials more than anything else because we grew up with it. And I'm like right towards the line of millennial and Gen Z.

But either way, if you're born post-1980, in some way or another, in a formative part of your life, you grew up with some of this stuff. And even if you were one of the oldest ones of the millennials who was born in 1980 or 81 or 82 whatever and you didn't have social media when you were in college you probably got on the horse or a lot of you got on the horse right after college when you weren't settled down in life yet and it's become a part of your day i even see a regular like i said in gen xers and boomers as well but i said gen z and millennials because we don't really know any other reality besides this type of world and besides this type of culture and now we are statistically the majority of the workforce meaning we have the ability to affect everything that occurs within the economy and culture, technically,

technically we have the most power to do that of any demographic when you combine Gen Z and millennials together. And Gen Z is just coming into the workforce now. They're like five to 10% in, something like that. Nothing crazy. The millennials are the biggest demographic in there, but you put them together and they outweigh 50% of the total. And so what this goes to show you is that some of the things like comparison culture, which is a negative, that are really born in the generations, the younger ones like Gen Z and millennials, they're probably here to stay. And in that case, unfortunately, it's a part of life now like you are comparing yourself against what everyone else does and that just feels like something you're wired to do like you were born with it but you're really not it's just the way the social media environment trains us all to be and nowhere do you see the comparison culture more open and evident than on instagram this is why i

wanted to bury the lead on some of Instagram. So let's start getting to that right now. Instagram, of all the social platforms, is the most popular platform among Generation Z and the millennials. It has the most attention with those demographics. And I just pointed out why that's critical, because they're literally, we are literally taking over the workforce and therefore controlling a lot of culture and everything downstream that comes of it. So let's look at the platform that we are most likely to pay attention to. So I want to start with some stats here to set the stage. And these ones I'm going to give right now are from Omnicore. But as of January 2020, there were over 1 billion worldwide users of Instagram, 121 million of which are in the U.S.

I don't know if these numbers include bot accounts. I assume they do. But if they don't, then these numbers are even bigger because bot accounts are obviously worthless 65 percent of all users are between ages 18 and 34 which underscores the fact that that's prime millennial gen z 63 percent of all users use instagram daily and the average user which isn't just the 63 percent that uses it daily i want to point that out this And the average user, which isn't just the 63% that uses it daily. I want to point that out. This is the average user across all users,

including people who never fucking use it. The average user uses Instagram for 28 minutes a day. So imagine all the people who use Instagram daily and now try to think of how much they're actually using it on average per day. And the overall vibe is look at me it's what it's all about people just do it subconsciously even it's about sharing the best part of your life putting the best filter on it and it's not everyone it's not everyone but putting the best filter on it and putting it out there to get the most likes

and nothing tells the story better than the early days of instagram i mean that's what it was created for is created to fuck with pictures and make them look a lot better that's what kevin sistrom the founder has literally described it as but in the old days before a lot of people were using the platforms some of the earliest influencers were like kim kardashian who remains has one of the platforms, some of the earliest influencers were like Kim Kardashian, who remains has one of the biggest followings in the world today. And so they were early adopters got onto the platform early, and built a big following. As a result, there was less things to pay attention to. But we immediately saw as people began to adopt the platform,

different ways that random people maybe people who didn't necessarily have a real skill or talent or didn't really have something that they knew a lot about meaning all these things that that should make someone an influencer someone who has the attention of other people because they have an expertise or a reason or a credibility to show or share ideas on something. All these random people built big followings at the beginning strictly because they were early adopters and strictly because they did things like like for likes. I was talking with one friend who's got a really big following, and he's actually a successful guy now but after i first met him a few years back i saw his following and i was like dude you got a fuck ton of followers like how many how did that happen and he started laughing his ass off and he said when did you get

on instagram and i told him i had been on it doing marketing for other people, but I'm like, I really didn't join it myself until 2018. I just never really did it. And he goes, all right, well, if you had been there in like 2013, like the very early days, maybe even said 2012, what would happen is you would go to a picture of say Kim Kardashian or someone with a huge following, and the comments would be everything there because it was a wild, wild west. And people would go in and comment on the post and say, like for like or follow for follow or something. And we would just be commenting all day and then following and unfollowing and hoping other people forgot to do vice versa.

And he goes, it was like addictive. It's what we did for forgot to do vice versa and he goes it's it was like addictive it's what we did for months at a time and he goes i built a following through that so now he's able to use the following because he does some stuff with it but that was hilarious to me and if you think about it as crazy as some of that sounds it actually does still happen today instagram did what they could do to try to clean it up, but they actually enabled some of it and some of the changes they made. So one of the things they do is they have like this, people call it like comment sticking where they take bigger accounts or accounts that have more traction on certain pages that

you're more likely to look at. And as you're scrolling through your feed, they put those comments as the ones you can see besides hitting like view comments. And so there are people who have gone around and just commented on so many posts on the same accounts that they become that sticky comment. And then they gain followers through that. I don't have some examples in front of me right now, but I will post the article on that in the show notes so you can check it out. But there's some people who build a following that way. And then you also have, if you have a blue check mark, if you go to comment on anything in general, especially if you comment early, your comments are put towards the top. So if you're commenting on some of the biggest influencers even like a kim kardashian who's got over 100 million followers

you can somehow get to the top and get attention from that another way that people in the early days though to go back to those another way that people built their followings early on is they did something viral and because there was less people there was a way bigger ability to go viral and so there was a guy like murad osman i don't even know if people are as familiar with his name but he's big i mean he's got millions of followers and he's the guy that created the follow me to movement so that was the whole the whole thing where you hold back your hand and then it gets held onto in the picture and you take a picture with the face facing away. Like all the girls do. He's the guy that created that because he was a photographer and his girlfriend was always trying to pull him to the next place when he'd be stopping to take some painstaking picture.

And so one time he just snapped it and posted it and boom, there you go. Now today, would that go? Maybe. picture and so one time he just snapped it and posted it and boom there you go now today would that go maybe but for every murad osman now there's a million other people posting things that could hypothetically go viral so it's harder to do so as instagram continued to grow and the user base also continued to expand, these new users would come onto the platform and figure out new ways to amass a big following. Some of these ways included people who may have just literally relied on pre-existing social clout

that they had before they ever joined the app that allowed them to network and build a big following. Some people turned to looks. So women and men who were really good looking just posted content of themselves and people admired it because they were really good looking and followed them. These are who we now know to be Instagram models.

Others may have had crazy backstories and built upon those stories, whether they were just insane or inspirational or anything in between they got people to identify with it and want to follow them and then others came in and

demonstrated knowledge, authority and a clear handle of some sort of topic or some sort of cultural area that people who were interested in said topic or cultural area would view them as a trusted source to go to for information and for advice. And so we started to see subcategories, especially of that last one I just mentioned, form.

And we saw subcategories like people who were interested in fashion, people who were interested in food, lifestyle, fitness, beauty, travel. The list goes on. And these, the people who built these followings and who found these niches among some of those subcategories, and some people had multiple subcategories, but the people who built these followings and found these niches among some of those subcategories. And some people had multiple subcategories. But the people who built these followings and found these niches are the ones who were considered the first influencers. And are the ones who really dawned the influencer era for real.

Now, it's not like this had ever been some form of a career before people didn't just walk onto social media and suddenly say like all right i'm just gonna post content about myself about shit i'm passionate in and i'll make money on it i guess some people had kind of done that on facebook in the early days i don't know much about it but as far as especially younger people people below the age of 30 this was a very foreign concept youtube had been around people created content on there and then made ad revenue that was that was a different concept but as far as being in charge of your own content posting it and then figuring out a way to monetize it and turning it into a career that was new. And it was new because it involved having to go directly to brands and working with them.

And we're going to get to that in a minute. But first I want to point out some statistics that just show you how far this has reached today. And how many influencers there really are out there. And the scope of how many of these people are out there and the scope of how many of these people are making a career of something like this so i had said earlier that there were over 1 billion instagram accounts globally just over 10 of these accounts have at least 10 000 followers and i say 10 000 because,000 is generally the cutoff for the smallest real ability

to actually monetize consistently micro-influencers. Now, if you have 10,000 followers, unless you are really out there advocating for yourself with brands and posting content and creating great content all the time in which case you're probably going to grow to a lot more than 10 000 but let's say you didn't for the sake of argument if you have 10 000 followers you're not swimming in money you're not making five thousand dollars a post or anything like nowhere even close to that that

that's a harder living and a lot of people who have followings like that have real jobs because they could never earn their living off of making money on instagram but at 10 000 you're at least monetized or you have the ability to monetize and actually do something with it and and make some some real. So just over 10% of those 1 billion accounts have at least 10,000 followers. So I guess math, it's like 100 million accounts have that. Which is kind of crazy when you think about it. Once you get up to 50,000 followers though, the number decreases dramatically.

It's between about 1% and two percent of all instagram accounts globally have that amount of followers and 50 000 followers has much more monetizable ability there are people who can make that a career i'm not saying they're going to be millionaires or anything like that but they're doing all right. And you think about it, like in society, people are always talking about the 1% of something. And I guess 50,000 followers on Instagram is about the cutoff of what you would call the 1%. It's hard to do.

1% or a little more than 1% of accounts actually accomplish it. But once you get up to 100,000 followers, so you go from 50 to 100, now there's only about 300,000 to 400,000 accounts globally who have that number. So roughly, what's that, like 0.04? 0.04%. It's a low number. Someone do the math for me.

But a very, very low number of accounts actually get to 100,000. When you're at 100,000 followers and you're posting on a regular basis, now you're making some money. Now you can do some things. You still have to, if you're down literally at like a hundred thousand, you still got to advocate for yourself a lot. You have to go to brands. You have to prove value, which is something I'll explain probably more in the next episode, why that's a real thing now, but you can go out there and you can earn some serious, serious money. And that's why it's very, very hard to get there. And another important thing that we shouldn't forget in all this is that when it comes to the rise of influencers, they're an entirely new movement. The people who had attention

were the traditional celebrities, the actors, the actresses, the athletes, the people on TV, people who were brought to us by the middleman, not by the freedom of the internet. People who were involved with organizations that were broadcast on things like TV. That's who was famous. And many of those people continue to be famous.

The difference now is they have to be on the internet too. And they have to compete with more people for our attention and therefore their brandability and their name recognition than they did, say, a decade ago. Influencers a decade ago, many of these people never would have been famous. No one would have ever known them. They wouldn't have had discoverability. They wouldn't have been able to put their own content out there. And get other people to notice them.

In many cases. Not all of them. Now they're out there. And so now. People find them. And dedicate some of their attention. their day towards these influencers where they would have been doing it in the past towards more traditional celebrities. So there's more people, more supply of people who can get attention. And the same amount of demand. so it's kind of a dog fight just to be able to get brand recognition even among some of the

traditional spaces and people who are traditionally famous i mean i always think about it this way like i'm a big eagles fan if i were a 15 year old kid well i was a 15 year old kid so when i was 10 or 15 years old if i saw jeremiah trotter in the wawa that was like a huge fucking deal like oh my god jeremiah trotter was in there he was a great linebacker for the eagles today if i were a 10 or 15 year old kid let's just use trotter and say he was playing today as an example. I don't know that that would be a big deal. Because he's just another guy. I would almost go on and look at his Instagram and say, like, oh, he's got 20,000 followers.

What's the big deal? There is the access and the behind the curtain to influencers and people of note that the internet and things like Instagram have allowed us has almost desensitized us to certain levels of stardom. Now, when it comes to megastars like people like Bieber or enormous influencers like Logan Paul and stuff like that, yes, if a 15-year-old sees them, they're probably going to shit themselves. But other people who traditionally it would have been a big deal to see, who were like somewhat of stars or somewhat known people, now it's not that big a deal. I don't know. It's confusing to think about, but I do kind of wonder about that and how fast that changed. But anyway, I want to get back on point here. That kind of goes over the whole attention battle that's going on. And the reason I wanted to bring that up was because this battle for attention is a battle over money as well.

If all of our attention is online, that is where marketing and sales are going to go. That's why everyone's going away from TV as well. If all of our attention is online. That is where marketing and sales are going to go. That's why everyone is going away from TV as well. People aren't there anymore. They're online. So they're on socials. They are on. This is where Gen Z's and Millennials are. It's where even like on Facebook.

It's where a lot of boomers are. So this is where businesses look to sell and move product. So all these influencers are battling over trying to get brands and convincing brands to send product and therefore money also their way so that they can sell said product to their following. I mean, it's a tit-for-tat kind of deal. And the reason brands really like this is because it allows them to get to customers through a secondary source. It's like the ultimate testimonial. Instead of a brand coming up to you like, hey, buy our product. Look at the sign. It's shiny. It's great.

Look at all the benefits you're going to get. Buy it, buy our product. Look at the sign. It's shiny. It's great. Look at all the benefits you're going to get. Buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it. Instead of that, they go to influencers and say, hey, Influencer X over here, for example, you definitely would love using this product. This is right up your alley. What do you think? They go, okay, I like the product. Cool. Can we pay you to use that and make some posts about it

and tell your following how much you enjoy using it and even give them a discount code to buy and code to buy it it's what they do i mean this is like duh like if you've been on instagram this this is what happens left and right and so all these influencers have been trying to build their followings because that industry grew and people realize, oh my god, the brands are going to throw us money. So let's figure out how to get our followings as big as possible so we can make as much money as possible. were able to literally build trust and have had a lot of success getting their followers to buy products. One of the things we will focus on in the next episode is how some of that sentiment has begun to shift. And there's been a lack of trust due to some influencers, some, like not all of them, but some influencers being bad actors in some cases and therefore

hurting a lot of good influencers in the process. But for now, what's happened to build up this influencer marketing industry is unquestionable. The numbers are insane. This is an industry that does billions a year now. And some estimates say that by 2022, 2023, that number is going to be up towards 10 to 15 billion. So businesses are throwing a lot of money at a lot of different people to convince other people that their brands are good

and they should therefore buy them. And if you look at some of DMI's 2018 data, which will be in the show notes, 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations. That was as of 2018. But that's the kind of power that this industry was able to build over really like a five-year period. There's another stat in there.

It said 86% of women use socials for purchasing advice. You know what that means. They're looking for other people to tell them what they're into and see if they like it. The point is I'm trying to establish that influencers have long since developed this marketplace and over the years they built this tremendous trust regardless of where i'm going to go with this in the next episode where i mentioned obviously i'm going to describe some negative parts of this to focus on how influencers were able to do this is very important first. Because there's no denying how big this got and how much trust they built over a period of time there.

And I saw an article in Forbes that I think really described the psychological relationship that influencers have built with us over the past five, six years, especially very, very well. And it was by this guy, Bradley Hughes, and he broke down different ways that we feel bonded to influencers. So one of the things he described was this idea of cultural conformity. And in the article he wrote, human beings are social creatures that are programmed to connect deeply with those in our pack. With this connectivity comes an intense expectation to be similar to the pack, or perhaps better said, to keep up with the Joneses or maybe even the Kardashians. Point being, when we make a choice to follow an influencer, it's because we either A, see a piece of ourselves in them or a similarity in them, or B, or both, we see things about them that we want for ourselves and desire for ourselves and wish ourselves to be. So that creates a kinship where then when we interact with the things they do and what they put out there we feel like they're they almost have like a relationship with us like we know them

like we watch their instagram stories right next to the stories we watch of our friends we see their posts right next to the posts we see of our friends it's like a part of our day they are a part of our life even if we don't know them personally sometimes it's little things like them literally responding to our comments when we comment on their post i mean that is real they do respond they recognize you it's something social media and the power of it allows but these things build up and it feels different than just following someone because they're famous or because you're interested in them. And actually one other thing within that cultural conformity concept that Who's brought up that I really liked as well was the power of the halo effect.

The halo effect is this idea it's a term it's this idea that when we see somebody really great or really good at one thing in particular over time as we interact with with them and and watch them be great at this one thing we eventually just come to believe all these other things about them that they're they also must be great at this or they also must do things like this or act this way or be this way now that sounds like gibberish but the example bradley who's used in the article that i think will get it home is tiger woods so tiger woods i mean i think he's the greatest golfer of all time everyone thought he was the greatest golfer of all time in the

2000s until 2009 when he had the big public scandal now what was the big public scandal you know look he cheated on his wife who was the of his kids, and he was having a lot of sex. The guy was literally banging chicks in the back of his car in the parking lot at 6 a.m. at diners. I mean, he was definitely out there. But at the end of the day, you know, was that all wrong? Yes, absolutely. But why did we care that much? Why was it so bad when Tiger did that? I mean he didn't kill anybody. He didn't, as far as we know, rape anybody. I don't think he raped anybody. No, he just fucked a lot. And yet we dragged him through the mud because he was Tiger Woods. It's like, oh my god, no, Tiger Woods, the great golfer, like, he doesn't do that.

No, no, no, no. Like, Tiger Woods doesn't cheat on his wife and fuck other chicks. No, no, Tiger Woods would never, he would never be a sex addict come on it's what every grandma was saying staring at her tv in disbelief it's because we just believe that because we saw this guy who was great on sundays and wore the red and fist pumped his way as the ball went into the hole and won a lot of fucking tournaments and said all the right things, we assumed everything about him was perfect. He was happy in life. He had the beautiful wife. He had the great kids.

Everything was great. And no man like Tiger Woods would ever make a mistake, let alone these kinds of mistakes. And so it turned into this massive public scandal that derailed his career. Now, it was nice to see him win a major last year, finally, but it completely changed the complexion of his career and life. And I'm not defending what he did, but that probably wasn't fair. And it's a direct consequence because he was a megastar.

It was a direct consequence of the halo effect. We expected things of him that we time and we form this kinship, this idea of cultural conformity that Hoos is talking about, we form expectations about other things for them. We put them up on pedestals that are even beyond maybe who they really are. We get incredibly excited if they do things like respond to our comment because it's like oh my god like they're so important and so these are the same people that then bring product to you and tell you they like it so you should like it too and fuck yeah you're gonna buy it that's how they built this market another point he made in the article was that we have a sense of power and control in choosing them, and this is important. When we pick an influencer to follow, it's our decision to smash the follow button. We go to their profile. We look through their content. We judge them. They have no idea we're doing it, but we're judging them and what they put out there and whether or not it's something we admire or may admire or kind of like or maybe would like.

And then we decide whether we are going to follow them and therefore allow their content to enter our feed, the point Bradley made in the article is that it kind of validates our decision to dedicate the attention we're giving to them. You see what I'm saying? Did I say that right? I definitely said that wrong. It validates our decision to give some of our attention to them. That's kind of what I wanted to say. Meaning other influencers are posting at that time, but they're not coming into our feed because we didn't choose them. So that also creates this little kinship. It's like it becomes a part of your story on social media one other point that i want to mention that he hit on that i think was important is the desire to help others that we have innately as humans it's it's just

something true like think of the most selfish person you've ever met and i will challenge you to tell me that that person has never actually opened a door once for a random person on the street just out of nowhere. They definitely have. And the point is there is something innate inside of us as humans that makes us feel good when we help out other people. So after we've decided to follow an influencer because we like their content and after we watch them over a period of time and begin to feel an attachment to them and a kinship with them,

we naturally want to help them too. So some of the simple ways to do this are by validating their content with a like or a comment, which also obviously helps their metrics. And then some of the more serious ways to do it are to buy the products that they're out there selling for brands trying to make a living this is what happened this is why this industry it's going to be a 10 to 15 billion dollar industry and is already in

the billions so i i want to cut this episode there the whole point was to provide context as to how this grew and just how widespread the influencer marketplace however you want to say it is and I think we got that across so part two we're going to go into some of the downside effects we've seen, especially over the last couple of years, share some specific stories around it,

talk about some of the ways influencers have gone wrong and therefore hurt the brand of a lot of influencers who don't do some of these things. And then we'll delve into all that. So until then, give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.