Tech Brew Ride Home - The "Influencers" Beat With Taylor Lorenz

Episode Date: February 24, 2019

Taylor Lorenz, over at the Atlantic has the influencer beat down. I’ve told you about so many of her stories, often as longreads. You think influencers… the universe of YouTube stars, Instagram stars, social media stars generally is a niche thing? No way. This is already a huge industry with a ton of money sloshing around in it, and Taylor covers it better than anyone else. Sponsors: Bubble.is (coupon code "ride") Burrow.com/tech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to a bonus episode of the TechMeme Ride Home. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Taylor Lawrence, over at the Atlantic, has the influencer beat locked down.

I've told you about so many of her stories, often as long reads. If you think influencers, the universe of YouTube stars, Instagram stars, social media stars generally is a niche thing, I'm here to tell you no way. This is already a huge industry with a ton of money. washing around in it. And Taylor covers this space better than anyone else. So today, we get a sense of this space from all angles, society-wise, business-wise, even platform-wise. But first, a word from our sponsors. Okay. Now let's talk to the great Taylor Lawrence. Here's why I'm so thrilled. Your beat is so fascinating to me. And I, so maybe that's actually my first question is,

uh, I'm imagining, you know, it's like one of those old 30s movies or something. You go to the other and you be like, I want to cover the influencer social media beat or do they come to you and propose it to, like how, how did you get on this beat? Oh my gosh. Um, I mean, I've been doing this for almost a decade. So it's been a long time. I kind of, yeah, a little over 10 years ago, got really into Tumblr. I had not really spent a lot of time on the internet growing up. And then I graduated college and I didn't really know what I was doing. I was working temp jobs. I got extremely into Tumblr. Like it was my life, like 16 hours a day on Tumblr. And I kind of just, I don't know, I just got really into sort of like internet culture.

and I became really involved in a lot of Tumblr communities, but also like kind of got a lot of my own audience online and then like met a lot of other people, I guess, that were like kind of early YouTube Tumblr people, like YouTube Starry Tumblr people, but it was, I mean, it was still pretty early back then. I didn't really, so I started, yeah, so that kind of like got me interested in the internet.

And I was, I sort of ended up because of my, the success of a bunch of tumblers that I made, getting a job at an ad agency. So I was running social media for brands and started just writing about it on the side. I felt like a lot of people weren't taking, I guess, like, the internet culture seriously, or I felt like they weren't really covering Tumblr the way that I thought it should be or covering a lot of the online communities that I was involved with very well. And so, yeah, I just sort of started to do more and more of it, and I've been doing it ever since.

But I will say, sorry, what were you saying? Well, I was going to say, sorry to interrupt, the, you are, of course, a big picture covering internet culture in general, but would you say that what you've been covering recently is like influencer culture? It's crazy. I've been covering influencer culture for seven years. Like, I don't, I launched, in back in end of 2014, 2015, I actually helped launch a sub-brand for Time Inc that was under People magazine.

covering influencers. I mean, I helped completely redefine the way that people in EW approached covering. At that time, they were calling them digital stars, but it was, you know, sort of it was influencers. People just didn't call them influencers as much then. But I've been covering, like, and I've covered a lot of early Vine stars, MySpace people, early YouTube. I think, I think people just, it's this really weird confluence of things because I actually feel like for so long. It was really hard. Like, my story's going to get a lot of attention,

and I just kind of wrote for fun. But definitely in the past, like, weirdly, like, the past two years, I think it's kind of exploded. And suddenly there's a lot of, like, mainstream media that suddenly is covering this space, which is amazing, because it just validates my beat more. But, yeah, and I think that that sort of correlates with how a lot of this sort of, like, influencer culture has become mainstream.

dream where suddenly people are like, oh. Well, let's define that a little bit. You know, you're mentioning YouTube, even MySpace, Vine. Let's pour one out for Vine. The concept is essentially these, I guess, social platforms, but any of these modern platforms can turn anyone, theoretically, into a star to have some sort of a following. So is this, this is like a multi-billion dollar almost industry at this point, right?

Yeah. Oh, not almost. I mean, it's projected to reach up to $20 billion. The influencer marketing industry is projected to reach up to $20 billion by next year. Okay. It's a huge industry. So, yeah. This is my first question.

Sure. Why? Go ahead. Sorry. No, what are you going to say? I was going to say, why are brands suddenly so willing to play ball with random? that have an Instagram account because, again, this is maybe, I'm probably going to have to reference being an old man, too many times in this conversation. It was for so long brands

shied away from the Hoy-Paloi and this sort of media. And maybe that has to do with, you had to prove yourself first. Maybe by having followers now they've ipso facto proven themselves in brand's eyes, but what change that made brands feel comfortable with Randos that have a bunch of followers? Yeah, it's funny because I, so I used to, as I said, work in the ad agency world. And I remember back in 2012, I was helping run social for Verizon. And we did a ton of influencer marketing back then. I mean, we did a lot of people like, this is going to date it, but it was back on, like,

Google Plus. And I remember we, like, did a bunch of unboxing videos with big Google Plus. people and YouTube stars and we had like I think we did something with Felicia day and you know so brands have been doing influencer marketing for a long time I mean the industry itself is over a decade old but I think I think that these people are just getting like more mainstream attention and so much of the rise of Instagram has kind of like created this boom where anybody themselves like these influencers are not just social media stars or almost like little mini entrepreneurs.

So they're marketing their own brands. They're doing a lot of their own deals. So it's kind of like, I don't know how to describe it. It's not so much that like it's been validated by these big brands who have sort of always relied on board of mouth and like so-called influence or marketing. But I think it's more like these people taking like these quote unquote influencers taking, I guess, power onto themselves to market, market like their own products or start their own line or like so much is also tied to the rise.

e-commerce and you know how anybody can set up a Shopify shop now and sell their own merch or stuff like that so yeah i think i think that's really helped it kind of explode the past couple years well okay you mentioned felicia day and this is kind of what i'm poking at um well well she even she might not have been super well known but she had been on tv shows she had you know agents maybe that's a bad example i'll say i'll say like jake or logan paul or nash career exactly how it how how how How come all of a sudden brands are comfortable a random 17-year-old in Peoria? If it can be shown that they have 70,000 Instagram followers, that that's enough for them to feel comfortable working with them? Well, it's not.

I mean, people don't just, these brands don't do these deals lightly. I mean, there's a huge infrastructure that's kind of being built. I mean, that said, it's very, it's changing constantly because these platforms are always evolving. and, you know, there are a lot. There's still needs to be so many standards put into the industry. But, I mean, brands are always looking for an audience, and they're looking for good creative and good distribution, you know, appropriate distribution and production.

And you can get basically all three of those things by doing a successful influencer partnership. I think, you know, so say you are Applebee's and you want to reach, I don't know, like, yeah, I guess like tween girls or young. young, teen boys or people that watch specific social media influencers, like videos. Doing a deal with them is good. I mean, because you can basically get access to that audience. You know, you work with the YouTuber to develop like creative, the team's natural.

That's going to be a fit for this audience. And the YouTubers or influencer is going to do all the production for you. So it's just a really effective form of marketing when done right. And it's a bunch more cost effective sometimes than shooting an ad and then trying. trying to kind of like target those people through, you know, sort of third party ads or through a television campaign or other things like that. I don't know. It's kind of like it's easier to kind of just plug into somebody else's audience. Because they're believing, the brands are believing that there's direct trust, that this audience is not intermediated. The 70,000 followers really trust this 17-year-old, whoever he or she is.

I mean, there's, there's proof that people trust, you know, yeah. Absolutely. And people do trust influencers more. I mean, you do trust it in an influencer recommendation over some random advertisement for sure, because there's a nature of, well, one, you've opted into their content, which is huge. So that shows a great deal of intent. And two, a lot of times you're, the reason that you're following a particular influencer is because they're aspirational. And so you rely on them to kind of curate things in your life for you. And so you are sometimes like very primed to kind of take recommendations from them. which is what makes that type of marketing when it's a fit so successful.

Some of the stuff that you've written about that I find fascinating is, you mentioned that the infrastructure that is being built up around this with these agencies and brokers and whatnot, how come, and maybe I'm wrong, and maybe you know way more about this than I do, why does that still feel so skeevy? I don't think it, I don't, I wouldn't say it feels skeevy. Maybe I'm just hearing all the headlines of when, like, people, make off with other people's money and things like that. Yeah, I don't.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not Stevie. I think that this is an emerging market just the same way. If you think of like SEO boom, remember like when everyone wanted to kind of like jump on it and everyone had to have an SEO expert and it was this new emerging field, that's sort of the same thing with influencer marketing. You know, it's kind of, it's just becoming like very mainstream. I would say it's become really mainstream in the past couple years. And so everyone sort of wants to.

to jump on the bandwagon. So obviously you're going to get a bunch of kind of like scammers and hackers and kind of, you know, not great people jumping along in that. But, I mean, I would say a large majority of people that are in that business are far from skeevy. I mean, a lot of these people are big Hollywood entertainment executive. I mean, it's not a, it's not a skeeby industry, I would say. at all. Is there a way to platform this in the sense that, well, all of these influencers are on platforms.

We know that, right? Yeah. But do you think that there is a company that's going to come, someone's going to come that's going to regimentize all of this, commoditize all of this? And so, like, it's almost a layer on top of all the platforms that there will be an ICM or whatever sort of, where it'll be one huge company that brands can go. and do their ad span across all influencers? Do you feel like that's a trend that's coming our way? So influencer platforms are already a big trend, and I actually wrote a big feature

about one of the oldest ones speaker, which was actually not paying their influencers. That's one of the ones that made me say that. Yeah, so that has been around. I mean, that one has been around for almost a decade, which just shows you how long influencer marketing has already been a thing. But, yeah, there's thousands.

of them. More than one opened a day. I think it was 2017. The stat was that 400 new influencer marketing platforms opened in 2017 alone, and even more in 2018, I'm sure, even more will open in 2019. So people, these are cropping up all over. Yeah. And the value is that a brand can kind of go to these platforms and do an ad spend. It's almost never a brand themselves. It's like a sub agency to a sub agency. The benefit to these influencers is that you can sign up for a bunch of these platforms and get a lot of inbound, which is great. But like you said, or like kind of we were both saying, is like I think because there's so many of them, the quality control is not always great.

And like we saw, even the most theoretically reputable one when it, you know, got into a lot of financial trouble and wasn't paying people. So it's usually better for, you know, influencers to deal directly with brand reps if they can. I hope you won't think that I'm completely ignorant about all this. because one of the reasons I do these is because I want I want to learn more about the space. Oh my God. Just the fact that you even know what I cover is like every day. I'm like, oh my God, someone read my work?

Well, okay. I'm going to tell you one, because I want to switch to this side of the equation. One of the things that bothers me about, and this is me editorializing, so forgive me. Sure. everybody turning them trying wanting to be influencers and wanting and and and turning themselves into these brand ambassadors and whatever they're doing is sort of the emotional stake in that and this is me remember it reminds me of the the poker boom of the last decade where it ends up you just got to spend 20 hours a day grinding stuff out and you make a tiny little living at the end of it so like um like the the the the the the the the piece of the that made me think of that was about posting fake sponsored content to pretend like you've already made it when you're covering when you're covering the the people on the other side of it not the brands the the want to be influencers what how emotionally are

you feeling about them oh I mean emotionally I feel great about them I feel great about them I guess I don't know I have a lot of friends that are influencers. Like I said, I've been in this space for a long time. I mean, I think one thing I feel is that I want that I respect their work, I guess. And I think that there's so much, so much of the coverage around them seems so rude and snarky. Which I just did. Okay.

Here's my reason for skepticism. Here's my reason for skepticism. It's way worse. It's way worse. And I actually, you know, it's funny with that big font connoissecarn article, I think, what a lot, you know, a lot got cut out that, that I think would help with context. And I tried to say a lot of this on Twitter, but, you know, this is not a new concept. Like, you know, magazines give away ad space for free.

People, you know, new platforms like on, you know, television, they gave away ads space for free. Giving away, like, sort of pretending that you have deals that you don't is sort of like a long, it's not pretending you don't have deals. It's basically doing spec work. It's something that a lot of, it's sort of commonplace in a lot of creative professions. Like I said, I used to come from the ad agency world, and we would constantly do spec work for clients or trying to new business, things like that. And so it's essentially, I would think, close to what these people are doing.

They're basically people that are kind of on the cusp of doing brand deals or they want to do better brand deals, and they want to show, they want to show those brands what they can do. And they want to show these brands that they like that they can deliver. And so, you know, they are going to give away some of their work for free. And so, like, that can be read as really dystopian. And I get that it is because it's like, wow, like, you're just debating yourself because you want to like. Doing all this free work for this multi-billion dollar brand. Yeah.

But it's like, I mean, yeah, but also, like, these people are a little mini entrepreneurs. And often, you know, to run a business and to generate leads, you have. have to give a certain amount of work away for free. It's just something about the influencer layer to it that people hate. And so, yeah, that article, I felt bad for the people in it because I was like, oh, I get you. I get what you're doing. But I can also see people from the outside snarking on it.

Well, no, but this is why you're so smart about this sort of stuff is because that, just reframing it as you're doing work on spec, that makes a ton of sense, right? Yeah. Mike, maybe final-ish question, though, is the, no, second to final question. Sure. The concept of, like, well, not everyone can be a star. So do you believe either we're in a new paradigm where, well, everyone can be a star a little bit? Like, it's almost like I want to buy into a utopia where maybe everyone can make a couple hundred extra bucks a month shilling for. whoever or whatever and everyone could be their own little universe of star because i actually you know there's tons of corners of the internet where that's been true for 25 years um or is are you afraid

that like well not everyone can make it like there's there's there's there's a limit to how much everyone can be a little entrepreneur and uh and and have their 15 seconds of space of fame have to look at it i mean yeah it completely depends on what your goals are if your goals are to get into traditional Hollywood. Yeah, you know, becoming an influencer can be really powerful because, you know, a lot of, I wrote a lot about this more kind of when I was at The Daily Beast. I think I wrote a lot more like entertainment crossover stories or even previously. But yeah, I mean, if you want to enter, like become like a true sort of Hollywood star,

like quote unquote famous in the traditional sense, like becoming an influencer is a good way to get there because you have this giant online audience that you're more likely to get cast in roles. You're more likely to get a modeling. contract, all of that stuff. For most people, they're not looking for that kind of like mass fame. It's more like we talked about like supporting yourself, supporting your family, you know, having your own little business. And I think that that's a lot that is pretty accessible. I mean, I basically use my online following to launch a career in journalism,

which is great. Like I think that it's just it's kind of like is what you make it. I don't see this era lasting forever. I think like these big open broadcast based social platforms are really toxic and I don't think people are going to spend time on them forever. So I don't know that like, you know, this sort of like has to like success or fame or whatever is going to be around forever. I mean, I think it will be around forever in the sense of like garnering an audience and marketing to that audience is always valuable. But I think like I don't know whether the age of like, you know, Instagram is going to Twitter,

or Facebook is going to last forever. Well, that you stole my final question, which was like, is this the new normal or whatever? But what you, by saying that, what you made me think of is that there's always going to be something new, but what I've seen time after time is like the people we know, we know now that got famous because of blogging were the early ones. And the people that we know now, like Justin Bieber was early on YouTube. So it's almost like every time there's a new paradigm, there are, it's not that. well, there's always going to be a certain amount of people that will get super rich and super famous out of it and not everyone can. But then it's always the next platform or the next thing, like the people that are early and most successful there. So it's almost like a cyclical thing.

People are always like, what's the next Instagram or whatever? I don't know. I think like, I mean, I think that this, like you said, we're in this current paradigm of like these feed-based social platforms in these big open systems and little to no moderation. And that's been great for all of these current stars. But I think, you know, if I was like a savvy 16-year-old or whatever and I'm looking to get an audience, I don't know. I would probably be looking at like more creative ways or trying to think about the future. I think, yeah, because I don't think it's going to last forever. That said, you know, I think people, sorry, I think there's always a generation to like capitalize on.

you know, the current system. I definitely capitalize on Tumblr. I mean, I wouldn't be where I was about Tumblr, and it was such a brief window. And if I didn't exploit it, I wouldn't have the job I have today. So I'm really grateful. But, you know, in terms of what would I exploit now, I don't know, you know, it's a different world. Instagram is really saturated. Facebook is dying. I guess maybe TikTok. I don't know. Well, apparently, definitely TikTok, but also pour one out for Tumblr, I guess we have to at this point, right? Every day I pour one out for Tumblr, yeah.