What did Lydia Millen tell her when she checked into the Savoy? How many Brits have viewed and commented about her experience with heating and food?
When Lydia Millen’s heating broke in late November, she checked into Britain’s oldest luxury hotel, the Savoy, where gilded rooms go for anywhere from $700 to $5,500 a night. “I’m going to make full use of their wonderful hot water,” the British influencer told her 797,000 TikTok followers.
The response—3.9 million views later—was predictably vehement. Many commenters compared Millen to Marie Antoinette; others cracked jokes like “My TV is broken so I’ve hired a private jet to fly me to Qatar so I can watch the footie.” The room has not been read according to one comment, which had more than 14,000 likes.
Millions of Britons are currently experiencing “fuel poverty” as energy prices soar; six days before Millen checked into the Savoy, UK inflation reached a 41-year high. Many British families are currently choosing between heating and eating, while rail workers, nurses, and firefighters are planning to strike for livable wages.
The Rise and Fall of Cultivating an Audience: The Case of New Yorker Sophie Wood and the Influencer Amy Zwirn
People and organizations at every corner of society have embraced the idea that anyone can cultivate an audience by providing consistent and relatable content on social media and then leverage that audience’s engagement as evidence of “influence” for social and economic rewards. The industry is growing at a rapid pace and affects the way information, products, and services are conceived, marketed, and sold. The industry makes exploitation easy, because it makes their work critical to the commercial sphere and in shaping public discourse.
“When Black Friday happened, I didn’t post any sales,” says 25-year-old New Yorker Sophie Wood, who has been creating fashion, beauty, and lifestyle content since 2015 and has more than 59,000 followers across her Instagram and TikTok accounts. “I think it’s kind of silly to be encouraging frivolous spending at a time like this, when so many people are getting laid off. It feels very strange for me to be spending money on items I’m buying.
She says she has recently started working with ethical and sustainable fashion brands, who produce clothing that is built to last. She also now posts fewer pictures of gifts and PR packages that she receives, “just because it feels like bragging,” and has even asked some companies to take her off their gifting lists.
Across the pond, Amy Zwirn, head of agencies at London-based marketing company Influencer, says that brands are becoming more discerning about the talent they work with, opting for “trusted voices.”
She says that speaking to your favorite creator during a really uncertain time is different than speaking to brands. Zwirn believes that if the UK does enter a recession, companies will build trust with consumers by seeking out specific influencers to act as longe-term ambassadors, rather than doing ad hoc campaigns with numerous creators.
The Oasis of Oscar Rodrigo: An Insider Look at the Social Media Effort to Get Vaccined
In July 2021, singer Olivia Rodrigo visited the White House as part of a campaign to encourage young people to get vaccinated. The visit was a series of carefully planned photo ops and social media friendly content creation, which included a meeting with the Vice President and posing with the President in matching sunglasses. Rodrigo and Dr. Anthony Fauci made a video of them reading positive tweets about vaccines, drawing on a popular late-night television trope in which celebrities read tweets about themselves.
The entire visit was meticulously planned and openly acknowledged as an attempt to leverage Rodrigo’s status as a “Gen Z influencer” to deliver a message to a targeted population. These sorts of public relations stunts—pseudo-events, as historian Daniel Boorstin called them—have happened for generations. The interesting thing about this one was who orchestrated it: not the usual squad of publicists and managers but a man named Landon Morgado, whom the White House had recently hired for the job of “directing creator partnerships.” That the White House created this role—and filled it with a person from Instagram’s fashion team—illustrates just how far the influencer industry has come in the past decade as a cultural centerpiece.
Meanwhile, brands and marketing agencies, while different, both act within the influencer industry to contract and promote influencers’ work. Tools and practices have been built by brands and marketers to figure out who to work with and how. Some tools systematically devalue people of color as well as queer people. Increased internal and external pressures have resulted in speeding up of production and marketing cycles, products made for short-term use, and less creative risk-taking related to the need to do well on social media.