Every Body is a Brand
I posted my first Instagram on November 28, 2011; it’s a pic of a Tudor-style house in my neighborhood that I like, put through one of the original IG filters, sans caption. Instagram was a visual medium! That was it! In June 2014, I followed a common trend and started posting by first putting my images through Afterlight and resizing them with a white border so the whole image would display. I remember a popular YouTuber and a photographer I followed both doing this; thus, my first distinct memory of being influenced as to how to use social media.
Then, in 2015, Instagram introduced portrait and landscape options for images and in May 2016, I adopted the new feature; the white borders around each post were no more. It was also around this time that I started thinking more critically about the idea of social media influence. Most people’s social media presences were still for their friends, but I started seeing more careful curation, people following you who didn’t know you, etc.
And this is part of the (insidious?) appeal of social media, isn’t it? There’s this idea that anyone can be an influencer. And in a way, everyone can. In this week’s High Noon Original report, I join Griffin Wynne of Bustle to discuss the phenomenon.
In The Roundup, explore the drama in the heritage and new media spheres, as well as a very clever digital art experience and some notes on design.
Drop a comment with your thoughts and see you at High Noon!
xxSCREMES (Shawn)
The Roundup
In a major restructuring, Condé Nast elevates Anna Wintour to Chief Content Officer for Condé and Global Editorial Director for Vogue. • Speaking of media tumult, what really happened to Man Repeller this year? • Gallerist James Fuentes launches an incredibly clever and navigable online gallery experience. • Jane Drinkard thinks about this Legally Blonde scene a lot. • At Mount Sinai, Rebecca Moses pays tribute to first responders with “glamor portraits” of nurses. • Architecture can be as much character as setting in some of the most beloved stories. • For the design-minded, Alice Rawsthorn’s Instagram is an essential follow.
The Long Read
The week’s keynote story
Only going to read one thing this week? Read me.
Report: Never Above The Influence | Shawn Cremer & Griffin Wynne | High Noon Original
It seems like yesterday we were sneaking TV before finishing our homework, being bombarded with anti-drug commercials urging us to be "Above the Influence." If the arrow in the circle isn't burned into your mind, allow me to remind you. It was a campaign started in 2006 by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, conducted by the Office of National Drug Control Policy after the previous campaign "My Anti-Drug" was found ineffective.
The "influence" they are talking about is strictly intoxicants: weed, pills, booze, cigs; keyboard cleaner and other aerosols people "huffed." I think of this repeatedly, every time I see James Charles and Jeffree Star trending on Twitter. Every time that girl I knew in little kid swim classes (who I've managed to maintain a social-media friendship with) posts about her "daily routines" to her 674 followers. Every time I go to post on my own page, envisioning (if even secretly and shamefully) what it would be like if this was the post that would finally make me viral.
When internet fame feels so close you can post it, and seemingly everything is determined by market trends and capitalism it seems futile to assume one could ever be above the influence.
But what does this mean for those who are the influence? More specifically, what is above an influencer? When you've turned your followers into dollars like yarn into gold, by selling other people's serums and bathing suits, perhaps the only next step is turning the brand of your internet persona into a literal product-selling brand.
The concept of an influencer ought to be simple, but like so many internet terms, it has become contested and complicated. It's also a relatively new element to our popular conscience; a Google trends chart shows that it's only since 2015-16 that the search term "influencer" has jumped.
So what are influencers? In the contemporary social media vernacular, an influencer (1) amasses a following and then (2) creates relationships with brands to promote those brands' products in an 'authentic' way that makes sense for their following, which (in theory) they know and understand intimately.
When I first started thinking about this topic — that influencers don't just influence people, they influence the economy — I was initially curious as to why influencers had moved from sponsoring other brands to creating brands of their own. But after scrolling through a sea of #sponsored #content, I realized that wasn't quite the right question.
Influencers have been starting their own brands since the beginning. Only, these brands started with… well the brand before a product even existed.
Before Instagram, The Kardashians, (perhaps the OG American influencers) had launched their first entrepreneurial endeavor with DASH in 2006. Yes, they had Twitter, and the first season of KUWTK in the works, but never forget, the older K's (Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney) are not social media-native influencers in the way that we think of influencers now; in fact, they shaped the way future influencers would use social media, especially Instagram.
Through the years, other instances of TV celebrities (influencers by default) creating brands: Alexa Chung with ALEXA CHUNG and Mary-Kate and Ashley with The Row. Yet, like the elder Kardashians, the Olsens and Alexa Chung owe their fame to large cable networks. They were packaged as celebrities to the general public, coming to us through the silver screen. There was something aspirational, yet untouchable, about their kind of fame. And they used this status to launch their next endeavors. In fact, that removed aspirational type of fame persists; the Olsen twins don’t even have social media accounts and The Row’s Insta does not draw attention ever to its founders.
So what about the social-media natives? The chosen few that grew their influence entirely online...who became famous with the same everyday tools you use to look at your cousin's dog. What happens when you gain a following before gaining fame?
You sell shit.
First, you sell a physical manifestation of your digital brand. James Charles, Jeffree Starr, and the like started their own makeup brands. These are strictly beauty influencers (yes, both have become so big that they encompass a broader type of "lifestyle" influencing, but they occupy a niche and their product brands reflect that niche) and they created products that fit their category.
But what about when your brand isn't so specific? When you didn't get famous for a particular skill or niche area of expertise? When you're truly just a kid who makes videos that millions of people like?
Emma Chamberlain started her YouTube channel in 2017 and it was at first sort of about style, but quickly became just Emma being Emma. A forerunner of the "quirky and relatable" style of Gen-Z internet personality, coffee was always an integral part of Emma's shtick, but her channel is not that of a barista or coffee connoisseur, and yet, a year ago, Emma launched Chamberlain Coffee Co. In a way, this specific product marks a graduation from "merch" which at some point, most YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram influencers drop. It’s more or less “on-brand” and, most importantly, it has a built-in influencer marketing strategy.
Stranger yet, with absolutely no relation to the pre-existing digital brand is David Dobrik's choice to branch into perfume. As Kanye West said about Lady Gaga and Polaroid, what does David Dobrik know about perfume?? Created in partnership with self-styled DTC fragrance brand Flower Shop Perfumes, which has truly a nothing website and appears to have no fragrances of its own, the perfumes retail for $60 a bottle, and the launch was accompanied by a classic Instagram blitz with a new account that has garnered 78.5k followers.
A reflection of David's Perfume is TwoJeys, a jewelry brand launched in 2019 by Spanish influencers Biel Juste Calduch and Joan Magritte. Similar to David, Biel and Joan have a cohort of friends who are all influencers in their own right. However, this group does not embody the rowdy never-grow-up teen boy style of David's companions. The influencers in this group maintain accounts with beautiful imagery that already lend themselves to a high-concept brand (i.e. jewelry) without much cognitive dissonance.
And then, there are the influencers who want to have brands of their own, but cannot seem to make anything without stealing it. Of course, the makeup palettes and coffee sachets and perfumes are not being actually handcrafted by the influencers “creating” them, but the ideation has the guise of originality. Major brands are known for ripping off smaller brands a lot, but when an influencer does it, it doubly calls into question what type of influence is being peddled. Repeat offender Danielle Bernstein has just this year been embroiled in at least three instances of We Wore What stealing smaller brands’ designs: the chain masks, the not-actually-vintage shorts, the patterned packaging. Her company’s strategy is generally to countersue the small brands so as to intimidate them into backing off from holding We Wore What accountable. A smaller influencer might actually work with those smaller brands, but once one becomes a shark, the other fish are not potential partners, but competition to be gobbled up.
So, to ultimately answer the question: at what point do influencers move from creating sponsored posts for brands, to launching their own brands, this question begs itself. What we end up seeing is not so much a shift, but a physical manifestation of the preexisting brand. After years of giving away free content, the brand has a product and the product has a price point. Launching a brand with products is among the highest echelon of what an influencer can do with their career. At some point, packaging one’s digital persona brand into a literal product brand becomes synonymous with the concept of (mega-)influencer.
And when that point comes, you sell shit.
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Cheers
For a wintery take on the Old Fashioned, try this: