Work for Free! – Influencers mine the oldest trope in showbiz

EXPOSURE (For free lights!)

I’d only just returned from holidays and taken back my side biz, ‘Sydney PA Hire’, from my seasonal manager, Jamie Valente, when this corker popped into the email stack, headed: Brand Partnership Opportunity.

“I’m reaching out from a Sydney-based influencer marketing agency connecting brands and creators through campaigns, events and social experiences,” it began. They’re celebrating their first anniversary this November with 150 invited guests, including “Sydney creators, influencers, business owners and brand partners”, and they’d love to have Sydney PA Hire come on board as their “official lighting/uplighting partner for the evening”.

Great!

However, the package on offer avoided money entirely, then piled on the benefits!

Official Lighting Partner recognition. Logo and signage “where appropriate”. Tags and mentions across event Stories and posts. My lighting rig “naturally featured” in content created by invited Sydney creators. The “opportunity” for my setup to appear in professional event photography. And so on: eight items on the menu, every one of them hedged. “Where appropriate.” “Where applicable.” “Selected promotional content.” No committed number of posts, no reach figures, no media kit. No guarantee of anything.

Naturally, I asked for money. Normal response.

They didn’t like it.

“Given the quoted cost of $11,000–$16,000, it won’t be suitable for our event, so we won’t be proceeding further,” came the reply. “We also believe there is always room to communicate with kindness and professionalism, particularly when dealing with small and growing businesses simply trying to build relationships within the industry.” They closed by asking that their outreach “not be misrepresented publicly, as it was only a genuine partnership enquiry to see whether there was mutual interest”.

Well, I posted on socials and it went nuts. Mumbrella (a media channel) picked it up as a media release and the agency went into reverse gear. The ‘influencer agency’ is called ‘Bridge House Co’. www.thebridgehouse.co

Exposure

If you’re older, you may remember Bartercard. Say what you like, it at least attempted to match like for like: ‘lawn mow’ versus ‘wash your car’, or some such. Today’s version? Intangible, unquantifiable gloss and the inevitable expectation gap, where, had I been young and dumb enough to do this vacuous gig, my sweat and gear would have been buried under the GLORY of the event while I got a brief credit, five photos and an FU. Like, how can 150 ‘influencers’ be affected (seriously) by my fab light show sufficiently to call me in to do a gig?

This crap is as old as the industry itself. A quick tour follows.

Vaudeville and the Depression era, when “amateur nights” and playing “for the door” were the standard ways venues got free entertainment. Then came fifties payola, where record labels paid radio stations to spin their songs, which triggered that famous scandal.

The 1980s brought the classic pay-to-play era on LA’s Sunset Strip. Unknown bands were handed tickets they had to buy from the promoter up front. Couldn’t sell them? They ate the cost; literally paying to play the show. Awesome business.

Even the big end of town has a go. Back in 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NFL tried to get prospective Super Bowl halftime acts to hand over a share of future tour revenue for the privilege of playing. Rihanna, Katy Perry and Coldplay were the names floated, but, whoa, none agreed. The 2012 London Olympics similarly asked musicians to perform unpaid. The managers and agents, clustered in Los Angeles, are too smart for that!

Several things stand out here. Firstly, the ‘influencer’ bubble is, in my view, declining in trust. The money is actually still flooding in: the industry’s own benchmark survey has 87% of marketers planning to increase influencer budgets, and 72% planning to increase them by 50% or more. The UK alone is tipping £1 billion into it. More craziness, you guys.

But underneath, the cracks around ‘trust’ are real. UK research found 44% of consumers lose trust when influencers seem fake or scripted, 49% when paid partnerships aren’t disclosed, and only about a third trust influencer reviews at all. That is the metric.

The ‘influencer’ spend curve has a hangover coming. It’s payola-era radio in about 1958, where everyone’s still paying, everyone knows it’s gone rotten, and the correction hasn’t landed yet. That ‘freebie hustle’ isn’t a sign of a thriving industry; it’s a sign of one whose economics are getting desperate at the bottom end.

And of course Sydney PA Hire ‘only works for money!’