Influencer, But Make It Australian
Old frameworks for a new industry and a question of authenticity.
If you wanted to engage the services of an influencer in Australia, there are a handful of agencies who have them on their books. Yet, if you were to think of the term influencer, its quite unlikely that you would be able to reel off their names (no pun intended) in a way that you may be able to do with those from overseas. To understand this space a bit better, I have done a bit of a deep dive about the industry as it stands.
The following is an exploration.
The Australian industry surrounding influencers is quite limited, and as many things in this space are, very niche. It is unlikely that when you mention the names Jezz Alizzi or Sara Donaldson, that people will know who you mean unless they are into style/lifestyle on Instagram. Even then, they may be familiar with what they look like than what their names are.
Many people who subscribe to this newsletter are in marketing, or work in an industry which interacts with it, as a result you have the applied knowledge of what this tends to look like. For those who don’t and come at marketing from their lived experience of how annoying or eerily specific ads are, marketing is the process of managing the relationship between brands and customers. Introducing influencers into the mix means that there is a halfway point between the brands and the customers.
According to the internet (a wonderful and dubious source), Tammy Hembrow is the Australian with the most Instagram followers, 16,292,858. She also has her own brand, a clothing brand called Saski and a Tammy Fit App, which sounds like it has something to do with health and fitness. Health and Fitness is the area which also led to the popularity of Kayla Itsines. According to Instagram, she too has 16 million followers but I’m not sure of the specifics within this. Itsines also has an app, Sweat with Kayla, which includes exercise and meal planning, has written books and ebooks called Bikini Body Guides. Both women are very ’hot’.
Obviously these two women are insanely popular, but there are multiple tiers of influencers.
Measuring influence is hard, because it often needs an acknowledgement of factors such as mood, what the people around you are doing, your work etc. that we simply don’t know. Even though it seems like our phones do know from time to time. Anyway, if we are to be more specific about the type of influencers that companies want to pair up with to sell their products, then we need to turn to a brand influencer. This refers to ‘anyone in a position to have a direct impact who purchase products or services, a trusted subject matter expert within an online community.’ This definition is taken from my Oxford Media Dictionary (I think/hope).
Within the brand influencer space there are nano influencers which have 500-10,000 followers and micro and macro influencers which have 10,000 plus.[1] When you look at the agencies above you can get in touch as an influencer who wants to work with them, or a business who wants to be paired up with an influencer.
As mentioned earlier, there are a handful of agencies who only represent influencers, represent influencers as a part of their offering of talent, or agencies who position other types of celebrities as influencers in influencer spaces, but who do other things (e.g., fashion designers, TV hosts etc.).
Marketing agencies marketing themselves and other people to market for you is fascinating. Those I could find and look at included, MGMT, Contagious Agency, ByThem, Chic Digital Creative, agntblk, and The Talent Society. Some allowed you to sign up as influencer. In all, the process of trying to work through these sites was a frustrating one. Their positionings were future focused, focused on authenticity and the shaping of culture. Taglines such as ‘be the future of content creation’ (MGMT) and ‘authentic creation made by them’ (ByThem) sit alongside an impressive roster of talent, and big brands. Some simply said they were connected to influencers but wouldn’t say who these influencers were.
The confusion about how to categorise influencers on these sites, mirrors the audience’s confusion about who these people are, and what they do. The multihyphenate nature of this work, means they can simply not be given one title, but to the audience it can be tricky to wrap your head around the fact that TV Presenter and food journalist Melissa Leong, also ‘sells’ products through social media partnerships. This is not because the audience is silly, but that there is a trust and lack of understanding about how this industry works. And that benefits the industry.
As mentioned in this very newsletter multiple times, authenticity or perception of authenticity is crucial to the influencing part of the work of influencers. The audience’s trust and attention is not something that can be bought, but built over years, many pieces of content and many bits of harvested data.
I feel like I am a very open and willing audience member in the influencer space. I’m not one of those people who dismiss the work they do or anything like that. However, I recently saw something that made me question the whole industry. Influencer Jess Alizzi was doing some Instagram promotional work for Oppo phones. Have you heard of Oppo phones? Can you imagine someone who previously had an iPhone and is all about the ‘aesthetic’ using one? Well, I can’t. And this perception is damaging. Just like the perception of authenticity is important, so is the perception of truth. And I just don’t believe that Jess Alizzi uses an Oppo phone. In fact, many of her previous posts show the use of an iPhone. I went into full sleuth mood but no photos of an iPhone or the Oppo have been posted since the promotional image.
The post in question. And below are images featuring the iPhone.
This is NOT to say that all influencers do stuff like this (but a lot probably do), or that Jess Alizzi is fibbing and that she’s not crazy about her Oppo, or that this is a uniquely Australian problem, but it’s interesting, nonetheless.
According to The State of Social Media and Influencer Marketing in Australia Industry Report[2] product information is the third reason why those surveyed follow influencers, the first being inspiration and motivation and the second being tips and advice[3]. The same report states the following:
· 2 in 5 people are more likely to purchase a product they see an influencer or blogger posting about
· Over half of people surveyed read influencer blogs and reviews to find out what they think of a product the reader is thinking about purchasing
Whilst these statistics show that influencers may have a role, or act as the final nail in the coffin when it comes to purchasing decisions, they do not acknowledge the other factors at play. I also think we often see the same formula when it comes to brands working with influencers. As an audience, I would love to see this industry try some more creative ideas.
The Australian Influencer industry is tricky to discuss because the industry appears to still be figuring out what it looks like. Many of these influencers started as freelancers and are beginning to convert this ‘side hustle’ into a fully-fledged business. Established agencies can be quite slow to determine how much effort and image should be given to this ever-evolving role. Agencies who existed pre-influencer, are, in a way, attempting to place an old framework of representing ‘talent’ into a new space, which naturally comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. New agencies created to solely work with people in this space, have either received education, which was born out of the old system, or are dealing with companies who, once again, are operating in a way which doesn’t suit.
Further to this, the influencer industry in general, like the internet, is offering local solutions and approaches to a global industry. The size of Australia has ramifications for our media, and often means many decisions are made with the bigger (Western) countries in mind. The content can often exist without geography playing any part in it.
How companies can use influencers in a way that remains authentic to both the influencer and the brand is not a solely Australian problem, but as the Australian space is still quite small, there’s with so much room to grow, I’m curious to see what comes next.
[2] The State of Social Media and Influencer Marketing in Australia Industry Report
[3] I am aware that I am using an industry funded report from 2019 but I feel that the information still holds