Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic created a period of social and economic crisis that introduced two distinct problems for social media influencers. At the same time that the pandemic made their work economically precarious, it also made their work morally hazardous, as large-scale human suffering made influencers’ lifestyle promotions appear out of step with their audiences’ day-to-day experiences. How did influencers and the personnel they work with organize their labour to navigate uncertainty and avoid moral criticism? Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with fashion influencers as well as the industry personnel they work with, I explain how influencers and those close to them respond to and combat issues of uncertainty and change during a period of crisis. I pair this interview data with a year-long online observation of influencers’ labour online. In a calibrated move from aspiration to authenticity, influencers stressed the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ qualities of their lives during the pandemic, evading moral sanctions against profit-making. Throughout, they leveraged their tentacular connections with audiences to refine content in step with shifting demand and desire online, maximizing their market reach and annual revenue.
Introduction
Social media influencers, including bloggers and digital content creators, have generated much attention in mainstream news media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. These news media suggested that influencers, owing to the precarity of their work aside shrinking advertising budgets and brands at the edge of bankruptcy, were losing their edge. In the early months of the pandemic, Cristine Criddle (2020), a journalist for the BBC News, explained that influencers’ contracts and brand deals had all been ‘cancelled’ (see Perelli and Whateley, 2020). Gone were influencers’ glamorous press trips, gifted opportunities and the polished lifestyles for which they had become known (see Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020; Marwick, 2015). These opportunities were not only logistically challenging to coordinate amid pandemic restrictions, but morally hazardous in the wake of widespread human suffering and growing class inequality.
In Canada, as elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted access to employment-based income and government benefits, worsening feelings of economic uncertainty among individuals and groups (Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2022). For its part, the United States registered a threefold increase in unemployment within the first 8 weeks of the pandemic, driving low-wage workers and the precariously employed into hazardous economic conditions (Han and Hart, 2021), namely, contract workers and those whose jobs were characterized by ‘high instability’ (Han and Hart, 2021: 2395). As members of the contract-driven and unstable creative economy (see Glatt, 2022), social media influencers should have been among those most seriously at risk and yet, influencers fared better than one might have expected, with industry insiders reporting an uptick in brand deals only months later (Blake, 2021). As one such insider explained to me, ‘our agency has well surpassed what our goals were at the beginning of this year. I mean, we pretty much doubled in size [. . .] and revenue’. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, how do influencers and the personnel they work with organize their labour to navigate precarity and avoid criticism? What strategies and characteristics explain their intense social visibility and economic success during this period of social and economic crisis? And what might these tell us about cultural production in the digital era?
With these questions in mind, this article sheds light on the ways in which influencers engage with platformed cultural production and respond to change within our creative economy. In doing so, this article contributes to a broad sociological literature on the dynamics that surround and shape cultural industries and the figures who populate them (e.g. Childress and Friedkin, 2012; Dex et al., 2000; DiMaggio, 1977; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010; Mears, 2010), as well as to a growing literature on the significance of social media influencers and their creative labour online (Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020; Maares et al., 2021; Pham, 2015). I extend these literatures to include a look towards the unique dynamics that surround platformed cultural production and precarity in the digital era. I do this at a moment in which, to borrow from Hearn and Banet-Weiser (2020), ‘platforms increasingly mediate our cultural lives’ (p. 1). Specifically, I shed light on the tentacular nature of platformed cultural production and the dynamic feedback mechanisms that connect influencers to audiences online. These mechanisms, including direct messages, comments and criticisms, reduce ambiguities surrounding audience demand and desire (see Bielby and Bielby, 1994; Duffy and Sawey, 2021; Godart and Mears, 2009; Hirsch, 1972; Hoppe, 2021), allowing influencers to calibrate and edit content more adeptly than their counterparts in the traditional media circuit.
Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with established and aspiring fashion influencers as well as the industry personnel they work with, I explain how influencers and those close to them respond to and combat issues of uncertainty and change during a period of crisis. Throughout, I pair this interview data with a year-long observation of influencers’ labour online. My findings suggest that social media influencers were well positioned to adapt and pivot as their followers and industry counterparts took interest in product categories and market sectors the pandemic made more relevant. Leveraging their tentacular connections – entanglements with audiences and community members online – influencers encouraged their followers to re-think (and escape) the pandemic in ways that were normatively fashionable and uniquely purchasable. Calibrating authenticity in step with audience feedback, influencers were able to expand their market reach and annual revenue while minimizing the moral opprobrium that surrounds brand work online.
Creative labour and the production of culture
Scholars of cultural production draw our attention to the significance of cultural products, their meaning(s) and to the ‘worlds’ in which they are made and sold (Becker, 1982; Bourdieu, 1993; Crane, 1992; DiMaggio, 1977; Peterson and Anand, 2004). In recent years, these scholars have turned to a cast of aspiring and established creatives, and their respective position-takings across cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2006). This includes a look towards industries such as art, music, theatre and film (Kleppe, 2017; Peters and Roose, 2022; Wohl, 2019), and to the organizational characteristics and conditions that typify creative labour and cultural production (Wohl, 2021).
Sometimes referred to as work within the ‘gig’ or ‘hustle’ economy (Gandini, 2019; Mehta, 2017), creative labour is praised for its collaborative, dynamic and self-directed qualities (Munro, 2017). This labour, however, is often short-lived, poorly paid and highly precarious (Banks, 2007; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010; Mears, 2011; Neff et al., 2005). As Ursell (2000) shows in their investigation of television production, industry dynamics force young creatives to vie for attention in a highly competitive and unpredictable market in which ‘all hits are flukes’ (Bielby and Bielby, 1994). This is true for cultural workers across creative industries where ‘aesthetic uncertainty’ and risk are especially high (Hoppe, 2020; Wohl, 2021) and where ‘consumer demand is fundamentally unknown’ (Godart and Mears, 2009: 672; see also Hirsch, 1972).
To combat uncertainty, those who perform creative labour often look to industry competitors (Crane, 1999; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) or else mimic previous ‘hits’ to reduce uncertainty and ensure commercial success (Bielby and Bielby, 1994; Childress, 2017; Peterson, 1997; Peterson and Berger, 1975). Model bookers, for example, often look to one another when making creative decisions, casting just a handful of uniformly attractive young people in any given collection (Godart and Mears, 2009; Foster and Pettinicchio, 2021). Similarly, fashion designers look to well-resourced market competitors to combat uncertainty and minimize risk (Crane, 1999; Hoppe, 2020), favouring ‘representations of taste originating in fashion capitals’ like Paris as these provide important cues about what styles, colours and fabrics will work best in the seasons ahead (Hoppe, 2021: 10).
For all its uncertainty, creative labour across cultural industries remains widely popular including and especially among young aspirants hoping to ‘make it big’ on the back of grit, perseverance and their own entrepreneurialism (Ashton, 2021). In recent years, social media influencers, including bloggers and digital content creators, have come to epitomize the entrepreneurial nature of creative labour (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2018; Duffy and Hund, 2015; Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020; Poell et al., 2022). And this is no accident. As O’Meara (2019) explains, ‘the Instagram influencer emerges out of a broader set of political and economic transformations’ (p. 2) defined in large part by the rise of creative labour in our visual and virtual culture.
While these transformations have been underway for some time (Banks, 2007; Scott, 2017), social media platforms and the rise of labour opportunities across them have accelerated ‘the precarity of career fields that are characteristically unpredictable and individualistic’ (Duffy et al., 2019: 4). As Glatt (2022: 3856) writes in her work on social media influencers, the conditions of precarity have escalated and intensified online where young creatives compete for visibility across ‘fragmented’ and ‘unstable’ platform environments. Influencers’ labour across platforms can tell us a great deal about the dynamics that surround cultural production and precarity (Nieborg and Poell, 2018), including what obstacles and opportunities this form of cultural production may present to creative workers and young aspirants in the digital era. It is to influencers’ labour that I now turn.
Cultural production in the digital era
Social media influencers play an important role in positioning products and shaping their sale. Acting as intermediaries and arbiters of taste (Entwistle, 2006), these cultural workers lie between producers and consumers, communicating messages about the value of purchasable goods and how best to style them (Abidin, 2016; Pham, 2015). They do this through blog posts and static images, as well videos and livestreams shared across media platforms. On Instagram, for example, fashion influencers style products and suggest which of these should be purchased, why and for exactly how much. Together, their taken-for-granted posts – the careful edits and captions that underscore them, and the value that these posts assign to people, products and tastes – constitute an important part of platformed cultural production (Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020; Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Pham, 2015).
Importantly, influencers’ platformed production takes place alongside other industry figures and creative personnel (Duffy and Sawey, 2021; Poell et al., 2022). These figures include talent agents, advertisers and brand representatives who negotiate short and sometimes long-term contracts with or on behalf of influencers online. Talent agents, for example, are responsible for brokering deals with brands and advertisers, exchanging media kits – or audience profile and engagement metrics – for payment and an agency commission. Influencers provide deliverables in turn, photographing consumer products in ways that align with their brand partners’ messaging and the ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ of influencers’ briefings.
Brand partnerships play an important role in buttressing the production of influencers’ content and sustained engagement on Instagram (Leaver et al., 2020; Maares et al., 2021; Meisner and Ledbetter, 2020), allowing some influencers to invest in their platforms, acquire professional equipment and pay for photographers or studio spaces. Owing to their close relationship to (and dependence on) brand partnerships, influencers’ labour is considered highly circumscribed and precarious (Duffy and Wissinger, 2017; O’Meara, 2019). Put differently, influencers’ labour hinges on the continued success of the brands that they partner with. Explaining, perhaps, why news media speculation in the early months of the pandemic were quick to pronounce ‘the end of influencers’ (see Pitcher, 2020).
While brand work is, no doubt, important for the continued success of influencers’ labour online, it exists in tension with a wider cultural shift towards authenticity and ordinariness (Friedman and Reeves, 2020). On social media, influencers must manage this tension, remaining authentic while also staging the sale of products in ways that are at once visually appealing and sincere (Duffy and Hund, 2019; Maares et al., 2021). Amid economic crisis and widespread human suffering, this tension became particularly pronounced, shedding light on what some have called an ‘oxymoronic coupling’ between influencers’ brand work and a push towards the presentation and performance of authenticity online (Pooley, 2010: 72).
Here, I follow Marwick and Boyd (2011) in defining authenticity among social media users and influencers as ‘a display of the hidden inner life’ (p. 149) or a window into the everyday. On Instagram, displays of authenticity are carefully managed and performed for followers to see (Duffy and Hund, 2015; Marwick, 2015; Marwick and Boyd, 2011b). Authenticity is performed when, for example, influencers make personal disclosures to their audiences or post content that is unedited online (Maares et al., 2021; Reade, 2021). These performances are balanced against Instagram’s aspirational ethos (Duffy, 2015; Hund and McGuigan, 2019), requiring that influencers appear put together and polished, but authentic and relatable too (Foster, 2022). As Duffy and Sawey (2021) put it, influencers are often made to ‘respond to the social media ideal of authenticity without disrupting Instagram’s ethos of aspirationalism’ (p. 140). On Instagram then, authenticity and aspiration exist along a continuum and must be carefully calibrated to ensure influencers’ visibility and success.
For some, calibration results in a form of ‘amateurism’ different in style and form than the polished and professional ‘look’ of traditional media images (Abidin, 2017; Foster and Baker, 2022; Simatzkin-Ohana and Frosh, 2022). Among family influencers, for example, amateurism ‘is a practice and aesthetic’ that tends to garner significant support while fostering perceptions of authenticity and relatability online (Abidin, 2017). Yet, amateurism applies less neatly to fashion influencers who photograph aspirational lives and lifestyles. Indeed, these figures – best known for their lavish looks – stand toe to toe with the fashion elite (Pham, 2015), raising questions about how social media influencers and their brand partners might calibrate shifts between aspiration and authenticity to avoid moral sanction.
For others, calibrating authenticity entails a host of relational practices including routine and ongoing communication with audiences (Baym, 2015), the production of unscripted content and confessionals, and the use of specific linguistic and cultural markers ‘strategically deployed to build emotional and affective resonance’ (Duffy and Hund, 2019; Foster, 2022; Shtern et al., 2019: 1951–1952). Calibrating authenticity by way of these relational practices is fraught with risk, as audiences can (and sometimes do) levy ‘critical blowback’ against influencers who are either ‘too real’ or not real enough (Duffy and Hund, 2019: 2986). Influencers then must anticipate and respond to their audiences’ demands when calibrating content, yet we know little about the ways in which influencers incorporate audience feedback into their work, the relational dynamics that characterize the construction and performance of authenticity online (Maares et al., 2021), nor how these dynamics may shift during periods of social and economic crises.
Data and methods
To better understand the nature of influencers’ creative work online and the dynamics that shaped platformed cultural production amid the global coronavirus pandemic, this project draws on interviews and online observations. Together, interviews and observations shed light on how influencers and the personnel that they work with navigate precarity during a period of acute social and economic crisis. Interviews provide a particularly revealing avenue through which to access influencers’ working lives and the affective qualities that accompany their labour online (Lamont and Swidler, 2014; Lareau, 2021; Pugh, 2013).
In what follows, I draw on 40 in-depth interviews with established (n = 19) and aspiring (n = 4) fashion influencers and the industry personnel they work with including influencer marketers (n = 7), public relations representatives (n = 2) and talent agents (n = 8). Of these interviewees, 19 were women and 21 were men (see Table 1). A total of three interviewees identified as East Asian, two as South Asian and four as Black. The remaining interviewees self-identified as White. Interviews were conducted between September 2020 and June 2021 and took place over the phone and via video call. They typically lasted between 30 minutes and an hour and were transcribed and coded using the MAXQDA software. To ensure anonymity, all interviewees have been assigned a pseudonym.
Influencers and industry personnel.
Interviewees were identified through elements of observational and immersive ‘netnography’ (Costello et al., 2017; Kozinets, 2015) and with the help of industry contacts in fashion and public relations. In practice, this meant communicating with industry personnel both via email and on Instagram, while also reaching out to and observing influencers and their work online. Specifically, I followed influencers’ content production and weekly posts, as well as their sponsored activities and Instagram stories. Throughout, I kept notes on influencers’ Instagram posts, product endorsements, captions and audience activities online. This allows me to comment on the product categories that influencers endorse and the discursive strategies they deploy to frame purchases and connect with audiences online. Consistent with Reade’s (2021: 6) work among Instagram users, I engaged with, ‘liked’ and commented on influencers content in order to maintain a ‘position of openness, kindness and mutuality’ among others online.
Of the interviewees I spoke with, approximately 19 were established influencers with 5 or more years of experience on Instagram and thousands or tens of thousands of followers online; 4 were aspiring influencers (sometimes called ‘nano-influencers’) with smaller followings, but well-curated and very fashionable feeds. Whereas the established influencers I spoke with often worked with luxury fashion (and beauty) labels, the aspiring influencers featured here typically promoted or photographed mass fashion goods and collaborated with emerging or entry-level fashion brands. Seventeen of the interviewees I spoke with are industry personnel who work to support influencers and the production of their content or else, who reach out to and work with influencers on a regular basis. Industry personnel were sourced through talent agencies, their public contacts and brand connections both in Canada and the United States. These personnel reported years of experience in business and marketing, cutting across industry sectors and product categories.
Drawing on an established literature related to social media influencers (e.g. Abidin, 2016, 2017; Pham, 2015; Reade, 2021), interview questions were sensitized to address what criteria industry personnel employed to locate or source talent, what kinds of payment(s) are awarded to Instagram’s influencers and in exchange for what content. Industry personnel were asked, for example, how they would define an influencer and for what reasons they might work with them. Influencers were likewise asked to comment on why industry personnel or brand representatives might be reaching out, and what deliverables were asked of them (e.g. story post, static image, reel).
Consistent with this project’s objectives, interviewees were asked to describe what (if any) effects the COVID-19 pandemic had had on their work online. And whether and how these effects had changed or evolved over the course of the pandemic. Through the course of data collection, and after preliminary conversations with influencers and the industry personnel they work with, some themes and concepts emerged as highly significant to influencers work. Authenticity, for example, was often cited by influencers and industry personnel as among the most important qualities shaping influencers’ labour online. Aside these claims, influencers and the agents they worked with commented on the significance of influencers’ relationship with their audiences and the importance of communicating with and replying to followers online. Engaging with audiences through comments and direct messages allowed influencers to gauge demand and to incorporate feedback into the production of Instagram content.
With these emergent themes in mind, interview questions were refined to better capture the subtleties of influencers’ work, the practices this work involves and the emotions they engender (Pugh, 2013). Interviews covered topics such as production processes and photography, biographical details surrounding influencers’ fame and aspirations, the brokerage of brand deals and life during the COVID-19 pandemic more broadly.
Findings
My analysis unfolds in three steps. First, I provide a descriptive look into the early days of the pandemic as influencers and the personnel who surround them were made to pivot their product marketing and business strategies. I do this to highlight the precarity that influencers faced and to draw attention to the nature of their work alongside industry partners like brand representatives, agents and marketers. Second, I turn to interview data and to influencers’ posts online to highlight the strategies and practices these cultural workers deployed to combat precarity and avoid moral criticism. Throughout, I document influencers’ digital appeals towards the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’ or what I call, a calibrated shift from aspiration to authenticity. Third, I demonstrate how audience feedback mechanisms, including direct messages, comments and criticisms, shape the production of influencers content online and the communication of authenticity more broadly, namely, I document how influencers leverage their tentacular connections with followers to craft content that is responsive to audience demand and desire. Throughout, they render life during the pandemic normatively fashionable and uniquely purchasable.
Managing uncertainty in the COVID-19 pandemic
In the early months of the pandemic, influencers and industry personnel reported several obstacles and uncertainties with respect to their work and daily operations. These obstacles and uncertainties were multi-fold and heightened the precarity of influencers’ labour online, rendering several of the interviewees I spoke to without work or else at a loss for how best to capture and edit content. Influencers confronted, for example, uncertainties related to marketing specific kinds of product categories and still others reported on obstacles related to photographing consumer goods and providing ‘deliverables’ to brands. As Patrick, an influencer with more than 70,000 followers on Instagram, reported, the pandemic ‘stifled a lot of creative options for me and other people’, complicating the production of digital content online. Photographing content from home was particularly challenging for the influencers I spoke with, limiting the stylistic elements, ‘aesthetic forms’ and ‘taste work’ for which they had become known (Pham, 2015: 106). For fashion influencers, this includes highly stylized snapshots featuring the latest sartorial staples and photographs taken along city streets and busy cafes.
Allie, an influencer with some 92,000 followers on Instagram, identified a similar set of obstacles related to his day-to-day work, sharing that ‘the biggest change is not going to social events, not partaking in any meeting up with new people, or having the opportunity to share and be creative’. As in other creative industries, influencers depend on a series of connections with brand partners, agents and marketers who provide contracts and directives to assist with content production and the coordinated performance of platformed cultural production. Collaborations between influencers – a routine occurrence allowing these figures to reach a wider number of followers across both they and others’ platforms – were also halted by widespread lockdowns and social distancing measures (Duffy and Sawey, 2021; Glatt, 2022), necessitating that influencers and industry figures like brand representatives and marketers pivot their marketing strategies, and pause or cancel existing contracts.
Amanda, an influencer with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, shared that some of her deals – many of which were months in the making – had been cancelled. In her own words, Amanda was ‘dropped’ from marketing campaigns and Instagram contracts including by brands like Nike who decided to direct their spending elsewhere. As a result, Amanda and her team were, for a period, uncertain about their earnings. Still, Amanda was hopeful that brands would soon see ‘that all eyes are now online’. Other influencers too reported that they were dropped or left without work in the early months of the pandemic as budgets tightened and brands re-grouped. Sarah, an influencer with some 55,000 followers for example, shared that in the early months of the pandemic ‘all brands stopped their sponsored content partnerships because’, she reasoned, sponsored posts were in ‘poor taste’. Indeed, promoting visions of consumption – much of them aspirational – during a period of human suffering and death risked appearing tragically tone deaf.
Sarah and Amanda’s comments then are revealing of how influencers and their brand partners approached collaborations as the pandemic took hold and, of the uneven distribution of power and resources that typify influencers’ labour online (e.g. Duffy and Sawey, 2021; Glatt, 2022). Concerned that consumers might be upset by product placement and exhortations to shop, influencers were dropped from endorsement deals with little notice and no guarantee of further work, rendering their already tenuous arrangements aside brand partners more precarious.
Continuing in this vein, Sam, a Canadian talent agent, reported that ‘billings were down by 50% over COVID due to advertisers pausing their marketing efforts to be sensitive to what was going on’. Others too struggled to gauge how audiences might respond to the sale of photographs – and the products they feature – in a period of acute economic and social crisis. Put differently, the glamorous trappings of Instagram’s lives and lifestyles (Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020; Marwick, 2015), challenged the moral sensibilities of everyday consumers in the early months of the pandemic, necessitating that influencers re-think their approach to platformed production. As Maria, an influencer with more than 50,000 followers on Instagram, observed of her work during the pandemic, ‘a lot of campaigns slowed down in the beginning because companies weren’t sure if it was appropriate to be advertising. There was a lot of pressure for influencers not to advertise because it felt insensitive’ (emphasis added) in the face of widespread inequality and pandemic-suffering.
For their part, marketers and brand representatives shared feelings of uncertainty and felt it necessary to exercise caution in the early days of the pandemic. This caution owed, at least in part, to (1) plummeting sales revenue and to (2) broad class inequalities the pandemic brought to light, including inequalities made worse by rising unemployment and market volatility in the early months of the pandemic (Şahin et al., 2020). As Andrea, an influencer marketer, explained to me, ‘a really interesting question that brands and influencers have to face right now concerns what is appropriate’. Brands can’t, she continued, invite influencers to workout classes or luxurious stays in hotels abroad. These once popular invitations were logistically complicated to extend in the early months of the pandemic and represented a reputational hazard for influencers and their brand partners who might be perceived as ‘out of touch’ or ‘tone deaf’. To borrow Andrea’s own words, ‘brands needed to be a bit more cautious of what they were promoting’. For some brand representatives and marketers, this meant cancelling contracts or pausing negotiations with influencers and their teams as budgets were tightened and spending diverted elsewhere. Evan, a public relations representative for a luxury brand based out of the United Kingdom, for example, explained that he and his partners were ‘using influencers to speak to people’ in new ways, offering livestreams hosted by influencers instead of in-person collaborations or hotel stays. These, said Evan, helped ‘to keep audiences engaged’ and mitigated against criticisms related to the sale and promotion of luxury goods amid the global Coronavirus pandemic.
Commenting on brand strategy more broadly, Evan added that ‘companies were really trying to figure out how to crisis manage and adapt to the new realty that everybody was facing’. This meant trimming budgets to compensate for shrinking sales, but also being more careful about the kinds of activities and lifestyles brands promoted vis-a-vis their influencers. Brands couldn’t risk, as Evan explained, being seen as elitist or out of touch amid global lockdowns and so avoided touting luxury products through their digital partners online. In their place, brands made appeals towards the importance of rest and reflection, individual well-being and virtual connection. Evan’s brand, for example, used influencers as a voice through which to channel good will, encouraging followers to ‘unwind’ and ‘relax’ through virtual retreats and exercise classes in lieu of in-person stays and activities at the brand’s brick and mortar locations. These virtual activities were perceived as more or less amoral and were, as a result, less likely to draw censorious comments from audiences online.
Samson, an influencer marketer, echoed Evan’s remarks on brand strategy amid the pandemic, explaining that ‘brands had to really think about their budgets’ and the content that they were endorsing during a moment of social and economic crisis. Aspirational content including images featuring luxury fashion goods and lavish purchases challenged the moral sensibilities of consumers online. And while this kind of content has long been popular among fashion influencers who ‘operate firmly on the terrain of the aesthetic’ (Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020: 3), the pandemic made these product categories and market niches morally hazardous and as such posed a reputational threat to brands and their business. How then did influencers go about crafting content online? What strategies did they deploy to combat precarity and what effect did these strategies have on their revenue?
Calibrating authenticity
The early months of the pandemic necessitated that fashion influencers and the industry personnel that they work with including talent agents, brand representatives and marketers make a calibrated shift from aspirational content to content that communicated authenticity. Calibrating content in this way entailed balancing Instagram’s aspirational ethos (Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020; Marwick, 2015) against shifting currents related to the importance of authenticity among audiences online (Abidin, 2017; Maares et al., 2021). This does not mean that aspiration was no longer relevant to influencers’ work or that authenticity was unimportant before the pandemic. Rather, the balance between aspiration and authenticity was recast during the pandemic to evade moral sanctions against profit. This required a calibration process better attuned to audience sensitivities including and especially where consumption and its inequalities are concerned. The influencers I spoke to calibrated authenticity by shrouding their images and the products they endorsed in appeals towards the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’, encouraging their followers to re-think (and escape) the pandemic in ways that were normatively fashionable and uniquely purchasable. Calibrating content in this way resulted in several permutations including in the production and promotion of snapshots capturing influencers’ day-to-day lives at home, body-positive content focusing on ‘real’ and ‘unedited’ beauty, as well as disclosures surrounding influencers’ strategies for managing mental health and well-being.
Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic, as Samson an influencer marketer explained, ‘created a lot of opportunity for the world of creators to really harness their craft’. In practice this meant, ‘thinking about what they [influencers] were doing and how they were projecting themselves’. The projections that were most valuable, Samson continued, were those that communicated authenticity to audiences online including posts related to how influencers were coping with the pandemic and what products brought them a genuine feeling of comfort aside lockdowns and an always negative news cycle. Amanda, for example, ‘turned down’ opportunities to promote ‘detox teas and slimming pills’ – products she felt were disingenuous and inappropriate at the time – in favour of ‘home content’ and honest posts about her figure and size. ‘They [Amanda’s audience] just love things that feel relatable’, and so, Amanda made a calibrated effort to communicate authenticity throughout the pandemic.
Calibrating and communicating authenticity meant that Amanda, like others I interviewed, used fewer filters and edits over their content, photographed their lives from home and captioned their content with more elaborate appeals towards the ordinary and the everyday. Some favoured video content and ‘stories’ over images and in-feed posts as these offered a more authentic window into the lives of influencers in the COVID-19 pandemic. Irrespective of the medium through which they were expressed, influencers’ appeals towards authenticity allowed these digital intermediaries to connect more closely to the lived experience of their followers online and to a broader set of inequalities made visible in the wake of the pandemic. In one particularly revealing case, Amanda wrote ‘and some days we order McDonalds to our bed and that’s okay. It’s okay if you just survive’. And, in another, with fresh flowers and a fluffy blanket wrapped around her, ‘Lockdown outfit: a duvet because every day is about comfort nowadays’.
Others too communicated authenticity by drawing attention to the ordinary and everyday nature of their lives in the pandemic, highlighting everything from their home décor projects and mental health journeys to their skincare routines and perceived flaws. These appeals resonated with audiences, returning ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ to influencers’ content and curated pages online. As Alexa, an influencer working out of Montreal, told me: ‘In terms of what my audience prefers and what they engage with right now, they like when I’m being my truest self, you know, no filter . . . they like something very candid and very raw’. Raw images, or images that have gone without filters are indeed popular online (Reade, 2021), but this has not always been so. And this, Alexa explained was a lesson learned with time and practice. ‘A lot of people that follow me, they think that I have this perfect life where I just get products and, you know, I look pretty and put together’. This is in large part because Alexa’s feed, like that of fashion influencers I interviewed, has been (and is) highly stylized to reflect glamour and ease (Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020). Amid the pandemic however, Alexa calibrated her content more carefully, turning to stories or disappearing images and videos in step with audience feedback to show a ‘behind the scenes’ look at her real life. This look, she made clear, performed far better with her followers online. And while, at first, blush, Alexa’s pandemic-content appeared more authentic and less edited, it would be mistaken to suggest that Alexa’s content was without the fashionable cues and stylish flourish for which she’d become well-followed.
Indeed, aside influencers’ appeals towards authenticity lies a set of aspirational aesthetics and visual cues that continue to communicate savvy and style. Consider Adam and Marc, an influencer couple with 21,000 followers on Instagram. In the early days of the pandemic, the pair made appeals towards authenticity writing that ‘it can be hard to turn off work and slow down. Sometimes it feels like we’re always going’. Adam and Marc, meanwhile, are photographed lying together at home in sheets that their caption tells us are an ad feature sponsored by the Four Seasons. David, an influencer with 31,000 followers, shared that he was spending ‘more time than usual in bed nowadays’, wearing Thom Browne sweats and using his favourite Chanel eye mask to deal with lockdowns and isolation. Amanda, discussed above, dressed her appeals in a similar fashion. Pairing ‘cozy clothes’ like knit crop tops with three-figure leggings while ‘manifesting a positive week’ amid isolation (and ad features). However well intended, images that feature ad placements and products fashioned and styled to enchant audiences with aspirational visions of store-bought comforts and exhortations to ‘slow down’, sweep the structural conditions and class-based inequalities that underscore the COVID-19 pandemic out of focus. Yet, these photographs tend to perform quite well among audiences who are known to favour authenticity – or at least its appearance – online (Maares et al., 2021).
When asked what kinds of content resonated best with her audience amid the pandemic, Lauren, an influencer with nearly 15,000 followers of her own, explained that ‘being open and honest about a lot of things like’, for example, ‘posting pictures without makeup on’ connected her to others online. Followers, she shared, provided real-time feedback in response to posts like this, writing with direct messages and comments to say, ‘thank you so much’. Lauren’s captions and story content reinforced this messaging, with in-gird photographs paired aside text that read, ‘let’s work harder to #normalizeacne!’ and skincare products designed to enhance one’s beauty including costly treatment masks and LaMer’s (CAD) $470-dollar facial moisturizer. All the while, followers’ real-time feedback helped Lauren, like others I spoke with, calibrate her content online.
Leveraging feedback
The feedback that influencers receive in reply to their content is key to their success online, setting these digital intermediaries apart from those employed in the traditional (and notoriously unpredictable) media circuit (see Bielby and Bielby, 1994; Hirsch, 1972). That is, influencers can (and often do) make use of their tentacular connections – entanglements with audiences and community members online – to help inform the process of platformed cultural production and calibration. Influencers, for example, reach out to audience members, replying to comments and soliciting feedback that can be taken up to refine later posts, captions and product endorsements straight away. Importantly, this process is iterative and dynamic, allowing influencers to craft (and change) content they can be sure will resonate with audiences online as they work to reduce ambiguity surrounding demand and desire. As Jennifer, a talent agent in Toronto, shared, ‘with social media you can produce content and edit messaging overnight’, allowing for a highly responsive and almost certainly well-liked Instagram post. Incorporating audience feedback was crucial during the early months of the pandemic, when significant criticism circled around brand work and the presentation and display of aspirational lives and lifestyles more broadly.
Influencers have, of course, been in the business of connecting with audiences for some time. They are known, for example, to ‘feign’ intimacy through public-facing messages, comments and audience replies (Marwick and Boyd, 2011). These comments and replies help to foster perceptions of authenticity and relatability (Foster, 2022), but are not without risk (Duffy and Hund, 2019). Still, audiences responded well to and, as my data shows, requested greater engagement amid the COVID-19 pandemic, challenging Instagram’s otherwise polished posturing and ambivalent perfection. Aside travel restrictions and sweeping lockdowns in the West, audience engagement – and what authenticity it demands – served as a salve for isolation and boredom, with influencers looking to and communicating with audiences more and more frequently. Importantly, communication with audiences helped to resolve ambiguities around demand and desire, resulting in a subtle, but not insignificant shift in how often influencers sought feedback and how seriously they took it.
Amid the Global-19 pandemic, Patrick, an influencer discussed above, asked his audience members to report on the kinds of content they would like to see online and responded in kind. For Patrick, this meant posting audience ‘polls’ and replying to comments in-feed with videos and outfit shots that were sensitive to audience demand and desire including, ‘how to’ videos, ‘style hacks’ and ‘work from home outfit ideas’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘looks for less’ and ‘affordable designer alternatives’ were also styled by Patrick in the early months of the pandemic, reflecting a calibrated move away from aspirational (undeniably more expensive) fashion options and the moral opprobrium that may surround them. Scott, an influencer with nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram, also reached out to and replied to audience members through polls and comments, asking his audience how he might better speak to their interests amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. Soliciting engagement from audiences and responding in kind is especially important online where, as Duffy and Sawey (2021) note, influencers must ‘know their audience in order to profit from them’ (p. 146).
Outside of comments, direct messages and criticisms can also be used by influencers to calibrate and edit content. Laruen’s work on Instagram provides an illustrative example of how calibration takes place in-step with direct messages and audience criticism. As she shared with me,
I recently promoted a perfume and I didn’t do my research because it was a really well-known brand and, it turns out, they actually weren’t cruelty free – which isn’t something I ever promote. And someone reached out and was like, ‘hey, I know you don’t support cruelty free’. She’s like, ‘I just want you to know, this perfume you promoted, they test on animals’, and I was mortified.
With a signed contract barring Lauren from removing the post, she made clear to her audience and to the brand that she would not work with their products again, restoring followers’ faith in Lauren’s expressed commitments, while communicating a sense of authenticity online.
Of course, audiences may reply more forcefully. During the pandemic they might, for example, express harsh criticism in direct messages and comments targeted towards influencers and the appropriateness of their branded content. In some instances, followers comment on the ‘privileged’ lives of influencers or else critique their sponsorships and ad work as ‘tone deaf’ and ‘inappropriate’. Criticisms such as these are not without precedent. As Duffy and Hund (2019) observe, influencers are sometimes arraigned for their polished lives and lifestyles and for their ‘so-called fakery’ (p. 4991) online. And while criticisms like this are, no doubt, challenging to face, they can be used to calibrate content and provide influencers with meaningful cues about what kinds of images, videos or stories might resonate best with followers online. These cues are especially important during periods of crises when significant ambiguity surrounds audience desire and when moral sanctions against profit-making become more clearly pronounced. Amanda’s audience, for example, demanded more transparency around advertising and sponsorships, prompting her to incorporate more clear disclaimers around which products had been paid for by brands and which were purchased with her own money. Other influencers I spoke to were prompted by audience members to be more honest about their day-to-day lives over the course of the pandemic with a specific focus on how influencers were coping with lockdowns and pandemic restrictions.
Calibrating content in step with audience feedback, including comments, direct messages and criticisms, allowed the influencers I spoke with to pivot their content quickly and in ways that resonated with demand and desire amid the COVID-19 pandemic. With audience members tuning-in to content online, brands and marketers were quick to reactive campaigns and seize potential sales. Commenting on business growth over the pandemic, Abby, a talent agent working between Toronto and Los Angeles, explained that ‘90% of the talent’ on her roster ‘exceeded their billings in 2020’. Overall, she continued, ‘influencers are doing as well as they were before [the pandemic], perhaps even better’. Jennifer, a second talent agent added that, ‘a lot of brands reinvested their money in the digital space’ producing a ‘boost in contracts’ over the COVID-19 pandemic. Adam and Marc shared that 2020 ‘was the best year for us in business’, with brand partnerships returning quite rapidly as the pandemic pressed on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, influencers’ contracts – buoyed by global advances in the fight against COVID-19 and by changing public attitudes towards lockdown measures – boomed in the year to follow too, easing what precarity had been brought about by the pandemic’s onset.
Discussion and conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic wrought a peculiar kind of havoc across creative industries, shutting down everything from live music to fashion shows and film sets. Influencers and the industry personnel who support them online were made to adjust and pivot in step with a ‘new normal’ characterized by sweeping lockdowns and public restrictions. These restrictions rendered influencers’ work considerably more precarious in the early months of the pandemic and necessarily altered the aesthetic forms and styles they so often traffic in (see, for example, Pham, 2015). In comparison to some of their counterparts in the mainstream media circuit however, influencers faired considerably well, negotiating lucrative brand contracts, while increasing their revenue through ad work online. Throughout the pandemic, influencers’ ability to harness authenticity was, I argue, key to their success. Shrouded in appeals towards the ordinary and the everyday, influencers went about their labour, producing videos, images and stories designed to help audiences re-think the pandemic in ways that were normatively fashionable and, importantly, purchasable. This they did while leveraging their tentacular connections with audiences online, editing content in step with audience feedback mechanisms including direct messages, comments and criticisms to maximize their market reach and avoid moral criticisms related to brand work online.
While influencers’ labour throughout the COVID-19 represents an extraordinary case for study, its lessons are not bound to the pandemic’s beginning or end. Rather, the COVID-19 pandemic can tell us a great deal about cultural production including and especially about the obstacles and opportunities that typify production processes and creative labour in the digital era. On the one hand, exogenous shocks (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) like those brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic can significantly alter the conditions that shape cultural production and creative labour as well as the precariousness that characterizes this work (Banks, 2007; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Neff et al., 2005; Wohl, 2021). On the other hand, platformed cultural production is highly responsive to these shocks and the changes they engender. The processes that make up its parts including capturing, captioning and editing content are dynamic and can be (and often are) adjusted quickly in response to changing currents surrounding audience demand and desire online. As my findings make clear, influencers’ content can be edited ‘overnight’ to better meet the needs of audiences, ensuring its visibility and so its success. During the pandemic, these edits and changes required a deliberate process of calibration as fashion influencers produced content that was at once aspirational and authentic. Calibration is by no means a straightforward task. Rather, calibration, as I have shown, entails an ongoing and dynamic back-and-forth between influencers and their audiences, as influencers reply to audiences or else solicit feedback.
Audience feedback provides important and immediate cues that can be taken up to edit content, setting influencers and other digital intermediaries apart from those employed in the notoriously unpredictable media circuit (Bielby and Bielby, 1994; Peterson, 1997; Ursell, 2000). When in doubt, influencers look to their audiences to craft content, asking what they might like to see or share. Those who engage with cultural production across the creative industries would do well to deploy digital tools to connect with and engage audiences in real time, bridging the distance between content production and reception (Childress, 2017). Some producers employed within the fashion industry have, for example, made use of online tools and digital platforms to keep audiences engaged throughout the pandemic, harnessing the persuasive power of these platforms and the influencers who populate them to sell products and foster brand loyalty. Others make use of forecasting networks and digital design tools to reduce uncertainty and ensure sales (Hoppe, 2020). Among them are fashion houses like Gucci and Dior who look to digital offerings including livestreamed events and virtual shopping appointments to connect with audiences more immediately. These digital offerings, according to popular press and business reporting, have produced a significant uptick in sales for fashion retailers (Danzinger, 2021; Silberstein, 2021) and economic success for others in the traditional media circuit who have pivoted social media marketing.
Moving forward, future research should continue to investigate the ways in which influencers and the industry personnel who surround them connect with audiences and communicate authenticity online. This research should consider how the communication of authenticity may vary across categories and types of influencers online, and attend more closely to how platform architectures and their technical logics both enable and constrain opportunities to communicate authenticity. Poell et al. (2022) provide a useful guide for exploring work of this kind, supplying the language necessary to unpack the infrastructure and algorithms that moderate digital platforms and their influencers. Continuing in this vein, scholars who study platformed cultural production should be critical of authenticity and its performance online, asking through what means authenticity can be communicated (e.g. Maares et al., 2021), what ‘work’ its performance might accomplish, and for whom? While appeals towards ‘ordinariness’ and the ‘everyday’ play an important part in communicating authenticity and connecting with audiences in a period of crisis, these appeals eclipse important questions related to the appropriateness of advertising during the COVID-19 pandemic and shift focus away from influencers’ role in promoting consumption amid widespread inequality and human suffering. Surely, there is reason to be critical of this consumption – and the increasingly close connection between market goods and social media – at a moment in which distributions of wealth and debt continue to worsen.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: This study was supported by the Government of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
