Instagram for under 13s. Guardian.
Alcopops, sweets-flavoured vapes and this, all striving to hook young consumers into long-term habits. Despite the presumed PR slant on this (look, we're being proactive in protecting children!) presumably there will be a considerable backlash. There's also no apparent tightening of methods to more effectively block young people from the main site.
2021 JAN
JOJO ALSO IN TROUBLE OVER MERCH...
BBC reports on sexual Qs in a JoJo board game produced with kids channel Nickelodeon.
DEC 2020 World YouTube leader is a 9year-old warning $30m from streams. Guardian.
OCTOBER 2020 ZOELLA'S A TO Z COMPANY BUYS £2M PROPERTY. Guardian. + Top 100 global influencers with Dwayne Johnson earning up to $1m per post.
October 2020 Influencer trade union? £15bn global industry!!
Yet the influencer industry – estimated to be worth £15bn worldwide by 2022 – can and does exploit workers, many of them young women. In 2018, American technology reporter Taylor Lorenz revealed that the talent management agency Speakr owed influencers thousands in unpaid fees. The influencers Lorenz interviewed had posted ad campaigns orchestrated by Speakr – whose clients include Ford, Disney, Microsoft and Sony – but their invoices remained unpaid for months. A then 22-year-old influencer who was owed $4,000 (£3,100) by Speakr took the company to a sma
More bad publicity for Zoella, who apparently did well financially during the lockdown. Her £25k/pa office manager (duties also include walking the pug!) is having her wages subsidised by the government, leading a Tory MP to call for government investigation! That annual wage just happens to be how much she can charge for a single sponsored Insta post!
ZOELLA LINKS (subscriber figures updated May 2020)
YouTube
Zoella (11.4m subs, down from 12m in 2017); Zoe Suggs (4.8m);
Alfie Deyes (5m; as Alfie Deyes vlogs 3.8m);
Joe Suggs (as ThatcherJoe, 8m; ThatcherJoe vlogs 3.6m; ThatcherJoeGames 1.8m)
Insta
Zoella (1.2m); Zoe Suggs (9.4m),
Alfie Deyes (3.9m), Joe Sugg (5.5m)
Zoella (200k), Alfie (5m), Joe Sugg (5.2m)
Zoella (2.4m), Alfie (1.5m), Joe (2.2m)
Website
Zoella.co.uk.
Tie-ins
WH Smith, Boots
UGC - fan-made sites like Zoella Beauty (Facebook...242 subs!). Fan-made Snapchat? JoeSuggUpdates Insta (1k) + dailyvloggersuggs Insta (1k)
ESPECIALLY USEFUL ARTICLES!
ALFIE: 2019 profile of Alfie's business (Gdn). His PR firm, CarverPR.
Kylie Jenner was making £1m per Insta post!
Alongside this, we need to be aware of how web 2.0 has enabled 'ordinary people' like Zoella to become millionaires - what are 'social influencers'?
businesses pay influencers with more than a million followers $10,000 or more for a one-off post endorsing their product (Guardian, 2020)
We need to look at the wider industry context (including the pandemic's challenge to the economics of such stars, with so many companies cutting back on marketing spend, and so many stars being attacked for whining about lockdown as they reside in their large homes). There's also the issue of changes in advertising regulation to tackle product placement where the audience isn't informed - and Zoella has been a particularly high profile example of this. She even released an apology video (as she did for the advent calendar, eventually) - and she's been found guilty again very recently!!
 |
| Zoe Sugg has played with the dual identities of Zoella and Zoe. Its interesting that she hasn't uploaded onto her Zoella YT channel for a year, but has been busy on her Zoe Sugg channel, which only has a bit less than half of the subscriber numbers. Its likely that this is a response to the negative publicity that Zoella has had, and an attempt to double down on the sense of openness and authenticity that are so crucial to a social influencer. She's played around with make-up free shots and dialled down the glossiness a bit, though her Insta remains a festival of glam colour on the whole, and what she's actually posting on remains fairly vacuous and shallow (though I write as a 40-something male, so I acknowledge that's a potentially gendered, age-related viewpoint - Stuart hall would of course agree!!). Its a brave move stepping away from an extra 7 MILLION subscribers, but surely it is because the Zoella brand has been damaged by the product placement controversy, advent calendar, and growing sense of clinging on to other more currently popular or zeitgeisty figures like her own brother Joe Suggs and of course Alfie Deyes, her boyfriend. |
Has the pandemic doomed social influencers like Zoella?
Over the past decade, influencer culture has reshaped how brands reach consumers – the influencer marketing industry was worth around $6.5bn in 2019, and almost half of marketers spent more than 20% of their budget on influencer posts. The combination of accessible celebrity and trusted endorsement allowed companies to target their customers in a more tailored way.Payment for posts reflected this – businesses pay influencers with more than a million followers $10,000 or more for a one-off post endorsing their product.
Zoella's 2019 Xmas (on Dec 16th!)
Useful as it showcases -
- the fakery: she's held a whole Xmas day, gift unwrapping and all, 2 weeks (assuming a quick edit) before Xmas
- the access-all-areas image. Fans are able to see inside this 'special' family occasion, meet the wider family etc. Basic U+G: personal identity + escapism (its easy to work in all 4 PIES)
- endorsements? I haven't watched it all, so am only speculating - but I imagine she did this so early to cash in pre-Xmas advertising. By Dec 24th all the big, expensive campaigns have been pulled.
- amateurism v slickness: she's now got slick cartoon graphics! But we still get the cam-in-car simplicity too.
Fake online influencers a danger to children, say campaigners
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/04/fake-online-influencers-a-danger-to-children-say-campaigners?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/04/fake-online-influencers-a-danger-to-children-say-campaigners?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail
https://www.popbuzz.com/internet/youtubers/zoe-sugg-charity-neon-sign-price-bag-and-bone/
https://thetab.com/uk/2018/11/23/the-42-most-soul-destroying-moments-from-zoellas-new-book-cordially-invited-86658
Now sort of rebranding as plain Zoe Suggs, while her bro grooves on the fame-enhancement factory that is the BBCs ratings juggernaut Strictly Come Dancing, Zoella's November 2018 has been filled with mockery for her frankly preposterous new book
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/vbav5b/i-followed-the-advice-in-zoellas-new-book-cordially-invited
As this Vice.com satire effectively demonstrates, Suggs sees her fanbase as Muggs. She actually does ... literally ... advise using an umbrella if it's raining and spreading butter on bread (her guide on making a ham sandwich. I'd skip the white bread, butter, cheese and ham, but hey)
This, a year on from the widespread, highly publicised controversy over her damnably expensive calendar.
I'll gather further ZS stuff in this post
From waiting lists to unboxing: the bizarre world of beauty Advent calendars
Her 2017 £50 advent calendar was 'widely described as tat'
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/nov/30/from-waiting-lists-to-unboxing-the-bizarre-world-of-beauty-advent-calendars?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/nov/30/from-waiting-lists-to-unboxing-the-bizarre-world-of-beauty-advent-calendars?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/12/zoella-s-cordially-invited-reviewed-woman-she-blocked-twitter
Instagram: from Facebook's 'best hope' to Russian propaganda campaign tool
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/18/instagram-facebook-russian-propaganda-ira?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
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