The Influencer Industry: interview with Emily Hund

Emily Hund is the author of the forthcoming book The Influencer Industry:  The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media and a research affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

In a interview given to Rafael Grohmann, she talked about factors that make influencer an industry, authenticity, labor issues, fake followers market, role of marketing agencies, and influencer as concept.

DIGILABOUR: What are the characteristics and factors that make influencer an “industry”?

EMILY HUND: I call it an industry because there is a coordinated collection, processing, and sale of a good happening. Broad strokes, the actors in this field are brands, marketers, social media companies, and influencers and those who aspire to be them. What they are selling might vary – oftentimes those in the industry call it influence, they are measuring supposed influence. But what they are really selling is authenticity. Once the industry really started to develop, it pretty quickly became saturated with people who were all influential, they all met quantitative benchmarks for influence in some way. They had a lot of followers, those followers were clicking, buying, etc. So when the supply is so high, marketers and brands have to further differentiate. So it became not just who is influential, but who is influential in a real way? Who do followers connect with? Who do we, as brands and marketers, believe? And then we can kind of go in and analyze what are those factors that make someone appear credible and believable and real. Consistency, cadence, visual aesthetic, the amount they interact with fans, the frequency and type of other brand deals, the other products or businesses they might be involved in, the very language they use and how they choose to communicate – all of this is collected, processed, and sold amongst the participants in this system. And then myself and other researchers who are looking at the space go in and assess how they are doing this, who and what gets left out or catapulted to high visibility. What inequalities are baked into the process, and how our social and economic and technological histories inform this. What impact are these industrial processes having on our shared and individual realities and self-expressions?

DIGILABOUR: There was a combination of technological, economic, cultural and social factors for the construction of this industry. What was most surprising in the construction of this history?

EMILY HUND: The most surprising and gratifying thing to me to uncover as a researcher was how tied in the influencer industry is to various cultural logics and popular thoughts that far predate it. It was extremely satisfying to uncover the through-lines that connect how we talk and think about influencers today to what scholars and early advertising and PR executives were doing 100 years ago. I say this in the book and over and over again to other people:   the creation of this industry was not predestined, it was not inevitable, it was the result of people making particular decisions in particular circumstances. I think putting the pieces together of how exactly that played out, and how these various cultural, technological, and economic factors interacted will be both surprising and satisfying to readers. 

DIGILABOUR: In what ways does the influencer industry provide infrastructure for various forms of digital labor to exist and be rendered valuable?

EMILY HUND: The influencer industry has inspired technological changes to major social media platforms and birthed its own suite of technologies that manage and reproduce the industry. So there is a real technological infrastructure that enables this collection, processing, and sale of influence and authenticity that we discussed earlier. There are countless marketing platforms and exchanges that help brands, marketers, and influencers find each other based on search terms, demographics, and various other factors. Marketing companies create in-house tools to evaluate influencers’ authenticity, credibility, brand safety, etcetera. These are subjective measures, obviously, that are translated into quantifiable traits. How influencers fare on these evaluations have a direct impact on who gets chosen for what deals and why–and thus, who gets to be most visible online, whose aesthetics and ideas are promoted, who gets to make a living at this. The fact that this system exists at all is a continual message to people that again doing the free labor of content creation is a worthy pursuit, and if you do it the “right” way, you just might be rewarded. One thing I hope people take away from the book is a more comprehensive understanding of the cultural and economic power influencers wield and why–and just how much social media companies and marketers depend on them for their own survival. 

DIGILABOUR: In addition to authenticity as a social construction, you highlight its instrumental purposes. How does this relate to marketing, including the growth of the fake followers market?

EMILY HUND: While most everyone that I’ve interviewed for my research over the years communicated a genuine desire to show up as themselves online, whatever that means to them, there is no getting around the fact that being seen as “yourself” and “real” are also necessities if one wants to earn money, visibility, or credibility as an influencer. So in this context, you have to communicate realness in recognizable ways, using particular tools, regardless of how true those patterns are to you. Being yourself or being real becomes an industrial construction. 

Of course, this gets increasingly complicated when we start talking about authenticity of the audience. By now it is common knowledge that not all followers are real people, that people can buy followers, that bots and spam accounts make it harder to judge an influencer based solely on follower count.  Of course, when we see someone has 1 million followers, we are still likely to believe and be impressed by that figure at that moment. But the increasing public knowledge about the machinations of social media at large has just shifted the means and raised the stakes for content creators looking to be seen as truly authentic. They are finding other ways of proving themselves:  interacting with followers more, sharing more on TikTok and Instagram Stories, revealing behind the scenes information about how they do their work and how much they get paid, and more. 

DIGILABOUR: What is the role of marketing agencies and other marketing-related entities in the influencer industry?

EMILY HUND: Marketing agencies play a vital role in the influencer industry. Their development is really what pushed the space forward from bloggers and brands figuring out how to collaborate 15 years ago into the complicated and valuable industry that now exists. They have hands in everything:  seeking out deals, negotiating rates and deliverables, helping influencers manage careers, setting standards (for better or worse) about authenticity, credibility, and brand safety, variously encouraging and inhibiting influencers’ creative production…they just do SO much, and they are probably the least publicly visible player in this industry.

DIGILABOUR: Do you see problems in the conceptualization of “influencer”?

EMILY HUND: I understand the contentions around the term. I also understand its roots. It was a logical term to use in the early days of the industry, when certain social media users were wielding significant influence over followers, particularly when it came to buying goods and making aesthetic choices. They were quite literally influencing, and the term “influencer” has a bit of an aspirational ring to it, so it all made sense. As times have changed, I absolutely understand why some influencers have come to take issue with the term. In the public imagination, “influencer” has become associated with the more negative sides of the work, both real and perceived:  an association with consumerism,  pursuit of self-interest, sort of abdicating thought to make decisions. People use it in a sort of disparaging and joking way – “I got influenced” with the implied “lol/ugh.” At the same time, influencers’ work and roles in society have also expanded tremendously. Many are maintaining large, multi-channel businesses comprising content creation/production, marketing, sales, sometimes product lines, sometimes consulting, the list goes on and on. I still appreciate the term for its succinctness. But there comes a point where succinctness perhaps starts to become limiting. I believe influencers have earned the right to self-definition and also the right to professionally organize and argue for protections for the expansive, culture-defining and profit-producing work that many of them do. 

DIGILABOUR: Since the publication of your dissertation in 2019, what are the main changes you already see in the influencer industry, and what changes do you envision for the coming years?

EMILY HUND: Without a doubt, the biggest change that has occurred since 2019 is the rapid acceleration of the influencer industry into one focused, generally speaking, on ideas rather than things. The massive explosion of influencers focused on “teaching” their followers something – and it runs the gamut from parenting advice to fashion advice to science and medical advice, history, current events, on and on. Obviously, in the midst of 2020 this became even more pronounced. Tragedy–such as the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd–invites opportunities for learning and change, but also, unfortunately, for hucksters looking to exploit tragedy for money, power, or both. There has been a rise in visibility for influencers with genuine knowledge, experience, and credentials but also an unfortunate rise in influencers with none of the above – those self-styled faux-experts who position themselves as unencumbered by the “establishment” when they are very much participating in and benefitting from another type of establishment. People and organizations have learned to exploit the tools and practices of the influencer industry–they have learned to use that industrially constructed version of authenticity–in order to enrich themselves. This is the industry’s biggest challenge over the coming years, and my biggest concern:  bolstering financial and institutional transparency in the influencer space, incentivizing creators to gain education and expand their creativity while keeping the public good in mind.