The Deceptive World of Influencer Marketing on Social Media
While we all know advertising has been around for a long time, it is an industry that is always changing and constantly evolving. This has led to a drastic change in how people advertise since the formation of social media. Ad space on social media was initially introduced by Facebook in 2007 when Mark Zuckerberg and the other minds behind Facebook decided that it could be useful for them to start making money by selling ad space. While Zuckerberg was reluctant to sell ad space at first, this was the beginning of an entirely new platform for advertising that he never knew was possible. The way ads reach us through social media now has reached the deepest corners of our feeds, and it is impossible to enter social media now without seeing an ad for something within the first 15 seconds.
Not only are we being fed ads through the ad space on these platforms, but they very often come from the creators that we watch as well. Most social media influencers can find themselves at this point when a brand reaches out to them for a partnership or a one-time ad deal to sell their product. This can be in the form of a discount code on a website that their followers can go and use to purchase items, or it can be companies that send out equipment and clothes to these influencers for them to make a video about it, or even just to mention the product or company in a video. This can lead to users not even knowing they’re being advertised to, while the influencer is being compensated in some way for it. This is a very interesting concept to think about due to the fact that you begin to get into the realm of subliminal marketing and selling to someone in a way that they don’t even know that they’re being sold to.
Something that is important to note when considering influencer advertising is that the people that are being advertised to are the fans of the influencers, so there is a form of trust there that is expected from the influencer to the consumer, and there have been a few instances of breaching trust in the past with these influencer campaigns that have led some very large faces in the industry into some very deep water.
One of the more notable instances of this was through Logan Paul’s “CryptoZoo” scam. In 2021, right around the time that NFT’s and cryptocurrency were hitting a major boom, Logan and a few other of his influencer friends launched a cryptocurrency/game site under the name CryptoZoo. While he didn’t tell his subscribers that he and his friends actually created it, he encouraged them to go and buy stock and buy the currency, in turn raising the price of it. When it reached a massive high for it’s value, everyone at the top, including Logan, who had the most currency out of everyone, sold off their stock and profited as much as possible, while leaving their subscribers at a massive loss on their investment. This speaks to the major breach of trust that happened in this case and many others like it, where there is an influencer that younger children look up to, and trust has fully taken advantage of their young and uninformed subscribers for personal gain.
It is very tricky to try and guess where advertising and influencer marketing can end up in the future, simply due to the speed and how drastically it has changed just in the past 5–10 years alone. All we can know at this point is that it is imperative that we all stay mindful of situations and advertisements like the ones mentioned so that we can all be safe online, and be sure that what we are paying for online, is really what we are going to get.
