Celebrity Endorsements via Instagram
Nowadays, being a celebrity is a multi-job industry. Celebrities not only have to balance their professional and private lives, but they also have to throw social media into the equation — not just to up their fame status or to remain relevant — in order to earn an extra dollar…or millions of dollars, if we’re being realistic here. To further support the above claim, an article that reflected on research conducted in the area of celebrity endorsements had this to say: “But in order to maintain the lifestyle that even allows them to be someone who is paid for Instagram ads, they’re required to push those exact products — for both the money and for the implicit confirmation of their popularity. They’ve built for themselves a type of fame that can only really be sustained through these dishonest (or at the very least, highly edited) portraits of their lives.” It is so curious to me how the realm of celebrity has shifted so drastically just in the last few years! Celebrities now have to be extremely social media savvy (or at least hire someone who is) to keep up with the flooding of endorsement deals.
What exactly is an endorsement, you may ask? Well, an endorsement, in the case that I am speaking on, is when a company reaches out to a celebrity — specifically, a celebrity with a substantial following base on Instagram — to promote their product. So, the celebrity makes a deal with the company and does just that — they promote the product in an Instagram post and get paid lots and lots of money for doing so. The only thing thats a tad wishy-washy with these endorsements is that they thrive in somewhat of a gray area, meaning they are not explicitly ads, but it is entirely obvious that these celebrities or personalities are being paid to post about a certain product.
Speaking of getting paid to post, I’m sure you are wondering exactly how much these “Instafamous” celebrities are making from these endorsements. In order to break down the numbers, it is important to understand that how much celebrities get paid by a company is extremely dependent on how many followers they have. To give some examples: Scott Disick has 13.3m followers and makes around $15K-$20K per post; Lisa Rinna has 403K followers and makes $3K per post; the really big celebs like Kylie Jenner who has 75m followers can make up to $300K per sponsored post!
Whether you frown upon celebrity endorsements and think it’s a way of “selling out”, it doesn’t look like this business tactic is going away soon. To quote an article regarding the above statement, “Celebrities and brands are currently enjoying a sweet spot, in which celebrities can seem as though they’re authentically championing a product that enhances the lifestyle they’re presenting to the world, all the while it’s the same old pay-for-play game.” Thus, as long as there are famous people to play the game, you’re going to be seeing these sponsored posts for a very long time.
