Instagram Stars Are Posting Fake Sponsored Content
Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: A shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number “6,” shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s launch, and tagged OnePlus’sInstagram handle. And it looked similar to posts from the company itself announcing the launch of its new android phone. Joshi’s post, however, wasn’t an ad. “It looked sponsored, but it’s not,” she said. Her followers are none the wiser. “They just assume everything is sponsored when it really isn’t,” she said. And she wants it that way.
A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. Now, it’s a sign of success. “People know how much influencers charge now, and that payday is nothing to shake a stick at,” said Alyssa Vingan Klein, editor in chief of Fashionista, a fashion news website. “If someone who is 20 years old watching YouTube or Instagram sees these people traveling with brands, promoting brands, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do everything they could to get in on that.” […]
Sydney Pugh, a lifestyle influencer in Los Angeles, recently staged a fake ad for a local cafe, purchasing her own mug of coffee, photographing it, and adding a promotional caption, carefully written in that particular style of adspeak anyone who spends a lot of time on Instagram will recognize: “Instead of [captioning] ‘I need coffee to get through the day,’ mine will say ‘I love Alfred’s coffee because of A,B,C,’” she told me. “You see the same things over and over on actual sponsored posts it becomes really easy to emulate, even if you’re not getting paid.” […]
When Allie, a 15-year-old lifestyle influencer who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, scrolls through her Instagram feed, sometimes the whole thing seems like an ad. There’s a fellow teen beauty influencer bragging about her sponsorship with Maybelline, a high school sophomore she knows touting his brand campaign with Voss water. None of these promotions however, are real. Allie is friends with them and so she knows. She once faked a water sponsorship herself. “People pretend to have brand deals to seem cool,” Allie said. It’s a thing, like, I got this for free while all you losers are paying.“ […]
Henry, a 15-year-old beauty influencer who asked to be referred to by his first name only, said he doesn’t post fake ads himself, but said he noticed his social status rise as he got more attention online this year. “People come up to me at school like, ‘do you get sponsored?’ When I say I do they’re like, ‘OMG that’s so cool.’ I noticed the more followers I gain the more people in the hall come up and talk to me.”
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