The changing winds of beauty and influencers is just the beginning
From influencers to restaurants, media companies to celebrities, one of the primary goals with digital platforms is to build a community that is invested in you, no matter where you go or what you do. Total followers is a piece of that success [but not everything, because a devoted micro-community is more valuable than fake followers], but the real trick is to cultivate a genuine emotional connection with an audience, no matter the size, because it can translate into real money and power.
Photo illustrations by Tracy Ma/The New York Times. Photographs of Rae by Paola Kudacki for The New York Times.
And wherever you are in the process - building through slow growth or have gone viral and gained followers overnight - at some point you’ll need to address your digital strategy in order to effectively monetize and have staying power. Posting content haphazardly will result in haphazard results. Plenty of people have followers, but few are able to translate that into revenue streams and businesses. Enter Addison Rae Easterling, who is making that journey right now.
In the New York Times Magazine article “The Beauty of 78.5 Million Followers,” reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis walks through Easterling’s step into the beauty industry by creating a co-brand - Item - with Ipsy, the largest beauty subscription service in the US. At the time, she had over 73 million followers on TikTok, which is a population larger than the United Kingdom, that she gained largely through videos of her dancing and strengthened through “talk[ing] to them about emotional and personal issues.”
What opened the door for Easterling is her enormous social media following. She has a captive audience and Ipsy needed a saleswoman, but it was her next steps that showed both savvy and the distinct shift in the influencer ecosystem.
As Grigoriadis writes, with this massive following, “... Rae found herself in a strange and modern predicament: She had become very famous and needed to get paid for it. Rae would start selling merch, making T-shirts with the phrase “I’m a Bad Bleep,” a reference to a viral song by Australian rapper The Kid Laroi (“I need a bad bitch/Addison Rae”), but continuing down that road, the typical influencer-hawking-vitamins-for-your-hair route, may have seemed too small.” Instead, she followed a newer path, carved out by influencers and celebrities alike - think Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Jennifer Lopez - and decided to start her own beauty brand.
The move to create a beauty brand with partial ownership, especially for someone rising in fame rather than an existing celebrity, is a shift in power. “There used to be straight licensing deals, where a company gets to use someone’s name for a combination of a design fee, a percentage of sales, a royalty and sometimes a minimum guarantee — that was the traditional, old-school way,” says Raina Penchansky, head of the influencer marketing company Digital Brand Architects, as quoted in the article. “But now a lot of manufacturers, especially in California, are going to an influencer and saying: ‘We’re going to launch this brand together. We’re the back-end manufacturer, and we own, say, between 80 and 50 percent of the brand, and you own the other piece of it. And when it sells, we get an exit.’”
The beauty industry is a prime space for this evolution to take place. As Grigoriadis writes “In our new virtual society, the same beauty industry that was once maligned has been embraced as a universal good. Beauty companies are lauded for providing us with tools of self-expression and celebrating the human desire to adorn the face using something other than the tricks of social media (filters, lighting, Facetune).” And similar to gaming, it’s the interactivity of the web - specifically tutorials on YouTube - that “has made beauty’s pop-culture gambit such a success.”
But beauty is just the beginning. “What was becoming clear was that social media has demystified and deglamorized beauty just as it has made it a more constant pressure,” according to Grigoriadis. This model will transfer to other industries - think wellness and alcohol companies for a start - and it all starts and ends with a devoted community.
With the right community, even the social platform becomes less significant because fans will follow you anywhere. Ideally you bring them from social over to your owned platforms [website, newsletter, podcast] or apps like Community, and in many cases, create your own echo chamber protected from cancel culture.
So what can we learn from Easterling’s experience so far?
Plan for success - few people gain followers overnight and even if they do, it’s not always a great thing. The added pressure to figure it all out under the public eye, like Addison Rae, is stressful and the stakes are higher. It’s better to get your content and digital strategy under control ASAP because you never know when the attention may come and it’s good to imagine it can happen at any time [because it can!]
Activate quickly and get the followers - while we don’t recommend chasing followers, there is something to be said about jumping on social platform features [Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn Live, Snapchat Spotlight] or emergent platforms [Clubhouse, Dispo] and leaning in hard in order to build your community. Being an early adopter can have a huge payoff [just ask Gary V], so we definitely encourage it, but be ready and plan for success because [back to the first bullet] ideally you’re not building the plane while flying it. Aka, be intentional with what you’re doing and know your goals with the community before activating it
Put your community first now - always and forever prioritizing the community when it comes to content, purpose and strategy [products, merch, future launches, you name it] is the North Star to success
The opportunities to monetize a community are multiplying, which means that people and brands of influence aren’t going anywhere [sorry], and we’re at just the tip of the iceberg. Get organized now and find your niche because the winds are shifting.