Adrian Watkins

A new wave of agents is cashing in on social media influencers — with strings attached.

Bcoming a social media influencer might be a lucrative career option for some people today, with consumer brands growing ever more reliant on influencer marketing. Until around 2012, however, most influencers were just creating content for their websites and social media as a hobby. Any income it did generate simply supplemented earnings from another, more traditional career.

While these early influencers were not driven by money enough to convert their popularity into paychecks, there were people observing their rise and what this could potentially mean for brands. These individuals became the first wave of influencer managers — a resilient bunch of rough-and-ready opportunists, keen to turn extraordinary video views and subscriber numbers into the linchpins of persuasive pitches for sponsorship deals. They saw influencers’ stories as commodities they could leverage based on the fact that there was such evident demand for them and they were more akin to salespeople than talent managers.

In fact, these early industry-makers still hold this position and aggressively protect the worth of what their clients are selling. One influencer manager — whose roster features the world’s most popular YouTubers — refused access to his talent for a book I wrote about influencers, based on the fact that they would not financially benefit from sharing information about their journey in this way, but the publishing house would. No money, no story. The idea that they would freely give away any insight into their lives for zero financial reward was, to him, not just implausible but, frankly, bad for business.

Before Liam Chivers started his influencer agency OP Talent in 2012 — and became the manager of YouTube behemoths KSI and Ali-A, to name just two major names on his books — he was a sales trader working for a games manufacturer. “We made six million discs a day and I had good contacts in gaming,” he says.

YouTube became visible on his radar when he and his wife had their first child. Having met couples who also had children at the same time through British prenatal support organization NCT, he and his new dad friends started gaming together on Friday nights. He says: “I would watch YouTube to get better and get tips. At that point, we were playing Call of Duty (COD) and I wasn’t a fan of YouTubers but did find myself watching the same people over and over again.”

If the first generation of managers broke ground to establish the market, the second wave moved soon after to grab a share of brand marketing budgets.

As luck would have it, he had a meeting with Activision — the publisher of COD — in June 2012 at one of the industry’s biggest conventions, E3. He flew to Los Angeles for the event and while doing the rounds, he noticed someone familiar.

“I saw this scruffy young lad walking across the hall and recognized that this was a guy I had been watching called xJawz. I looked at his badge and he had managed to get in with a fake pass to get industry information on COD,” he says.

xJawz was one of YouTube’s first gaming influencers, known offline as Sam Betesh. He had started his channel when he was fifteen years old and had a strategy of publishing two or three videos a day through which he would share information on how to play COD and win.

Betesh immediately spotted Chivers’ iPhone case — it featured the video game he was obsessed with and had been given to Chivers as a present during his meeting with Activision. Long story short, Chivers gave him the case and Betesh said he would tweet him as a thank you from his popular Twitter account. “It was worth $2, but to a gamer, it was a collectors’ item,” says Chivers.

Over the next few hours, he watched in amazement as he accumulated hundreds of new Twitter followers due to Betesh’s one tweet. He could see the power of digital influencers was real but wasn’t quite sure how he fit into the picture until he was at his second major industry conference that year: Gamescom. He had given gaming YouTuber Alastair Aiken — AKA Ali-A — passes to the event and introduced him to his contacts at Activision. As a result, he spent three days on the company’s stand playing COD. Aiken’s reaction to this experience made it clear to Chivers what his next step was. He says: “Ali looked me in the eye and said, ‘This is incredible — I need an agent.’”

Having seen the CD industry destroyed by the internet, Chivers knew his days selling discs were inevitably numbered. “I wanted to be there at the start of the revolution,” he says. “I spent the next couple of weeks getting in touch with every business I knew to start pitching.” As a result, energy drinks brand Monster became Aiken’s sponsor. This partnership lasted for six years.

Chivers’ high-enthusiasm, low-strategy approach to monetizing Ali-A’s content was that of an opportunistic salesperson — he saw possibility and moved quickly. This wasn’t talent management in the traditional sense; to broker that first deal, he was focused on discovering interested parties with a budget and appetite for YouTube promotion rather than strategically plotting the gamer’s ascent. However, like a human sledgehammer, Chivers was breaking ground to start building an industry. This is something Simon Chambers, owner of Storm Management—and who started working with influencers in 2014—applauds him for. “To make a market, you need someone to do that at a point where nobody understands the potential of what is possible or what the opportunities are.”

Chivers speedily established himself almost at the same time as the initial brand desire to work with gaming YouTubers was happening. He launched his talent management agency OP in August 2012, signed Olajide Olatunji — AKA KSI — and Ali-A within two months of each other and continues to represent both. To give a sense of how their careers have developed under his watch, in a 2014 poll by US trade publication Variety, KSI was voted more influential to American teenagers than any traditional celebrity. In addition, a boxing match between him and fellow YouTuber Logan Paul in 2018 created such a consumer frenzy, Business Insider estimates the event generated revenue of $11 million. Meanwhile, Ali-A was the most-watched gaming influencer on YouTube in 2018. Despite having no hesitancy to build a company in the then-unestablished world of influencer marketing, Chivers admits that he did not foresee this level of success. He says: “I didn’t know how big it would be. At the start it was such a battle, and it still is some days, but it has become much more appreciated.”

Like all early-adopting YouTubers, his clients began publishing videos because they loved the platform and communicating with their audiences. Now, however, it’s business. He says: “They are focused on success and continue to do well because they are fast, consistent, produce relatable content, and interact with their audiences. These guys are tweeting them and answering their comments — it’s completely and utterly down to engagement.” Endemol Shine UK acquired OP Talent in 2016.

While Chivers was arguably the first person to recognize the potential to build a market around gaming influencers, he wasn’t the first person to trailblaze monetization of YouTube’s lifestyle space. This was Dominic Smales, who founded digital talent agency Gleam Futures. Like Chivers, he had a career in sales and marketing before moving into digital. A health scare which resulted in a six-month break to recover made him reconsider what he wanted to do, and he realized his passion was social media. In a 2018 interview with beauty journalist Emma Gunavardhana for her podcast — The Emma Guns Show — he said, “It was in the days when Facebook was blowing up and YouTube was starting to get traction.”

His business began as a social media consultancy in 2010 called Gleam Digital, and Smales worked regularly with Chanel, advising the brand on how it could connect with online audiences. The catalyst for his move into the influencer space? Watching sisters Samantha and Nicola Chapman on their beauty-focused YouTube channel, Pixiwoo.

He told Gunavardhana: “I was absolutely fascinated by the fact these two girls were popping up on the homepage of YouTube pretty much every week, and driving more engagement, comments and views than a lot of the viral videos that were generally the content you’d find on YouTube in those days.”

The passionate response they elicited from their subscribers was the first step towards Smales’ eureka moment which turned consultancy Gleam Digital into talent agency, Gleam Futures. “The phenomenon was that audiences were watching these guys not just for the learning, but because they were into them and their lives and personalities,” he said.

The influencers were accustomed to creative freedom but with the monetization of the industry came scripts, strict guidelines and inauthentic brand deals.

Working from a coffee shop near his home, he began giving the sisters commercial advice. They later introduced him to fellow YouTubers Tanya Burr, their brother Jim Chapman and Ruth Crilly. “It was like we were building a family business,” he told Gunavardhana.

Smales admitted he was uncertain about which direction the influencer industry would go in but he had no doubts about its potential to boom. “The only thing I knew for sure was this was definitely going to grow.”

Gleam has since become synonymous with some of the world’s most successful YouTubers (the company calls its talent ‘digital first’). Although it lost three major names in 2017 — Caspar Lee, Joe Sugg and Alfie Deyes — it continues to represent noted vloggers including those initial clients who helped Smales build his business, as well as numerous content creators with mass audiences including Zoe Sugg and Claudia Sulewski.

Like Chivers, he revealed that the ongoing success of his clients is down to their attitude. In the interview with Gunavardhana, he said: “It’s never not about hard work and focus.” Gleam received a significant investment of an undisclosed amount from agency group Dentsu Aegis in 2017.

If the first generation of managers broke ground to establish the market, the second wave moved soon after to grab a share of brand marketing budgets, which, by 2014, were being split out to include dedicated influencer spend. Much of this second generation of managers came from existing talent-focused companies or were people already working in media, who saw launching influencer divisions or acquiring influencer marketing agencies as a way of not being left behind by this emergent, desired market. Already experienced in putting together traditional advertising campaigns that featured talent, they were from the worlds of marketing, advertising, modeling, and celebrity, and treated the formula for producing influencer creative as they would any other.

Someone who spotted the growing tide of interest was the aforementioned Simon Chambers, who set up a dedicated department for digital talent at Storm — the global modeling agency he owns — the same year.

“I can’t decide if it was defensive or offensive, but it was clear the space was taking off in a big way,” he says. “Brands were working more and more with YouTubers and bloggers and we could see it was becoming an exciting place.”

To comprehend this new generation of talent better, Chambers headed to YouTube conference VidCon that year. “I didn’t understand anything anyone was saying,” he recalls. “I was the oldest person there and made hundreds of notes. I went back for three years to build up my knowledge.” Doing this gave Chambers an edge on his competition, as many agencies were also adapting to sign digital talent, but he realized early on — thanks to VidCon — that YouTube was ‘a world of its own.’ Although he made the move to include influencers on his books with a focus on the video platform, he believes the Instagram influencer explosion has blurred the lines which previously separated the people he represents. It is much easier to create content for Instagram, he says, and due to this, there is now the sense anyone can be — and should be — an influencer.

Speaking of how this broadening of the market has impacted the talent Storm was founded for — models — he says: “Every major contract states they’d like the model to post on social media as well. Everything has converged and approximated but we still see the difference between someone who has a large social following and whose primary career is something else, and content creators.”

Chambers can also fall back on the fact that Storm has an established process when it comes to managing talent and brokering deals, which insulates him somewhat from the ‘wild west’ feeling of the industry that seems to make establishing trust between influencer agents and brands difficult.

Si Barbour-Brown, founder and director of digital talent agency The Sharper Group, believes brand suspicion is down to the profits-focused first era of the industry when certain influencer managers were charging a premium and under-delivering.

“Some creators’ management have set a bad example and continue to set a bad example but we’re getting to a stage where people know who is and isn’t professional,” he says. “The fact is, this needn’t be complicated and you shouldn’t always have to pay five figures for a YouTube video.”

He also believes the approach of first-generation influencer management has been to the detriment of the influencers themselves. In his view, it is ‘unbelievable’ how few UK YouTubers have crossed over to television given how prominent they are globally and how long they have been in the public eye. He cites Joe Sugg as the ‘only’ person who has done really well thanks to his (almost) star turn on BBC One competition, Strictly Come Dancing. “He gave a really good account of himself and it has been great for YouTube,” he says.

Meanwhile, having spent a year analyzing and troubleshooting issues in the industry prior to launching his News Corp-backed influencer agency THE FIFTH in 2019, Oliver Lewis believes the only route to change and a deeper sense of satisfaction for every party is longer-term, more substantial partnerships. However, he doesn’t believe this can happen in a widespread way overnight. He says: “Influencer marketing is one of the most exciting and fast-growing areas in brand communication, but it’s still in its infancy.” He adds: “As with any industry in rapid growth, challenges persist.”

One of these challenges is the way in which the very business of digital influence has become an uncomfortable reality for many of the actual influencers. Perhaps because it wasn’t their idea, perhaps because they started their channels to have independent spaces in which they were the authority, many influencers chafe when brand deals ultimately leave them with several ‘bosses’ to answer to. While managers have brought a much-needed sheen of professionalism to the space, they haven’t necessarily produced the most compelling work. The influencers were accustomed to creative freedom and their content creation process was often reactionary. Their power lay in their human approach — the natural rhythm of their speech, their flaws, and their honesty. Yet with the monetization of the industry came scripts, strict guidelines and — in some cases — inauthentic brand deals.

The truth is that the three parties involved in the monetization of digital influence — influencers, management, and brands — have different goals. Influencers want to create content and get paid for it — they’ll take the deals to continue doing what they love — but this is often approached as a necessary evil rather than part of a commercial master plan. Meanwhile, managers are either operating as ballsy opportunists or as suppliers to meet demand — they are fighting to create a market for their clients or delivering a commodity to an industry they were already operating in. And brands? Ultimately, they want to sell product. Period.

Original article