“He got like, 40,000 likes and shares on his last post,” Mr. Lachtman said. (That post featured Mr. Ayala, an affable 23-year old with a kind of frat-boy charm, pouring hot coffee on his bare hand.) “The dog is down there with his 50,000 followers,” Mr. Lachtman went on, gesturing at Biggie Griffon, a pouty Brussels Griffon who sat underneath a pizza-and-cheeseburger-strewn picnic table.
Known online as Biggie Smalls the Notorious D.O.G., Biggie has actually garnered more than 75,000 followers across Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr with punny posts involving rap lyrics and improbable photos. He is paid in turn to promote brands like BarkBox, a subscription service for dog accessories, on his social media feeds, with Niche brokering the deals.
In an era of new economies, this may be one of the most curious: the network that has sprung up to help the follower-laden stars of Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and other social media services make money by connecting them with brands wanting to advertise to their audiences. People like Mr. Lachtman and his co-founder, Rob Fishman, run what may be seen as a parallel universe to Hollywood, one in which shares and likes matter more than box-office sales and paparazzi shots. Here, authenticity — a word that comes up often in this arena — trumps a Photoshop-perfect facade or publicist-approved message.
Some of these agents want to groom their clients (or creators, as they’re often called) into marquee names who can resonate beyond a smartphone screen. (Though it’s worth noting that some already have a bigger following than “traditional” celebrities: Nash Grier, Instagram’s answer to the archetypical teenage idol, has more than 5.9 million followers on the social network; Oprah Winfrey has about half that.)
“We want to cultivate these stars, and if they graduate to being the next Jimmy Fallon, great,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, a founder of the New York-based GrapeStory, an agency that represents a coterie of Vine comedians in addition to other social media personalities. “But when they’re just trying to get $10,000 or $20,000 out of a brand, which is life-changing for these kids, we know how to get it done.”
“You come work with GrapeStory,” he added, “you’re guaranteed to make five and six figures per year.”
While the metrics of the businesses may be different — Niche, for example, charges brands for the use of their services instead of talent — these agencies share much of the bravado of their Hollywood counterparts. (...)
That worth can be significant. Niche’s so-called branded marketing deals can pay upward of five figures a post — enough that one of Biggie’s owners, Lindsey Louie, quit her job with Google to work full time on Biggie’s feeds and work as the company’s community manager. Niche also enables creators to track their performances across social networks (what post got like after like on Instagram but flopped on Facebook, for example) and allows brands to see which creators work best for them.
“We’ll do stuff like discount codes,” Mr. Lachtman explained on a Wednesday afternoon in Niche’s San Francisco office. This time, Biggie was out of the crate and padding across the conference room table, paws sometimes landing on Mr. Lachtman’s MacBook. “Biggie gets a custom code; let’s see how many BarkBoxes he sells versus other dogs.”
“The dog demographic on these social platforms is huge,” he added, scanning Biggie’s statistics on his screen. Mr. Lachtman recounted an April Fool’s Day campaign Niche did with American Eagle called American Beagle. “We flew a bunch of dogs to their headquarters in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I think we had five dogs that each had 400,000 followers. It’s a crazy audience. It works really well.”
by Sheila Marikar, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Preston Gannaway for The New York Times
