No, wait. This isn’t a joke. This is a 21st-century shakedown.
Here is how it works: An influencer walks into a restaurant to collect an evening’s worth of free food and drink, having promised to create social media content extolling the restaurant’s virtues. The influencer then orders far more than the agreed amount and walks away from the check for the balance or fails to tip or fails to post or all of the above. And the owners are left feeling conned.
In a business without boundaries, anything goes. Brian Bornemann, the chef and a co-owner of the restaurants Crudo e Nudo and Isla in Santa Monica, Calif., said that while there are reliable influencers, the “lower echelons” see a free meal as a way to build their personal brands. And the most entrepreneurial influencers, whether they have sophisticated skills or merely a prospector’s zeal, offer an ascending roster of fee-based services. Exposure packages can cost upwards of $1,000 for a prescribed number of Instagram stories, posts and a professionally made video, sometimes with performance bonuses tied to views.
Influencer content is lifestyle advertising, selling a quick, aspirational message that has more in common with a fashion ad than with reality. Visit this restaurant, a post implies, and your life will be as much fun as mine. Status is defined by popularity rather than by expertise or by character, and credible, food-savvy comments can get lost in the increasing din.
The opportunists — who give new meaning to the term “grab and go” — aren’t good for restaurants, which are trying to get back on their feet after the pandemic. They aren’t good for the rest of us, either, because they make the already dubious content flooding our feeds even more suspect. The more we rely on influencer posts, the more our critical faculties shrink, because often there’s no depth, no context, no reporting, nothing beyond the surface image of fun, and we can’t tell whom to trust. (...)
Journalists and influencers are not the same species, but we intersect at one point on the graph — we provide information — making it easy to get us mixed up. Welcoming influencers into your dining room can seem easier, at first glance, because they’re looking for good news: All you have to do is feed and water them, and with luck, they go away to post nice photos along with a little copy.
That initial ease comes at a price. Fear and imagination are a potent mix, and wary restaurateurs worry about retaliation if food influencers don’t get what they want: criticism of food that they might have said tasted better if it had been free, complaints about nonexistent bad service or a bottle of wine that the group drained dry before judging it to be off.
Or they can stiff a restaurant. I hear first-tier influencers sharpening their cutlery to defend their honor, but numerous restaurateurs tell me that dealing with the second tier is a constant challenge. (...)
Mr. Bornemann tells influencers he hasn’t worked with to come in on their own dime, once, before he’ll do business. “If they balk,” he said, “they’re bogus.”
Owners can take on the additional job of trying to verify influencer numbers because there are many ways to artificially boost follower counts. If influencers reach out to say they enjoyed a meal at a restaurant and would be happy to return and post in exchange for a freebie, owners can ask for the date of the initial visit to see if there’s a credit card charge on file or check the menu to see if the items the influencers loved were offered on the night in question.
Some restaurants reject all requests below a minimum follower threshold, and some simply refuse to engage. But it takes nerve to opt out.
by Karen Stabiner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Angela Kirkwood
[ed. Human Yelpers. I hope the term influencer dies soon - people leveraging shallow social media personalities into short-lived, vapid careers. Get a real job - like publicists! - haha (and get off my lawn). See also: Hollywood Strike Leaves Influencers Sidelined and Confused (NYT):]"Deanna Giulietti is not in the actors’ union, but she turned down $28,000 last week because of its strike.
Ms. Giulietti, a 29-year-old content creator with 1.8 million TikTok followers, had received an offer to promote the new season of Hulu’s hit show “Only Murders in the Building.”
But SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, recently issued rules stating that any influencer who engages in promotion for one of the Hollywood studios the actors are striking against will be ineligible for membership. (Disney is the majority owner of Hulu.) That gave Ms. Giulietti, who also acts and aspires to one day join the union, reason enough to decline the offer from Influential, a marketing agency working with Hulu.
The union’s rule is part of a variety of aggressive tactics that hit at a pivotal moment for Hollywood labor and shows its desire to assert itself in a new era and with a different, mostly younger wave of creative talent.
“I want to be in these Netflix shows, I want to be in the Hulu shows, but we’re standing by the writers, we’re standing by SAG,” Ms. Giulietti said. “People write me off whenever I say I’m an influencer, and I’m like, ‘No, I really feel I could be making the difference here.’”
That difference comes at a cost. In addition to the Hulu deal, Ms. Giulietti recently declined a $5,000 offer from the app TodayTix to promote the Searchlight Pictures movie “Theater Camp.” (Disney also owns Searchlight.) She said she was living at home with her parents in Cheshire, Conn., and putting off renting an apartment in New York City while she saw how the strike — which, along with a writers’ strike, could go on for months — would affect her income."
