https://www.theguardian.

com/media/2019/apr/05/its-genuine-you-know-why-the-online-influencer-
industry-is-going-authentic

‘It’s genuine, you know?’: why the

online influencer industry is going
‘authentic’
Calamities such as Fyre Festival have tarnished the booming business of YouTube
and Instagram stars. Now the industry’s top tastemakers have a new plan: keeping
it real. By Sophie Elmhirst

Main image: Illustration: Gleam Futures/Guardian Design

In a central London hair salon last December, the fashion influencer Victoria
Magrath (@inthefrow) mingled among a few of her 849,000 Instagram followers.
Magrath – tall, with signature silver hair – was celebrating the launch of her book,
The New Fashion Rules, at an event organised by her talent agency, Gleam
Futures. She chatted easily, her high, delighted voice ringing out over the roar of
the hairdryers and her manner so convincingly intimate that it was possible to
think she knew her followers as well as they knew her. In a group discussion, a fan
asked how her wedding plans were going, another if it was too late to start being a
blogger. Magrath was encouraging: “Anyone can do it if they’ve got the right
formula.”

After nearly seven years in the game, Magrath is now part of the digital
establishment – the Waitrose of influencers, high-end and dependable. Her
content, spread across Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and her blog, is an old-school,
manicured mix of fashion hauls, luxurious travel and commercial partnerships
with brands from Armani to Reiss. Last year, she went on 36 trips, often gifted by
PRs, on which her photographer boyfriend Alex (@harrison) took pictures of her in
Venetian gondolas and St Lucian waterfalls. “It’s nice to keep the content flowing,
that’s the main reason we do it,” she told her followers in the salon. “I love London,
but there’s only so many times I can keep taking pictures in Notting Hill.”

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‘It’s genuine, you know?’: why the online influencer
industry is going ‘authentic’ – podcast
Such is the life of a top-of-the-range influencer in 2019, who has to sustain an
insatiable audience and satisfy platforms that reward constant posting. The beasts
must be fed. But Magrath senses that change is afoot. The sheer volume of digital
content has reached a point where everyone is becoming desensitised. “There’s
been a million makeup tutorials and a million fashion hauls,” she told me. “People
are a bit done with it.”

Over the last decade, influencer marketing – the business of brands paying social
media celebrities to advertise their wares – has become a well-established tactic.
Influencers now have their own line on a brand’s marketing-spend spreadsheet
alongside TV, radio and so on. But as Magrath suggested, the industry is now
entering a new phase. If phase one was hyperactive expansion – bump the follower
count, boss the Instagram algorithm, rack up the brand deals – then insiders say
that phase two is about authenticity, about “coming back to quality again,” as
Dominic Smales, CEO of Magrath’s agency Gleam Futures, told me.

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Victoria Magrath. Photograph: Gleam Futures

In this new era of authenticity, influencers must display passion, a word that fills
the air at Gleam. (It is the kind of office where instead of replying “yes” to a
question, everyone says “100%!”) Magrath is like Gleam’s head girl, a role model
for others: “Victoria is really passionate about Dior, for example,” said Smales.
“She’ll hang out with the people at Dior because she loves that brand, she loves
what they do, for no payment or anything like that. Not everything is transactional,
it’s genuine, you know?”

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Like many in the industry, Gleam have come to dislike the term “influencer”,
finding it both misrepresentative and degrading. They describe themselves instead
as a “digital-first talent agency”: if their talent have influence, that is simply a
blessed byproduct of their creative abilities. Gleam pride themselves on being able
to distinguish between the hollow Instagrammers in it for fame and cash, and the
genuine talent who have the potential to broaden and prolong their career beyond
the transient limits of a social media platform (hence digital-first: their talent
might start online, but they could go anywhere, do anything). “We want to
represent the absolute crème de la crème,” Lucy Loveridge, Gleam’s head of global
talent, told me. “In the UK, there’s a lot of what I would call ‘influencers’. There’s
less talent.”

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Back at the salon, after hugging the last of her followers goodbye, Magrath sat
down to relax. She was still buzzing from the event: “I just feel like I have a massive
family, to be honest.” Her usually buoyant tone only slipped once, when talking
about her audience’s relentless expectations. Last Christmas, Magrath had decided
not to do Vlogmas – a YouTube tradition where vloggers post a video every day in
December. Some of her followers expressed their displeasure. “I’m like, ‘Well you
got three blogposts, seven images, two videos and a multitude of tweets this week,
so what more could I do, you know?’”

At Gleam, they often emphasise how hard their talent works: content-production is
a grind, and a talent essentially does six jobs in one – producer, presenter,
cameraman, editor, marketeer, PR. It looks easy, influencing – one long holiday
with free clothes and a paycheck at the end – but as with many aspects of the
industry, the image deceives. This year, said Magrath, was going to be all about
stripping back the artifice. Honesty was in. “More honest portrayals of people’s
lives,” she explained. “I kind of want to move that way as well.”

In this strange moment – when the Pope (@pontifex) writes a tweet describing the
Virgin Mary as the “first influencer” and Kim Kardashian West is extravagantly
paid for promoting an appetite-suppressing lollipop to her then 111 million
Instagram followers – the word “influencer” has become a little soiled. There have
been noted catastrophes, such as Fyre Festival, when supermodel influencers
including Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski advertised an event that
spectacularly failed to resemble its publicised image. There have been revelations
of corruption – bought followers, undeclared paid-for content, fake likes. And
there has been controversy around some of the industry’s stars, such as vegan
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YouTuber Yovana Mendoza (@rawvana) who was recently caught on camera
eating fish, and Logan Paul, who last year posted a video of the dead body of a
suicide victim in Japan, prompting YouTube to temporarily suspend advertising on
his channels. (Earlier this year, Paul announced on his podcast that he was going
to “attempt to go gay” for a month.)

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Last year, the cumulative effect of events like these led to a spate of industry-press
articles proclaiming the death of influencer marketing. Some insiders felt there
was a danger that trust in digital celebrities had been so eroded as to render them
worthless. In a speech last summer, Unilever’s chief marketing officer Keith Weed
called on the influencer ecosystem to “rebuild trust before it’s gone for ever”.
Dutifully, the industry began an ostentatious clean-up operation: platforms deleted
fake followers, regulators tightened guidelines around sponsored content,
influencers developed a new line in performative transparency – with many
posting how-the-sausage-gets-made videos explaining how they earn their money
(though rarely saying how much).

“I wouldn’t say it’s all commercial, and I wouldn’t say it’s all sincere,” digital
anthropologist Crystal Abidin told me, describing the current trend in which
influencers undercut their own projection of Instagram perfection to reveal the
value in their flaws. “These days it’s hard to tell which.” Either way, despite last
year’s loss of faith, the industry is growing. According to agency Mediakix,
influencer market value on Instagram alone is projected to rise from $800m in
2017 to $2.3bn in 2020. (In the same period, the number of sponsored Instagram
posts is predicted to more than double, from 2.5m to 6.1m.)

For Gleam’s roster in this new bare-all era, being authentic – or at least appearing
so – is vital. The agency’s talent is a who’s who of mainstream influencing, a
brand-friendly crowd who play by the rules. They include the industry’s most
famous, now heritage-status stars, many of whom have been around for a decade
and are probably in the running for a blue plaque: lifestyle vlogger-turned-actor
Tanya Burr, make-up artist sisters Sam and Nic Chapman (AKA Pixiwoo) and Zoe
Sugg (Zoella), undisputed queen of British YouTubers. Gleam’s stars have no single
unifying characteristic, but there are overlaps. Unsurprisingly in an industry that
sanctifies the visual and trades on aspiration, no one is unattractive. Self-
improving activities dominate – yoga, healthy eating, fitness, makeup, fashion.
Many of Gleam’s talent appear to be in the process of either buying or renovating a
house.

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Sam and Nic Chapman, AKA Pixiwoo. Photograph: James Lincoln
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Recently, however, industry buzz has grown around “micro” and “nano”
influencers. Mega-influencers with multi-million followers are supposedly going
out of style: “They worked with so many brands they couldn’t possibly be
authentic,” said Sarah Penny, head of content at marketing agency Influencer
Intelligence. But Smales, a man who likes to be ahead of the curve, is fairly
dismissive of this new vogue: “I’d be pretty confident in saying that you’d probably
get better value from spending lots of money on Zoe than a little money on a
micro-influencer,” he said, a little defensively. It’s not in his interest that a
marketing budget should be dispersed among a bunch of random Joes with 30,000
followers instead of going in one full thwack to one of his audience-loaded stars.
Like any talent agency, Gleam take a cut of their talent’s fee – in line with the wider
talent industry, they told me, so somewhere in the region of 10-20%.

Precise figures are elusive in the world of influencer marketing. Kylie Jenner
recently became the youngest ever “self-made” billionaire at the age of 21 and
apparently receives $1m per Instagram post. Other reported pay packets range
from the $250,000 Kendall Jenner was given to promote a fantastical shitshow
(Fyre), down to the almost quaint £12,000 that Zoe Sugg is rumoured to receive
for each Instagram post. At the bottom of the food chain reside the aspirational
high-school influencers, as recently reported in the Atlantic, who advertise brands
for free, believing that to look sponsored denotes social status and credibility.

In reality, influencers rarely have a set fee. Chris Davis, the head of brand
partnerships at Gleam, told me that a talent’s market rate was usually decreed by
whatever the last brand was willing to pay, unless a talent desperately wanted to
work with a brand, in which case they’d do it for less. It also depended on demand.
If a talent was busy and the brand wanted a partnership to happen on a certain
day, they’d have to pay more. “The way I always describe it,” said Davis, “is like an
Uber surge price.”

Gleam’s challenge isn’t just to secure deals for their talent, but to prove they’re
worth the money. Davis said that for too long the industry had judged success by
counting clicks and likes. Audience engagement was all very well, but brands now
want proof that a talent can deliver a financial return. While Instagram can tell you
how many people click on affiliate links or swipe up on a Instagram Story (the
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platform’s self-deleting video feature) to get to a brand page, platforms don’t say
how many people actually end up buying a product. Brands might share this
information with Gleam, but not always. “If you could say to someone that if you
spend £1 with this person you will see £5 in return,” said Davis imagining what
would surely be the killer blow in his fantasy pitch, “what are you willing to pay for
that?”

The Gleam Futures office is a sleek, open-plan space on the sixth floor of a modern
block in Fitzrovia, with views across the rooftops of London. On a recent Thursday
morning, staff were busy at their desks, which were as uncluttered as you’d expect
in a digital-first talent agency. Scented candles burned, a pop playlist looped,
everyone seemed to possess the same giant water flask. Smales – a youthful father
of two with a professional casualness about him – has the corner office, a glass box
containing an elegant vintage desk lamp and a large ornamental wooden hashtag
adorned with light bulbs. On the walls were black-and-white portraits of his talent:
Victoria Magrath with a hand on a hip, Lily Pebbles covering her mouth with her
hands as though she’d just emitted a tiny burp, the Pixiwoo sisters Sam and Nic
Chapman standing back to back.

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Sam and Nic were Gleam’s first talent, the reason for the agency’s existence. The
pair, makeup artists from Norwich, began filming themselves 12 years ago after a
friend asked Sam how to do a smokey eye and she posted the first of countless
YouTube tutorials. Smales, at the time working as a social media consultant for
brands such as Chanel, spotted the sisters’ videos on YouTube’s homepage in the
now-remote era when there were, as he put it, roughly “10 or 20 people doing it”
and no one was making any money. He reached out through YouTube’s messaging
system, they met up, hit it off, discussed the commercial possibilities. “I won’t
profess to have had an epiphany moment where I saw the future of social media,”
said Smales modestly, “but I knew this was going to grow.” In 2010, he founded
Gleam, one of the first agencies to represent this new breed of talent and an early
architect of the influencer industry.

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Dominic Smales, CEO of Gleam Futures. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Gleam expanded quickly, partly because its first batch of talent were, literally, a
family. Sam and Nic introduced Smales to their brother Jim Chapman, who was
hating his job in insurance, and his girlfriend, Tanya Burr, who was making
YouTube videos while saving up to go travelling. “We all just started talking about
the potential,” said Smales. Commercially, the innovation was radical. Viewers, it
turned out, trusted recommendations from their friends, or from people who felt
like their friends, more than other forms of advertising.

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Through Pixiwoo, Smales had an early realisation that came to define how Gleam
chose their talent. Sam and Nic were successful not just because they made
watchable content, but because he “could take them out of their bedrooms where
they were filming their YouTube videos and put them in a room full of Chanel
execs and they would be charming and charismatic and the real them”. It was vital
to find people who could both be and seem themselves.

A decade on, Gleam staffers now talk about Sam and Nic’s Pixiwoo journey as
though it’s a primer to be handed out to newbie influencers who arrive on
Instagram and presume they’ll take home a tidy sum for unboxing some
eyeshadow. The sisters established their personal brand, grew their audience from
a few thousand to 2.1m YouTube subscribers and, in 2011, founded a makeup
brush company called Real Techniques. “Now that brand is bigger than Sam and
Nic,” said Smales. “It’s the fastest growing makeup brush brand in the US, it’s the
No 1 makeup brush brand in the UK.” This was the other lesson Sam and Nic
taught Smales: to last, a talent needs to be able to diversify offline. “I would bet my
bottom dollar that a large proportion of people who pick up a pack of Real
Techniques makeup brushes in Ohio won’t know who those two girls are, and
might discover Sam and Nic through Real Techniques.” Smales looked triumphant.
“And that’s kind of the dream.”

Recently, the Chapman clan were photographed for the cover of the Times
Saturday magazine for a feature about the family’s social media empire. Someone
at Gleam had cut out the article and placed each page in a plastic wallet in a black
folder which they displayed on a coffee table in the office reception. It was
touching, somehow, to see the corporate pride in a newspaper magazine feature,
when approximately 1.7 million more people subscribe to Pixiwoo’s YouTube
channel than buy the Times.

Initially, Gleam’s roster were all YouTubers like Pixiwoo. But since Instagram
developed video features (Stories in 2016 and IGTV last year), hit a billion users
and became the dominant platform for influencer advertising spend, Gleam is now
as likely to sign talent on the basis of their Instagram alone. Gleam do not like their
talent to be dependent on a single platform, however. “Vine disappeared
overnight,” warned Lucy Loveridge. Variety is key: television shows, beauty
products, books. “Why shouldn’t the pages of a paper book be any more valid than
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a blog post or a YouTube video?” wondered Smales. So many of their talent want to
write books that Gleam recently established a kind of in-house literary agency,
Gleam Titles. (A recent publication was Why Social Media Is Ruining Your Life”,
which seems a bit rich given that social media is the foundation of Gleam’s
business.) Last December, one of Gleam’s new talents, cleaning-obsessive Mrs
Hinch, signed a six-figure deal with Penguin in what must surely be one of the
fastest journeys from Instagram Stories to an 11-way book auction.

Mrs Hinch looms large at Gleam: the star of the hour. Sophie Hinchliffe – a 29-
year-old former hairdresser from Essex – first reached out to the agency early last
year when she had around 100,000 Instagram followers. At that point, Loveridge
wasn’t sure what they could do for her beyond a few brand partnerships, but then a
Gleam manager, Zara Nicholas, noticed her following was rising by thousands
every day, reaching a million within six months. (“Now we could do more,” said
Loveridge.) By the time Gleam went back to Mrs Hinch in the autumn, she’d
already been approached by a host of other management companies. But that’s
where Gleam’s status as the UK’s blue-chip talent agency with outposts in LA and
Sydney serves them well: they got her.

Sophie Hinchliffe, AKA Mrs Hinch, on ITV’s This Morning. Photograph: Ken
McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock
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Hinchliffe is the model influencer for the current moment. Gleam insist she didn’t
even know what an influencer was when she started; she’s thatauthentic. Her
content, now broadcast to her 2.2 million followers, takes the form of an ever-
unfurling Instagram Story accompanied by a pop soundtrack and a perky voiceover
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as she cleans her house: “One thing I haven’t done for a few weeks is my plugholes!
… Mrs Hinch, what a mess mate … Living your best life!” Along the way she offers
cleaning tips and expresses deep affection for her favourite accessories including
Vera the mop, Dave the duster and Stewart the sonic scrubber. (The Minky,
Hinch’s preferred brand of cleaning pad, often sells out, such is the demand
created among her fans, who she calls her Hinchers.)

Watching Mrs Hinch is like slipping into a pleasant but inescapable dream, both
baffling and oddly comforting. It’s not obvious why you want to see someone scrub
the bottom of their frying pan while an Usher track plays, but you soon find
yourself locked into the rhythm of her endlessly looping day – #spritzo’clock
before bed, a wipe-down of her kitchen worktop, a spray of the sofa. In between
offering swipe-up deals on mops, Mrs Hinch takes her followers round the
Morrisons cleaning aisle, thanks them constantly and always says good night. She’s
been credited with helping many of her followers who suffer from anxiety, and you
can see why: Hinchliffe offers a reassuring structure to the day, a vision of
domestic order.

Commercially Mrs Hinch is a gift, too, opening up a new sector of potential brand
partnerships for Gleam to negotiate. Unlike fashion and beauty brands, cleaning
products haven’t previously been associated with influencers. In the Gleam office,
piles of PR gifts for Mrs Hinch were arrayed on a window-ledge, including a twist
mop, 10-litre collapsible bucket and collapsible dish drainer. Luckily, Hinchliffe
has understood that staying grounded is not just psychologically advisable but
professionally essential – that the person who an audience and a brand buy into
must not be too quickly altered by success. “I think it will take a lot to take her
away from being who she is,” said Nicholas. “She knows that’s very, very
important, because otherwise people won’t be following the same person that they
started following.”

But even Instagrammers change. In this new era, where “realness” is prized, a
longtime talent “would be inauthentic to themselves if they didn’t change,” as one
Gleam manager put it to me. Ideally, a talent and audience grow together,
accompanying each other on a “journey”, though these journeys must look rather
different unless the audience has also spent a decade filming and monetising their
lives.

Take Anna Saccone, one half of the Saccone-Joly YouTube channel. Saccone and
Jonathan Joly started out in 2009 as a young couple living in a flat in Cork,
uploading YouTube videos of daft skits and Anna doing her makeup. Over the next
10 years, as the couple married and had children, they morphed into what Gleam
call “family talent”, parcelling up their domestic existence into daily 20-minute
YouTube videos that eventually attracted 1.9m YouTube subscribers, as well as
maintaining individual channels of their own. Their skill is to make you feel almost
part of the family, handheld footage taking you into bathrooms and bedrooms, to
sit at the kitchen table with their kids. Months of household minutiae are carried
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by moments of drama – moving house, the births of four children, even a
miscarriage. “They vlog their daily lives, basically,” Smales told me. “That’s all it
is!” Even he seemed amazed. “It’s like a very long-term real-life soap opera.” But a
decade is a long time in soaps, and the set is unrecognisable from its early days.
Thanks to partnerships with family-friendly brands such as Pampers and Febreze
Fabric Refresher, the Saccone-Jolys now film themselves in a newly renovated
Surrey mansion. There are mentions of staff.

The Saccone-Joly family. Photograph: Gleam Futures

Earlier this year, the Saccone-Jolys announced that, given time pressures, they
were only going to post videos on the family channel every other day rather than
daily. Shortly afterwards, Saccone said that she was going to stop posting to her
own YouTube channel altogether. She was overstretched, and wanted more time
with her kids. Over email, Saccone said that she didn’t think reducing her output
would harm her career. She simply wanted to cut the time she spent editing videos.
(A virtue of Instagram Stories is that they require zero production time, unlike a
YouTube video, which has to be edited down from a day’s worth of filming.) It was
just one of many shifts in her life. “I’m looking forward to closing my chapter of
pregnancies,” she wrote. “It’s going to have a big impact on my career. I’m really
excited to develop my identity outside of becoming a mum.”

Gleam call this process a “brand transition”. It often happens when influencers
become parents because they want to protect their children’s privacy. For Saccone,
who as she put it “became a mum online”, the context was different. “Now the kids
are getting older, I think we’re starting to show them less and less,” she wrote.
“They are becoming more conscious as they grow up. It’s their decision for later in
life.” Perhaps, but it would be hard to erase their children’s early lives from their
multiple homes on the internet. If the Saccone-Jolys did decide to stop filming
their kids, Gleam wouldn’t be concerned. “The whole thing with Anna and
Jonathan is that they started off without the kids,” said Loveridge. “So as much as
people love seeing them, I don’t worry.”

Perhaps she’s right, but it would be a strange soap that suddenly dropped most of
its cast. Their followers adore the children; their comments often sound like they’re
raising them, too. In an interview with the Irish Independent, Joly described how
fans would sometimes turn up on their doorstep to visit, as if they were their
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friends: “And it’s like, you can’t, OK?” Of course they can’t, but you can see why
people might feel they could. At the Manchester launch of Saccone’s new Benefit-
partnered eyebrow makeup kit – “worth £117” but selling for £49.50 – I sat next to
Eva, aged 13, who’d been watching the Saccone-Joly family channel every day for
four years. “My mum watches it with me,” said Eva. “It’s part of my life.”

In an industry still thrilled by its own youthful promise, while also having to prove
its commercial viability, there is a constant race to find the next big thing, to know
before anyone else, for example, that cleaning will be huge. No one plays the game
better than the talent themselves, and some, like old-hand YouTubers Caspar Lee
and Joe Sugg, are now moving behind the scenes. (Sugg is the younger brother of
Zoe Sugg, AKA Zoella; this trade runs in families.) Formerly represented by Gleam,
Lee and Sugg left in 2017 to set up their own agency, Margravine Management,
backed by talent giant WME. Zoe Sugg’s partner, Alfie Deyes, recently did the same
thing, quitting Gleam to form PointlessBlog Ltd.

One recent morning, on their way to do beaver voiceovers for a Nickelodeon movie
called Wonder Park, Sugg and Lee ate breakfast in a Soho brasserie. (Crushed
avocado on gluten-free toast for Sugg; Marmite crumpets for Lee.) Sugg has hair
that looks like a cresting wave arrested in motion, a sweet, small face that
bewitches young girls and older women, and a new terrestrial following to add to
his digital empire after his near-win on Strictly last year. “Yeah, my demographic’s
shifted a little bit,” Sugg told me. “Both ways actually.”

The pair still run their own YouTube channels: after nine years of making content
Lee has 7.4m subscribers; after seven, Sugg has 8.1m (as @thatcherjoe, because he
used to be a thatcher). They often collaborate on their distinctive brand of banter
and daft stunts (“Epic toilet paper prank on roommate” was a recent offering of
Lee’s). When they visited the Philippines, which regularly tops lists as the country
with the heaviest use of social media in the world, they had to have a police
escort from the airport. “That’s when it hits you,” said Sugg. “How borderless it is,”
added Lee.

Caspar Lee (left) and Joe Sugg. Photograph: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage

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Now, however, they spend half their time managing the careers of the next
generation – people like 16-year-old makeup talent GlambyFlo and chirpy lifestyle
YouTuber Mark Ferris, who vlogs road-trips and DIY mishaps. Sugg is the creative
director, helping talent come up with new ideas. “And you’re more like the
strategic director,” he said to Lee. “I am the strategic director,” said Lee.

Both Lee and Sugg want to carry on making content, not just to keep their
followers happy, but to stay on the inside of the machine, abreast of the algorithms
and endless platform shifts. They possess precious expertise – things like knowing
that while a brand might want you to put all its messaging within the first 30
seconds of a video, the key to getting YouTube to serve up your video to the
maximum number of viewers was to retain your audience for as long as possible,
and the key to retaining an audience was to make your videos the right length
(around 13 minutes) and lock them in from the start with an entertaining highlight
reel. “You have to do a trailer for a 10-minute video!” said Lee. Kicking off with 30
seconds of solid spon-con was probably the worst thing you could do.

Lee – the tactical brain to Sugg’s maverick – predicted that successful content
creators would increasingly have their own production teams, rather than being
one-man bands making videos in their bedrooms, as he and Sugg used to. They
both backed the micro-influencer trend, even though this seemed to predict their
own demise. “If you had 100,000 views on a car video,” said Sugg, “that could be
worth more than 1 million views of a video of me and Caspar eating hot peppers.”
Content avenues will expand to reflect “everything you see on television”, said Lee.
Wildlife will be big. Investigations into conspiracy theories. News.

As they’ve become businessmen, Lee and Sugg’s personal brands have transitioned
in tandem. Recently, Lee uploaded a video about his commercial projects. His
followers loved it, he said. Many have grown up with him, and now they want to be
entrepreneurs, too. “As they get older, it’s good to show them new things,” said
Lee, “and not just be the wacky kid I was.” Sugg has a more delicate balance to
achieve, now that he’s straddling YouTube legend and Saturday-night telly
stardom. “I’ve put my name on the line,” he joked. He meant his real name, as
opposed to his online persona. Sugg is alert to the nuances of his brand, as you’d
expect him to be. “I kind of say my YouTube personality is ThatcherJoe, that’s my
brand, and Joe Sugg is like separate to that,” he told me. “Joe Sugg is just Joe
Sugg.”

Acommon view among the staff at Gleam Futures (so-called because the company
is “all about future-gazing”, said Loveridge) is that the industry moves so fast that
it’s like having a new job every six months. Despite having close relationships with
platforms, this time last year no one knew IGTV was coming; no one knows what
will come next.

Except, perhaps, the people at Instagram. The future according to Instagram is

immersion, a total surrender to the platform at the expense of all others. At the
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first ever British VidCon, a YouTube-sponsored festival of video held at conference
centre London ExCeL in February, Instagram product manager Ashley Yuki told a
packed audience in a windowless chamber that she wanted the platform’s 1 billion
users to engage with Instagram’s features “holistically” to save them from having
to hop around other platforms. In other words, she wanted them to abandon
Instagram’s rivals such as Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube. (Instagram v YouTube
is one of many frontlines in the Facebook-Google war.) Yuki offered a tutorial on
how this looked – you trail your next IGTV video in your Stories, use the new
feature of a countdown sticker to show your followers exactly how long they have
to wait until the video drops, drop the video, then Instagram Live with your
followers so they get real-time interaction. (In one of VidCon’s many meta-
moments, the guy next to me Instagram-Storied the masterclass on Instagram
Stories.)

Afterwards, in a lounge decked out in all the glorious rainbow colours of

Instagram, Yuki and I spoke, unfilmed, sitting on a natty green sofa with lights
blaring into our faces. “Once you’re here and able to share yourself, your raw self,
your best self, and all the different selves,” she told me, “you also see on Instagram
that you can go beyond that.”

VidCon’s CEO, a vigorous American called Jim Louderback, told me that the way
he saw it, we were finally entering the exciting stage of digital media. The
disruption phase was over – digital platforms had redefined print media, music,
TV and film. Now we could get on with making the new: virtual reality, augmented
reality and all the other as yet unimagined realities. “The people who are going to
create those things,” he said, “it’s probably not Caspar [Lee] and Joe [Sugg],
because they’re not growing up in that world.” Don’t worry, I wanted to tell him,
they’re one step ahead. They’ll be managing those people.

In Louderback’s view, there was no division between traditional and digital media
any more: everyone was operating on a continuum – YouTubers were making
movies while Will Smith had drawn nearly 5m subscribers to his year-old YouTube
channel. The volume and variety of content is now so vast that it’s impossible to
keep abreast of it all. Instead we live in a strangely dichotomous world where the
presence of James Charles, an American makeup artist and YouTuber with almost
16 million subscribers, attracted so many of his British followers to a Birmingham
shopping centre that local traffic gridlocked and people had to desert their cars,
while half the country still had no idea who he was.

As for the influencers: “I want to get away from that word,” said Louderback. In
the course of our conversation he described them as both “direct-to-consumer
brands”, like the mattress company Casper, and as people with “the heart of an
artist” – as in, “they owe their ability to make money with the heart of an artist
only because of their fans”. I asked him about the latter phrase and he said he’d
heard it the other day and loved it. “I’m trying it out on you,” he laughed. “Is it
working?!”

14
No one really knows what the future holds for this new species of talent, because
no one’s done the job for long enough. “Zoella’s not going to be pumping out
YouTube videos for her entire life,” said Smales. She already has four books, a
Zoella Beauty range, her own social media company called A To Z Creatives and a
“brunch-inspired” makeup collection with ColourPop cosmetics; who knows what’s
next on the mood-board?

Fake it till you make it: meet the wolves of Instagram

Read more

For the rest of Gleam’s talent, the year ahead at least holds some certainties. Mrs
Hinch will have a baby boy, and her book is out this week. Hinch Yourself Happy:
All the Best Cleaning Tips to Shine Your Sink and Soothe Your Soul was a
bestseller on Amazon before it was published; at the time of writing, it’s the site’s
top-selling book in the UK. Magrath, as she recently announced on Instagram, will
get married in a Phillipa Lepley dress. Saccone and Joly will “continue to grow with
our platforms and keep it fresh for as long as it’s still fun for us both”.

Sugg and Lee, meanwhile, will steer the next generation to adulation in the
Philippines. Finishing his brasserie breakfast, Sugg had a fantasy of the future that
involved everyone sitting in rooms with VR headsets on. Lee wasn’t sure: VR
headsets made him feel sick. “AI reality shows,” joked Sugg, ever the ideas man.
“Put them in a room and they start fighting.” Alongside AI warfare, there’s room in
Sugg’s vision for something a little more low-key. One of his favourite YouTube
channels is called Man + River, made by a guy who scuba-dives in Arizona rivers
and uses a metal detector to find things like mobile phones, which he then reunites
with their owners. Vaguely in this vein, Sugg wants a channel which is just a
grandfather and his grandson fishing, talking about which baits they’re using.
Niche, but he reckons it could be huge. He’s probably right.

15