Youth reach increased audience on Instagram
November, 2019
Every two weeks, junior Caroline Ayala comes into some money. Not by scooping ice cream or waiting tables — as is per-usual for most teenagers. Instead, Ayala makes roughly $40 every two weeks promoting the company Novashine, a teeth whitening company, on Instagram.
While it doesn’t take much on Ayala’s part, teens across the country have been becoming more and more influential. As more companies take advantage of social media popularity, the stronger hand they have in affecting the everyday lives of teenagers. Therefore, Instagram sponsored teens such as Ayala serve an increasingly prominent role in influencing her peers.
Ayala says she’ll usually put sponsored posts on her Instagram stories, not on her account, as well as limit the amount of sponsored posts she does because she knows it could get annoying.
According to Ayala, companies look at your followers when deciding whether or not to reach out to you for a sponsorship. In order to be qualified for a sponsorship, Ayala says you must have over 1,000 followers. As of Oct. 27, Ayala has 4,538 followers on her Instagram account, @carolinegraceayala.
Although it provides a few extra bucks, Ayala actually uses the product that she endorses. While normal whitening strips hurt her teeth, Novashine doesn’t and is easy to use. According to Ayala, she would never endorse a product that she didn’t approve of; in fact, she was using Novashine before she was ever approached about being sponsored.
Regarding being picked by the company to represent their product, Ayala says she was too excited and surprised that she was approached at all to ask how the company had found her Instagram page — especially since Novashine’s headquarters is located in Missouri.
Media Analysis teacher Cambria Myers specifically explores this phenomenon in her class. Usually referring to people like Ayala as “Instagram influencers,” Myers touches on the effect of using a teen to sell products to other teens.
“It goes back to ‘Who is the target audience?’” Myers said. “Obviously, it costs a lot of money to have a celebrity endorse something. Is it effective? Yeah, that’s why people do it. But when you can get a smaller scale, more local version of a teenager with a following, multiply that by however many [teenagers] across the country … [the consumer gets] a little bit more of ‘Here’s an everyday person that I can see myself in.’”
According to Myers, being sponsored and being an influencer isn’t always the same thing. Contrastingly, Ayala would consider herself an influencer because she promotes a product while getting paid to do so. However, she admits that others who might have a full-time advertising job may be more invested in the work or have more of an influence.
According to the Atlantic, teenage influencers rarely have to sign contracts in order to advertise a product. When reaching out to teens, most companies will either send their product for the teen to wear in a picture, or just send images to be worked into a post. In addition, companies tend to offer guidance on how they’d like their product to be featured, as well as when the post should go up. However, most brands leave advertising guidelines up to the teen in order to make the endorsement more authentic.
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In Ayala’s case, Novashine will direct message her on Instagram — usually asking if she has time to post. Then, they offer her money for each product post she makes. If she was able to post one within the next day, that would be $10 to $15; however, if she could post twice, that could be up to $20 to $25.
In terms of how she does a sponsored post, Ayala is given direction on what to say from the company. Usually, this will include that their brand is better than typical whitening strips. In addition, the company will have her say what she likes about it.
According to Myers, this type of business guideline is becoming more and more common, as teens’ honest opinions about a certain product makes the product, and thus the ad selling process, more genuine.
“I think that it’s, on one hand, really smart advertising because it’s more authentic,” Myers said. “It’s not, ‘OK , let me come up with this big elaborate, professional ad campaign — that we then push out to the masses.’ Instead, it’s, ‘Okay, our target audience is this type of teenager who likes this, cares about this, values this ... well let’s put the product in the hands of the actual teenager, so that they can show their opinion of it.’”
This type of advertising, according to Myers, is way more effective in attracting the mind of the consumer.
“With a celebrity, it’s ‘Here’s someone I idolize, here’s someone I admire, here’s someone I want to be like,’ whereas with another teenager it’s a little bit more within reach,” Myers said. “This person — I can see myself in them. This person is more like me. This is an everyday teenager.”
Myers thinks that, on the companies’ side, it’s a far less expensive way of advertising. Companies often end up giving their products to influencers to advertise them, as well as paying money for a certain amount of followers or likes. In turn, they save money by not spending millions of dollars on an ad campaign. The influencer marketing company Linqia reports as of 2019, the majority of businesses have a budget of $250,000 to $500,000 to spend on advertising with influencers (See Making Room for Media).
While Myers recognizes the amount of potential for businesses to save money, she also recognizes the effectiveness of having teens do product placements. According to Myers, the advertising industry has changed dramatically since the invention of social media. A few years ago, there was a reason that a 30 second Super Bowl commercial cost $5 million: it was an effective method in reaching the company’s intended audience.
Now, Myers says that a company can pay $750,000 to run a sponsored Snapchat filter for a day, and the reach per dollar amount on Snapchat is the same as a commercial on the Super Bowl.
“If I’m trying to get you to use the filter, and you use it, and then send it 20 of your friends, and now they’ve all seen my branding too — that’s the future of the ad industry,” Myers said. “Instagram is a form of native advertising, where a lot of times people who are looking at it don’t even realize that it’s an ad. What they notice first is, ‘Oh she looks cute,’ or ‘Ooh I like her makeup.’ And then they realize, maybe, after the fact that it’s an ad.”
Myers believes that the more social media platforms grow in users, the more you’ll see advertisers live on those platforms. As of late, Myers says that print advertising is dying. Although an ad could still be designed as a print ad, it might never run in print at all. While it could run in a Sports Illustrated magazine, it could also run in the same exact format on Facebook.
“Instagram ads, Snapchat ads, other kinds of user-generated content … those are going to continue to grow because that’s where people are spending their time,” Myers said. “If people aren’t reading a print magazine anymore, then why are you running ads in a print magazine? You [have to] find somewhere else to run your ads.”
Myers also points out that fast-paced social media helps the advertising business. Although the amount of seconds a person spends thinking about an individual Instagram post is minimal, if a person can relate enough to the post, the process of buying a product is at their fingertips.
“I think that a girl who is looking at a post, if they can see [another] girl and say ‘I’m a lot like that girl’ in their minds, that’s all it takes,” Myers said. “And then being able to click on that link in their bio, and it takes them straight to the website to buy that material, to buy that product … I think that’s powerful. It’s right then and there in the moment.”