Diversity in Influencer Marketing: Will Brands Finally #PullUpForChange?
By Holly Armstrong
In the wake of what is perhaps the largest political movement in US history, according to the New York Times, businesses are facing demands to ‘pull up’ and publicly release the number of Black employees at corporate level.
It is simply not good enough to post a black square with an obligatory hashtag if these companies aren’t doing the work to support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) in their employment practices.
The #PullUpForChange campaign, launched by Sharon Chuter, Founder & CEO of UOMA Beauty aims to fight for more economic opportunities for Black people by revealing brands’ employment statistics. The movement was created in response to the hundreds of brands piggybacking on the trend of #blackouttuesday and #BlackLivesMatter without taking action in the real world to actually address the racial injustices taking place everyday - injustices that are particularly prevalent in the corporate structure of large companies like themselves.
Chuter launched the campaign by highlighting the problem of brands taking advantage of such a trend when they themselves are part of the problem, challenging these businesses to make a choice to either pull up and reveal their employment figures or refrain from capitalising on the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
The BBC recently shared results from a 2018 survey, which revealed that 64% of consumers would reward firms engaged in some kind of activism. With this statistic in mind, it’s not hard to understand why so many brands are choosing to climb on board the movement. Sure, it’s certainly possible that there are companies out there who truly believe in the cause and hold no agenda in their public backing of the movement, but understanding the potential financial gain behind such a stance for these businesses is important, particularly when those brands talk the talk but don’t walk the walk in their business practices.
One way we can try to separate those brands whose integrity and principles lie on the right side of the movement from those simply engaging in performative and optical allyship is by examining their approach to influencer marketing. As one of the fastest-growing areas of advertising in recent years, reportedly generating $5.20 for every $1 spent by an advertiser, the online space has opened up several opportunities for talented, creative individuals from the BIPOC community, but there is still a long way to go.
Brands are set to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by the year 2022 but what proportion of this vast sum will reach BIPOC influencers?
Many influencers have recently taken the matter into their own hands, calling out brands that have previously exhibited tokenism and those who have contributed to the race pay gap in the industry of influencer marketing. As well as those brands who turn a blind eye to the problem, the ones guilty of hollow gestures professing to be inclusive and those who pay Black creators less than their white counterparts are just as much a part of the problem.
With the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in June, there came a new level of amplification of BIPOC voices sharing their everyday disadvantages and injustices. An anonymous Instagram account @InfluencerPayGap was launched on June 7, calling on influencers “with varying degrees of following, influence and engagement to participate” in order to reveal the disparities in opportunities and pay between Black and non-Black influencers, but specifically asking non-Black influencers to share their own experiences and pay figures for their previous work. The initiative hopes to make this kind of information more accessible to Black influencers so that brands can be held accountable.
Talking Influence advised marketers to consider their diversity and inclusion policies on a top level by evaluating the percentage of BIPOC in their team before choosing to capitalise on the perceived trend with an influencer marketing campaign, which could be perceived as a gesture of tokenism. Talking Influence’s Nancy Rothman emphasises the importance of the internal audit, urging brands to acknowledge their shortcomings head on, “without turning a blind eye” to some of their weaker areas before performing optical allyship with their influencer marketing campaigns.
Award-winning blogger, writer and activist, Stephanie Yeboah divulged her experience of being one of only two Black bloggers at a beauty event held by a brand whose foundation range only catered to white customers. One can only assume that such brands are totally unaware of how flagrantly their box-ticking exercised attempt at diversity comes across.
With organisations such as Chuter’s #PullUpForChange and online initiatives such as @InfluencerPayGap taking off, perhaps we can hope to finally see brands beginning to understand the critical importance of making these changes, and realising that it is no longer tolerable to continue as they have done for so long.