Black influencers share how the pandemic changed their creative strategy and perspective
Originally written in May 2021 for Columbia Journalism School
On one sunny August afternoon in Queens’ Gantry State Park, Eni Popoola was dressed to the nines.
The cropped hemline of Eni’s navy and green floral organza dress allowed her to move with ease as she laid a milk-white blanket on the grass. It matched the parasol she bought from Amazon that doubled as a shield from the sunlight and an elegant prop. She tugged at the ends of the blanket so it laid as flat as possible, for it would be the backdrop for a meticulously curated spread of treats.
Eni placed a neatly wrapped baguette on a bamboo tray next to a variety of crackers, finely-sliced meats, and cheeses. A gold plate dedicated to sweet indulgences held Biscoff biscuits, fudge brownies, strawberry thumbprint cookies, and berries. A bouquet of white roses sat in one brown wicker basket while two bottles of McBride Sister’s Black Girl Magic wine chilled on a bed of ice inside another. After weeks of planning on Pinterest boards and Instagram folders, then sourcing items from Bed Bath & Beyond to her neighborhood grocery store, all of the pieces of her picnic had finally come together.
The dress code for guests at the Inaugural Fool’s Paradise Garden Party at Gantry State Park in Queens was spring chic, but Eni was ready to go above and beyond for her blog readers and nearly 10,000 Instagram followers. The event was her chance to have a fun yet socially distanced outing after postponing her summer vacation and months of remote law classes.
“It was already an emerging trend. There were a couple of posts that I saw that were like ‘Picnics are the new brunch,” said Eni. “A travel group was hosting the event because they couldn’t travel anymore. When I learned about it, I told my friends, ‘We’re going, and we’re about to do this picnic full blown’.”
Eni, 26, wanted to show people how to recreate their own inexpensive-yet-luxurious experience, despite the pandemic’s limitations on daily life. The following day, she uploaded the pictures her friends took of her to her blog and titled it: Everything You Need For a Picture Perfect Picnic.
The ability to self-produce shareable social content like photos and videos makes influencers like Eni appealing to companies that seek a cheaper alternative to traditional advertising. With thousands of followers that support them, they serve as a personal link between brands and consumers.
“Influencers are your new celebrities,” said Shirley Dor, therapist and curator of Haitians Who Blog, an online community that connects Haitian and Caribbean content creators to influencer partnerships. “They’re the people that consumers are going to for information about their favorite stores and brands. Companies have caught on to that and recognize the potential because celebrities are great, but why not get someone who’s a lot more intimate with their audience?”
The influencer marketing industry jumped from being worth $8 billion in 2019 to an estimated $13.8 billion in 2021, according to the latest report by Influencer Marketing Hub. In a survey of 5,000 agencies, brands, and professionals, the research firm noticed a spike in influencer-led campaigns last summer as the pandemic kept production studios closed brands relied heavily on content creators to help advertise their products.
“The work that we do is actually full scale. You can’t have a basic phone that doesn’t have the range to provide those pictures. Then you have email management and preparing documentation that proves the analytics that brands are looking for. A lot of influencers aren’t sponsored, so they have to invest their dollars into the best quality clothing or recruiting a photographer,” says Shirley.
Eni’s younger brother takes most of her pictures and has done so since she started blogging in 2018. Born and raised in Queens, New York, Eni juggles planning daily posts and schoolwork as a full-time law student at Columbia University. The money she earns from sponsorships allows her to minimize her student loans and afford living in Harlem without a traditional job.
“I get questions about how I am able to manage both. Sometimes it comes at the expense of a social life,” said Eni. “On Fridays, we wouldn’t have class so in the evenings I would do content creation work, and then sometimes Saturdays would be a photoshoot day.”
As social media platforms roll out new features like Instagram’s Reels, influencers have to spend hours educating themselves on how to use incorporate them into their personal brands or risk falling behind trends.
“You have to always think about new ideas because if you’re sticking to your preferred method of creating content all the time, you’re just not going to advance. Such is the nature of the industry,” said Eni.
“One of the worst parts of the influencer industry is people devaluing your work and seeing it as just taking pretty pictures,” Shirley Dor said. Shirley also manages Dorsainvil Creative, an agency that offers strategic planning and graphic design services. After helping several influencers sharpen their online presence over the years, Shirley finds it especially insulting when brands shortchange creators, particularly Black people and other influencers of color.
“I’ve seen so many people drop out, disappear, come back, start over and fail,” she said.
Her frustrations are echoed in the media as publications point out the pay gap that discourages burned-out influencers from staying the course.
“Why are Black women being paid less for their posts?,” asks one Cosmopolitan headline.
“Marketers Are Underpaying Black Influencers While Pushing Black Lives Matter,” states the header of an article from Bloomberg Businessweek.
Dor experienced this discrepancy during one conversation in a meeting room on Clubhouse, the audio-driven social media platform. With racial tension in the U.S. still brewing months after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, brand representatives hosted discussions on how to acknowledge social justice issues in their messaging.
“When Clubhouse first started gaining traction, I was very active on the influencer side,” Dor said. “You had very insensitive brands who would use the marketing force of black creatives because we were quote-unquote ‘trending.’ They would use that to seem inclusive and make sure that their company isn’t caught in the crossfire of not partnering with black creatives, only to tell us that we are inflating our prices because we are just a trend.”
The value that Black influencers bring to companies is more enduring than the latest current event. With $1.4 trillion in buying power, Black consumers shop, watch live TV, play video games, and use their smartphones more than any other ethnic group in the U.S., according to a 2020 report by Nielsen.
Most of Cj Hart’s ideas come to him around midnight, just as the buzzy sounds of his Brooklyn neighborhood start to settle down and he unwinds after a long day.
Living in New York City puts him close enough to the big advertising agencies and big-label fashion brands that hire him to model their clothing. Before the pandemic, the average day on set involved being prepped by a glam team early in the morning to have his picture taken by photographers with expensive camera gear and high-powered lighting kits that would pop and flash with each click of the shutter. His role was to highlight the garment, so he would tilt his shoulders to demonstrate the structuring in a blazer, or put his hands in his back pockets while turning away from the camera, or jump up and kick a foot in the air to show off the colored rubber soles of his sneakers. He would time his dance-like movements to meet the vision of whoever was in charge of the shoot that day.
Cj, 28, finds himself trying to channel that creative energy now that he spends most of his time at home When ideas come in bursts, he reaches for his computer and opens up Google Slides to begin mocking-up a mood board and pulls visual inspiration from movies, places he’s explored, or photo-driven social media websites like Pinterest and Tumblr.
When the pandemic lockdown was declared in 2020, it shut down studios and cut openings for modeling jobs in New York’s already saturated modeling industry. Cj noticed that people who are able to create high-quality content were still landing jobs but their income depended on how well they could wear the hats of the model, producer, location scout, stylist, and photographer.
“Gigs got canceled, nobody was trying to shoot in person. They were having people do iPhone and Zoom photoshoots,” he said. “Because of the pandemic, influencers are making money.”
Calling himself an influencer means he is embracing a role that he tried to avoid ever since he landed his first gig, a campaign with H&M in 2017.
“They were trying to pin that title on me and I hated it because I was fighting for so long to be viewed as a model,” he said.
While still living in South Florida, Cj turned to his network of up-and-coming creatives and collaborated on several photoshoots that went viral on Tumblr first, then spread all over the internet. He said, “I looked for agencies and every single one turned me down. I don’t fit the industry standard. I’m not 6-foot-2, I’m not like super skinny, I don’t have a particular look or seem like I’m from a different country. That pushes you away, especially if you’re black and a man.”
As his photoshoots repeatedly went viral and he grew a large online following, companies started to reach out to him with requests to promote their products.
“In all transparency, it felt addicting to allow it to keep growing. But once I got over the 10,000 mark, nothing changed. My life was really the same, I’m still grinding. I didn’t get flown out anywhere, I didn’t get new things right away. That’s when I really learned that a following doesn’t mean everything that we expect it to.”
The high follower count attracts brands and boosts exposure, Cj says, but being consistent with posts and putting effort behind them is how you truly connect with your audience. For Cj, that means inserting his love of art, fashion and humor into his content.
Last November, it took two hours for Cj to set up and film a 1-minute-and-57-second promotional video for Beauty Strike, a vegan and cruelty-free skincare brand based in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
In the finished video, an upbeat jazzy tune underscores a scene of Cj waking up and getting out of bed. He shuffles toward the bathroom mirror to get the first glance of himself for the day. Quick jump cuts flip through clips of Cjs scratching his head, drumming his hands on his cheeks, and stretching his neck before he turns to look directly into the camera and greet viewers with an enthusiastic, “Hello!” Cj speaks with the cadence of a late-night radio host as he describes how to use Beauty Strike’s green tea cleanser, cucumber toner, and vitamin C serum in his morning routine.
“Green tea cleanser. I like this one in particular because the smell is subtle, but it will wake that ass up.”
Many influencers go through a process of trial and error not just during content creation, but with figuring out how much to charge for their services. The value of metrics like engagement, impressions, and growth rate varies from brand to brand, and there is no one point of reference that shows how much influencers should be earning.
“Ask for your worth and add tax,” read the caption under an Instagram post promoting Haitians Who Blog’s first event of 2021, a $15 online class on how to set and negotiate rates when working with brands. At the end of last year, Dor made a goal to become more of a resource to future influencers after receiving an influx of messages from people looking to monetize their platforms.
“For a very long time, people didn’t like sharing how they got their partnerships, it was a secret. They didn’t put their prices anywhere for other people to reference. That’s all changed now. Everyone’s open to having that conversation. There’s a lot more vulnerability and assistance on like how to navigate the industry,” said Dor.
Increased transparency about money allows influencers to sharpen their business acumen and learn to convert personal analytics into real dollars rather than free gifts.
“I used to be so honored at the requests to work with certain brands or to get product for free, but now I think about the time that I spent on content creation and how that time could be spent on other things. My time is actually very valuable. If you want access to this, you have to pay up,” said Eni.
In less than a year, Cj’s TikTok account gained 30,000 followers and counting as his profile gains momentum from viral posts. What started off as something he started “for giggles” turned into a platform he quickly realized he could leverage to have real-world impact.
Cj remembers making a casual, non-sponsored post on TikTok about Photodom, a Brooklyn-based black-owned photography shop that opened in September 2020.
“I was at the opening. I got to go to the store and the line was out the door, and I overheard people saying, ‘I saw the store on TikTok. This is the reason why I came’,” he said.
Cj believes influencer marketing “levels the playing field” by creating an ecosystem where black creators like himself can make a substantial living while supporting black-owned businesses and working to close the racial wealth gap.
“There’s a lot of legacy in certain brands and businesses right, so we’re playing catch up. I think social media and the access it gives us it speeds up the process,” said Cj. “It’s powerful when we get together because that’s when thing shut down and people start changing things.”
Eni celebrated a new milestone of reaching 10,000 followers as she posted about her picture-perfect picnic on Instagram. The photos gained so much traction that she was later featured in a New York Times article about luxury picnics.
“That’s one of my most proud moments. I don’t have the capacity to do that all the time because I’m not a full-time content creator, but that level of work is what it takes and I proved to myself that I’m capable of doing it.”
Now entering her final year of law school, Eni plans to continue use influencing as a creative outlet and an added source of income.
“I’ve got loans to pay off too and content creation will help with that. I’m very blessed in that regard,” she stated.
She isn’t worried about whether her online presence will interfere with her career. If anything, she says influencing has made her more marketable to future employers and more well-rounded overall.
“There are a couple of large influencers who are attorneys, so I also just like to look to them as a reminder that I don’t need beholden to this idea of how the typical lawyer is supposed to act, because that just assumes that I live to work and that’s not the case,” said Eni. “I’m just really happy that I’m getting to a place where I’m open to embracing both sides of what I do.”