Article by Sheila Marikar
On a Monday evening in late June, Darren Lachtman surveyed the sun-dappled patio of Southern Pacific Brewing, a bar and restaurant in a cavernous warehouse in San Francisco’s Mission District. Beer in hand, he nodded toward Robby Ayala, a comedian and employee of Niche, the social media management agency Mr. Lachtman, 32, founded with a partner last July. Mr. Ayala was one of more than a dozen Niche members invited to the company-sponsored happy hour.
“He got like, 40,000 likes and shares on his last post,” Mr. Lachtman said. (That post featured Mr. Ayala, an affable 23-year old with a kind of frat-boy charm, pouring hot coffee on his bare hand.) “The dog is down there with his 50,000 followers,” Mr. Lachtman went on, gesturing at Biggie Griffon, a pouty Brussels Griffon who sat underneath a pizza-and-cheeseburger-strewn picnic table.
Known online as Biggie Smalls the Notorious D.O.G., Biggie has actually garnered more than 75,000 followers across Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr with punny posts involving rap lyrics and improbable photos. He is paid in turn to promote brands like BarkBox, a subscription service for dog accessories, on his social media feeds, with Niche brokering the deals.
In an era of new economies, this may be one of the most curious: the network that has sprung up to help the follower-laden stars of Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and other social media services make money by connecting them with brands wanting to advertise to their audiences. People like Mr. Lachtman and his co-founder, Rob Fishman, run what may be seen as a parallel universe to Hollywood, one in which shares and likes matter more than box-office sales and paparazzi shots. Here, authenticity — a word that comes up often in this arena — trumps a Photoshop-perfect facade or publicist-approved message.
Some of these agents want to groom their clients (or creators, as they’re often called) into marquee names who can resonate beyond a smartphone screen. (Though it’s worth noting that some already have a bigger following than “traditional” celebrities: Nash Grier, Instagram’s answer to the archetypical teenage idol, has more than 5.9 million followers on the social network; Oprah Winfrey has about half that.)
“We want to cultivate these stars, and if they graduate to being the next Jimmy Fallon, great,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, a founder of the New York-based GrapeStory, an agency that represents a coterie of Vine comedians in addition to other social media personalities. “But when they’re just trying to get $10,000 or $20,000 out of a brand, which is life-changing for these kids, we know how to get it done.”
“You come work with GrapeStory,” he added, “you’re guaranteed to make five and six figures per year.”
While the metrics of the businesses may be different — Niche, for example, charges brands for the use of their services instead of talent — these agencies share much of the bravado of their Hollywood counterparts. Jason Stein, the founder of the social media agency Laundry Service , which in April started Cycle, a division dedicated to Instagram personalities, slams the lack of respect given to this new breed of stars with Ari Gold-level enthusiasm.
On a recent afternoon at Laundry Service’s New York office, which is decorated with custom wallpaper that shows Victorian-era figures steam-ironing the Facebook logo, Mr. Stein, 29, and Liz Eswein, 25, the executive director of Cycle, were talking about how Ms. Eswein was paid around $50 a promotional post as recently as two years ago. (Ms. Eswein, who created the Instagram account newyorkcity while studying media and communications at New York University, now has more than 1.2 million followers on the social network.)
“People still come and think they can get away with that, and it’s like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ ” Mr. Stein said, throwing up his hands. “What are they thinking? It’s literally getting away with robbery.”
If Mr. Stein comes out swinging, Ms. Eswein coddles. She acts as a kind of den mother to the more than 1,000 Instagram photographers Cycle represents, who have been paid to do projects for brands including Michael Kors and Coach. “It’s less about, how much can you make this year, and more about educating the photographer and what their worth is,” she said.
That worth can be significant. Niche’s so-called branded marketing deals can pay upward of five figures a post — enough that one of Biggie’s owners, Lindsey Louie, quit her job with Google to work full time on Biggie’s feeds and work as the company’s community manager. Niche also enables creators to track their performances across social networks (what post got like after like on Instagram but flopped on Facebook, for example) and allows brands to see which creators work best for them.
“We’ll do stuff like discount codes,” Mr. Lachtman explained on a Wednesday afternoon in Niche’s San Francisco office. This time, Biggie was out of the crate and padding across the conference room table, paws sometimes landing on Mr. Lachtman’s MacBook. “Biggie gets a custom code; let’s see how many BarkBoxes he sells versus other dogs.”
“The dog demographic on these social platforms is huge,” he added, scanning Biggie’s statistics on his screen. Mr. Lachtman recounted an April Fool’s Day campaign Niche did with American Eagle called American Beagle. “We flew a bunch of dogs to their headquarters in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I think we had five dogs that each had 400,000 followers. It’s a crazy audience. It works really well.”
Brands see upsides beyond increasing their profiles. They can spend far less on an advertising campaign executed through these social media platforms than more mainstream ones, which is part of the allure of hiring a budding Instagram photographer to shoot a project versus, say, Mario Testino.
General Electric, which came to Niche to find people to evangelize “Spring Break It,” a campaign to promote its work with advanced materials, declined to say how much it paid each of the eight creators it involved in the project, but Linda Boff, G.E.’s executive director of global brand marketing, described it as “a fraction of a fraction of the cost” the company would have paid to advertise on a traditional distribution channel, like television.
One of the personalities featured in “Spring Break It” was Mr. Ayala, the Vine comedian and Niche employee who has gained more than three million followers with his goofy, self-deprecating posts — or as he described it at the San Francisco happy hour, “really, really dumb skits.” (A recent Vine featured him washing his face with Skittles.)
Mr. Ayala started posting short comedy videos on Vine while at Florida Atlantic University. Last year, shortly after he started law school, Niche contacted him with an opportunity: attend the premiere of “Last Vegas” and upload a series of Vines to promote the movie. The deal went so well, Mr. Lachtman offered Mr. Ayala a job helping manage Niche’s creators and the brands they work with, which he would be able to do while building up his own social media presence. Mr. Ayala left law school and has no plans to go back.
“I don’t know, social media and marketing seem a lot more interesting than civil procedure,” he said. “Law school didn’t really interest me. I was in class just avoiding getting called on by the professor.”
For social media stars, this is part of what makes agencies that cater to them crucial: They focus on people (possibly fighting sleep in a law school classroom) who may not be discovered by traditional means, whose talents may not fit into an existing category, unlike the Justin Biebers of the YouTube world.
And though they’re new, these agencies offer legitimacy. Scott Borrero, a photographer prominent on Instagram who uses Niche and the agency Conscious Minds to do deals with brands like Nike, said that after he obtained management, “people took me more seriously.”
“You can only do so much on your own,” he mused at Niche’s happy hour, twiddling with his iPhone, which he had just used to edit an “outfit of the day” shot of Ms. Louie, one of Biggie the dog’s owners. (“V8, there’s no V8 filter, that’s a juice!” he joked during the process, swiping through an array of photo retouching apps as Ms. Louie looked over his shoulder.)
The agencies also foster a sense of community. (At the Niche happy hour, one photographer yelled across the patio to another, “Hey, I know you from Instagram!”) Michael O’Neal, a founder of the agency Tinker Mobile, which represents photographers with large Instagram followings, perched atop a picnic table and reminisced about a gallery show Tinker participated in last November featuring 100 portraits from 50 photographers, all shot with an iPhone. “It was about bringing people together and elevating what’s on a screen to a gallery wall,” he said.
Traditional agencies want in, too. William Morris Endeavor (WME) represents about 100 Internet stars, including Mr. Grier and Joy Cho, who has amassed more than 13 million Pinterest followers (and partnerships with brands like Target) with inspiration boards about fashion, food and lifestyle. In an email, Ms. Cho touted the agency’s ability to put large companies dabbling in social media at ease, saying the brands “often feel more comfortable going into a new territory when a company like WME is vouching for the power of someone’s reach.”
Dan Porter, in charge of WME’s digital division, likes to refer to Ms. Cho and her ilk as “digital first” talent. “Their talents are eventually going to cross over a lot of platforms,” Mr. Porter said, talking about the potential for a Vine star to do a live tour or a Pinterest personality to put out a book. (Ms. Cho has written two books.)
In this world, the line between traditional and social stardom is growing ever more blurry. So is the distinction between competitor and cohort: WME is an investor in Niche. Mr. Porter admitted “we’re in that middle fuzzy zone” of figuring out how this new world of fame management will work, but said at least within the walls of WME, “the goal of the digital division is for there to be no digital division.”
He offered a comparison to music videos: “It used to be when MTV was big, people would say, ‘This guy’s a music video director.’ ”
“The director of a Loverboy video from 1987 was a guy named David Fincher,” he continued. “No one talks about him as a music video director.”
