Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - Sunday Nice Things： Women's Work

00:00:01.000 Hello, all. Welcome to Sunday Nice Things. As I continue to tour the country for everyone

00:00:07.600 is lying to you, as I keep giving interviews, I am constantly asked one question. How did

00:00:14.880 we get here? How did mom influencers, and in particular tradwife influencers, become

00:00:21.900 so influential? It's a great question. It's also one I've reported on a lot. A few weeks

00:00:28.820 ago, I dropped the very first episode of Under the Influence in this feed to try to give a little

00:00:34.580 bit of background where this is all coming from, how it got started. That reporting's from five

00:00:40.260 years ago, but it still really holds up. A lot of you have been writing to me asking for more.

00:00:46.500 All these episodes are available, but they do get buried in the feed, so I wanted to resurface them.

00:00:51.220 This is the second ever episode of Under the Influence. I love this one because we include

00:00:55.740 the theories of 19th century economic philosopher Thorstein Veblen, which truly apply to why

00:01:02.500 influencer content seems so aspirational to us today, and why it actually does make us buy

00:01:08.520 things. I quote Thorstein Veblen a bunch in my other interviews, and it always kind of blows

00:01:14.620 people's minds. They're like, what do influencers have to do with this 19th century white dude?

00:01:20.780 and I'm like, oh my god, so much. So much. The crux of this episode, which we call women's work,

00:01:27.640 is that moms have been commodified since the beginning of moms. And the only difference now

00:01:32.960 is who is making the money. This is also the episode where I try to become a mom influencer

00:01:39.220 and fail miserably. So that, that right there, that's worth the price of admission.

00:01:44.600 It's a lot of fun for everyone. Enjoy, guys.

00:01:50.780 All right, so, guys, what would you think if I become an Instagram mom influencer?

00:02:06.200 I'd probably think a lot less of you, honestly. 0.98

00:02:09.740 That's kind of shitty. 0.98

00:02:11.080 That's kind of a shitty thing to say. 0.96

00:02:12.960 I feel like it's just, like, desperate, you know?

00:02:16.000 This is my book club.

00:02:17.060 real ladies at my book club, 0.99

00:02:19.220 mostly moms in their 40s with young kids

00:02:21.240 who read books, drink wine,

00:02:23.400 and sometimes smoke a little weed.

00:02:25.520 Oh, cool. I follow these people

00:02:27.020 and it's like, oh, you need this

00:02:29.300 sweater. Do you buy it?

00:02:31.580 Sometimes.

00:02:33.560 Me too.

00:02:34.680 I have too.

00:02:35.440 Okay, big question, big question.

00:02:38.300 Where did you find that tie-dye sweatshirt?

00:02:40.080 From Instagram.

00:02:45.040 Wait, so how did this become a job, though?

00:02:47.800 I have no idea.

00:02:49.660 Can you tell me how this is a thing?

00:02:52.260 Like, how do you get paid? 0.99

00:02:54.000 How are we doing here, ladies?

00:02:58.180 The first thing people ask me when I tell them I'm doing a podcast about Instagram mom influencers is, 0.71

00:03:05.160 when did this become a job?

00:03:07.260 The second thing they ask is, how do you make money?

00:03:10.800 And then obviously, how much?

00:03:13.380 The social media influencer industry is only about 10 years old.

00:03:17.900 If Instagram was a person, it would only be in fifth grade.

00:03:21.020 But the idea of influencing is way older.

00:03:24.100 The idea of influencing is a stuffy old man who smokes a pipe and probably smells funny. 0.95

00:03:29.760 I'm going to take you back to the start of women influencing women through media. 0.84

00:03:35.040 Consider this episode a history of influencing. 0.69

00:03:38.080 How'd we get here?

00:03:39.420 How'd this become a job? 1.00

00:03:40.380 What kinds of mothers have been allowed to influence us over the past hundred years? 1.00

00:03:48.960 I'm Jo Piazza, and you're Under the Influence. 1.00

00:03:59.940 Chapter 2, Women's Work.

00:04:05.760 Hi. 1.00

00:04:06.880 Hi.

00:04:07.720 What are you doing?

00:04:08.380 Hiding in the bathroom and barricading the door so my kids can't get in.

00:04:12.320 Good luck with that.

00:04:13.760 Talk fast.

00:04:15.440 Is there a start to all of this?

00:04:17.120 Like where, who was the first influencer?

00:04:20.080 Was it Eve?

00:04:21.000 Did she influence Adam to have a bite of the apple?

00:04:25.540 How far back are we going?

00:04:27.420 We're not going all the way back to Eve.

00:04:29.200 But there's a lot of places that we could go to get to the start of influencing.

00:04:33.600 And the start point feels really important, but also totally arbitrary.

00:04:38.020 Like, we could pick any point in history, and women have been influencing other women.

00:04:42.440 But I generally think we should go back to the 19th century, to the launch of women's magazines.

00:04:48.880 Particularly, Vogue magazine.

00:04:51.440 Do you know when Vogue launched?

00:04:52.540 I think that Vogue started around the turn of the century, didn't it?

00:04:56.460 Yeah.

00:04:56.980 So, we're going back to 1892.

00:04:59.880 I looked up Vogue's early mission, and it was described as this.

00:05:04.860 A magazine that recounted the habits of New York's upper class, their leisure activities, their social gatherings, the places they frequented, and the clothing they wore, and everyone who wanted to look like them and enter their exclusive circle.

00:05:22.540 Oh my God.

00:05:23.700 When has upper class New York not been screwing it up for everybody else?

00:05:27.560 Never.

00:05:28.980 So we've got Vogue, but then we also have Good Housekeeping, which was a little bit earlier.

00:05:33.740 That was 1885.

00:05:34.860 And they launched with the slogan, to produce and perpetuate perfection, or as near unto perfection as may be attained, wait for it, in the household.

00:05:47.840 In the household is always key to these things, isn't it?

00:05:52.680 So the launch of women's magazines is really the modern era of women influencing other women that they didn't know. 0.66

00:06:01.120 But magazine editorials and advertising,

00:06:04.380 they were just mirroring what was happening in real life.

00:06:07.560 And this was observed by the 19th century economic philosopher Thorstein Veblen.

00:06:13.320 A brief introduction to the economic theories of Thorstein Veblen.

00:06:20.320 We don't talk enough about men.

00:06:22.300 Let's talk more.

00:06:24.420 This part's kind of fun for me.

00:06:25.680 A lot of people know that I was once this celebrity gossip columnist.

00:06:29.440 But you might not even know this about me.

00:06:33.040 I was also an undergraduate economics major at the University of Pennsylvania.

00:06:36.660 I didn't know that.

00:06:37.820 It's true. I contain multitudes.

00:06:40.100 You absolutely do.

00:06:41.860 To find out more about Thorstein Veblen and how this old dead guy connects to modern day Instagram influencers, I talked to Emily Hund.

00:06:50.500 She's the researcher at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I went to school.

00:06:55.620 She's the one that first connected influencers to this 19th century economic philosopher.

00:07:01.400 Veblen, in the late 19th century, wrote his satirical, almost like critique of the system, the theory of the leisure class.

00:07:10.920 Each class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social scale, while it rarely compares itself with those below or with those who are considerably in advance.

00:07:21.080 He was critiquing how people look to the class above them to decide what they should have.

00:07:28.020 In other words, our standard of decency and expenditure, as in other ends of emulation,

00:07:33.140 is set by the usage of those next above us in reputability, the wealthy leisure class.

00:07:42.660 So what Veblen did is he introduced this idea that human beings always look to the class right above them

00:07:48.840 to tell them how to look, how to act, and what to buy.

00:07:53.380 Vogue, people.

00:07:54.780 We've always been influenced by someone else.

00:07:58.640 It's human nature.

00:08:00.220 And that's why his idea from 100 years ago

00:08:02.400 explains why we can't turn away from influencers today.

00:08:05.820 These portrayals of lifestyle are so cloaked in aspiration.

00:08:12.000 That's what it's all about.

00:08:14.400 You know, you see these beautiful feeds

00:08:17.260 and these wonderful looking products designed to get you interested and to get you to want them.

00:08:23.400 And so it offers the same thing in that followers can have access to these lifestyles

00:08:29.660 that they may not have ever encountered or they may not have even considered

00:08:33.960 were it not for Instagram and for social media.

00:08:38.540 Look, you're probably never going to know what a certain influencer makes

00:08:41.860 or what tax bracket they're in.

00:08:44.180 but the things that they post, the expensive puffy coats, the suede boots, the thousand-dollar

00:08:49.840 baby strollers, that all makes them seem pretty rich. They all seem richer than me.

00:08:56.700 In Thorstein Veblen's time, drooling over the class that was slightly above you,

00:09:01.460 or a lot above you, desiring their things, it didn't happen all the time. And that's because

00:09:07.560 different classes just didn't collide very often. Rich people lived in rich people neighborhoods,

00:09:15.000 Poor people lived in poor people neighborhoods.

00:09:18.400 A lower-class person never really went into a rich person's home unless they were working there.

00:09:24.820 The invention of magazines and television changed all that.

00:09:28.780 Suddenly you could see into other people's homes, and there was a lot of power in that.

00:09:33.480 The reason I think Thorstein Veblen's theories are so interesting right now

00:09:37.220 is that we can essentially peek inside other people's homes all the time

00:09:41.280 from this little machine that's always attached to the palm of our hands.

00:09:45.480 It's constant. It's never-ending.

00:09:48.620 So this danger, I think, is this colonization of our free or our private time.

00:09:53.580 We're almost never not being sold to, or at least feeling the pressure to shop.

00:10:02.120 It's this ideology that we need to be constantly buying things in order to be happy or fulfilled.

00:10:07.800 today the never-ending scroll of influencer content finds us everywhere i scroll through

00:10:16.080 instagram first thing in the morning while i'm sitting in the bathroom we give these influencers

00:10:19.640 time that we didn't even know we were giving them but let's back up just a little bit 1.00

00:10:24.420 so first women just collided with other women in real life on the street in the park but soon 0.99

00:10:33.940 there were magazines and those let women look at pictures of other women all the time in the

00:10:38.700 privacy of their own homes. Then of course came television. Suddenly picture perfect ideals of

00:10:44.820 motherhood, June Cleaver, Donna Reed, all of their crisp aprons and perfect hair, those showed 0.95

00:10:51.340 American mothers what they should be aspiring to. This also gave brands an opportunity to sell

00:10:57.180 things. Washing machines, cleaning products, dishwashers, all of the stuff that an aspirational

00:11:06.800 mother should be using. But we didn't really see pregnant women on television or in any media

00:11:20.260 until 1953. 1.00

00:11:23.200 That's when Lucille Ball got pregnant in real life.

00:11:26.640 Ricky, this is it. 0.85

00:11:28.140 This is it!

00:11:29.800 And Lucy and her husband Desi Arnaz,

00:11:32.640 those media geniuses,

00:11:34.120 they decided to write it into their show. 1.00

00:11:37.220 The scripts never actually mentioned the word pregnant 0.67

00:11:39.400 because, ugh, pregnancy. 1.00

00:11:42.720 Carrot Top Lucy Ricardo is infanticipating. 1.00

00:11:46.480 Oh, isn't that right?

00:11:48.040 This might have been the first major must-watch TV moment.

00:11:51.300 See, Desi and Lucy scheduled real-life Lucy's C-section

00:11:54.460 for the same day that television Lucy was set to give birth.

00:11:58.440 Almost 75% of the American television-watching population

00:12:02.140 tuned into that episode.

00:12:03.860 That's 44 million people.

00:12:06.500 More people were talking about Lucy giving birth

00:12:09.120 than were talking about the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

00:12:13.360 Ladies and gentlemen, the world and we have passed the midway point.

00:12:16.980 The podcast Planet Money actually has an amazing entire episode about this part of Lucy's life.

00:12:22.840 So listen to that if you're curious for more.

00:12:25.380 But for our purposes, this is where things begin.

00:12:28.700 This is where Lucy influenced influence.

00:12:33.420 Lucy and Desi began working with brands to sell you all of the baby things that you saw on the show.

00:12:38.900 The very first issue of TV Guide featured a cover photo of newborn Desi Arnaz Jr.

00:12:44.520 The caption was, Lucy's $50 million baby. 0.59

00:12:49.200 Maybe that's the start of mothers influencing other mothers to buy things. 0.97

00:12:55.500 To be fair, we saw a wide array of mothers on TV in the 70s and 80s. 1.00

00:13:00.160 We saw single moms. 0.99

00:13:01.960 We saw messy moms. 1.00

00:13:04.240 Sometimes there were no moms at all. 1.00

00:13:06.500 That's when motherhood started to evolve. 0.99

00:13:08.700 And not for the better.

00:13:10.600 When my mom and her friends were parenting us,

00:13:12.840 we're Gen X and the early millennials.

00:13:14.880 They all sat around smoking

00:13:16.340 while we recklessly ran around the neighborhood,

00:13:18.620 maybe coming home at dinnertime.

00:13:25.600 But in the 90s, moms were given a message 0.91

00:13:28.200 that they had to do more.

00:13:30.240 That's when moms were told they had to mom harder.

00:13:33.300 That momming was a full-time job 0.56

00:13:34.840 even when you had a full-time job. 0.95

00:13:36.960 That you had to give your children

00:13:38.020 your undivided attention 0.89

00:13:39.280 all the time or they'd grow up to be sociopaths 0.98

00:13:41.880 that skinned the neighbor's rabbits.

00:13:45.040 Also, everyone quit smoking.

00:13:47.820 Claire Kane Miller of the New York Times

00:13:49.800 summed this up beautifully in an NPR interview. 0.99

00:13:52.980 Women's labor force participation,

00:13:54.800 the share of women who are working outside the home,

00:13:57.420 plateaued in the 90s. 0.92

00:13:58.700 And one of the reasons is that parenting has become harder.

00:14:03.040 It's become more time-intensive.

00:14:04.800 It's become more expensive.

00:14:07.240 Parents are expected to do more.

00:14:08.760 This has become what most people now say is the right way to parent, is to basically spend as much time as possible with your kid.

00:14:17.720 But whether or not you can afford it, whether or not you have time to do it, most people now agree that this is the best way to do it.

00:14:22.860 There was never enough time.

00:14:25.320 Moms were lonely and stressed and exhausted.

00:14:27.880 They needed help, but their friends were lonely and stressed and exhausted too.

00:14:32.620 Who the hell could they talk to?

00:14:34.080 Who had time?

00:14:34.780 well by the 90s they could go online call now for america online a new way to use your computer

00:14:43.580 to communicate so now we're at the turn of another century blogging sites like blogger

00:14:49.600 and live journal were just gaining steam but take a second and look up the history of blogging on

00:14:54.800 wikipedia there's absolutely no mention of mom bloggers in fact there's hardly any women mentioned

00:15:02.620 at all. I want to point that out, because how often have women and other overlooked people

00:15:08.100 gone back to history and said, huh, we were there. Where'd you put us?

00:15:13.920 It all depends on who's writing the history, my friends.

00:15:18.560 We've gone through a hundred years of history now. First women influencing women in real life, 0.98

00:15:24.400 then in the pages of a magazine, then Lucy licensing all of her baby things on television. 0.99

00:15:29.080 women flocked to the internet in those early days because they were hungry to tell their stories 0.77

00:15:34.560 it was always about community and it was always about how can we work together to help each other

00:15:41.140 and support each other and be a shoulder to cry on or to help me figure out what the heck to cook 1.00

00:15:44.900 with these chicken breasts tonight that's cooper monroe she's an influencing marketing guru that

00:15:51.060 is a title that is a social media blogs really today cooper's the founder and ceo of something

00:15:56.800 called the motherhood. It's an agency that connects mom influencers with brands. But back in the

00:16:02.540 beginning of the 2000s, Cooper had just left her fancy corporate PR job in New York City.

00:16:07.460 She moved home to Pittsburgh to raise her young kids. And once she got there, she needed something

00:16:11.120 to do. So she started freelancing for the local newspaper and did a little blogging on the side.

00:16:17.540 Cooper was one of the early mom bloggers she won't read about in Wikipedia. But at the same

00:16:22.300 time she was blogging i was running around the lower east side with men who do get the credit

00:16:26.900 in the early 2000s i spent most of my time in bars listening to those guys talk all about blogging

00:16:32.440 and gawker and myspace and foursquare and how they were changing the face of politics

00:16:37.520 all while watching them do bad karaoke and a lot of drugs or as cooper puts it there were a lot of

00:16:44.940 young white guys writing blogs about politics and technology online they were all buttoned up and 0.99

00:16:50.820 serious but in real life they were a fucking mess now in real life it was the women who were 0.99

00:16:56.800 trying to hold it together but online they were allowed to be a mess the sad truth is that no one 0.98

00:17:02.880 was taking them seriously here's cooper again they were talking so honestly from their soul

00:17:11.680 and from their heart and telling these incredibly beautiful moving inspiring funny hilarious

00:17:17.260 various stories that were somewhat irreverent, sometimes train wrecks, but boy, you couldn't

00:17:23.520 turn away. You know, these, these storytellers, these bloggers that soon became called condescendingly

00:17:30.020 mommy bloggers started to create a very powerful community. There was no social media. There's no

00:17:36.300 Twitter, no Facebook, no Pinterest. Instagram wasn't even a glimmer in anybody's eye, but the

00:17:41.180 comment sections were turning into these tiny little worlds that had ongoing conversations and

00:17:48.580 mini dramas and all the other things in between. We may not have our mom and our aunt, our cousins

00:17:54.140 sitting around the dinner table with us drinking a cup of coffee, and we may not have neighbors we

00:17:58.040 know, but we can find people we can connect with and get information from and get support from

00:18:03.760 online. In the first decade of the 21st century, the mom blogging community grew into its own mini

00:18:10.740 social network complete with its own celebrities one of the first big stars one of those train

00:18:16.920 wrecks was heather armstrong the deuce i freaking loved the deuce i didn't have kids and i still 0.98

00:18:23.300 loved the deuce she was an ex-mormon and she blogged about sowing her wild oats as a 20-something

00:18:29.260 ex-mormon living in la she talked about this in an interview with lance armstrong i don't think

00:18:34.380 they're related and then when i had my baby like my traffic tripled in a day yeah and they were

00:18:40.700 like oh she has a kid and is she gonna talk about having a kid like she normally talks about life

00:18:46.020 and that's exactly what i did right because i hated what was going on i mean i had really

00:18:52.240 bad postpartum depression i had no idea what i was doing this kind of honesty is amazing

00:18:59.980 Saying, I started blogging about motherhood because I was lost.

00:19:03.700 I don't feel like we see that today when we look at the internet.

00:19:08.360 Heather Armstrong and her blog, The Deuce, were considered the height of early mom blogging.

00:19:12.940 But even then, this was far from being an industry. 1.00

00:19:16.840 After the break, we'll find out about these badass women who took the pioneering steps of turning their side hustle into a full-time job. 1.00

00:19:23.280 hey what you doing are you doom scrolling other people's vacations miami san diego with expedia 0.57

00:19:34.660 your trip can earn rewards which you can use towards your next eligible stay

00:19:38.000 soon people will doom scroll you expedia the one place you go to go places terms apply

00:19:43.540 so now we've gone from picture perfect moms and magazines to larger than life mothers on tv 0.70

00:19:52.020 And then the internet allowed moms to commiserate about what a mess their real lives were.

00:19:56.640 How hard it all was. 0.99

00:19:59.360 One of the women doing that was Natalie Levin.

00:20:03.140 How happy are you that you're not a mom influencer in the time of coronavirus?

00:20:07.420 Oh my gosh. You know, I was thinking about this just yesterday.

00:20:10.240 I would have to be like live streaming things and coming up with like, work out with me.

00:20:15.120 I mean, like the possibilities for content right now are endless.

00:20:18.940 And that would be exhausting.

00:20:21.460 This is the time to be a private citizen.

00:20:25.640 That's Natalie.

00:20:26.880 I talked to her back in March of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic,

00:20:30.820 back when we all thought we'd just be hoarding toilet paper for two weeks.

00:20:34.840 For a lot of Natalie's adulthood, she wasn't a private citizen.

00:20:39.020 She was a weird kind of celebrity on the internet,

00:20:41.900 a mom blogger, and then a mom influencer on Instagram. 0.94

00:20:45.320 You might know her by two different names,

00:20:47.480 Nat the Fat Rat, which was her original blog,

00:20:49.880 or HeyNatalieJean, which was her Instagram account.

00:20:53.540 She started writing on the internet in the early 2000s,

00:20:56.460 just like Cooper Monroe.

00:20:57.640 And she did it for the same reason.

00:20:59.520 She was lonely and she craved community.

00:21:01.880 So it was 2003 and George Bush was president.

00:21:09.280 I had just gotten married and was working in,

00:21:13.640 actually Lake Oswego, Oregon,

00:21:15.260 with my husband at the time, Brandon.

00:21:16.880 And it was one of those office jobs where you're really bored a lot.

00:21:21.060 And so I had discovered blogging.

00:21:23.520 Blogging cut through Natalie's loneliness and depression.

00:21:26.740 Think of blogging like Zoloft before everyone, including me, was taking Zoloft.

00:21:31.580 She was trying to get pregnant and it wasn't working, but she didn't have anyone to talk about it with.

00:21:36.040 We had a strong community, actually, of those early days.

00:21:38.640 Suddenly I had like hundreds of readers and I was getting hundreds of comments on posts.

00:21:43.680 My husband was thrilled.

00:21:45.240 He thought it was the coolest thing.

00:21:47.020 He's like, wow, my wife is a celebrity or something like that.

00:21:50.460 So yeah, those things were really fun.

00:21:53.340 It was a real lifeline for me too, because I was infertile for so long and had found

00:21:57.420 other bloggers who were also infertile going through the same things as me.

00:22:00.720 So I was able to like announce my pregnancy on the blog and everyone was really excited.

00:22:05.040 It was a really fun time.

00:22:06.400 Up until that point, I mean, we had figured out how to make some money with our blogs

00:22:09.820 kind of by working with like independent Etsy sellers

00:22:13.460 or other blogs who wanted to like sponsor you,

00:22:17.400 quote unquote, by paying 50 bucks

00:22:19.020 and then you put up their banner ad.

00:22:21.120 In the beginning of blogging,

00:22:22.260 banner ads were a blogger's only income stream.

00:22:25.020 50 bucks here, 100 bucks there.

00:22:27.560 Some of the bigger sites like The Deuce

00:22:29.020 were getting paid thousands

00:22:30.040 and they started actually supporting writers. 0.75

00:22:32.760 But a lot of these mom bloggers 0.98

00:22:33.980 were writing reviews of products 1.00

00:22:35.760 or they were taking pictures of products.

00:22:37.800 They were essentially giving companies free advertising.

00:22:40.840 When Huck was born, it just exploded.

00:22:43.120 I was getting all this attention from stroller companies and, you know, skip hop and here, try this, here, try that. 0.80

00:22:50.420 Do you need a breast pump? Do you need this? People sending me things. 0.99

00:22:54.380 A lot of companies thought they could just throw free product at women because mom blogging was women's work. 1.00

00:23:01.020 It was obviously something that women wanted to do out of the goodness of their own hearts. 0.99

00:23:05.760 Because women are good people. 1.00

00:23:07.800 We just like to do things for other people. 1.00

00:23:10.460 Now, if men were running those blogs, no one ever would have thought they'd work for free shit. 1.00

00:23:15.020 It really preys on women in a lot of the same ways that I think MLMs do, 0.99

00:23:18.760 multi-level marketing schemes, because you're approaching women who are primarily stay-at-home moms.

00:23:24.280 So you can say in a casual way, I know you don't take this seriously.

00:23:27.820 So how about if you just, you know, take this 12th set of pots and pans and do this?

00:23:33.040 And all of us were willing to be like, oh, yeah, okay, that's kind of fun.

00:23:36.580 Why not?

00:23:36.960 But these gifts were not paying Natalie's bills.

00:23:40.240 And after a while, something clicked. 0.62

00:23:42.120 One of the bloggers that I read, Gabby Blair, who does Design Mom, 0.87

00:23:46.760 she's an amazing, amazing force of a woman. 0.87

00:23:49.580 And she started writing occasionally about how, hey, we should be asking for money.

00:23:54.520 We did have this sense that we were kind of creating an environment for everyone else.

00:24:00.020 I love Gabby Blair.

00:24:01.840 I've followed Design Mom forever.

00:24:03.380 But until Natalie told me this, I had no idea.

00:24:06.960 how instrumental she was in getting moms paid.

00:24:09.940 My mind, which is, I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur,

00:24:13.620 starts going, okay, well, I could really provide a value

00:24:17.660 for a shop that's trying to launch

00:24:20.420 or a product that's trying to launch. 1.00

00:24:22.780 Gabby's one of the women responsible 1.00

00:24:24.340 for getting mom blogging taken seriously.

00:24:27.240 She's a Mormon mom of five,

00:24:28.820 and she was an art director in New York

00:24:30.540 when she went on maternity leave with her fifth kid.

00:24:32.800 That's when she started Design Mom. 0.55

00:24:34.860 I'd had enough babies at this point 1.00

00:24:36.480 to know that I can absolutely go crazy on maternity leave 0.51

00:24:40.400 with all the hormones and the postpartum depression

00:24:43.080 and everything if I'm not doing something really creative.

00:24:46.260 But I needed something that didn't require me

00:24:48.840 to be pretty and showered and out of the house

00:24:50.720 that I could really do when I had time,

00:24:53.260 which might be in the middle of the night

00:24:54.300 when I was up nursing or might be when the baby's napping.

00:24:57.720 So it occurred to me, blogging could fit that bill.

00:25:01.580 One day, Gabby did a giveaway.

00:25:03.920 It was a pair of earrings

00:25:04.920 that she got from a friend of a friend.

00:25:07.140 She did it because she wanted to grow engagement.

00:25:09.480 She wanted people to comment on her posts.

00:25:11.700 And they did. 0.95

00:25:13.840 They wanted those earrings.

00:25:16.020 All of a sudden, Gabby could see the impact

00:25:17.940 she was having on her audience.

00:25:19.640 The commercial impact.

00:25:21.260 It's really where my mind started going,

00:25:24.280 oh, maybe I could turn this into something.

00:25:27.400 Maybe this could be a job.

00:25:29.220 Maybe there's a business here,

00:25:30.620 not just a fun outlet, a creative outlet.

00:25:34.920 Ultimately, I never went back to the office after that maternity leave.

00:25:39.640 The blog took off.

00:25:42.240 And in 2010, it was providing full-time income.

00:25:45.960 I signed with an ad network.

00:25:47.880 It was called Federated Media.

00:25:50.400 That was definitely a game changer because it was like legit full-time income.

00:25:55.120 There's been a few sort of heydays of blogging and that 2010 era was definitely one of them.

00:26:01.900 Cooper Monroe was part of that heyday too.

00:26:04.920 after she'd started blogging during my Lower East Side party days.

00:26:08.340 By 2010, she was pushing for women in the Motherhood Network to get paid for working with brands. 0.94

00:26:13.720 We started working with a lot of major brands who were testing the waters, dipping their toe in.

00:26:18.400 One thing that we did from the outset is insisted and had never veered from 0.89

00:26:23.840 that we were going to pay the women to do this.

00:26:27.300 and found that it was vital that they were provided an income for all that they were going to have to do. 1.00

00:26:35.820 There's overhead and infrastructure and babysitters and gas and time and effort.

00:26:40.420 And there was pushback at the beginning, certainly.

00:26:43.820 But at the end of the day, they are doing work.

00:26:46.960 They're creating something that is of value.

00:26:49.980 And therefore, they need to be compensated for it.

00:26:53.340 And now that that is kind of an industry standard, but there were many, many years where that was a real struggle, a real debate.

00:27:04.060 Cooper, Natalie, Gabby, and dozens of other women, they all stood their ground.

00:27:09.060 They all said, we're going to get paid or we're not going to do this.

00:27:12.720 In that era, right around 2010, that marked the rise of sponsored blog content.

00:27:18.920 That means companies paying bloggers to write about their products,

00:27:22.360 to integrate them into their editorial. 1.00

00:27:25.140 All of today's mom influencers have these women to thank 1.00

00:27:28.040 for the business model that pays their bills.

00:27:31.320 But something else was on the horizon.

00:27:33.920 Something that would change absolutely everything 0.93

00:27:36.260 about how women made money on the internet. 0.98

00:27:40.240 But first, a quick break. 1.00

00:27:48.000 10 years ago, Instagram slammed into our world like a tsunami of jelly beans.

00:27:57.660 It is no understatement to say that it completely changed the way a lot of us live.

00:28:02.960 And if you were a mom who wrote things on the internet back then,

00:28:05.960 it completely changed how you worked.

00:28:08.560 Sometimes for the better, at least at first.

00:28:11.980 When Huck was about a month and a half, I think, Instagram happened.

00:28:16.100 That's Natalie again.

00:28:17.600 And just like she was with blogging, Natalie was quick to see the potential in Instagram.

00:28:21.360 A friend once looked online, you can see what download you were for Instagram.

00:28:25.200 And I was under the one million mark and he's an app developer.

00:28:27.880 And he thought that was very impressive.

00:28:30.780 I was right there in the beginning.

00:28:35.720 Glennis.

00:28:36.560 So.

00:28:37.560 Can you believe that Instagram has been around for 10 years now?

00:28:40.520 It's been a decade, a decade since Instagram first completely changed all of our lives.

00:28:44.940 it's wild because on the one hand you think it's been around forever and on the other hand

00:28:49.480 the record of our lives only starts somewhat recently and if you were a grown-up when it

00:28:55.880 arrived it was such a novel thing sometimes when I scroll all the way back on my Instagram and I

00:29:01.300 remember how revolutionary filters were and they were so much fun especially if you grew up in the

00:29:08.280 heyday of women's magazines you know you you could like change the lighting and you could smooth out

00:29:13.660 your skin and you could accentuate your features. And it was like, oh, I'm just didn't know my right 0.97

00:29:18.400 angles. Like a forties movie star, like Ingrid Bergman was only photographed from one side of

00:29:24.020 her face. Like it all suddenly made sense. And you're like, it felt like so much fun and so much

00:29:29.260 control and so much like, oh, now I can edit myself and the world I live in. It was really

00:29:36.740 joyful. And suddenly our lives kind of did look like a magazine photo shoot. We put on the Nashville

00:29:41.800 filter. I was a Valencia person. I was a Sierra person. Oh, yeah. It says a lot about you. It

00:29:48.160 does. It's like a horoscope. I talked to Sarah Fryer and she's this Instagram historian. She

00:29:55.120 wrote like this definitive history of Instagram actually called No Filter. And she said something

00:30:02.960 that really stuck with me, that this has been a decade of completely reshaping what we value

00:30:09.540 in our society? Ten years of reshaping who we aspire to be, how people judge their relevance

00:30:19.280 in society. This has been an app that has so shifted our sense of self and our measures of

00:30:28.240 success in our modern world. What filters have done is they've trained us to accept that it's

00:30:35.640 possible on Instagram to portray your life as more beautiful or perfect than it actually is.

00:30:40.960 Everything we put there has a strategic nature to it. It is something that is polished or

00:30:49.180 beautified beyond what our regular lives are. And so is it still art or is it an ad?

00:30:59.020 Instagram was never set up to be an advertising platform. The adorable little man founders of

00:31:04.300 Instagram, wanted to create a platform for photography, for art, a way to let normal

00:31:09.740 people take professional-looking photos that looked way better than real life. But in the

00:31:14.340 beginning, there was no way to link these pictures to sell anything. The founders actually thought

00:31:18.380 ads were pretty gross. The Instagram founders initially were a little bit horrified by this.

00:31:25.140 Having billboards across this beautiful art space that was Instagram would just make it

00:31:32.140 completely unusable, they feared. But like most people in Silicon Valley, they eventually began

00:31:37.860 to think about the bottom line. By 2014, Instagram had 300 million active users, and the co-founder

00:31:44.340 Kevin Systrom finally admitted that Instagram could be good for advertising. What we should do

00:31:49.360 is take it slowly, decide which advertisers will set the bar high, which I think you've seen with

00:31:54.340 companies like Hollister, Ben & Jerry's, Lexus. Those companies, I think, get Instagram because

00:32:00.260 they have an organic presence. And what that does is it creates a really wonderful like loop. It's

00:32:05.460 a feedback loop. And I think that's created a virtuous cycle. But he still didn't want ads that

00:32:09.640 looked like ads, not like the in-your-face shit that was on Facebook. By the way, this is just 0.99

00:32:14.540 two years after Instagram was acquired by Facebook. Systrom talked about ads on Instagram in a CNBC

00:32:20.160 interview with Julia Boorstin. When you open up a Vogue magazine and you flip through and you see

00:32:25.540 beautiful advertising and beautiful content. That's the type of feeling we want to evoke.

00:32:30.040 So we've stayed away from some of the other stuff up until now, but I won't count it out.

00:32:34.580 It all goes back to Vogue, doesn't it? This is when perfection started to creep back into the

00:32:41.600 influencing world. When internet moms stopped showing their messy lives and started displaying 1.00

00:32:46.780 beautiful magazine-style lives. Just like at the end of the 19th century, history repeats itself. 0.92

00:32:53.120 so really he was fine with the fakery the manipulation that people were doing with

00:33:00.740 branded content as long as they weren't explicitly saying buy this thing for 50 bucks because who

00:33:07.600 wants to be sold so directly to and so that's how it really evolved it was this like very subtle

00:33:14.420 almost unclear whether it was an ad or not and in that way it was more effective

00:33:19.820 and so I think that that vibe really shaped the influencer industry to where people would tout

00:33:29.360 products alongside their audiences but they wouldn't necessarily say this is an ad they

00:33:36.740 would say I shot this with my Samsung camera they wouldn't tell you that Samsung paid them

00:33:42.200 to do that that was something that influencers didn't think was unethical because they would say

00:33:47.440 oh, I would never work with brands that I didn't personally like.

00:33:51.520 But everyone has a price.

00:33:54.620 And everyone needs to pay the bills.

00:33:57.720 This kind of advertising had to be more compelling than your regular TV ad.

00:34:01.720 Harder to look away from because there was so much else to look away to.

00:34:04.980 They were much closer to the glossy Vogue ads.

00:34:07.720 And the genius thing that Instagram influencers did

00:34:10.360 was craft advertisements that didn't look at all like advertisements.

00:34:14.760 They just looked like life.

00:34:15.940 an airbrushed and beautiful sort of life.

00:34:19.960 And this new world of sponsored content

00:34:21.900 was great for Natalie Levin.

00:34:24.940 Natalie's family needed money.

00:34:26.640 Her side hustle could no longer just be an adorable hobby

00:34:28.940 because they lived in New York

00:34:30.180 and her husband had 200 grand in student loan debt.

00:34:33.640 The good news is that Natalie was ready-made for Instagram.

00:34:37.040 She was cute.

00:34:38.040 Her kid was cute.

00:34:38.980 Her husband was cute.

00:34:39.920 Her house was cute.

00:34:41.080 Instagram was a platform that loved cute.

00:34:43.380 suddenly I was learning that everything I saw was content that changed the way I did everything

00:34:51.940 because now I wasn't picking bedding because it was what I liked I was picking bedding because

00:34:55.940 it was what I liked and also does anyone else have anything like this um how is this gonna

00:35:00.840 photograph do I have a link can I link to this and get an affiliate off of it I was walking around

00:35:07.080 New York City all the time so I was in great shape clothes were like sent to me all the time

00:35:12.020 So I was always playing dress up with things.

00:35:13.740 And it was like, wow, I can afford to have someone come clean my house once a week so I don't have to do it.

00:35:20.060 Side note, ask accountant if I can write off house cleaner when I become a mom influencer. 0.93

00:35:27.740 A big sea change was when talent agencies decided to pick up bloggers.

00:35:33.400 They were just expanding what they could represent in the media.

00:35:36.740 I don't even know what kind of blogger you would have called me.

00:35:38.760 Now they call it lifestyle bloggers.

00:35:40.240 I was told I was a mommy blogger.

00:35:42.020 this is when things started to take an ugly turn for natalie

00:35:47.100 when mom influencing was no longer fun no longer fun for natalie but also no longer fun for a lot

00:35:54.640 of women instagram ruined women for a time it kind of felt like i had just like peeled off my

00:36:00.940 skin and i didn't exist anywhere because i was everywhere don't worry you're going to hear that

00:36:06.260 whole story from natalie in a later episode but right now i want to talk about the agents

00:36:11.460 This switch about seven years ago when Hollywood agents started picking up a new breed of client.

00:36:16.660 There were more celebrity magazines than ever.

00:36:19.080 I know, I made them.

00:36:20.860 There were more celebrity websites than ever.

00:36:24.040 So to fill that giant content hole, there had to be more celebrities than ever.

00:36:28.440 And it was as if those of us who worked in the gossip industry just created them from scratch.

00:36:33.680 Suddenly you were reading about socialites, reality television stars, the ninth girl thrown off the bachelorette.

00:36:39.820 All of these new celebrities immediately got agents and started selling new things.

00:36:44.400 And this is when we started seeing the rise of personal branding as a business. 0.95

00:36:49.700 Paris Hilton, God freaking bless her, she really pioneered this.

00:36:53.760 But the Kardashian clan, they perfected it.

00:36:57.040 They created an empire.

00:36:59.140 And now in 2013, 2014, mom bloggers and influencers were also becoming celebrities.

00:37:04.860 They had a following too, and people were buying the things they recommended.

00:37:08.080 it. Agents wanted some of that money. Here's Cooper again. The stakes were so high and the

00:37:14.640 expectations were so high, that got kind of a little out of control. It was funny because

00:37:19.540 the corporate angle was reach, reach, reach, scale, scale, scale. How do you scale this? I mean,

00:37:24.920 there was endless amounts of conversation around how do you scale, quote unquote, the mommy bloggers?

00:37:29.860 And I read that in 2017 or 2018, 475 influencer agencies opened up in the United States. I mean,

00:37:36.360 some insane number like that. We signed an influencer exclusively as their agent,

00:37:42.680 kind of on a whim. And we kicked butt with that first influencer. And that first influencer

00:37:48.280 within the first three months brought in close to 20 influencers. That's Joe Gagliese. He's the

00:37:54.340 founder of something called Viral Nation. They're another influencer agency that came on the scene

00:37:59.180 about seven years ago. We were kind of off to the races, really at a great time when there was only

00:38:02.960 a couple of companies representing influencers.

00:38:05.180 From there, it just kind of grew exponentially over the first year.

00:38:08.120 We were representing hundreds of influencers and working through all these deals for them.

00:38:12.620 And just like Brad Pitt would have an agent, we were doing the same thing.

00:38:15.800 Brands were hungry for moms. 0.98

00:38:17.340 They couldn't get enough of them. 1.00

00:38:18.960 You know, these mom influencers and lifestyle influencers really represented a key component

00:38:23.040 for what brands were looking for.

00:38:25.480 Mom influencers, as you know, in just general marketing are a much more lucrative category

00:38:30.220 than millennials, right? 1.00

00:38:31.980 They have a lot more buying power.

00:38:33.680 They can represent, you know, larger brands.

00:38:35.960 They're usually very PG rated in their content.

00:38:38.640 Good brands really love authentic moms.

00:38:41.920 Moms are generally, you know, in the marketing world, seen as the anchor of the household, decision makers.

00:38:47.940 You know, they play a lot of roles, not only in the child's life, but in their family life and in their purchase decisions and in lifestyle and fashion and beauty. 0.50

00:38:56.480 To put that in perspective, moms make about 85% of household purchases in the U.S.

00:39:02.040 They have a yearly buying power of approximately $2.4 trillion. 1.00

00:39:06.460 That is some power, bitches. 1.00

00:39:09.060 You know, anytime a brand can get new exposure to the mom space in a way that's unique and organic, 1.00

00:39:15.720 they're going to take it, which is why I think the influencer mom space really evolved pretty quickly.

00:39:21.640 Suddenly, there were even business conferences 0.96

00:39:23.560 where moms and brands could collide in person and cut deals. 1.00

00:39:29.740 Mom 2.0 is the best conference for women in social media. 0.84

00:39:34.120 This is where the professional storytellers are.

00:39:36.160 This is where I get to hear not just what their stories are,

00:39:39.160 but what their relationship is to their stories,

00:39:41.540 how they're making a business out of their stories.

00:39:44.100 Gabby Blair of Design Mom,

00:39:45.820 she was instrumental in helping launch Mom 2.0

00:39:48.900 and her own conference, Alt Summit.

00:39:51.020 And from the very start, again, she put her foot down. 0.64

00:39:53.680 She told brands that if they wanted to come to the conference, they had better be ready to pay these mothers. 0.96

00:39:58.840 We were really careful about the sponsors we would bring. 0.98

00:40:01.760 Part of the vetting process was, are you ready to work with these women? 1.00

00:40:06.040 Are you ready to pay them? 1.00

00:40:07.780 Of course, you're welcome to give them swag like any conference sponsor likes to do.

00:40:11.800 Wonderful.

00:40:12.860 But are you ready to hire them? 1.00

00:40:15.220 and women would leave Alt Summit with contracts, with contacts that they would then, you know, 1.00

00:40:22.840 get sponsorships that would last, you know, it might be their income for the year. Like it was

00:40:26.580 serious business going down. There are serious contracts being made. There are development

00:40:31.400 deals happening. People are going to get TV shows from this. People are going to get contracts with

00:40:36.540 Home Depot or Lowe's that are going to last years, you know, a decade for some people at this point.

00:40:42.460 So all of a sudden, it was huge.

00:40:43.800 And I can say the same kind of parallel was happening at Mom 2.0.

00:40:49.040 For somebody who's interested in coming to Mom 2.0,

00:40:51.720 I would say it's the best investment you can make in yourself.

00:40:56.160 That brings us to right now,

00:40:59.500 a time when influencers on Instagram sell billions of dollars of products

00:41:03.140 to women from a little machine that sits in the palm of their hands.

00:41:07.020 joe now that you've done your history work has it changed your feelings on getting involved in

00:41:20.020 this world or does it give you a clearer idea of what you are undertaking i think what it's

00:41:26.640 showing me is that this is a job this is a content job this is a world of women entrepreneurs who

00:41:33.920 are essentially creating magazines for you every day. 0.96

00:41:37.100 Anyone with a big following on Instagram

00:41:38.640 is essentially creating their own media empire.

00:41:42.540 You have launched magazines before

00:41:44.640 and you've launched magazines about celebrities.

00:41:46.500 Like you have a very comprehensive understanding

00:41:49.380 of what packaging, branding, storytelling,

00:41:55.060 marketing involves.

00:41:56.160 So does understanding Instagram in this way

00:41:58.820 make you more interested in getting into this world

00:42:02.540 or less? More because the money that's being made off Instagram is money that used to be made

00:42:09.520 in magazines. It's money that I used to make and I've applied for jobs in magazines now and I have

00:42:16.060 not gotten them. So yeah, I wanted, I want to do this. I actually, I blurted out to Cooper Monroe.

00:42:23.840 I was like, do you think I can do this? What do you, what do you think about me? And she was

00:42:27.700 so nice in her answer. This is what she told me. Well, I mean, Joe, what I've seen and heard from

00:42:34.140 you is that you care deeply about women and about telling the stories of women and about empowering

00:42:40.800 women and lifting them up. And that feels like it's a place of real passion and importance for

00:42:45.760 you. You telling these stories using a platform where you've got people showing up every day

00:42:50.840 is very powerful because you come from a place where you have to tell it. It's what drives you.

00:42:57.300 That's why you're on the planet. I don't know. I know it's kind of a Pollyannish thing to say,

00:43:03.420 but for somebody to feel fulfilled in doing this, sharing what you know and care about

00:43:09.060 with people is where you're going to find that. And then the monetizing can follow,

00:43:16.100 but that can't be what's leading you there. I've got stories to tell. I know how to build

00:43:22.360 a magazine. I know how to build a brand. I'm less comfortable with putting my face out there all the

00:43:29.160 time. I like writing stories about other people. And I think the biggest hurdle is going to be

00:43:34.560 writing about myself. There's also this other really interesting thing. When Cooper said,

00:43:40.260 you have a story to tell, you have a story to share. Edgar Allan Poe once said something,

00:43:44.840 and I'm going to bastardize this quote, that people wanted to read short stories because they

00:43:50.740 they just didn't have the attention span to read a novel anymore. And I'm going to take that even

00:43:54.760 further and say, we don't have the attention span to read a short story or a news article,

00:43:59.360 but we can read an Instagram caption. This is where we're at in terms of content. And so

00:44:04.960 because I've got these stories to tell, there's no reason I shouldn't get paid for it or I

00:44:09.760 shouldn't try to get paid for it. But I genuinely have no idea what the fuck I'm doing. 0.93

00:44:14.700 well joe holder of multiple master's degrees if only is there like a school somewhere that can 0.85

00:44:24.300 teach you i feel like that's the next logical step for you is to go to school for this funny

00:44:28.820 you mentioned that gleness i'm actually sort of joking but is there there's a place that you can

00:44:36.020 go to learn to be an influencer and every influencer i've talked to has called it the

00:44:41.040 Harvard of social media influencing.

00:44:44.160 Are you kidding right now?

00:44:45.260 I'm not kidding you.

00:44:46.520 And next week I'm going to go to the Harvard of social media influencing

00:44:49.960 because I love school.

00:44:51.880 I cannot wait to see Joe at influencing Ivy League.

00:44:58.100 The influencing Ivy League.

00:45:00.380 What?

00:45:01.220 Like it's hard?

00:45:11.040 Under the Influence is reported and hosted by me, Joe Piazza.

00:45:33.220 Our story editor is Glynis McNichol.

00:45:35.580 Emily Marinoff is our producer.

00:45:37.360 Production assistance came from Mary Du.

00:45:40.300 Sound design by Emily Marinoff, Jessica Kreinchich, and Julian Willer.

00:45:44.520 Our theme and additional music was composed by Jessica Kreinchich.

00:45:47.720 Additional research was conducted by Jocelyn Sears.

00:45:50.960 Julian Willer is our consulting producer, and Mangesh Hedikador is our executive producer.

00:45:55.680 And special thanks to Erin Kaufman, who was the wonderful voice of Thorstein Veblen,

00:46:00.640 and Sarah Fryer for her very comprehensive history of Instagram.

00:46:09.540 You

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - September 21, 2025

Sunday Nice Things： Women's Work

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