Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - Women's Work

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00:00:17.400 All right, so, guys,

00:00:24.380 what would you think

00:00:26.780 if I become an Instagram mom influencer? 0.65

00:00:30.000 i probably think a lot less of you honestly it's kind of shitty that's kind of a shitty thing to

00:00:38.620 say i feel like it's just like desperate you know this is my book club real ladies at my book club

00:00:45.140 mostly moms in their 40s with young kids you don't read books drink wine and sometimes smoke a little

00:00:50.660 weed oh cool i follow these people and it's like oh you need this sweater do you buy it sometimes

00:00:58.280 me too i have too allie allie okay big question big question where did you find that tie-dye

00:01:05.520 sweatshirt from instagram wait so how did this become a job though i have no idea

00:01:14.840 can you tell me how this is a thing like how do you get paid

00:01:19.660 The first thing people ask me when I tell them I'm doing a podcast about Instagram mom influencers

00:01:29.380 is, when did this become a job? The second thing they ask is, how do you make money?

00:01:37.020 And then obviously, how much? The social media influencer industry is only about 10 years old.

00:01:43.800 If Instagram was a person, it would only be in fifth grade. But the idea of influencing is way

00:01:49.260 older. The idea of influencing is a stuffy old man who smokes a pipe and probably smells

00:01:54.680 funny. I'm going to take you back to the start of women influencing women through media. 0.99

00:02:01.240 Consider this episode a history of influencing. How'd we get here? How'd this become a job? 0.69

00:02:07.220 What kinds of mothers have been allowed to influence us over the past hundred years? 1.00

00:02:11.340 i'm joe piazza and you're under the influence 1.00

00:02:19.200 chapter two women's work 1.00

00:02:29.160 hi hi what are you doing hiding in the bathroom and barricading the door so my kids can't get in 1.00

00:02:38.500 Good luck with that.

00:02:39.980 Talk fast.

00:02:41.820 Is there a start to all of this?

00:02:43.340 Like where, who was the first influencer?

00:02:46.300 Was it Eve?

00:02:47.220 Did she influence Adam to have a bite of the apple?

00:02:51.760 How far back are we going?

00:02:53.640 We're not going all the way back to Eve,

00:02:55.400 but there's a lot of places that we could go

00:02:57.960 to get to the start of influencing.

00:02:59.800 And the start point feels really important,

00:03:02.540 but also totally arbitrary.

00:03:04.460 Like we could pick any point in history 1.00

00:03:06.040 and women have been influencing other women.

00:03:08.660 But I generally think we should go back to the 19th century,

00:03:11.300 to the launch of women's magazines.

00:03:15.080 Particularly Vogue magazine.

00:03:17.680 Do you know when Vogue launched?

00:03:18.580 I think that Vogue started around the turn of the century, didn't it?

00:03:22.680 Yeah.

00:03:23.180 So we're going back to 1892.

00:03:26.080 I looked up Vogue's early mission,

00:03:28.940 and it was described as this.

00:03:31.740 A magazine that recounted the habits of New York's upper class,

00:03:35.300 their leisure activities, their social gatherings, the places they frequented,

00:03:40.960 and the clothing they wore, and everyone who wanted to look like them and enter their exclusive circle.

00:03:48.420 Oh my God. When has upper-class New York not been screwing it up for everybody else?

00:03:53.760 Never. So we've got Vogue, but then we also have Good Housekeeping, which was a little bit earlier.

00:03:59.760 that was 1885, and they launched with the slogan, to produce and perpetuate perfection,

00:04:06.680 or as near unto perfection as may be attained, wait for it, in the household.

00:04:14.060 In the household is always key to these things, isn't it?

00:04:18.880 So the launch of women's magazines is really the modern era of women influencing other women that 0.55

00:04:25.420 they didn't know. But magazine editorials and advertising, they were just mirroring what was

00:04:32.500 happening in real life. And this was observed by the 19th century economic philosopher Thorstein

00:04:38.500 Veblen. A brief introduction to the economic theories of Thorstein Veblen.

00:04:46.500 We don't talk enough about men. Let's talk more. This part's kind of fun for me. A lot of people

00:04:52.920 know that I was once this celebrity gossip columnist. But you might not even know this

00:04:58.660 about me. I was also an undergraduate economics major at the University of Pennsylvania.

00:05:03.000 I didn't know that.

00:05:04.020 It's true. I contain multitudes.

00:05:06.280 You absolutely do.

00:05:08.420 To find out more about Thorstein Veblen and how this old dead guy connects to modern day

00:05:13.420 Instagram influencers, I talked to Emily Hund. She's the researcher at the Annenberg School

00:05:18.640 at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I went to school.

00:05:22.300 She's the one that first connected influencers

00:05:24.400 to this 19th century economic philosopher.

00:05:27.640 Veblen, in the late 19th century,

00:05:30.560 wrote his satirical, almost like critique of the system,

00:05:34.820 the theory of the leisure class.

00:05:37.140 Each class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social scale,

00:05:41.760 while it rarely compares itself with those below

00:05:44.280 or with those who are considerably in advance.

00:05:46.760 He was critiquing how people look to the class above them to decide what they should have.

00:05:54.220 In other words, our standard of decency and expenditure, as in other ends of emulation,

00:05:59.780 is set by the usage of those next above us in reputability, the wealthy leisure class.

00:06:08.820 So what Veblen did is he introduced this idea that human beings always look to the class right above them

00:06:15.040 to tell them how to look, how to act, and what to buy.

00:06:19.580 Vogue, people.

00:06:20.980 We've always been influenced by someone else.

00:06:24.840 It's human nature.

00:06:26.420 And that's why his idea from 100 years ago

00:06:28.600 explains why we can't turn away from influencers today.

00:06:32.080 These portrayals of lifestyle are so cloaked in aspiration.

00:06:38.220 That's what it's all about.

00:06:40.520 You know, you see these beautiful feeds

00:06:43.480 and these wonderful looking products

00:06:46.040 designed to get you interested

00:06:47.520 and to get you to want them.

00:06:49.620 And so it offers the same thing

00:06:51.740 in that followers can have access

00:06:53.840 to these lifestyles

00:06:55.860 that they may not have ever encountered

00:06:58.320 or they may not have even considered

00:07:00.180 were it not for Instagram

00:07:01.780 and for social media.

00:07:04.760 Look, you're probably never going to know

00:07:06.680 what a certain influencer makes

00:07:08.080 or what tax bracket they're in.

00:07:10.780 But the things that they post,

00:07:12.260 the expensive puffy coats, the suede boots, the $1,000 baby strollers, that all makes them seem

00:07:18.860 pretty rich. They all seem richer than me. In Thorstein Veblen's time, drooling over the class

00:07:25.920 that was slightly above you, or a lot above you, desiring their things, it didn't happen all the

00:07:32.440 time. And that's because different classes just didn't collide very often. Rich people lived in

00:07:38.820 rich people neighborhoods. Poor people lived in poor people neighborhoods. A lower class person

00:07:45.920 never really went into a rich person's home unless they were working there.

00:07:51.000 The invention of magazines and television changed all that. Suddenly you could see into other

00:07:56.380 people's homes, and there was a lot of power in that. The reason I think Thorstein Veblen's

00:08:01.500 theories are so interesting right now is that we can essentially peek inside other people's homes

00:08:06.600 all the time, from this little machine that's always attached to the palm of our hands.

00:08:11.760 It's constant. It's never-ending. So this danger, I think, is this colonization of our free or our

00:08:18.800 private time. You're almost never not being sold to, or at least feeling the pressure to shop.

00:08:28.340 It's this ideology that we need to be constantly buying things in order to be happy or fulfilled.

00:08:36.600 Today, the never-ending scroll of influencer content finds us everywhere.

00:08:41.880 I scroll through Instagram first thing in the morning while I'm sitting in the bathroom.

00:08:44.840 We give these influencers time that we didn't even know we were giving them.

00:08:48.760 But let's back up just a little bit.

00:08:53.140 So first, women just collided with other women in real life, on the street, in the park.

00:08:59.280 But soon, there were magazines.

00:09:01.640 And those let women look at pictures of other women all the time, in the privacy of their own homes.

00:09:06.600 Then, of course, came television. Suddenly, picture-perfect ideals of motherhood,

00:09:12.160 June Cleaver, Donna Reed, all of their crisp aprons and perfect hair, 0.55

00:09:16.820 those showed American mothers what they should be aspiring to. 0.96

00:09:20.700 This also gave brands an opportunity to sell things.

00:09:24.140 So I switched to Formula 409 spray cleaner, because 409 cleans... 0.99

00:09:27.980 Washing machines, cleaning products, dishwashers, all of the stuff that an aspirational mother should be using. 0.85

00:09:34.300 So hello, everybody, hello, hello, shampoo, hello. 0.98

00:09:42.020 But we didn't really see pregnant women on television or in any media until 1953. 0.94

00:09:49.380 That's when Lucille Ball got pregnant in real life. 0.84

00:09:52.860 Ricky, this is it.

00:09:55.980 And Lucy and her husband Desi Arnaz, those media geniuses, they decided to write it into their show.

00:10:03.400 The scripts never actually mentioned the word pregnant.

00:10:06.340 Because, ugh, pregnancy. 1.00

00:10:08.920 Carrot Top Lucy Ricardo is infanticipating. 1.00

00:10:12.680 Oh, isn't that what? 0.87

00:10:14.240 This might have been the first major must-watch TV moment.

00:10:17.500 See, Desi and Lucy scheduled Real Life Lucy's C-section

00:10:20.660 for the same day that Television Lucy was set to give birth.

00:10:24.640 Almost 75% of the American television-watching population

00:10:28.340 tuned into that episode.

00:10:30.060 That's 44 million people.

00:10:32.580 More people were talking about Lucy giving birth than were talking about the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

00:10:40.360 The world and we have passed the midway point.

00:10:43.820 The podcast Planet Money actually has an amazing entire episode about this part of Lucy's life.

00:10:49.040 So listen to that if you're curious for more.

00:10:51.560 But for our purposes, this is where things begin.

00:10:54.900 This is where Lucy influenced influence.

00:10:57.260 friends. Lucy and Desi began working with brands to sell you all of the baby things that you saw

00:11:03.840 on the show. The very first issue of TV Guide featured a cover photo of newborn Desi Arnaz

00:11:09.760 Jr. The caption was, Lucy's $50 million baby. Maybe that's the start of mothers influencing

00:11:17.780 other mothers to buy things. To be fair, we saw a wide array of mothers on TV in the 70s and 80s. 1.00

00:11:26.620 We saw single moms. 0.99

00:11:28.140 We saw messy moms. 1.00

00:11:30.440 Sometimes there were no moms at all. 1.00

00:11:32.700 That's when motherhood started to evolve. 0.99

00:11:35.140 And not for the better.

00:11:36.880 When my mom and her friends were parenting us,

00:11:39.120 we're Gen X and the early millennials.

00:11:41.280 They all sat around smoking

00:11:42.540 while we recklessly ran around the neighborhood,

00:11:44.840 maybe coming home at dinnertime.

00:11:51.800 But in the 90s, 0.91

00:11:53.460 moms were given a message that they had to do more.

00:11:56.300 That's when moms were told they had to mom harder.

00:11:59.540 That momming was a full-time job even when you had a full-time job. 0.94

00:12:03.180 That you had to give your children your undivided attention all the time 0.99

00:12:06.420 or they'd grow up to be sociopaths that skinned the neighbor's rabbits.

00:12:11.220 Also, everyone quit smoking.

00:12:14.040 Claire Kane Miller of the New York Times summed this up beautifully in an NPR interview. 1.00

00:12:19.200 Women's labor force participation, the share of women who are working outside the home,

00:12:23.620 plateaued in the 90s.

00:12:24.920 And one of the reasons is that parenting has become harder.

00:12:29.240 It's become more time intensive.

00:12:31.020 It's become more expensive.

00:12:33.440 Parents are expected to do more.

00:12:35.240 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.

00:12:43.920 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.

00:12:49.140 There was never enough time.

00:12:51.540 Moms were lonely and stressed and exhausted.

00:12:54.320 They needed help, but their friends were lonely and stressed and exhausted too.

00:12:58.840 Who the hell could they talk to?

00:13:00.280 Who had time?

00:13:03.060 Well, by the 90s, they could go online.

00:13:06.460 Call now for America Online, a new way to use your computer to communicate.

00:13:10.920 So now we're at the turn of another century.

00:13:14.460 Blogging sites like Blogger and LiveJournal were just gaining steam.

00:13:18.420 But take a second and look up the history of blogging on Wikipedia.

00:13:23.600 There's absolutely no mention of mom bloggers.

00:13:26.540 In fact, there's hardly any women mentioned at all.

00:13:30.040 I want to point that out.

00:13:31.320 Because how often have women and other overlooked people gone back to history and said,

00:13:36.100 Huh, we were there.

00:13:38.640 Where'd you put us?

00:13:40.120 It all depends on who's writing the history, my friends.

00:13:44.720 We've gone through a hundred years of history now. 0.97

00:13:48.200 First women influencing women in real life. 0.98

00:13:50.600 Then in the pages of a magazine. 0.99

00:13:52.380 then Lucy licensing all of her baby things on television. 0.99

00:13:56.540 Women flocked to the internet in those early days because they were hungry to tell their stories.

00:14:01.200 It was always about community.

00:14:02.920 And it was always about how can we work together to help each other and support each other

00:14:08.140 and be a shoulder to cry on or to help me figure out what the heck to cook with these chicken breasts tonight.

00:14:12.780 That's Cooper Monroe. 1.00

00:14:14.780 She's an influencing marketing guru. 0.97

00:14:17.080 That is a title. 1.00

00:14:17.760 That is a thing that people are these days.

00:14:20.060 Today, Cooper is the founder and CEO of something called The Motherhood.

00:14:24.700 It's an agency that connects mom influencers with brands. 0.69

00:14:28.080 But back in the beginning of the 2000s, Cooper had just left her fancy corporate PR job in New York City. 0.96

00:14:33.660 She moved home to Pittsburgh to raise her young kids.

00:14:36.020 And once she got there, she needed something to do.

00:14:38.440 So she started freelancing for the local newspaper and did a little blogging on the side.

00:14:43.760 Cooper was one of the early mom bloggers she won't read about in Wikipedia.

00:14:47.880 But at the same time she was blogging,

00:14:49.960 I was running around the Lower East Side with men who do get the credit.

00:14:53.680 In the early 2000s, I spent most of my time in bars

00:14:56.300 listening to those guys talk all about blogging

00:14:58.640 and Gawker and MySpace and Foursquare

00:15:01.280 and how they were changing the face of politics,

00:15:04.160 all while watching them do bad karaoke and a lot of drugs.

00:15:08.360 Or as Cooper puts it,

00:15:10.000 there were a lot of young white guys

00:15:12.180 writing blogs about politics and technology. 1.00

00:15:15.040 online they were all buttoned up and serious but in real life they were a fucking mess 0.97

00:15:20.100 now in real life it was the women who were trying to hold it together but online they 0.98

00:15:24.800 were allowed to be a mess the sad truth is that no one was taking them seriously

00:15:30.280 here's cooper again they were talking so honestly from their soul and from their heart and telling

00:15:39.040 these incredibly beautiful, moving, inspiring, funny, hilarious stories that were somewhat

00:15:45.940 irreverent, sometimes train wrecks, but boy, you couldn't turn away.

00:15:50.580 You know, these storytellers, these bloggers that soon became called condescendingly mommy

00:15:56.480 bloggers started to create a very powerful community.

00:16:01.280 There was no social media.

00:16:02.260 There's no Twitter, no Facebook, no Pinterest.

00:16:04.480 Instagram wasn't even a glimmer in anybody's eye.

00:16:06.560 But in the comment sections, we're turning into these tiny little worlds that had ongoing conversations and mini dramas and all the other things in between.

00:16:17.600 We may not have our mom and our aunt, our cousins sitting around the dinner table with us drinking a cup of coffee.

00:16:22.980 And we may not have neighbors we know, but we can find people we can connect with and get information from and get support from online.

00:16:30.580 in the first decade of the 21st century the mom blogging community grew into its own mini social

00:16:37.320 network complete with its own celebrities one of the first big stars one of those train wrecks

00:16:43.460 was heather armstrong the deuce i freaking loved the deuce i didn't have kids and i still love the

00:16:49.860 deuce she was an ex-mormon and she blogged about sowing her wild oats as a 20-something ex-mormon 1.00

00:16:56.020 living in LA. She talked about this in an interview with Lance Armstrong. I don't think

00:17:00.580 they're related. And then when I had my baby, like my traffic tripled in a day and they were

00:17:06.900 like, Oh, she has a kid. And is she going to talk about having a kid? Like she normally talks about

00:17:11.760 life. And that's exactly what I did because I hated what was going on. I mean, I had really

00:17:18.460 bad postpartum depression and I had no idea what I was doing. This kind of honesty is amazing.

00:17:26.020 saying, I started blogging about motherhood because I was lost.

00:17:29.920 I don't feel like we see that today when we look at the internet.

00:17:34.480 Heather Armstrong and her blog, The Deuce, were considered the height of early mom blogging.

00:17:39.140 But even then, this was far from being an industry. 1.00

00:17:43.060 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

00:17:56.020 So now we've gone from picture-perfect moms in magazines to larger-than-life mothers on TV. 1.00

00:18:03.100 And then the internet allowed moms to commiserate about what a mess their real lives were, how hard it all was.

00:18:10.440 One of the women doing that was Natalie Lovin.

00:18:14.200 How happy are you that you're not a mom influencer in the time of coronavirus?

00:18:18.500 Oh my gosh, you know, I was thinking about this just yesterday.

00:18:21.040 I would have to be like live streaming things and coming up with like work out with me or I mean like the possibilities for content right now are endless and that would be exhausting.

00:18:32.240 This is the time to be a private citizen.

00:18:36.720 That's Natalie.

00:18:37.960 I talked to her back in March of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic, back when we all thought we'd just be hoarding toilet paper for two weeks.

00:18:45.920 For a lot of Natalie's adulthood, she wasn't a private citizen.

00:18:50.100 She was a weird kind of celebrity on the internet.

00:18:52.960 A mom blogger, and then a mom influencer on Instagram. 0.99

00:18:56.400 You might know her by two different names.

00:18:58.540 Nat the Fat Rat, which was her original blog,

00:19:01.240 or Hey Natalie Jean, which was her Instagram account.

00:19:04.620 She started writing on the internet in the early 2000s,

00:19:07.520 just like Cooper Monroe.

00:19:08.640 And she did it for the same reason.

00:19:10.600 She was lonely and she craved community.

00:19:12.940 So it was 2003, and George Bush was president.

00:19:17.600 I had just gotten married and was working in, actually, Lake Oswego, Oregon, with my husband at the time, Brandon.

00:19:27.960 And it was one of those office jobs where you're really bored a lot.

00:19:32.140 And so I had discovered blogging.

00:19:34.580 Blogging cut through Natalie's loneliness and depression.

00:19:37.820 Think of blogging like Zoloft before everyone, including me, was taking Zoloft.

00:19:42.660 She was trying to get pregnant and it wasn't working, but she didn't have anyone to talk about it with.

00:19:46.660 We had a strong community, actually, of those early days. Suddenly I had like hundreds of readers and I was getting hundreds of comments on posts. My husband was thrilled. He thought it was the coolest thing. He's like, wow, my wife is a celebrity or something. So yeah, those things were really fun.

00:20:03.960 And it was a real lifeline for me, too, because I was infertile for so long and had found other bloggers who were also infertile going through the same things as me.

00:20:11.800 So I was able to, like, announce my pregnancy on the blog and everyone was really excited.

00:20:16.120 It was a really fun time.

00:20:17.220 Up until that point, I mean, we had figured out how to make some money with our blogs kind of by working with, like, independent Etsy sellers or other blogs who wanted to, like, sponsor you, quote unquote, by paying 50 bucks and then you put up their banner ad.

00:20:32.200 In the beginning of blogging, banner ads were a blogger's only income stream.

00:20:36.080 50 bucks here, 100 bucks there.

00:20:38.640 Some of the bigger sites like The Deuce were getting paid thousands,

00:20:41.640 and they started actually supporting writers.

00:20:43.820 But a lot of these mom bloggers were writing reviews of products, 0.99

00:20:47.140 or they were taking pictures of products. 1.00

00:20:49.080 They were essentially giving companies free advertising.

00:20:51.800 When Huck was born, it just exploded.

00:20:53.760 I was getting all this attention from stroller companies and, you know,

00:20:59.040 skip hop and here, try this, here, try that. Do you need a breast pump? Do you need this? 0.99

00:21:03.560 People sending me things. A lot of companies thought they could just throw free product at

00:21:08.520 women because mom blogging was women's work. It was obviously something that women wanted to do 1.00

00:21:14.560 out of the goodness of their own hearts. Because women are good people. We just like to do things 1.00

00:21:20.020 for other people. Now, if men were running those blogs, no one ever would have thought they'd work 0.75

00:21:25.420 for free shit. It really preys on women in a lot of the same ways that I think MLMs do, 1.00

00:21:29.840 multi-level marketing schemes, because you're approaching women who are primarily stay-at-home

00:21:34.700 moms. So you can say in a casual way, I know you don't take this seriously. So how about if you

00:21:39.700 just, you know, take this 12th set of pots and pans and do this? And all of us were willing to

00:21:45.880 be like, oh yeah, okay, that's kind of fun. Why not? But these gifts were not paying Natalie's

00:21:50.200 bills. And after a while, something clicked. One of the bloggers that I read, Gabby Blair,

00:21:56.580 who does Design Mom, she's an amazing, amazing force of a woman. And she started writing 0.81

00:22:01.960 occasionally about how, hey, we should be asking for money. We did have this sense that we were

00:22:07.040 kind of creating an environment for everyone else. I love Gabby Blair. I've followed Design

00:22:13.760 Mom forever. But until Natalie told me this, I had no idea how instrumental she was in getting

00:22:19.640 moms paid. My mind, which is, I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur, starts going, okay, well,

00:22:27.220 I could really provide a value for a shop that's trying to launch or some, you know,

00:22:32.120 a product that's trying to launch. Gabby's one of the women responsible for getting mom blogging 0.99

00:22:36.560 taken seriously. She's a Mormon mom of five, and she was an art director in New York when she went

00:22:42.040 on maternity leave with her fifth kid. That's when she started Design Mom. I'd had enough babies at

00:22:47.120 this point to know that I can absolutely go crazy on maternity leave with all the hormones and the

00:22:52.840 postpartum depression and everything if I'm not doing something really creative. But I needed

00:22:58.140 something that didn't require me to be pretty and showered and out of the house that I could really

00:23:02.440 do when I had time, which might be in the middle of the night when I was up nursing or might be

00:23:06.940 when the baby's napping. So it occurred to me blogging could fit that bill.

00:23:12.640 One day, Gabby did a giveaway.

00:23:14.980 It was a pair of earrings that she got from a friend of a friend.

00:23:18.220 She did it because she wanted to grow engagement.

00:23:20.540 She wanted people to comment on her posts.

00:23:22.780 And they did. 0.95

00:23:24.940 They wanted those earrings.

00:23:27.100 All of a sudden, Gabby could see the impact she was having on her audience.

00:23:30.720 The commercial impact.

00:23:32.340 It's really where my mind started going,

00:23:35.360 oh, maybe I could turn this into something.

00:23:38.460 Maybe this could be a job.

00:23:40.200 Maybe there's a business here.

00:23:41.880 not just a fun outlet, a creative outlet.

00:23:46.160 Ultimately, I never went back to the office

00:23:48.880 after that maternity leave.

00:23:50.700 The blog took off.

00:23:53.300 And in 2010, it was providing full-time income.

00:23:57.020 I signed with an ad network.

00:23:58.960 It was called Federated Media.

00:24:01.480 That was definitely a game changer

00:24:03.160 because it was like legit full-time income.

00:24:06.200 There's been a few sort of heydays of blogging

00:24:08.140 and that 2010 era was definitely one of them.

00:24:11.880 Cooper Munro was part of that heyday too. After she'd started blogging during my Lower East Side

00:24:18.220 party days, by 2010, she was pushing for women in the motherhood network to get paid 0.99

00:24:22.860 for working with brands. We started working with a lot of major brands who were testing

00:24:27.300 the waters, dipping their toe in. One thing that we did from the outset is insisted and

00:24:33.520 had never veered from that we were going to pay the women to do this and found that it was vital

00:24:41.700 that they were provided an income for all that they were going to have to do. 1.00

00:24:46.780 There's overhead and infrastructure and babysitters and gas and time and effort.

00:24:52.060 And there was pushback at the beginning, certainly.

00:24:54.880 But at the end of the day, they are doing work.

00:24:58.020 They're creating something that is of value.

00:25:01.060 And therefore, they need to be compensated for it.

00:25:05.200 Now that that is kind of an industry standard,

00:25:07.600 but there were many, many years where that was a real struggle,

00:25:11.300 a real debate. Cooper, Natalie, Gabby, and dozens of other women, they all stood their

00:25:19.280 ground. They all said, we're going to get paid or we're not going to do this. In that 0.96

00:25:24.180 era, right around 2010, that marked the rise of sponsored blog content. That means companies

00:25:31.140 paying bloggers to write about their products, to integrate them into their editorial. All

00:25:36.720 of today's mom influencers have these women to thank for the business model that pays 1.00

00:25:40.520 their bills. But something else was on the horizon. Something that would change absolutely

00:25:46.500 everything about how women made money on the internet. But first, a quick break. 0.98

00:26:03.020 Ten years ago, Instagram slammed into our world like a tsunami of jelly beans.

00:26:08.780 It is no understatement to say that it completely changed the way a lot of us live.

00:26:14.040 And if you were a mom who wrote things on the internet back then, it completely changed how you worked.

00:26:19.680 Sometimes for the better, at least at first.

00:26:23.060 When Huck was about a month and a half, I think, Instagram happened.

00:26:27.180 That's Natalie again.

00:26:28.680 And just like she was with blogging, Natalie was quick to see the potential in Instagram.

00:26:32.440 A friend once looked online, you can see what download you were for Instagram,

00:26:36.280 and I was under the one million mark

00:26:37.900 and he's an app developer

00:26:38.940 and he thought that was very impressive.

00:26:41.800 I was right there in the beginning.

00:26:46.740 Glennis.

00:26:47.620 So.

00:26:48.620 Can you believe that Instagram

00:26:50.000 has been around for 10 years now?

00:26:51.600 It's been a decade,

00:26:52.540 a decade since Instagram

00:26:53.700 first completely changed all of our lives.

00:26:56.260 It's wild because on the one hand,

00:26:58.000 you think it's been around forever.

00:26:59.480 And on the other hand,

00:27:01.180 the record of our lives

00:27:02.620 only starts somewhat recently.

00:27:05.420 And if you were a grown up when it arrived, it was such a novel thing.

00:27:09.480 Sometimes when I scroll all the way back on my Instagram and I remember how revolutionary 0.51

00:27:14.760 filters were and they were so much fun, especially if you grew up in the heyday of women's magazines,

00:27:22.000 you know, you could like change the lighting and you could smooth out your skin and you 0.51

00:27:25.340 could accentuate your features.

00:27:26.480 And it was like, oh, I just didn't know my right angles.

00:27:29.900 Like a 40s movie star, like Ingrid Bergman was only photographed from one side of her face.

00:27:35.520 Like it all suddenly made sense.

00:27:37.040 And you're like, it felt like so much fun and so much control and so much like, oh, now I can edit myself and the world I live in.

00:27:47.420 It was really joyful.

00:27:48.380 And suddenly our lives kind of did look like a magazine photo shoot.

00:27:51.880 We put on the Nashville filter.

00:27:53.700 I was a Valencia person.

00:27:55.460 I was a Sierra person.

00:27:57.340 Oh, yeah.

00:27:58.040 It says a lot about you.

00:27:59.080 It does.

00:27:59.440 it's like a horoscope. I talked to Sarah Fryer and she's this Instagram historian. She wrote

00:28:06.360 like this definitive history of Instagram actually called No Filter. And she said something that

00:28:14.460 really stuck with me, that this has been a decade of completely reshaping what we value

00:28:20.620 in our society? Ten years of reshaping who we aspire to be, how people judge their relevance

00:28:30.360 in society. This has been an app that has so shifted our sense of self and our measures of

00:28:39.320 success in our modern world. What filters have done is they've trained us to accept that it's

00:28:46.720 possible on Instagram to portray your life as more beautiful or perfect than it actually is.

00:28:52.040 Everything we put there has a strategic nature to it. It is something that is polished or

00:29:00.260 beautified beyond what our regular lives are. And so is it still art or is it an ad?

00:29:10.100 Instagram was never set up to be an advertising platform. The adorable little man founders of

00:29:15.380 Instagram wanted to create a platform for photography, for art, a way to let normal

00:29:20.820 people take professional-looking photos that looked way better than real life. But in the

00:29:25.420 beginning, there was no way to link these pictures to sell anything. The founders actually thought

00:29:29.460 ads were pretty gross. The Instagram founders initially were a little bit horrified by this.

00:29:36.240 Having billboards across this beautiful art space that was Instagram would just make it

00:29:43.220 completely unusable, they feared. But like most people in Silicon Valley, they eventually began

00:29:48.940 to think about the bottom line. By 2014, Instagram had 300 million active users, and the co-founder

00:29:55.420 Kevin Systrom finally admitted that Instagram could be good for advertising. What we should do

00:30:00.440 is take it slowly, decide which advertisers will set the bar high, which I think you've seen with

00:30:05.420 companies like Hollister, Ben & Jerry's, Lexus. Those companies, I think, get Instagram because

00:30:11.340 they have an organic presence. And what that does is it creates a really wonderful like loop. It's

00:30:16.540 a feedback loop. And I think that's created a virtuous cycle. But he still didn't want ads that

00:30:20.720 looked like ads, not like the in-your-face shit that was on Facebook. By the way, this is just 0.99

00:30:25.620 two years after Instagram was acquired by Facebook. Systrom talked about ads on Instagram in a CNBC

00:30:31.240 interview with Julia Boorstin. When you open up a Vogue magazine and you flip through and you see

00:30:36.620 beautiful advertising and beautiful content. That's the type of feeling we want to evoke.

00:30:41.120 So we've stayed away from some of the other stuff up until now, but I won't count it out.

00:30:45.660 It all goes back to Vogue, doesn't it? This is when perfection started to creep back into the

00:30:52.680 influencing world. When internet moms stopped showing their messy lives and started displaying 1.00

00:30:57.860 beautiful magazine-style lives. Just like at the end of the 19th century, history repeats itself. 0.92

00:31:04.200 so really he was fine with the fakery the manipulation that people were doing with

00:31:11.820 branded content as long as they weren't explicitly saying buy this thing for 50 bucks because who

00:31:18.680 wants to be sold so directly to and so that's how it really evolved it was this like very subtle

00:31:25.500 almost unclear whether it was an ad or not and in that way it was more effective

00:31:30.900 and so I think that that vibe really shaped the influencer industry to where people would tout

00:31:40.440 products alongside their audiences but they wouldn't necessarily say this is an ad they

00:31:47.820 would say I shot this with my Samsung camera they wouldn't tell you that Samsung paid them

00:31:53.280 to do that that was something that influencers didn't think was unethical because they would say

00:31:58.520 oh, I would never work with brands that I didn't personally like.

00:32:02.600 But everyone has a price.

00:32:05.720 And everyone needs to pay the bills.

00:32:08.820 This kind of advertising had to be more compelling than your regular TV ad.

00:32:12.800 Harder to look away from because there was so much else to look away to.

00:32:16.060 They were much closer to the glossy Vogue ads.

00:32:18.800 And the genius thing that Instagram influencers did

00:32:21.440 was craft advertisements that didn't look at all like advertisements.

00:32:25.840 They just looked like life.

00:32:27.040 an airbrushed and beautiful sort of life.

00:32:31.040 And this new world of sponsored content

00:32:32.980 was great for Natalie Levin.

00:32:36.020 Natalie's family needed money.

00:32:37.720 Her side hustle could no longer just be an adorable hobby

00:32:40.020 because they lived in New York

00:32:41.260 and her husband had 200 grand in student loan debt.

00:32:44.720 The good news is that Natalie was ready-made for Instagram.

00:32:48.120 She was cute.

00:32:49.120 Her kid was cute.

00:32:50.060 Her husband was cute.

00:32:51.000 Her house was cute.

00:32:52.160 Instagram was a platform that loved cute.

00:32:54.460 suddenly I was learning that everything I saw was content that changed the way I did everything

00:33:03.020 because now I wasn't picking bedding because it was what I liked I was picking bedding because

00:33:07.020 it was what I liked and also does anyone else have anything like this um how is this gonna

00:33:11.920 photograph do I have a link can I link to this and get an affiliate off of it I was walking around

00:33:18.160 New York City all the time so I was in great shape clothes were like sent to me all the time

00:33:23.100 So I was always playing dress up with things.

00:33:24.820 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.

00:33:31.140 Side note, ask accountant if I can write off house cleaner when I become a mom influencer. 0.93

00:33:38.820 A big sea change was when talent agencies decided to pick up bloggers.

00:33:44.480 They were just expanding what they could represent in the media.

00:33:47.820 I don't even know what kind of blogger you would have called me.

00:33:49.840 Now they call it lifestyle bloggers.

00:33:51.320 I was told I was a mommy blogger.

00:33:53.100 this is when things started to take an ugly turn for natalie

00:33:58.180 when mom influencing was no longer fun no longer fun for natalie but also no longer fun for a lot

00:34:05.720 of women instagram ruined women for a time it kind of felt like i had just like peeled off my

00:34:12.020 skin and i didn't exist anywhere because i was everywhere don't worry you're going to hear that

00:34:17.340 whole story from natalie in a later episode but right now i want to talk about the agents

00:34:22.540 This switch about seven years ago when Hollywood agents started picking up a new breed of client.

00:34:27.760 There were more celebrity magazines than ever.

00:34:30.180 I know, I made them.

00:34:32.100 There were more celebrity websites than ever.

00:34:35.120 So to fill that giant content hole, there had to be more celebrities than ever.

00:34:39.520 And it was as if those of us who worked in the gossip industry just created them from scratch.

00:34:44.760 Suddenly you were reading about socialites, reality television stars, the ninth girl thrown off the bachelorette.

00:34:50.900 All of these new celebrities immediately got agents and started selling new things.

00:34:55.480 And this is when we started seeing the rise of personal branding as a business. 0.95

00:35:00.780 Paris Hilton, God freaking bless her, she really pioneered this.

00:35:04.840 But the Kardashian clan, they perfected it.

00:35:08.120 They created an empire.

00:35:10.220 And now in 2013, 2014, mom bloggers and influencers were also becoming celebrities.

00:35:15.940 They had a following too, and people were buying the things they recommended.

00:35:20.160 Agents wanted some of that money.

00:35:22.240 Here's Cooper again.

00:35:23.840 The stakes were so high and the expectations were so high, that got kind of a little out of control.

00:35:29.800 It was funny because the corporate angle was reach, reach, reach, scale, scale, scale.

00:35:34.760 How do you scale this?

00:35:35.760 I mean, there was endless amounts of conversation around how do you scale, quote unquote, the mommy bloggers.

00:35:41.340 And I read that in 2017 or 2018, 475 influencer agencies opened up in the United States.

00:35:47.240 some insane number like that. We signed an influencer exclusively as their agent,

00:35:53.760 kind of on a whim. And we kicked butt with that first influencer. And that first influencer,

00:35:59.700 within the first three months, brought in close to 20 influencers.

00:36:03.160 That's Joe Gagliese. He's the founder of something called Viral Nation. They're another

00:36:08.380 influencer agency that came on the scene about seven years ago.

00:36:11.340 We were kind of off to the races, really at a great time when there was only a couple

00:36:14.360 companies representing influencers. From there, it just kind of grew exponentially over the first

00:36:18.860 year. We were representing hundreds of influencers and working through all these deals for them. And

00:36:23.780 just like Brad Pitt would have an agent, we were doing the same thing.

00:36:26.860 Brands were hungry for moms. They couldn't get enough of them. 1.00

00:36:30.060 You know, these mom influencers and lifestyle influencers really represented a key component

00:36:34.120 for what brands were looking for. Mom influencers, as you know, in just general marketing are a much

00:36:40.240 more lucrative category than millennials, right? They have a lot more buying power. They can 1.00

00:36:45.040 represent, you know, larger brands. They're usually very PG rated in their content. Good brands really

00:36:50.900 love authentic moms. Moms are generally, you know, in the marketing world, seen as the anchor of the

00:36:56.620 household decision makers. You know, they play a lot of roles, not only in the child's life, 0.97

00:37:02.860 but in their family life and in their purchase decisions and in lifestyle and fashion and beauty.

00:37:07.560 To put that in perspective, moms make about 85% of household purchases in the U.S. 0.99

00:37:13.120 They have a yearly buying power of approximately $2.4 trillion. 1.00

00:37:17.540 That is some power, bitches. 1.00

00:37:20.140 You know, anytime a brand can get new exposure to the mom space in a way that's unique and organic, 1.00

00:37:26.800 they're going to take it, which is why I think the influencer mom space really evolved pretty quickly.

00:37:32.720 Suddenly, there were even business conferences 0.96

00:37:34.640 where moms and brands could collide in person and cut deals. 1.00

00:37:40.480 Mom 2.0 is the best conference for women in social media. 0.84

00:37:45.200 This is where the professional storytellers are.

00:37:47.240 This is where I get to hear not just what their stories are,

00:37:50.240 but what their relationship is to their stories,

00:37:52.620 how they're making a business out of their stories.

00:37:55.180 Gabby Blair of Design Mom,

00:37:57.280 she was instrumental in helping launch Mom 2.0

00:37:59.980 and her own conference, Alt Summit.

00:38:02.100 And from the very start, again, she put her foot down. 0.64

00:38:04.760 She told brands that if they wanted to come to the conference, they had better be ready to pay these mothers. 0.96

00:38:09.920 We were really careful about the sponsors we would bring. 0.98

00:38:12.840 Part of the vetting process was, are you ready to work with these women? 1.00

00:38:17.120 Are you ready to pay them? 1.00

00:38:18.860 Of course, you're welcome to give them swag like any conference sponsor likes to do.

00:38:22.880 Wonderful.

00:38:23.960 But are you ready to hire them? 1.00

00:38:27.260 And women would leave Alt Summit with contracts, with contacts that they would then, you know, 1.00

00:38:33.960 get sponsorships that would last, you know, it might be their income for the year.

00:38:37.260 Like it was serious business going down.

00:38:39.660 There are serious contracts being made.

00:38:41.920 There are development deals happening.

00:38:43.640 People are going to get TV shows from this.

00:38:45.560 People are going to get contracts with Home Depot or Lowe's that are going to last years,

00:38:50.780 you know, a decade for some people at this point.

00:38:53.520 So Alt Summit was huge.

00:38:54.780 And I can say the same kind of parallel is happening at Mom 2.0.

00:39:00.080 For somebody who's interested in coming to Mom 2.0, I would say it's the best investment you can make in yourself.

00:39:07.200 That brings us to right now, a time when influencers on Instagram sell billions of dollars of products to women from a little machine that sits in the palm of their hands.

00:39:18.080 joe now that you've done your history work has it changed your feelings on getting involved in

00:39:31.100 this world or does it give you a clearer idea of what you are undertaking i think what it's

00:39:37.720 showing me is that this is a job this is a content job this is a world of women entrepreneurs who

00:39:45.000 are essentially creating magazines for you every day. 0.96

00:39:48.180 Anyone with a big following on Instagram

00:39:49.720 is essentially creating their own media empire.

00:39:53.620 You have launched magazines before

00:39:55.720 and you've launched magazines about celebrities.

00:39:57.580 Like you have a very comprehensive understanding

00:40:00.460 of what packaging, branding, storytelling, marketing involves.

00:40:07.240 So does understanding Instagram in this way

00:40:09.900 make you more interested in getting into this world

00:40:13.620 or less? More because the money that's being made off Instagram is money that used to be made

00:40:20.600 in magazines. It's money that I used to make and I've applied for jobs in magazines now and I have

00:40:27.140 not gotten them. So yeah, I want to do this. I actually, I blurted out to Cooper Monroe. I was

00:40:35.000 like, do you think I can do this? What do you think about me? And she was so nice in her answer.

00:40:40.840 This is what she told me.

00:40:42.660 Well, I mean, Joe, what I've seen and heard from you is that you care deeply about women

00:40:47.820 and about telling the stories of women and about empowering women and lifting them up.

00:40:53.580 And that feels like it's a place of real passion and importance for you.

00:40:57.540 You telling these stories using a platform where you've got people showing up every day

00:41:01.900 is very powerful because you come from a place where you have to tell it.

00:41:07.000 It's what drives you.

00:41:08.440 That's why you're on the planet.

00:41:09.340 I don't know. I know it's kind of a Pollyannish thing to say, but for somebody to feel fulfilled

00:41:16.960 in doing this, sharing what you know and care about with people is where you're going to find

00:41:23.080 that. And then the monetizing can follow, but that can't be what's leading you there.

00:41:30.940 I've got stories to tell. I know how to build a magazine. I know how to build a brand.

00:41:36.180 I'm less comfortable with putting my face out there all the time.

00:41:40.980 I like writing stories about other people.

00:41:42.820 And I think the biggest hurdle is going to be writing about myself.

00:41:48.000 There's also this other really interesting thing.

00:41:50.360 When Cooper said, you have a story to tell, you have a story to share.

00:41:54.200 Edgar Allan Poe once said something, and I'm going to bastardize this quote,

00:41:57.920 that people wanted to read short stories because they just didn't have the attention span to read a novel anymore.

00:42:04.300 And I'm going to take that even further and say, we don't have the attention span to read a short story or a news article, but we can read an Instagram caption. This is where we're at in terms of content. And so because I've got these stories to tell, there's no reason I shouldn't get paid for it or I shouldn't try to get paid for it. But I, but I genuinely have no idea what the fuck I'm doing.

00:42:25.860 well joe holder of multiple master's degrees if only is there like a school somewhere that 0.74

00:42:35.200 can teach you i feel like that's the next logical step for you is to go to school for this funny

00:42:39.900 you mentioned that gleness i'm actually sort of joking but is there there's a place that you can

00:42:47.100 go to learn to be an influencer and every influencer i've talked to has called it the

00:42:52.120 Harvard of social media influencing.

00:42:55.240 Are you kidding right now?

00:42:56.340 I'm not kidding you.

00:42:57.600 And next week I'm going to go to the Harvard of social media influencing

00:43:01.040 because I love school.

00:43:02.960 I cannot wait to see Joe at influencing Ivy League.

00:43:09.180 The influencing Ivy League.

00:43:11.460 What?

00:43:12.300 Like it's hard?

00:43:22.120 Under the Influence is reported and hosted by me, Joe Piazza.

00:43:44.300 Our story editor is Glynis McNichol.

00:43:46.660 Emily Marinoff is our producer.

00:43:48.440 Production assistance came from Mary Du.

00:43:51.380 Sound design by Emily Marinoff, Jessica Kreinchich, and Julian Willer.

00:43:55.600 Our theme and additional music was composed by Jessica Kreinchich.

00:43:58.800 Additional research was conducted by Jocelyn Sears.

00:44:02.040 Julian Willer is our consulting producer, and Mangesh Hedikador is our executive producer.

00:44:06.760 And special thanks to Erin Kaufman, who was the wonderful voice of Thorstein Veblen,

00:44:11.720 and Sarah Fryer for her very comprehensive history of Instagram.

00:44:20.620 Thank you.

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - February 11, 2021

Women's Work

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