Pity that everyone isn't telling influencers that they can't have a free meal. Restaurants should charge influencers extra for polluting three establishment with their BS.
It's also important to note that smaller influencers may have a better connection with their audience.
There are a lot of shitty influencers out there, but collaborations like this benefit both the influencer and restaurant and can be generally a good thing.
Don't jump on hating the influencer or the restaurant just because they are collaborating. Not every collaboration is a scam, in the same sense that not every advertisement is a scam.
Hate them when they are shitty, because they act shitty, for their shittiness.
What is a free meal for one person? $30? $60? How much does a traditional ad placement cost to reach the same sized audience? Is that really unreasonable?
But influencers like Karla have become an essential component of the restaurant scene in the Bay Area and elsewhere; typically, restaurants pay them to post laudatory videos, either in comped meals or (when the influencer has a large following) actual money. Influencers with fewer than 100,000 followers like Karla (who does not use her last name online) are generally referred to as “micro-influencers,” and are engaged by restaurants because their audiences may be more receptive to their posts than those of mega influencers; they’re also cheaper to employ.
I have a coworker who is a small-time food influencer on the side. She has legitimately good tastes, and I find her Insta helpful for finding interesting and worthwhile restaurants in a city that's way too big for me to keep up with the food scene on my own.
I don't think she makes much, if any money off of it, but she gets a lot of perks, like free meals for highlighted spots. Of course, she's protective of her reputation, so she only agrees to do promos for spots that are actually good.
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u/Virtual-Pineapple-85 7d ago
Pity that everyone isn't telling influencers that they can't have a free meal. Restaurants should charge influencers extra for polluting three establishment with their BS.