From Wired's Backchannel, July 14:
What do a Real Housewife, an Olympic athlete, and a doula have in common? They’re all being paid by an ad-tech startup as influencers—peddling not products but ideologies.
At first glance, the posts appeared to have nothing in common. A Philadelphia-area attorney who proffers financial advice urged her 1,700 Twitter followers to sign up for a credit union. A 23-year-old climate activist in Texas rallied her 49,000 fans on TikTok and Instagram to join a mailing list promoting Democrats in statewide offices. A physical therapist for the elderly in Florida prodded her 3,900 Instagram followers to sign a petition demanding that Congress pass paid medical leave, sharing the story of her grandmother’s battle with dementia. Each of these posts was funded by a well-heeled advocacy organization: the Credit Union National Association, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, and UsAgainstAlzheimer’s Action.
Even though none of the people reading these posts knew it, however, they were all made possible by the same company: Urban Legend, a small ad-tech startup operating out of a loft in Alexandria, Virginia.
Launched in 2020 by a pair of former Trump administration staffers, Urban Legend pledges on its website to “help brands run accountable and impactful influencer campaigns.” Its more comprehensive mission, one rarely articulated in public, is slightly more ambitious.
Staffed by a plucky 14-person team, Urban Legend keeps its largest asset carefully hidden away inside its servers: an army of 700 social media influencers who command varying degrees of allegiance from audiences that collectively number in the tens of millions. The company has painstakingly cultivated this roster to reflect every conceivable niche of society reflected on the internet: makeup artists, Nascar drivers, home improvement gurus, teachers, doulas, Real Housewives stars, mommy bloggers, NFL quarterbacks, Olympians, and the occasional Fox News pundit.
These influencers are paired with clients on Urban Legend’s private platform, the Exchange, where buyers spell out the parameters of the message they want to push to the public and set a budget. Influencers snatch the best available offers from a menu and are then free to craft the campaign’s message, molding it to the rhythms and vernacular of their followers. Clients only pay for each “conversion” an influencer nets—$1.25, say, for every follower who joins a newsletter. In two years, Urban Legend’s influencers have run more than 400 campaigns, connecting people to its clients millions of times. Henri Makembe, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist in Washington who has worked with Urban Legend several times, compared the concept to “unboxing” videos—when an influencer unwraps and showcases a product sent to them by a brand. Such product influencers are a $15 billion marketing industry. “Now we’re realizing, ‘Oh: We can do that with an idea,’” Makembe says.
This model is the brainchild of Urban Legend’s 35-year-old founder and CEO, Ory Rinat. Rinat spent the early part of his career working in Washington’s media circles before becoming director of digital strategy for the Trump White House. The idea for Urban Legend arose from many currents in American public life, including “the rise of influencer marketing, the increase in trust in those people, and also the rise of individuals to be their own media brand,” he says. In both retail and influencer politics, he says, small is big: “Our creators range from 3,000 to 14 million followers,” Rinat tells me, but the majority are “micro-influencers” (those with 100,000 or fewer followers) and “nano-influencers” (fewer than 10,000).
Like baseball, selling influence is a pastime that rarely gets reinvented. There are only so many ways to get a person to do the thing you want. In politics, the more solicitous methods include robocalls and email spam with increasingly audacious subject lines (“Hey, it’s Barack”). “The most impactful messaging strategies have always been the most personalized,” says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive campaign consultant based in California. Peer-to-peer outreach has long proven the most effective at persuading or mobilizing—appeals that create “the feeling like this is a real person talking to me.” Urban Legend’s approach reflects this insight, embracing influencers less as celebrity spokespeople than as peers for hire. If an influencer’s financial advice helped you save for a vacation or their fashion tips earned you compliments, maybe their view on the minimum wage, or critical race theory, is worth considering too. “To then have that person give you information about politics? That’s potentially an incredibly potent and powerful messenger,” says Shenker-Osorio.
But the rise of this new messenger has disquieted some. For one, it’s unclear whether influencers are following federal disclosure rules. And as at similar firms, the names of Urban Legend’s influencers and clients are a closely held secret—or were, until recently—creating the prospect of an internet flush with untraceable money, in which Americans can no longer tell an earnest opinion from a paid one. Initially, Rinat told me that the firm’s clients included a Fortune 50 tech company, a “major labor union,” an “environmental advocacy group,” and one “LGBTQ+ advocacy group.”
In Washington, there’s been a swell of interest in the influencer business, across the political spectrum. It bears the signs of an incipient arms race, much like the advent of super PACs a decade ago. Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley who has briefed the Biden administration on social media regulation, predicted that Urban Legend’s model will be recapitulated widely before the 2024 presidential election. “This is the future,” Farid told me....
....MUCH MORE
