Stop Making Children Advertise Your Stuff for Free
After being in the ballet world and on Instagram for a hot second, I've noticed some stuff that I find really appalling, but nothing gets my blood boiling like brands getting children to shill their products under the guise of making them "ambassadors" or "sponsored artists" or "affiliates." I hate it. I hate that ballet is turning fourteen year old girls into salespeople because they believe that being an influencer is super glamorous.
I won't lie--I fall for it too. I think I'm still an ambassador for a teeny tiny leotard brand and whenever a brand I like announces they're looking for "members to join the team" I get a little bit excited. Do I want free jewelry or free pointe shoes or prototype leotards? Uh....yeah? I like free things. I like attention on the internet. I like validation. I like the likes and the follows and the comments, even if they come from my mother.
However, I recently saw a post from a young girl I follow--an extraordinarily talented and intimidatingly driven and very sweet girl--of the stock photo of a ballet bag with a caption that read as the following:
"Wishlist Wednesday's: There are so many things on my [brand] list, but my top choice would be the [product name in full]. It's small and light weight and would allow me to fit so much into it- while keeping my items organized and safe."
The caption was followed by three hashtags regarding the brand and being a would-be ambassador. Tapping on one of the hashtags, I found other posts that said the brand's pointe shoes were "sparkling, perfumed and comfortable...when I wear new pairs...it's like a deep breath of fresh air" or girls expressing their excitement at being picked to continue to round 2 of the ambassador search.
Yes, this is mostly towards Gaynor Minden. @Gaynor Minden. What's good. You make great shoes but you can catch these hands.
Gaynor Minden isn't the only one. I see Russian Pointe doing this and I'm sure I'd see more if I had not unfollowed most brands months ago. (Full disclosure: I actually wear Gaynor-Minden pointe shoes. I have worn them exclusively for over two years. This is not brand-hate from an outsider.)
I feel like "grown up brands" that sell things like 𝓈𝓊𝓈𝓉𝒶𝒾𝓃𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝒿𝑒𝓌𝑒𝓁𝓇𝓎 or swimsuits or the dreaded 𝓕𝓲𝓽𝓣𝓮𝓪 always say "DM us to see if you'll be a good fit!!" or reach out with an email when they want to snag someone into being an unpaid salesperson, but ballet brands know they can get away with exploiting children's naivete. These kids don't know better. They just want social media fame and free things and that brand wants this skinny, bendy, adorable girl to be the face of their product. If these brands sold Fit Tea or some other strange detox product, I wouldn't be surprised to see a pre-pubescent 13 year old trying to get me to buy it, and I also wouldn't be surprised to see much of the Instagram ballet world excuse it, granted the child and the brand spun everything the right way.
This is how we end up with thirteen year olds as "brands" and verified personalities rather than just "students of dance" and I unfortunately believe that this is an American thing. Glance at any 13 year old American ballet student's Instagram profile page, and in their little bio, alongside every summer intensive they've ever attended and the corresponding year, you'll likely find two or so brands they represent, from movable circles of studio flooring to satin flower garlands to wrap around a bun. Tap on any bio of a Russian student at the Vaganova or Bolshoi academies and you'll see that, more often than not, their bio reads "ballet is my life" or some variant.
Most pieces written on Instagram's influence on ballet students is about the body--the weight, the lines, the aesthetic. You won't be as thin as her and that's fine, you're not hyperextended and that's fine, you don't have a 150 degree arabesque and that's fine, she's just showing you the very best moment of her photoshoot/video and that's not reality--all of these are excellent points, and ones that I strongly believe we need to remember, but I'm also concerned with the advertising angle of ballet Instagrams.
This is not necessarily anti-consumerist. I love me some tiny houses and Marie Kondo, but I also trawl Etsy for ballet skirts even when I have about eight and have a pretty extensive CD collection in the year of our lord 2019. I bought a leotard recently because ABT Corps de Ballet member Scout Forsythe wore it in an Instagram post. However, Scout has been working professionally since 2014 and lives in New York City alone and can make her own informed decisions as a professional dancer and adult, which I then in turn can put my trust in. Children are definitely intelligent and know what they like, but I hear more than one mother in the hallways of the conservatory talking about how many different brands and makes and models and versions of pointe shoes her daughter tried in the past two months and how she's still trying to see what works best for her feet. The girls who are applying for the opportunity to be brand ambassadors often times do not even use these shoes exclusively, and any posed, beautiful shot out in nature might be of her wearing the competitor's brand. She's likely a child, still waiting for the bones in her foot to settle, still deciding on which style of ballet she wants to pursue, maybe even deciding if she wants to pursue dance professionally at all, and is unfortunately choosing her tools of the trade on who will give her social media validation, rather than what's best for her body type and schedule. Is that how ballet students should be choosing their shoes? Is that how brands should be picking their ambassadors? Is that how brands should be selling their products? Via uninformed and inexperienced social media micro-influencers?
I don't really think so, and the fact that most Gaynor Girls or "Russian Pointe sponsored artists" are literally children with a social media account run by their parents because of their age is really sort of icky.
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Poisonous Language Used by Influencers by Hannah Louise Poston, a mindful consumerism advocate and beauty influencer known for her "no-buy year".
Child Advertisement Law and YouTube by Corridor Crew, a VFX and vlog production company that includes commentary on social media law and practices.
I won't lie--I fall for it too. I think I'm still an ambassador for a teeny tiny leotard brand and whenever a brand I like announces they're looking for "members to join the team" I get a little bit excited. Do I want free jewelry or free pointe shoes or prototype leotards? Uh....yeah? I like free things. I like attention on the internet. I like validation. I like the likes and the follows and the comments, even if they come from my mother.
However, I recently saw a post from a young girl I follow--an extraordinarily talented and intimidatingly driven and very sweet girl--of the stock photo of a ballet bag with a caption that read as the following:
"Wishlist Wednesday's: There are so many things on my [brand] list, but my top choice would be the [product name in full]. It's small and light weight and would allow me to fit so much into it- while keeping my items organized and safe."
The caption was followed by three hashtags regarding the brand and being a would-be ambassador. Tapping on one of the hashtags, I found other posts that said the brand's pointe shoes were "sparkling, perfumed and comfortable...when I wear new pairs...it's like a deep breath of fresh air" or girls expressing their excitement at being picked to continue to round 2 of the ambassador search.
The thing
is, in this post, there was something I found particularly heinous. The
way this brand chooses ambassadors is that they have a bunch of girls post on
Instagram about wanting to be an ambassador--talking about the products, how
great they are, how much they want to try them, etc. to see who does the
selling best. They compete for this with Instagram and other social media posts over a course of months, so even if they don't get to be ambassadors, even if they don't
get picked, they gave the brand like a month of free social media
advertising.
For a ballet brand--a brand ingrained in the visual arts, a brand that relies on devastatingly thin, gorgeous women posting pictures of themselves from all over the globe, a brand that knows that ballet Instagrams are followed by ballet students and vice versa, social media advertising is incredibly important. You can't just pay for a sponsored ad for your ballet wear brand and put your marketing in the hands of the Instagram algorithm. I know that! Instagram has tried to sell me everything from a private jet (I am an unemployed student) to marriage counselling (I have been single my whole life) to egg donation recruitment (no one wants my eyesight for their baby) to Birthright trips (I am Chinese-Irish). You cannot risk having Instagram show your very specific ballet wear ad on the feed of a 55 year old environmental engineer who maybe once took a ballet class when she was three and could never understand why you need different tights for performance, rehearsal, and recovery. It needs to be kept within the community. These children are doing it for the brands.
When I saw the post in question, it was so
awfully clear that it was not written by a child pining after a new
bag--for one thing, the hashtags had a tell-tale "and" in between the
last two, i.e. she was emailed instructions like "and remember at the end
put #hashtag #hashtag and #hashtag" and the phrasing itself--that the bag was lightweight and would keep her things organized and safe, was odd. I'm 25 years old, and I still think about the aesthetic appeal of the bag, the looks, the pattern, and then move on to if it can hold my stuff. I was also there for the switch in social media marketing from "this is a product that I like" to "this is a product I am getting paid to represent/would like to get paid to represent" and I can tell when I'm being sold to by someone inexperienced, and it's frankly disgusting. It's like some sort of terrible and
bizarre advertising Hunger Games and instead of getting dozens of couture gowns
and a new house and your life, you get some really cozy sweater tights.
Gaynor Minden isn't the only one. I see Russian Pointe doing this and I'm sure I'd see more if I had not unfollowed most brands months ago. (Full disclosure: I actually wear Gaynor-Minden pointe shoes. I have worn them exclusively for over two years. This is not brand-hate from an outsider.)
I feel like "grown up brands" that sell things like 𝓈𝓊𝓈𝓉𝒶𝒾𝓃𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝒿𝑒𝓌𝑒𝓁𝓇𝓎 or swimsuits or the dreaded 𝓕𝓲𝓽𝓣𝓮𝓪 always say "DM us to see if you'll be a good fit!!" or reach out with an email when they want to snag someone into being an unpaid salesperson, but ballet brands know they can get away with exploiting children's naivete. These kids don't know better. They just want social media fame and free things and that brand wants this skinny, bendy, adorable girl to be the face of their product. If these brands sold Fit Tea or some other strange detox product, I wouldn't be surprised to see a pre-pubescent 13 year old trying to get me to buy it, and I also wouldn't be surprised to see much of the Instagram ballet world excuse it, granted the child and the brand spun everything the right way.
This is how we end up with thirteen year olds as "brands" and verified personalities rather than just "students of dance" and I unfortunately believe that this is an American thing. Glance at any 13 year old American ballet student's Instagram profile page, and in their little bio, alongside every summer intensive they've ever attended and the corresponding year, you'll likely find two or so brands they represent, from movable circles of studio flooring to satin flower garlands to wrap around a bun. Tap on any bio of a Russian student at the Vaganova or Bolshoi academies and you'll see that, more often than not, their bio reads "ballet is my life" or some variant.
Most pieces written on Instagram's influence on ballet students is about the body--the weight, the lines, the aesthetic. You won't be as thin as her and that's fine, you're not hyperextended and that's fine, you don't have a 150 degree arabesque and that's fine, she's just showing you the very best moment of her photoshoot/video and that's not reality--all of these are excellent points, and ones that I strongly believe we need to remember, but I'm also concerned with the advertising angle of ballet Instagrams.
This is not necessarily anti-consumerist. I love me some tiny houses and Marie Kondo, but I also trawl Etsy for ballet skirts even when I have about eight and have a pretty extensive CD collection in the year of our lord 2019. I bought a leotard recently because ABT Corps de Ballet member Scout Forsythe wore it in an Instagram post. However, Scout has been working professionally since 2014 and lives in New York City alone and can make her own informed decisions as a professional dancer and adult, which I then in turn can put my trust in. Children are definitely intelligent and know what they like, but I hear more than one mother in the hallways of the conservatory talking about how many different brands and makes and models and versions of pointe shoes her daughter tried in the past two months and how she's still trying to see what works best for her feet. The girls who are applying for the opportunity to be brand ambassadors often times do not even use these shoes exclusively, and any posed, beautiful shot out in nature might be of her wearing the competitor's brand. She's likely a child, still waiting for the bones in her foot to settle, still deciding on which style of ballet she wants to pursue, maybe even deciding if she wants to pursue dance professionally at all, and is unfortunately choosing her tools of the trade on who will give her social media validation, rather than what's best for her body type and schedule. Is that how ballet students should be choosing their shoes? Is that how brands should be picking their ambassadors? Is that how brands should be selling their products? Via uninformed and inexperienced social media micro-influencers?
I don't really think so, and the fact that most Gaynor Girls or "Russian Pointe sponsored artists" are literally children with a social media account run by their parents because of their age is really sort of icky.
-
Poisonous Language Used by Influencers by Hannah Louise Poston, a mindful consumerism advocate and beauty influencer known for her "no-buy year".
Child Advertisement Law and YouTube by Corridor Crew, a VFX and vlog production company that includes commentary on social media law and practices.
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