How This Digital Agency Is Cashing In on a New Kind of Celebrity Endorsement
Three days after time expired on Super Bowl XLIX, Oliver Luckett still can’t wrap his head around how badly they blew it. His frustration has nothing to do with the Seattle Seahawks snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and everything to do with halftime-show headliner Katy Perry’s failure to exploit her moment in the spotlight to connect with fans via social media.
In the hours leading up to her performance, which drew a record 118.5 million U.S. viewers, Perry tweeted only three times to her 65 million Twitter followers. Other social platforms got no love at all.
This, Luckett contends, is heresy. “Shame on her. Look at her Facebook page—not one mention of the Super Bowl! It’s unbelievable,” he says, shaking his head as he scrolls the MacBook screen in front of him. “The night of the Super Bowl, I sent her page to the execs at Universal [Music Group, Perry’s record company] and said, ‘Guys, y’all need to be fired. You’re embarrassing yourselves.’ Her fans wanted to interact with her. Where are the Instagram photos? Show me her inspirations. Show me something. Get people excited.”
Luckett knows that even the smallest scrap of content—a clever tweet, a Vine video, an image filtered through the Instagram prism—can have a massive and long-lasting impact across the social landscape. TheAudience, the Hollywood-based media publishing startup he founded in 2011, is cashing in on this fact with a new kind of celebrity endorsement that aligns corporate clients with social media tastemakers and trendsetters—the digital-savvy teens and twentysomethings who’ve leveraged YouTube, Snapchat and other platforms to catapult to global fame. Some are fashion models, some are DJs,
