Influencers are pretty ubiquitous nowadays — it seems like everyone and their cat and prairie dog (yes, their are prairie dog Instagram accounts), are influencers these days. And it’s fairly common knowledge that many social media influencers receive free product from brands in exchange for free exposure, a.k.a free advertising.
Of course, it was inevitable that influencers would eventually take advantage of this exchange, and that is exactly what one influencer tried to do, but failed at.
An influencer bride from the UK thought she could get away with requesting free wedding photos from a small business in exchange for brand exposure.
The wedding photography company Betrothed & Co posted the whole heated e-mail exchange in a Facebook post .
The bride’s publicist reached out to the company, writing that her client was hoping for a documentary style video leading up to the event in 2021 and on the actual day.
In exchange, the bride would provide “extensive” promotion to her 55,000 followers in the form of “Story Shout Outs” and offer a discount of 25% to her followers.
The photographer took the time to respond and laid it all out for Melissa in a blunt, yet respectful, way.
He pointed out the exploitative nature of the bride’s request, as they are a small business and that 55,000 followers isn’t that powerful to command a large reach.
They were not shy in bringing attention to the ridiculous 25% discount request for the bride’s followers.
And then there was a brief pause of calm before the storm, and I say brief because it took Melissa virtually no time to craft a response shortly after theirs.
Melissa had the audacity to call Laura and Frankie’s response abusive.
She also used manipulative tactics to try and scare them into agreeing to her requests and threatened to publicly shame them.
Well, Frankie was not having any of that, and he clapped back at Melissa HARD.
He was quick to point out contradictions and inconsistencies in the publicist’s e-mail, and was sure to let her know that she should be proof-reading her e-mails in the future.
Frankie does take a step back from his savage sarcasm to empathize with the bride, as his own mother unfortunately passed away due to her struggles with cancer.
But, leave it to Frankie to end this conversation with a bang — he asks who the influencer is after all of it!
It seems that the tables have turned for the influencer bride and her publicist, as their own threats backfired on them.
This certainly isn’t the exposure that an influencer would hope for!
