Posts Tagged ‘music’

So What’s the Big Deal About Influencer Marketing?

January 25, 2026

When I First Discovered the Power of Influencers

I will never forget the first time I saw someone playing slot machines on their own television. It was about five years ago, during Covid. I asked her if the site she was using was affiliated with a major casino, and if she knew what percentage of the money gambled was paid out in winnings.

My friend said that it was an offshore company that she didn’t know anything about and she wasn’t sure what the payoff rates were. I was flabbergasted that anyone would use their credit card to gamble when they had no assurance that it was a legitimate operation.

I tried to conceal my incredulity as I asked: “What reason do you have to believe that you have any chance of actually winning money?”

She said: “An influencer that me and my friends like recommended this site.” Apparently, that was good enough for her.

So What’s an Influencer?

According to my friend Gemini, an influencer is “an individual with the power to affect the purchasing decisions, opinions, or behaviors of others due to their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with their audience.”

For marketers, finding the right influencer to endorse your product can be extremely lucrative. It’s common to hear people boast about ROIs of over $5 for every $1 spent.

Many influencers initially gained notoriety as actors, musicians, athletes, models, and television personalities like Selana Gomez, The Kardashians, Cardi B, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Amber Rose, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lionel Messi.

Another group of influencers came into prominence as creators, people who develop high-quality content, such as blogs, memes, and videos.

Targeting Is the Key to Influencer Marketing

There are two main strategies for marketers when it comes to finding people who may be interested in purchasing the goods and services you have to offer:

  1. Casting a wide net through traditional forms of media such as billboards and tv ads and hoping to entice a small percentage of that audience to buy your product.
  2. Targeting people who may already be inclined to buy what you’re selling or people who are actively seeking what you have to offer through strategies like direct mail, inbound marketing, and influencer marketing.

Because targeting is a major component of influencer marketing, audience size is much less important than other factors, such as trust, connectedness, expertise, and authenticity.  

For example, Ronaldo and Messi each have over half a billion Instagram followers, but they probably wouldn’t be a marketer’s first choice for endorsing beauty and skin care products.

In the early days of internet marketing, many marketers who were looking to cast a wide net became infatuated with the notion of going viral. The limited efficacy of this strategy became widely apparent after Evian launched its hugely popular Roller Babies campaign in 2009.  

As marketer Luke Sullivan notes:

It’s no surprise their online video featuring diaper-wearing babies on rollerblades might produce 80 million views. But…Evian sales plummeted by 25 percent…Apparently, roller-skating babies have nothing to do with selling water (1).

According to author and fitness influencer Amanda Russell, viral “is a wildly empty metric….A social post can rack up huge numbers and still not drive any sort of meaningful action. A bunch of eyeballs does not equate to impact, and being the hot topic of conversation isn’t the same as being trustworthy” (2).

Amanda goes on to say: “People assume 10,000 followers are better than 1,000 followers…but it’s just not the case. It’s the loyalty, support and engagement of that following that matters most” (3).

According to Nate Jones, an executive for the Nex Gen practice of UTA Entertainment marketing, “zeroing in on micro-communities can be a more cost-effective and targeted strategy,” than “working with attention-grabbing social media stars such as Alix Earle, MrBeast or Kai Cenat” (4).

What Are People Looking for in an Influencer?

There are influencers for just about any type of interest or activity you can think of, including mommy bloggers, NASCAR dads, fishing aficionados, and beauty product vloggers. What people are looking for when they choose an influencer is:

  • Knowledge
  • Authenticity
  • Engaging content

Being an influencer doesn’t require credentialed authority in a particular field. That’s why “an influencer does not have to be an expert like a dermatologist to give skincare advice, as long as they are a consistent content creator about the topic of skincare.” (5)

Video Content Rules

Although blogging, making personal appearances, books sales, and other activities can all be an important part of the influencer’s toolkit, we’ve come to an age where video content rules, whether it appears on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or any other social media channel.  

According to Atlantic Monthly contributor Derek Thompson, these days Everything Is Television.

By “television,” I am referring to something bigger than broadcast TV, the cable bundle, or Netflix….Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. (6)

by Richard W. Bray

  1. Luke Sullivan. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads, p 191
  2. Amanda Russell. The Influencer Code: How to Unlock the Power of Influencer Marketing, p 41,
  3. Amanda Russell. The Influencer Code: How to Unlock the Power of Influencer Marketing, p 4
  4. Gillian Follet. Why brands are turning to local leaders–not just social stars–the to build trust and connection, AdAge, August 1, 2025.
  5. Holly Frew. New Research Unveils Key Strategies for influencer authenticity, Georgia State News Hub, February 20,2025
  6. Derek Thompson. Everything Is Television. Derek Thompson dot org, October 10,2025  

									


				
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Clichés Don’t Make the World Go Round, but They Can Make Songs Better

				September 4, 2017

				

					
Ira Gershwin


The Word Mavens Are Wrong


Style guides and writing teachers say we should avoid clichés like the plague. They’re bad, hackneyed, and trite. They say clichés are crutches, used by writers who are too lazy and stupid to think up new ways to say things.


But the experts wrong. Clichés have all sorts of wonderful uses.


Assisting Thought by Evoking a Visual Image


Many clichés are metaphors. According to George Orwell, an effective metaphor “assists thought by evoking a visual image.”


The anti-cliché crowd argues that no matter how strong or evocative a clichéd metaphor might be, its power dwindles with repeated use. But that ain’t necessarily so.


If you say, “Mary is burning the candle at both ends,”  a vivid picture comes to my mind which highlights the possible pitfalls of Mary’s behavior. This is an example of an outstanding metaphor that doesn’t diminish in fortitude no matter how many times you hear it.


The phrase “you’re just putting a band-aid on that problem” is another clichéd metaphor which remains evocative and effective despite repeated use.


These two clichéd metaphors are still effective because, even if we no longer light our houses with candles, candles and bandages are still part of our shared consciousness.


Metaphors—Dead, Alive, and Otherwise


But metaphorical clichés will lose vigor as words go out of fashion.  For example, the expression “hoisted by his own petard” packed a much greater rhetorical punch in an age when people commonly referred to bombs as petards.


Sometimes linguists employ the term “dead metaphor” to describe phrases like “hoisted by his own petard.” They reason that metaphors only remain “alive” as long as we can picture them in our mind’s eye.


But what if I tell you that Larry, who’s a very casual sports fan, just jumped on the Dodgers’ bandwagon? Even if you don’t know that there was a time when politicians actually hired wagons full of musicians to attract voters, it’s still easy to see what this expression means. So, is the bandwagon metaphor, alive, dead or somewhere in between?


Not All Clichés Are Created Equal


Not all clichés are created equal. And the better ones deserve respect.


Of course, many clichéd metaphors are duds. And a bad cliché is about as effective as a screen door on a submarine.


I tell students that the best way to judge the potency of a metaphor is to visualize it. For example, try to visualize yourself “throwing some shade on someone.”


The cliché “throwing shade on someone” means to deprecate a person. It’s a lousy metaphor and it sets my blood to boiling every time I hear it.


On the other hand, when Victor says, “Yo, man. I’d loved to hang out with you guys all day, but I gotta bounce,” he’s employing a marvelously robust metaphor. It tells me that Victor is so active he’s downright kinetic.


Ira Gershwin Defends Clichés


As Ira Gershwin explains in his book Lyrics on Several Occasions, “The literary cliché is an integral part of lyric-writing.”


Sometimes lyricists cleverly rework a familiar cliché into a song. Like when Smokey Robinson says “I’m a choosy beggar, and you’re my choice.” Or when the Temptations sing “Papa was a rolling stone/Wherever he laid his hat was his home.” Or when Paul McCartney asks: “Would you walk away from a fool and his money?” Or when the Who’s Rodger Daltry laments, “I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.” Or when Ian Hunter complains that love has left him feeling “Once Bitten, Twice shy.”


Gershwin notes that clichés are an essential part of the songwriter’s toolkit because:


The phrase that is trite and worn-out when appearing in print usually becomes, when heard fitted to the appropriate musical turn, revitalized, and seems somehow to revert to its original provocativeness.


Putting Clichés to Good Use


Here are some examples of songwriters putting clichés to good use:


Irving Berlin—I’m Putting all my Eggs in One Basket


Phil Collins—Against All Odds


Gene Autry—Back in the Saddle


Ira Gershwin—Bidin’ my Time


Arthur Hamilton—Cry Me a River


Waldo Holmes—Don’t Rock the Boat


Cole Porter— I Get a Kick Out of You


Sammy Cahn—High Hopes


Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong—Heard it Through the Grapevine


Neil Diamond—Love On the Rocks— (Nice pun, Neil)


Robbie Robertson—The Weight (Take a Load off, Annie)


Stevie Wonder—Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours


Al Hoffman and Dick Manning—It Takes Two to Tango


Larry Blackmon and Tomi Jenkins–Word Up


Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold–It’s Now or Never (Music by Eduardo di Capua)


by Richard W. Bray

									


				
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What’s the Matter with Kids these Days?, Part 473—It’s all about the Music, Man

				February 4, 2010

				

					


What’s the Matter with Kids these Days?, Part 473—It’s all about the Music, Man


(Disclaimer: I don’t think that all new music is execrable; from what I’ve heard, much of it is quite good. While many of my contemporaries are content to listen to the same Classic Rock standards over and over, I’m actually open-minded enough to watch Austin City Limits even when they feature so-called Indie Rock groups)


This headline, Young People and ipods have Utterly Destroyed Music, reflects a nearly ubiquitous conversation among people my age these days. The argument goes something like this:


When we were young, music really meant something, man. Our music defined a generation and helped to end a war. This is a stark contrast to today‘s shallow and meaningless music, which is all about bling, sex and superficiality, man. Music is so sucky because Kids These Days are so busy navel-gazing, playing video games, and updating their Facespace pages that they don’t have the same kind of passion for music that our own glorious generation once did, man. 


(This imaginary disgruntled DFH reminds me of a roommate I had in college with Ray Manzerek Disease, a verbal tic wherein the speaker is unable to utter three consecutive sentences without saying the word man)


Of course, What’s the Matter with Kids these Days? has been a common complaint at least since the time of Aristotle. (And a healthy dose of Mike Males is always a good antidote for this type of specious thinking.)


But there clearly is a difference in the way young people listen to music today. Without getting into to whether or not music means as much to today’s adolescents as it did to previous generations (how could you possibly quantify such a thing?) I will briefly note a few ways in which technology has changed music.


Today music is cheap, portable, durable and easily transferable, but that wasn’t always the case.


Back in the day, the standard delivery system for music (LPs), were much bulkier and more fragile than, say, MP3s. Records were big and delicate. They were kept inside a paper sleeve inside a cardboard sleeve (and many people placed the entire album inside a plastic sleeve for extra protection.) Records were easily-broken and they could only be held by the edges because mere fingerprints could ruin them. Although portable record players existed, they were weren’t exactly high fidelity (a term which was once freighted with a sanctified resonance among music lovers.) A good record collection and stereo, often including gargantuan speakers, was not only expensive, but it could take up practically an entire living room.


So do young people appreciate music less than we did because it’s practically free and you can put it in your pocket?


I don’t know, man.


by Richard W. Bray

									


				
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