*A TikToker by the name of Dana (@taehungz) is calling out racist marketing agencies that choose to work mostly with white social media influencers.
Dana went viral after bringing attention to a clip posted by mega-influencer Victoria Paris in which Paris notes how she made thousands of dollars on one deal and negotiated $20,000 for another. As reported by the Daily Dot, Dana made clear that her criticism is “no shade or hate” to Paris, but instead to spark a conversation about pay in the influencer industry.
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“There’s a saying that’s like, ‘pray that your name is mentioned in rooms that you don’t exist.’ That is the entire influencer marketing world,” Dana says in the video. “Like somebody with authority has to see the value in your content for you to be recommended for a brand and for the most part, it’s not Black people in these positions.”
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Dana goes on to point out that “Influencer marketing is a very white-dominated industry so the entry-level coordinators she was mentioning in another video that sent PR to influencers cause they wanna be their friend — they’re white,” Dana says in reference to Victoria.
“The agents are white. The managers in charge of making the decisions on which influencers will be recommended to get a paid brand deal — they’re white,” she continues.
“I worked at three different agencies and I was either one of the only Black girls or like one of three, either on my team or like within the entire company. Nobody was dark-skinned,” Dana shares. “And influencers that they work with look like everyone else in the office.”
Dana also called attention to the fact that marketing agencies rarely work with dark-skinned influencers.
“The colorism, the featurism, and the texturism, it’s terrible. And they’re still being offered lowball rates compared to the white influencers they work with 24/7,” Dana says.
“Doesn’t matter what you talk about…if the person who’s in charge of making a big spreadsheet of influencers to recommend to a brand for a campaign does not think about or care about Black creators you are never gonna see a deal,” she says before noting that “white mediocrity” trumps “guaranteed Black excellence”,
“If you are a Black creator, if you are a creator of color, and you have an established audience and you’re just frustrated as to why you’re not getting brand deals I need y’all to know it has nothing to do with you. It’s these racist-ass agencies,” Dana says in the TikTok video that you can watch above.
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