[VIDEO] The Marriage Between Media Influencers and Digital Media Companies Is Turning Teens Into Financial Adults

Encourage your teens’ gifts. Whether it’s playing the violin, hacking or running 11 second hundred meter dashes, pat your children’s backs. They may just end up paying for their own college tuition. This is what California-native teenager Acacia Brinley is doing, according to a report on the Daily Breeze.

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Brinley has a talent for using make-up and a flare for producing video tutorials sharing her craft. This potent mix of skill yields millions of views of her YouTube videos and followers on her Instagram feed. Brinley didn’t start producing her videos with the intent of making money, but with those kinds of numbers, it was only a matter of time before advertisers would come knocking.  

And this is where we get to the second part of our story. It is not traditional advertising companies that are approaching the Brinleys of the world.  This is because celebrities—and she is a celebrity now—like Brinley are not like their brethren in Hollywood who are slick and trained in public relations. It’s because of this that large corporations, who spend considerable resources on perfecting their messaging, hesitate to entrust their brands to these micro-celebrities. So it’s a new crop of advertising agencies that have jumped into the fray to coordinate people like Brinley and the brands willing to bank on them.

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One of these brands is theAudience which understands that the appeal of Brinley-like personalities is that they don’t come off as spokespeople. They’re just in the business of creating videos about their personal lives and sharing them. So when an advertisement pops up, in the form of a product that the performer happens to be using it comes off as a recommendation from a friend instead of a pitch. It’s known as “native advertising.”

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