Overinfluenced and over it

I’m your resident tea spiller, Sid Marlowe, and I’ve had a front-row seat to some ghastly influencer behaviour of late, and it needs to stop

“No. Do it again.”

It wasn’t what she said, but how she said it – that shrill, invasive voice barking out displeasure at a volume designed to make a scene in a very public place. A public place in Blue Waters where I dined with a companion, hoping to catch the last of the drone shows before the end of the festival. That terse, nails-down-the-blackboard screech came from the table next door.

The overly rouged mutton masquerading as lamb, poised just so, sat staring into the iPhone that had just been handed to her. “No. No! Just do it again,” she yapped. “Get the light right this time,” she added, yanking a blinding ring light closer to the topaz cocktail that was her subject for whatever mediocre seen-it-a-million-times-before video she wanted this poor lad to film for her.

My god. We’d stumbled upon a genuine “influencer in the wild” as their detractors like to call them, and not just a mere TikTok wannabe with a long-suffering Insta-husband filming her. No, this was something more. This was a digital princess, replete with paid staff who were – if her harpy-like verbal assaults were anything to go by – failing her in every way.

Next to her, but well out of the camera frame, sat a frail assistant juggling a notebook, vape pod, and make-up, and across from her, the junior videographer-cum-lighting-technician. What manner of production were we witnessing?

Well, I’ll tell you.

For the sake of clout, we were witnessing the debasement of two young professionals by a rude, entitled nobody taking up space and attention in the hopes of becoming Dubai’s next social media darling. Instagram has a lot to answer for.

Plums, I am so exhausted by the whole gaggle of shallow fakeness vomited onto social media and Netflix specials by the illiterati, meaningless and vapid man-bun-toting jocks and duck-faced-never-beens broadcasting their quote-unquote reality TV lifestyle and ignorance into our lives through our screens.

We didn’t get to see the drones in the end. We completely missed the show, so enthralled were we by this production in front of us. No, enthralled is the wrong word. What is the term for when you can’t pull your eyes away from a car wreck? That’s what we were.

She sat through take after take, faking delicate sips of her drink, ensuring that the level never dropped below the rim. Every now and then her assistant would wave frantically for their waiter to bring over fresh ice and the whole contrivance would start all over again. The poor chap filming was visibly wilting in her disappointment.

Eventually, she deemed his take acceptable, added her filters and posted it to her social media accounts. Then they were done. They paid and left, having spent more than an hour in a prime location, having bought a single AED 60 cocktail.

Remind me again how influencers are good for business. 

A friend in the industry regularly shares stories about the flood of social media beggars that fill his company’s Instagram inbox. “Do you do collaborations?” is influencer-speak for “I want free food, in exchange for an Instagram post that shows me off more than your product, shown to a fraction of the 9,500 bots that make up my 9,510 followers!”

When he declines them – politely, professionally, and with a grace that bears testament to the man’s ability to suffer fools dispassionately, if not gladly – they so often want to argue with him, citing their follower count or some other version of a vanity metric that, I have to tell you plums, are meaningless when it comes to attracting real, paying customers.

I ask you this: have you ever chosen a restaurant because their latest Instagram reel got one million views? Have you changed from your regular breakfast spot with good food to some over-priced, hard-to-find niche in a hotel because a random person on Instagram draped herself over their vegan açai? Of course not. But I’ll bet you’ve tried a new spot because a living, breathing person you know shared a story about the fantastic brioche she had in City Walk. Because that is influencing; that authentic post by a real person who went and paid for her meal, instead of begging for it.

But if you’re looking for someone to blame (because, plums, who doesn’t love a good blame game?) then that must fall on the hotels and restaurants that invite these vultures in, and who give them credibility that is undeserved, and who legitimise what amounts to nothing more than begging.

These self-absorbed pouting ninnies are not marketers, and the “benefits” they offer up by way of trade exchange are not benefits at all. As a restaurant, you don’t need a costly ad agency to get you out there – nor do you need the outrageous overpriced traditional media to sell your ads to people who have no intention of buying your gold-leaf steak tartare. Sidenote: for the love of all that is real and authentic, please, stop with the gold leaf already!

Plums, all you need is one free morning and a few YouTube tutorials to teach you how to set up your own ad accounts on TikTok, SnapChat, and Meta for Facebook and Instagram, and with a tiny budget, and a quick tutorial on how to create a target audience in your area that is interested in your product, you can drop professional photos of your gorgeous food right where the buying public is – on their phones, all day, every day.

You don’t need a stranger on social media or any of her clones. Speaking on behalf of all your paying clients everywhere – stop ruining our dinners we pay you good money for by allowing these plastic princesses into your venues – we’re SO over it!

This article appeared in Issue 002 – the Men’s Edition