Someone with 2.6 million followers NOT selling 36 t-shirts is the best news yet for the influencer marketing industry

The story of a young lady who goes by the handle @Arii on Instagram - with her 2 million followers - failing to reach the required number of t-shirt orders to "start a brand" has poured fuel on the arguments that the influencer marketing bubble is about to burst.

Media and marketers alike are queuing up to bash the whole idea of influencer marketing every time a campaign goes wrong. But actually I interpret this particular episode differently. Or at least I think that if the 'bubble is about to burst' that is a good thing.

Here's why those calling out the end of influencer marketing are wrong. And why Arii has just done real influencers a massive favour.

Purposeless Posting

Arii's Instagram feed is a study in pointlessness. Her posts are simply one photograph after another of herself, always scantily or glamourously dressed, with perhaps one or two word captions and almost no hashtags.

What this means is that her content is totally unremarkable (literally - even she can't be bothered to remark on it) and unlikely to come up in any searches.

Really valuable content creators have a niche that they post about. They make their content - image, video, captions, etc - really interesting, useful or entertaining. And they use hashtags and other mechanisms to make their content findable.

The best content creators are making content for a reason - they post with purpose.

Dubious Followers?

The one thing that is rather curios about Arii is that she has 2.6 million followers.

Her content is, I suppose, titillating. But I'd be surprised if two and a half million people were following her because of that.

And then there is the engagement rates - 300 comments from 2,600,000 followers is not great. Whilst I have no evidence that this means Arii's followers are not legitimate, if I was interested in working with any content creators that had such a high follower count but low levels of engagement, I'd want to try to understand why.

Wrong product for the audience

The other issue with the Arii story is the product.

A quick look at her Instagram feed makes it clear that Arii tends to post photos of herself looking like this;

The post about the t-shirts she was trying to sell (now deleted) was this;

Even if we assume that all of Arii's followers are real people, why would they buy a loose-fitting grey t-shirt from someone they follow because - presumably - they love her glamourous way of dressing? There is such a massive disconnect here between the image Arii projects and the product she's promoting, it is almost comical.

Any brand that thinks they can work with an influencer like Arii to sell anything other than the sorts of products she wears in everything she posts, really doesn't get how this works. Influencers' value lies in their authenticity. In Freestak's world of running, cycling, adventure and snow sports influencers, we know that promoting sugary snacks or diet pills is not going to generate a good response. When we run campaigns for top apparel, equipment, nutrition, technology and so on, the results are fantastic.

What this means for Influencer Marketing

A 'bubble' in this context can be defined as "a significant, usually rapid, increase in asset prices that is soon followed by a collapse in prices and typically arises from speculation or enthusiasm rather than intrinsic increases in value."

If there is an 'influencer marketing bubble' then perhaps it is about to burst. But as with every other bubble - whether that is tulip mania in the 1600s, the stock market crash of 1987 or the housing bubble and mortgage crisis of 2007 - what happens is that unscrupulous players who have immorally or fraudulently skewed the market for their own benefit are the ones who lose out. We are still buying fresh flowers, investing on the stock market and borrowing money to buy houses. We're just doing it a bit less. Or a bit more mindfully. Or with more regulation.

What I think the story of the t-shirt failure tells us is that there are good content creators, ambassadors and influencers. And there are bad ones. The value of working with good influencers is not diminished by the existence of bad ones. Brands - like people buying flowers, investors looking to put money into companies and banks lending to house buyers - just need to work out who is trustworthy and appropriate.

It really is that simple.