Entrepreneur

How This Digital Agency Is Cashing In on a New Kind of Celebrity Endorsement

TheAudience is connecting brands and customers across social media platforms via influencers.
Making branding magic: Just another day at the office for Oliver Luckett (center) and theAudience crew.

Three days after time expired on Super Bowl XLIX, Oliver Luckett still can’t wrap his head around how badly they blew it. His frustration has nothing to do with the Seattle Seahawks snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and everything to do with halftime-show headliner Katy Perry’s failure to exploit her moment in the spotlight to connect with fans via social media. 

In the hours leading up to her performance, which drew a record 118.5 million U.S. viewers, Perry tweeted only three times to her 65 million Twitter followers. Other social platforms got no love at all.  

This, Luckett contends, is heresy. “Shame on her. Look at her Facebook page—not one mention of the Super Bowl! It’s unbelievable,” he says, shaking his head as he scrolls the MacBook screen in front of him. “The night of the Super Bowl, I sent her page to the execs at Universal [Music Group, Perry’s record company] and said, ‘Guys, y’all need to be fired. You’re embarrassing yourselves.’ Her fans wanted to interact with her. Where are the Instagram photos? Show me her inspirations. Show me something. Get people excited.”  

Luckett knows that even the smallest scrap of content—a clever tweet, a Vine video, an image filtered through the Instagram prism—can have a massive and long-lasting impact across the social landscape. TheAudience, the Hollywood-based media publishing startup he founded in 2011, is cashing in on this fact with a new kind of celebrity endorsement that aligns corporate clients with social media tastemakers and trendsetters—the digital-savvy teens and twentysomethings who’ve leveraged YouTube, Snapchat and other platforms to catapult to global fame. Some are fashion models, some are DJs,

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Entrepreneur

Entrepreneur10 min read
The Fastest-Growing Franchises
If you’re looking for a franchise brand to buy, you’re surely asking yourself this question: Which brands are worth my time and money? There are many ways to answer that, but here’s a useful starting point: Look at the brands with major traction. Tha
Entrepreneur2 min read
3 Ways to Build Real Businesses on the Side
If you have marketable skills, but you aren’t sure how to spin them into a business, try teaming up with someone from an entirely different industry. Together, you could pinpoint opportunities for innovation. That’s what Gene Caballero did. Back in 2
Entrepreneur3 min read
What’s the Real Damage?
Miri Offir knows how to talk to people in crisis. After serving in the Israeli military, she came to the U.S. in 2003 and took a secretary job at the post-disaster recovery franchise 911 Restoration. She worked her way up—eventually becoming the comp

Related Books & Audiobooks