Influencers and social media content creators and new kinds of intermediary companies positioned between influencers, advertisers and platforms represent a growing part of the Finnish creative industry workforce. These new media industry companies have been able to benefit from the emergence of platforms, and show growing revenues, unlike the incumbent media businesses, which have suffered from the loss of ad revenue for the first two decades of the new millennia. While influencer marketing is a fast-growing sub-category of social media marketing, not much is known within media studies of the strategies of influencer industry actors.

1. Understanding the strategies
of influencer businesses
– the case of Finland
Conference presentation at the Promotional media workshop, Department of Media Studies,
Stockholm University in Stockholm, December 1-2, 2022 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31513.29282.
Tuija Aalto PhD. Candidate (Doctor of Social Sciences), University of Tampere
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences / Journalism
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A new industry
● The Influencer industry (Abidin et al 2020)
emerged during the 2010’s, enabled by social
media platform affordances.
● Influencing as media business practice per se
vs. celebrities relating to fans on social media
(relational work, see Baym, 2015). Connection to
TV and film industries’ audience building.

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● Platformisation, the rise of the platform as the
dominant infrastructural and/or economic model in
media, electronic communications and ICT
sectors (Evens & Donders 2018)
● Platformisation of cultural production
(Poell et al 2021)
○ Institutional aspects
(markets, infrastructure and governance)
○ cultural practices
(labour, creative, and democratic practices).

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The main types of influencer industry actors
● Cultural intermediaries
○ mediating between advertisers, platforms and
influencers: multi-channel-networks or MCN’s,
(in Finland since 2014); influencer agencies
● Cultural producers
○ new companies founded by social media
content creators and influencers
○ Established media companies.

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Method: will interview influencers and influencer
agency managers and apply qualitative content
analysis to the interview transcriptions.
● A total of 25-30 semi structured interviews
● Analysis of the interviews with the grounded
theory approach first, themes emerging from the
data.

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The relationships between influencers and
broadcasters show up most prominently in
my preliminary findings
● As the influencers and creators have
demonstrated their ability to produce audiences,
they are an interesting resource to media
companies as gatekeepers to young audiences

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Tentative preliminary findings
● Traditional broadcasters and influencers engage
in the exchange of visibility in ways that benefit
both:
○ Traditional media companies gain access to
the relational capital of influencers,
○ Influencers may be able to raise their prices
● Influencers may gain entry to the IPR-based,
platform independent businesses of TV and
VOD.

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The perceived power of social media creators or
influencers to “move audiences” has opened some of
them opportunities to
● be cast as guests and hosts of TV or radio shows
on broadcast channels
● enter the IPR industries (producing records,
books, TV/VOD series titles or exclusive podcast
deals)
I propose to call this power “relational capital”.

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The relationships between influencers and influencer
agencies
● it seems that the influencers have strong
negotiation power
● the influencer agencies have re-invented their
business models
○ strategic consulting for brands
○ project-based relationships with influencers.

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○ To summarise, cultural producers, influencers
and broadcasters benefit from promotional
collaboration
○ while the cultural intermediaries find
themselves in rather precarious position and
must constantly renew themselves.

11. tuija.aalto@tuni.fi
Twitter: @Tuija