“Most brands, when they’re investing a certain level of money in people, they’re doing full background checks, they’re working with P. R.
agencies to understand potential risks, they’re doing audits of every piece of content they’ve been in or associated with.”
He added, “Influencers are a bit of a challenge that way because they’re creating hundreds or thousands of hours of content,
and they take down videos, too, so you have to go beyond the existing content that’s published, really know the person and know what they’ve stood for throughout their career.”
With political tensions running high in the past few months, advertisers have repeatedly found themselves
online in places where they want no association, from conspiracy blogs to alt-right websites.
The Maker unit of Disney, which zealously protects its brand, did not defend Mr. Kjellberg’s videos in a statement last week, but noted
that he had built his following “by being provocative and irreverent.”
“Brands need to start looking at working with influencers the same way they’ve approached celebrity
and athlete endorsements,” said Gabe Gordon, a managing partner at Reach, an agency that specializes in social videos.
PewDiePie Dust-Up Shows Risks Brands Take to Tap Into Social Media -
Social media has produced its own breed of stars, from the video bloggers of YouTube to the style mavens of Instagram,
and major media companies and brands have increasingly turned to this group as a way to reach the ad blockers and cord cutters of the world.
Those risks were cast into stark relief last week after The Wall Street Journal reported
that YouTube’s most popular personality, Felix Kjellberg, known to his 53 million subscribers as PewDiePie, had recently included crude anti-Semitic jokes and references to Hitler in his comedy videos to the apparent delight of neo-Nazi websites.
