Previous Research

According to Alice Marwick, in her article Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy, Instagram is home to "micro-celebrities." In her research, micro-celebrity "is a mind-set and a collection of self-presentation practices" (Marwick 138, 2015). A very important aspect of this is self-branding and creating a brand through social media (Marwick 140, 2015). This branding is what makes these micro-celebrities, or content creators, so appealing to certain brands. It makes the sponsorship, which we will see later on, so effective, as it does not feel like an advertisement. Although Marwick does not address sponsorship specifically, her article creates a good background for how social media, and Instagram in particular, creates very influential "instafamous" people.

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There are other research articles and projects that have looked into sponsored content on social media, such as Nora Lisa Ewers in her master thesis titled #sponsored – Influencer Marketing on Instagram or Thomas et al in their research titled The marketing of wagering on social media: An analysis of promotional content on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Although both of these works have explored sponsored content, they have done so in different regions in the world: Ewers in Germany and Thomas et al in Australia. Thomas et al also looked more at sports wagering and gambling. Ewer found that "No sponsorship disclosure had a more positive effect for celebrities, but a more negative effect for micro-celebrities," which is what I am looking at here (Ewers, 2017, i). Thomas et al found that "The use of celebrity/athlete endorsement of products, particularly within YouTube promotions" appeal particularly to young people and children (Thomas et al, 2015, 49). I believe that this assertion can apply to micro-celebrities and famous content creators on social media. These three articles helped me understand more about social media's influence and how that can affect sponsorship.