DHAKA: Alina Tsvor, 24, is a freelance photographer who sometimes struggles to make ends meet. But when she wanted to charter a helicopter to take her and her friends for a ride over Chicago, she had the currency.
Nikoletta Csanyi, 28, a banking consultant, leveraged her capital for a three-year lease on a 2014 Mercedes- Benz CLA. Jason M Peterson, 44, used his assets to get a first-class plane ticket to Iceland, where he stayed for a week at no cost.
Accprding to the India Times, these were deals made in exchange for posts on Instagram, where a thriving economy has emerged amid the scroll of pretty pictures.
Luxury brands have been hiring bloggers to plug their goods for years. But words are so Gen Y. Now marketers from companies like Burberry, Holiday Inn and Nike are trying to leverage the visual internet to reach a young generation of consumers that increasingly gravitates toward media in the form of images (emoji, Tinder, Instagram).
These brands are looking to co-opt the Insta-fluence of people posting photographs of their lives and experiences in a way that is interesting to strangers.
Tsvor, who likes to post photos of cities and landscapes, afforded herself a chopper ride by drafting an email to Chicago Helicopter Experience and making an offer: If the company treated her to a night above the town, she would snap photographs on her iPhone and share at least one (with a caption including the helicopter company's name) with her 55,000 Instagram followers.
"I got two rides out of it and got a bunch of my friends rides, too," Tsvor said.
Among the three in-air photos Tsvor posted over the next few weeks was an at-dusk bird's-eye view of the city that she published with the caption, "Just looking for some new roofs to climb @chetours." It garnered 3,400 "likes."
Csanyi got her Mercedes by winning a contest that required her to take the car on a three-day road trip to Washington, D.C., and post photos from the trip that included in the caption the @mbusa Instagram handle and the hashtag: #ClataketheWheel. Among her photos of the car was one lit in the background by the glowing rotunda of the Capitol.
In the caption she wrote: "Good night D.C. We had a lot going on today, will share more of the awesomeness tomorrow morning. Sleep tight @mbusa, we will dream with #clatakethewheel."
For the millennial generation, which spends a lot of time scrolling through social media feeds, Instagram influencers are far more important than celebrities. "They're more approachable. Celebrity is just not relatable," said Mark Aikman, Mercedes-Benz USA's manager of digital marketing.
"The prize Niki has with the CLA is not payment for her messaging," he added. "It's a prize."
Peterson, an advertising agency chief creative officer who has in excess of 308,000 followers on his Instagram feed, was sent to Iceland by Dom Perignon in exchange for four photos posted to his page.
BDST: 2056 HRS, OCT 19, 2014
