A Journalist’s Deep Dive Into The Billion Dollar Industry That’s Being Largely Ignored

Under the Influence did not turn out to be the exposé Jo Piazza intended to create when she embarked on a one-year journey to dive into the inner workings of the mom influencer industry. The award winning journalist and author set out to unearth the secrets of perfectly put together Instagram moms with their all-white furniture white and well dressed toddlers who never appeared to make any sort of mess. 

After months of thorough research and in-depth interviews, Piazza emerged with a respect for the business acumen, creativity and resilience of these women as they’ve essentially changed the way consumers shop online. 

Piazza and I discussed the power these women hold in a billion dollar industry that’s largely cast aside as frivolous, the evolution the industry has undergone over the past 20 years, and where she sees it going next.  

Amy Shoenthal: Tell me why you chose to create this podcast. 

Jo Piazza: I started making this podcast thinking that I would be doing an exposé of the crazy world of Instagram influencing. But when I started doing the reporting I gained an intense respect for influencers and what they do. 

I also realized that the majority of press written about this world is very snarky and nasty. A lot of it is written by a certain subset of journalists who clearly look down on what these women do and I don’t think that’s fair. So my goal shifted and now I’m trying to shine a spotlight on the work that goes into it. Sometimes I give a bit of attitude, but at no point have I intended to take them down. And the reaction from influencers has been great because they see the reporting I’ve put into this and they have enjoyed the podcast because it is one of the first times their industry has been seen and elevated. 

Shoenthal: In your quest to become a mom influencer yourself, you attended the “Harvard of influencing,” RewardStyle. What training and education did they provide? 

Piazza: It genuinely was excellent training about content creation, branding and marketing. They really do offer Marketing 101 and 102. They also teach creators how to make an entire content calendar the same way you would as an Editor-in-Chief of a magazine. They teach you how to write good captions, how to engage with an audience, how to figure out a balance on your feed, product placement and making those products look aspirational which in turn increases your bottom line. I can’t stress enough how useful their training is. 

Even though I no longer want to be a mom influencer myself, I’m still an author and I want to sell books. I have a novel coming out in the fall, We Are Not Like Them, which I am so damn proud of. So I’ll take all that I’ve learned here when it’s time to do marketing for that book. 

I truly respect what Amber Venz Box has created and I think she and this entire industry is so overlooked because it is an industry dominated by women for women. 

Shoenthal: Authenticity is a word that comes up a lot in the influencer space. Talk to me about the audacity of authenticity.

Piazza: The problem is I don’t think the word ‘authenticity’ means anything anymore. We want it to equate with real and honest and raw but because brands and influencers overuse it, it’s now a completely meaningless word in real life and in marketing. We should just retire it. 

I don’t think anyone is fully honest when talking about themselves online. It’s similar to writing a memoir. We are all rewriting the narrative as we write the narrative. 

I do think I appreciate different things as a mother now after talking to so many mom influencers. As a professional woman on the constant hamster wheel of her career in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, I have constantly been told that my career comes first and being a mom is second. Spending time with these influencers has allowed me to enjoy the domestic space more, to enjoy mothering more. 

Shoenthal: Why do you think women feel so pressured to be their most authentic self (online and off) while men are never asked that question? 

Piazza: We just expect more from women. We want them to be some ideal version of womanhood and motherhood. When they aren’t we tear them apart. When they are, we rip them down. It’s exhausting to be a woman in the world right now. 

Shoenthal: With TikTok (or “MomTok”) and Clubhouse on the rise and even a bit of fatigue around Instagram perfection as so many are struggling after a hard year, do you think there’s more of an appetite for the more real and messy moms?

Piazza: Yes, but I don’t think beautiful, aspirational, perfect pictures will go anywhere. Advertising with beautiful perfect pictures isn’t going anywhere either. There will be a space for what feels more real and messy, but Instagram perfection is not over because aspirational marketing will always be a thing. 

I get really depressed when I think about what social media did to eviscerate the news industry. I was a journalist and I don’t love that in order to tell a story these days you are forced to cultivate an audience and market yourself. But I do think we’re reaching a turning point with the democratization of storytelling. This is an industry for sure, and we need to treat it as such. 

Shoenthal: Talk to me about the state of journalism and going from writer to podcast host.

Piazza: The media world changes so swiftly that we have to adapt or fall behind. So I’ve had to constantly evolve. I started writing books and then started turning those books into podcasts and television shows to try to meet the consumer where they are. 

Audio is totally different from straight writing. It was a brand new muscle for me to write podcast scripts and I think it took me a little over a year to get used to it. The best advice I got about book writing was to delight and surprise your reader on every other page. With audio you have to do that every couple of minutes or you lose the listener. I also find that audio touches the audience in a really intimate way, the same as good longform journalism.

I still write and report for magazines. But you can’t make a living just from that. In order to make a good salary I have to have a patchwork of projects. It’s just the reality of the world. 

Shoenthal: You actually talk about that in the first episode, how all your journalist and writer friends are looking for other gigs. 

Piazza: Journalism has been ravaged by social media. About 75% of my friends who were journalists no longer have full time jobs. More are laid off every single day. It is practically impossible to make a living as a freelancer as most websites and even print publications pay a fraction of what they used to.  

Shoenthal: On the topic of journalism, you say the mom influencer industry has been widely under-reported. Am I in the minority in writing this piece? 

Piazza: Influencing is generally under-reported. And it’s such big business. It touches and changes all of our lives. I have a friend who has a retail location in four cities, and she’s closing all of them. But it’s not because of the pandemic, it’s because all her sales are through Instagram. Online shopping and Amazon changed how we buy things. Instagram has replaced browsing for clothes, shoes and jewelry in a store. If all of this goes online, it’s not just a retail question, it’s bigger, like what does the central business district of a city look like? Now it’s an urban planning question.

But the mom influencer industry is mostly ignored, mostly because it’s an industry dominated by women. And even when it’s reported on it’s so snarky. I intended to approach it with that same snark because of what I had read. And then I realized, wait, this is a business story. 

Because it’s under-reported and unregulated, it allows for a lot of inequity.

Shoenthal: Talk to me about that inequity. You mention the influencer pay gap, specifically between white influencers and women of color. How can consumers and brands alike work to fix this issue?

Piazza: Cast a wider net for the kinds of people you follow. Just like in real life we need to cast a wider net to make sure we have a more diverse group of friends and colleagues. Online, like in life, we tend to gravitate towards people who are like us. One of the easiest ways is (for white people) to find a woman of color influencer you enjoy and go through who they follow. I did that with Tina Meeks and now my feed has gotten so much richer. And the Instagram algorithm does no favors for diversity, it feeds me suggestions to follow people who look like me.

On the brand side it’s about transparency. There’s no transparency in the influencer industry, full stop. What brands pay people is very wishy washy. It’s based on gut and not science and there has to be more transparency when it comes to what influencers are making. Brands have to make a conscious effort to include diverse influencers. They’re not hard to find and they’re great at what they do.

Shoenthal: I’m remembering in a recent episode, you mention a Black influencer who used the term “regular influencer” in reference to white influencer.

Piazza: Language matters. We have to look at how we say things and what we say. 

Shoenthal: As a marketer, I feel like we’ve been migrating away from terms like “influencer” and moreso to “creator” or “partner.” Are you seeing that?

Piazza: Definitely, and that goes back to the term influencer, which again, is totally overused. I also think within the industry creators are trying to demand more professionalism, which we never really got in the blog space. Everyone who wasn’t a mom in the early days of blogging called themselves a digital journalist. The “mommy blogger” term stuck around because it sounded condescending. 

Shoenthal: Did you watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix? Has anyone ever called this the influencer industry version of that? 

Piazza: I have actually gotten that a lot. I agree that it is. I also think The Social Dilemma got a lot of attention because it was created by men and talked about a man’s world. The world of influencing gets less attention because it’s a world mostly created by women that appeals to women. Meanwhile, men in Silicon Valley towers are making billions off of the work women are creating. 

I can’t tell you how many editors I have pitched this podcast to who said we don’t cover parenting stories and then I say it’s a business story and they ignore me.

Shoenthal: Well one way to get attention for women’s contributions is mentioned in your final episode, when you share the story of how in 1975 all the women in Iceland went on strike. They refused to do housework, did no shopping, and they shut the economy down. 

Piazza: I knew if we got a season two, I wanted that to be the first episode. I want to explore what would happen if women just went offline for a day. What if we didn’t look at anything, we didn’t buy anything, we didn’t create anything. What would happen to the economy? 

Shoenthal: On the topic of season two, any news you can share?

Piazza: We’ve been fighting hard for one. When I first started I didn’t know if there was enough to report on for a second season but now I see that we’ve really only uncovered the tip of the iceberg. Plus our audience has expressed that they are hungry for a season two. I’m delighted to share that after lots of discussion, my bosses at iHeart just gave us the green light. We start planning for it this May.