Loren Gray is more than she seems to be.
At first glance, the TikTok and Instagram influencer’s posts seem to have about as much substance as a sheer top or a mini skirt. She’s dancing, or curling her eyelashes, or showing you the backstage scenes of a Netflix gross-out high-school comedy, in which her biggest scene involved her, well, soiling herself. She’s talked about that in a few posts.
Then you find out that Gray, who is 22, has 90 million followers or so, easily earns more than $1 million a year. And the film she stars in, Incoming, made it to the top ranks of Netflix films when it was released in late summer.
In an interview at the Web Summit in Qatar last year, she turns out to be entirely serious about making the most of her appearance (she turns blonde hair and delicate features into a doll-like look for the apps), building a long-lived brand, and either expanding into acting or music. Oh, and she’s working on an accounting degree at a community college in Los Angeles.
Her cause is mental health, which she talks about onstage at Web Summit, the international meet-up for the tech world. “My biggest thing is that everyone is nice to each other. Everyone deserves to feel loved and included,” she told her fan base back in 2018.
How Influencer Marketing Works
Influencer marketing is serious business, of course. She has signed deals with State Farm, Revlon and Target. She’s also turned down a seven-figure deal, she says, that required her to appear in a bathing suit. “If I focus too much on the monetization I lose focus,” she says. “It’s about finding the things I’m willing to be invested in.”
And, she notes that being an influencer is harder than people realize. The sheer number of takes, the practicing, the precision of the looks. What looks like the real Loren Gray on Instagram is a studied version of the girl who dropped out of high school and became a social media star. (Her mom moved to LA to homeschool Gray, who later earned a GED).
When you look closer, you see more clearly how the influencer world works: For a generation raised in a crazy, short-attention-span world, one of an influencer’s biggest appeals is consistency. In fact, five marketing professors broke down some of the success factors behind influencers like Gray in a Harvard Business Review article in 2022. The professors found seven characteristics that affect how much ROI a brand sees with an influencer campaign.
Gray stumbled on these first in 2013, when she started posting at the age of 12, but quickly figured out how to scale. She uses a variety of accounts, and partnerships that help her hone a valuable style and persona. She also has a presence on both Instagram and TikTok, which might come in handy if TikTok is banned.
Influencer characteristics
- Number of followers
- Posting frequency
- Follower-brand fit
- Originality
Post characteristics
- Positive tone
- Include a link to the brand
- DON’T announce a new product
In 2022, the influencer industry reached $16.4 billion. More than 75% of brands have a dedicated budget for influencer marketing, the professors reported in HBR.
The Women’s Tell-All Economy
There is an obvious contradiction in Gray’s focus on mental health, including the growing evidence that social media use is associated with aggravating mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. Exactly why that happens – is it because of what people see online, or because they’re connecting less with other human beings in real life? – is unclear. However, Gray easily ducks the criticism based on the medium. “Me looking pretty is the least of the problems people should be thinking about,” she says. One of the posts on her official Instagram account shows her as Marilyn Monroe, a hint of self-awareness that also comes across in person. Women have been selling their looks, and their vulnerabilities, for decades. Sometimes it takes that long for one woman to finally earn some respect for all of it: Witness Demi Moore’s Oscar nomination, astonishingly only her first.
The only thing that’s different on social media is that the bar is somehow even higher. The volume of content required to succeed on social media, to rise above the billions of other users on the platform, is enormous. In 2022, Hillary Rodham Clinton offered Gray some advice, which she took to heart: “err on the side of kindess,” the former Secretary of State told the young woman. “There’s so much mean-ness in the world, so much one-upsmanship.”
The depth of the exposure for any prominent woman can be painful. Gray says she was raped when she was 13, and told her fans about it – her fans are called “angels” – when she was 17. She revealed the story only because someone else threatened to share it online, first, she told me. Her story was covered by the BBC.
Gray doesn’t share many details, only that the rapist was someone she trusted. And she doesn’t talk about it often on her feeds. But she says she’s glad she shared the story with her fans, and that the support from the angels changed the way she saw herself. She understood that she was worthy, and she wants other people to understand they are, too. “Being an influencer is such as responsibility,” she says.