How Restaurant Influencers Work w/ Stephen Buranyi

Vittles

Journalist Stephen Buranyi discusses his investigation into the London restaurant influencer industry for Vittles magazine. He explores the

Key takeaways

• Most restaurant influencers are hobbyists rather than high earners, despite the perception of extreme wealth.
• PR agencies play a critical role by managing lists of influencers and arranging free meals in exchange for content.
• The restaurant industry... is fucking insane.
• People want to talk. People are always like, oh, I'm reading this story and I can't believe this person talked to you.
• Most of the influencers don't actually make very much money.

Main topics

• Economics of restaurant influencers
• The role of PR agencies in food media
• Evolution from blogging to short-form video

Notable quotes

The restaurant industry... is fucking insane.

Conclusion

The episode reveals a complex, often opaque ecosystem where PR agencie

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:06) Welcome back to the Vittles podcast with me, Adam Coughlin. Today we are taking a break from our normal genre of guest. No chef, restaurateur or restaurant industry figure, but a journalist. Stephen Baragny is an editor and writer at The Guardian, but he's also the author of the cover story for issue three of our print magazine, which by the time you're watching or listening to this podcast, will be out in the real world. It's a magazine focused on influencers, a magazine about who and what influences the way we eat. There's pieces in there about Natura, London's foremost restaurant supplier, or one of. A piece about MK Fisher. stuff about halal influencers and so much more. But today we're going to be talking about Stephen's story, which is about the origins, economics, politics and personalities behind the modern day restaurant influencer. The characters that pop up in our feeds every day, drooling, screaming and waxing lyrical. A band of content creators who, I think it's fair to say now, have become the dominant force in food media. As Stephen writes, while influencers' audiences are growing exponentially, Their relentless positivity and seemingly total lack of critical faculty has led to a viewer backlash. One influencer described to me as a crisis of authenticity. So today we're going to be talking about the reporting process, go behind the scenes of the culture, about shocks and surprises, and without too many spoilers, understand a little more about how all this happened. Stephen, welcome to the Vittles podcast. How are you Speaker 2 (1:39) doing? I'm good. Thank you for having me. What an intro. What a marathon. Speaker 1 (1:45) I want to ask first off, what did you know about restaurant influences going into this piece? I would say almost nothing. Speaker 2 (1:52) I'm not a food writer. I worked in food a long time ago and I still go Speaker 1 (1:57) to restaurants. But I would say that my feed, Speaker 2 (2:00) everybody's got their own sort of personal experience of the little box of the Internet. But I would be getting things like eating with Todd. He sort of muscles onto everybody's feet and occasionally just a random person being like, come with me as I eat X and Y. And so I had a sense that this was sort of a big thing and these were fairly famous figures who had some heft in the restaurant world because they were going to all these places. But I wouldn't say I was able to delineate very many characters or that I was seeing more than one or two of these things a day. Speaker 1 (2:28) During the course of the reporting of this article, you mentioned to me during that process, something that stayed with me, that quote, The restaurant industry of Murtaugh is fucking insane. Civil servants are easier to get to spill, honestly. Can you talk a little bit more about that and the challenges you came up against during this? Speaker 2 (2:45) Yeah, I would say that I probably went into this fairly naively. Not that I thought it would be any assignment is going to be easy, but I was just like, there's this pre-existing narrative that nobody really likes influencers and that they're screwing the traditional restaurant press. and that people find them quite annoying. And this is what you get if you read press Speaker 1 (3:05) articles about them, which is obviously one of the first places I went. So I was like, oh, if Speaker 2 (3:09) there's anything weird going on with them or I want to get stories about them, it'll be relatively easy. But actually, I found that not in an aggressive or like an overly difficult way, but nobody really wanted to talk about all the stuff that's being implied about influencers, whether that's that they have too much power, whether that's that they secretly take money, how much money they do make. how the whole system works in terms of not just PRs and restaurateurs saying, oh, it's great. They come in and they make a video and people respond to that. But getting into the real nitty gritty, which I tend to find one of the rules of being a journalist is, or one of the great secrets of being a journalist is like, people want to talk. People are always like, oh, I'm reading this story and I can't believe this person talked to you. And it's like, man, at base, like people want to talk. I found in general here, people did not want to talk. Do Speaker 1 (3:55) you Speaker 2 (3:55) have any theories as to why that is Speaker 1 (3:57) the case? Speaker 2 (3:58) Yeah, I think to a certain extent, Speaker 2 (4:03) I don't think anybody thinks they're doing anything wrong, but also I think there's a sense that they don't really want anyone to know how this whole thing actually works. There is a sort of like way in which I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth, but like I think that a lot of restaurateurs and PRs find influencers a little bit distasteful and a bit vulgar. And the fact that... as you look at it more and more, they're so deeply entwined and actually so reliant on each other that I think people don't really want to dig into that so much. And then there is the fact that like, and I think this operates at a level beyond, I don't think people are thinking about this or like people that like restauranteurs go home in their diary or peers go home in their diary and they're like, I can't believe this, like very strange contradiction I'm holding in my head. But like influencers at base are. selling like authenticity like that's what they are they're like a closer view of a person than you would have gotten in the past before front-facing video and for the algorithmic feed and before you know you could just see a million humans in your in this window in your pocket you Speaker 1 (5:03) can just Speaker 2 (5:03) see this intuitively but study after study shows that like people find the authenticity and the connection with the human of the influencer like the most engaging thing the most compelling thing But then also like the whole system is just being harnessed to sell things. And I think there's like a little, if you're working with influencers, you know that you're doing a kind of bait and switch where like you are finding somebody who is. has an authentic connection with the audience and that's what you want. And then you want to plug advertising into that. There's a slight contradiction there that like, I think people don't want to dig into too much. I don't think their heart's going to explode or their brain's going to explode if they confront this. But like, it's not great to talk about because like it relies on eliding a little bit or not talking too much about the fact that like, basically as a restaurateur or PR, you're trading food or access for advertising. Speaker 1 (5:56) It's a little grubby. It's a Speaker 2 (5:57) little bit Speaker 1 (5:57) grubby. Very, yeah. Particularly when that advertising is intended to appear as authentic. Totally. Yeah, it's quite an interesting contradiction. Speaker 2 (6:08) Also, I think there's a secondary thing. Like, I'm very much an outsider to this world. I've been a journalist for a long time, but I haven't, I've done very little food writing. And so I think there's a way in which... Being an outsider helped me a lot because I think the naivety made me knock on a lot of doors that I wouldn't have. And some of those ended up opening in very interesting ways. But it also meant that I wasn't really super savvy when I was first talking to PRs and stuff and restaurateurs. And so I think there's also a sense in which people just shut down. talking to outsiders a little bit or they just give the spiel where Speaker 1 (6:36) it's like oh we love them but they're not that special but they're very interesting and I hope they stick around for a long time do you know what I mean there is a good Speaker 2 (6:42) luck with your piece yeah and it's a question of like whether you want to get an insider to write something an outsider to write something and the benefits that come with Speaker 1 (6:49) both I get the impression you enjoy doing it though oh yeah Speaker 2 (6:53) except for Speaker 1 (6:54) the Speaker 2 (6:55) fact that my feed is ruined forever and and also the amount of time I spent consuming front-facing video, which is like, I don't think it's as bad for your brain as like CTE, but it doesn't feel good to be like, for research, I'm going to sit down for an hour and a half and watch every single video this one influencer has done. That wasn't ideal. But the rest of it, it's kind of fun. It's like a whole cast of weird characters, and I really got a sense that this is something that nobody had really dug into to this level, if I may toot our horn. a little bit. So even though a lot of the stuff you're doing is kind of stupid, you're just like, all right, I'm going to count the number of positive things they say in these videos. The question of like taking something really seriously that millions of people are experiencing, but nobody's really thinking deeply about was like super fun. Speaker 1 (7:38) If you were to like sum up as simplistically as possible, how would you categorize this as a story that you've done? Would you say it's like an economics story? Speaker 2 (7:49) Yeah, I'd say it's like a story about The economics that run below social phenomenon, if you just egg-headed a bunch. I write a lot for The Guardian Long Read, and something that we talk about a lot is to take something that's in your life, or something you really recognize, and then... dig into it and see if there's like either a secret world or like an unconsidered world or like a big explanation behind it that nobody had Speaker 1 (8:13) like Speaker 2 (8:13) really looked at before. It's a story that's about asking questions that everybody had but for some reason the principal people involved in like influencing restaurants never answered which is basically like how effective are these people at actually bringing customers in? How is it that they came to be so prominent and popular in promoting restaurants? Who's Speaker 1 (8:34) paying for it? How Speaker 2 (8:35) do they make money and like how are restaurants paying for it? How are PRs paying for it? How do influencers bring money in? I think it's quite interesting because it's a question you could ask about almost anything on social media, which is just like who's this directed at? Who is it benefiting and who's paying for it? Speaker 1 (8:49) What's the thing that surprised you the most? you'd previewed me this one and I was trying to come up with something Speaker 2 (8:55) besides the obvious one in the story which is that most of the influencers don't actually make very much money which is a sort of naive belief I held almost like when I was a kid and I thought all rappers were really rich because in the videos they had all the nice stuff. Very similarly I think a lot of influencing is predicated on selling this idea of access and to a certain extent a kind of power when really when you talk to people most of them are hobbyists which I think is one of the things I found most interesting because like It's interesting to think about anyway, like, how is all this happening and how are you getting these, like, millions, tens of millions of views and still not making very much money or, like, no money. But Speaker 1 (9:30) secondarily, Speaker 2 (9:31) I can understand why you would do this sort of pseudo-advertising job if you were making a good amount of money. I know why MrBeast does what he does, like, dead-eyed psycho MrBeast. I get it. YouTube pays him huge amounts of money. But, like, imagine MrBeast was doing that for fun. And he wasn't making any money but like and then extend that to a lot of influencers who are putting in this graft to make something that is ultimately just like adjacent to advertising and then like the bottom line at the end of the year is no money. It's a wacky thing to do for a hobby. Speaker 1 (10:02) So in the piece you uncovered, I mean, we've just spoken about the fact that a lot of them don't make any money and there's no money in this really. But you did uncover that the representative for one food influencer who doesn't specialize in restaurants asked for £40,000 for one collaboration. Yes. Speaker 2 (10:19) I believe we are legally obliged to say that his representatives dispute that amount of money and they say that is completely wrong. But yes, I reviewed some communication from representatives of... who asked for 40,000 pounds, 40,000 pounds, 40,000 pounds for basically a collaboration, which involved a little bit more than making a video, basically some content creation, Speaker 1 (10:42) which is a huge amount of money. Is the question, are some Speaker 2 (10:44) people making this much money? Speaker 1 (10:46) No, I certainly, sorry, you jumped in before I asked the question. Yeah, I'll do that, sorry. That's fine. But yeah, the question is, I think I know the answer already. Is this kind of money typical? And if not, why not? Speaker 2 (10:59) I would say it's really not typical and the way we got into this was basically through a couple different avenues. So talk to a bunch of influencers, some of them just telling me and some of them showing me receipts for payments for basically like what you can make for a brand collaboration or like the various kind of official advertising channels you can pay. Like somebody sends you a pick and mix. thing and you hold it up on your channel and you say this is great or this video is brought to you by whatever. Did Speaker 1 (11:29) that but then also talked to people on the advertising Speaker 2 (11:30) side and the PR side and basically asked what brands are coming to them with as budgets for influencers to do stuff. And you can, the figures look like it could be a lot of money, anywhere from 1500 to around 10 grand to like endorse something for a couple videos, a soft drink or whatever. And that sounds like a lot, but the thing is, if you go, the proof is in actually the influencers' videos themselves. Even the popular ones, if you go through, they're only really doing two to three to four of these a year. And even if they're getting the max, that's 30,000, 40,000 pounds, which is, it's like, hey, I wouldn't turn down that amount of money, but it's not a crazy amount of money. And Speaker 1 (12:09) the thing is, most Speaker 2 (12:09) of them Speaker 1 (12:09) aren't doing that much. I Speaker 2 (12:11) think with Speaker 1 (12:11) the thing, Speaker 2 (12:12) you see the way in which the internet is not very amenable to the local. So like obviously the UK is a relatively small country compared to somewhere like the US. It's very London centric. So if you are a London food influencer, your max audience is not very big. So if you do Speaker 1 (12:30) London Speaker 2 (12:30) restaurants, there is an absolute maximum ceiling onto how many followers you're going to get if all you're doing is food content. The vast majority of them will be in London. A couple of them will be like total food perverts who are like, Speaker 1 (12:40) oh, what's going on in London? Which is great, Speaker 2 (12:42) but there's not that many of these people. Does like travel content and really crucially he does recipes like he makes recipes and recipe creators Obviously, it does not matter where you live. The recipe can be made in Seattle. It can be made in Moscow, whatever It doesn't matter. It's not central to to one area basically the bigger reach you can get the more money you can command Speaker