I’m not really sure that the US Open has actually broken the influencer economy. But I’m not, not saying it has either.
It might be the tennis-balled, Honey-Deuced melon ball that broke the creator’s back.
Everyone knows that the US Open is the less refined version of tennis. It’s rowdy. Clearly never as posh as Wimbledon and all that. But it still was wild to see a group of fans doing full on photoshoots with a ring light from a hospitality suite while Naomi Osaka was serving.
The chair umpire had to stop the game and tell grown adults to sit down. The players said they could hear the “fans” shouting from the court.
What followed quickly was footage going viral, calls to ban influencers from sports cranked up to 11 and everyone reminding themselves that “The US Open used to be an actual tennis tournament.”
It just might be that there was a bit of a cultural red line that has been crossed. Brands immediately started issuing etiquette memos to their influencers while the tournament started revoking access.
It was veteran player Adrian Mannarino that said what everyone was thinking, “The tournament puts up with it, and I don’t know if it’s the best thing for tennis in general…The truth is it’s turning into a bit of a zoo.”
THE US OPEN DID IT TO THEMSELVES
Hot on the heels of 54 credentialed influencers driving 5.5 million social engagements last year, the USTA doubled down and invited 100 creators this year.
And they didn’t just invite tennis people. They invited anyone with a following. The tournament’s CEO Craig Tiley wants the event to become “the tennis Disneyland.”
Now Disneyland is great, but the “Disneylandification” of everything is not great. I’ll always remember my friend Dan calling a winery in the Okanagan, Disneyland once. It did such a great job of why the winery kind of sucked. It was devoid of a winery soul, and felt manufactured and not authentic at all. I’ve compared places to that all the time ever since.
I totally get why they think they need to do this. Up until recently Tennis was kind of an old person sport that showed up on the Tennis Channel a couple times a year. Getting all these influencers and brands involved has made the tickets worth it. Get in ticket prices for the first round are up 33%.
To be fair it wasn’t real influencers that ruined it. I think it was influencer culture that did it in. Influencers paved the way for people even invited by brands to start doing whatever they wanted in brand suites.
These ring light and influencer-coded zombies are taking everything they see in their feeds and acting the same way. The same way as listening to Youtube on the streetcar or a plane with full volume and no headphones.
It’s a symptom we are dealing with everywhere. For treating every interaction in life as content and you are the main character of the show.
THE FUNNIEST DOCUMENT OF THE YEAR
At least the brands decided they had to act fast.
Following Osaka’s incident at least one brand sent etiquette guidelines to influencers they had invited.
“We’d absolutely love to see content from the day and appreciate any tags where relevant!”
That polite bullet list explaining that you should remain seated during points and keep your phone on silent is kind of telling. It’s unreal that that wasn’t a default factory setting for humans attending.
Imagine your brand Slack channel blowing up during the drafting of that memo.
And then we have to look at the last two decades of marketing. We practically begged consumers to make content. We made campaigns, let them submit ads and awarded prizes, put the social media icons on everything we possibly could until everyone started sharing.
We trained entire generations after Gen X that filming content was how you experienced everything. Now we have to retrain everyone to be mindful of their seat mates. It’s shocking.
If ever there was a time to bring out the sequel to the greatest tennis movie of all time, Wimbledon and bring back the tennis wisdom of Peter Colt as a commentator melting down about influencers, now is the time.
THIS WAS NEVER JUST ABOUT TENNIS
Just like Richie Tannebaum. This is not a tennis problem. It’s a society problem.
Last year Pew found that 47% of American adults say people behave more rudely in public than before the pandemic.
74% say it’s rarely or never acceptable to film someone without their permission. There’s entire niche creators that just go around filming people to get authentic Karen reactions in the wild until cops show up and tell them that they can’t stop them in public. I’m telling you if you watch one of them, you’ll get sucked up into a wormhole of first amendment content that takes weeks to dig out of.
No wonder people think you can throw phones at Drake. You’re making content. The throw is the whole post.
Now, as someone who sipped from the chalice of NIMBYism like Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade and complained to city hall just this week, is this an example of this decline or just shifting of societal norms?
There has always been, and there will always be idiots doing stupid things in public. There’s just more of them now, and a lot of them are performing the idiocy for the camera now.
We are the content for the algorithm now. We’re the slop.
IS THIS THE RUBICON
That’s why it’s so interesting that Wimbledon just did the unthinkable. Banned accreditation for influencers and content creators as well as creator paraphernalia like ring lights.
This is the no-liquids-through-security of tennis moment.
Sure, Wimbledon as a brand, like the Masters, is in the scarcity business. They are selling you sophisticated experiences that are not controlled by the attendees. They are dictated by the brand. That’s what you are paying for.
For all this time the influencer economy ran on a beautiful glitch in the matrix. Give them all the access of the press and none of the obligations. No editors, no code of conduct, no credentials to revoke.
At the very least the wild west era of creators seems to be coming to an end. Will this break the whole influencer economy? Sadly not.
You knew there had to be at least one ad in this newsletter. In 1990 Canon ran the pilot episode of influencer culture. They crafted a line that has haunted Agassi for the rest of his life. The ad that made him think people thought he was style over substance.
Caesar crossed the Rubicon with one legion. This one crossed with a ring light and a suite pass.
COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE MILLIONAIRE
A century ago, if you wanted people to know you had money you walked into a hotel bar and ordered a cocktail called the Millionaire.
Technically there were as many as five versions that used this name during Prohibition. Some had whiskey, others had rum or gin. Harry Craddock featured two of them in his Savoy Cocktail Book. The point of these cocktails never was the taste, it was the ordering and the name that were important.
Some things just never change. The brand suite heathens in Queens were ordering the millionaire with their behaviour and filming it.
Today’s version uses Rye - which is good, because of course, we still aren’t selling Bourbon here. It was credited to the Ritz Hotel in London. If you’ve never had a cocktail and a club sandwich at the Rivoli Bar, you’re missing out.
But again, that’s a bar has a standard and dress code (unless you are paying Ritz room prices then you can get away with pretty much anything). These are things that keep the experience intact and should be enforced at all costs.
I hate wearing fancy clothes, but nothing is better than seeing people turned away from fancy hotel bars, for wearing shorts and a baseball cap. It’s worth it.
Millionaire Cocktail
2 oz rye
1/2 oz orange curaçao
1 tsp grenadine
1 egg white
A dash of absinthe or pastis
Dry shake everything without ice to froth that egg white, then shake hard with ice and double strain into a cocktail glass. Don’t panic, if you don’t have that curaçao at hand you can use Grand Marnier or Cointreau. Pro-tip: Always use the real pomegranate grenadine not the red dye #40 stuff.
Remember you’re a millionaire, act like it.
The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.
I wouldn’t be mad about a sequel to Wimbledon.