How much do influencers & creators impact our culture and the decisions we make? What has been the role of female creators and influencers in the evolution of the creator industry?
Our guest in this episode is Jo Piazza, a journalist, best-selling author, and host of the popular podcast “Under the Influence,” We sit down to discuss the cultural impact of influencers and the key role women have had in the industry's evolution. Jo helps us explore the benefits and challenges of the influencer industry, especially for female creators, and the remarkable empowerment women find through social media.
We also discuss the potential need for regulations and accountability in the influencer space, especially regarding parenting, political views, and mental health. Jo also gives us a glimpse into her upcoming novel, "The Sicilian Inheritance," a compelling story set in Sicily that weaves together history, feminism, and mystery. Check out the link below to learn more about the book and pre-order your copy - coming April 2024.
How much do influencers & creators impact our culture and the decisions we make? What has been the role of female creators and influencers in the evolution of the creator industry?
Our guest in this episode is Jo Piazza, a journalist, best-selling author, and host of the popular podcast “Under the Influence,” We sit down to discuss the cultural impact of influencers and the key role women have had in the industry's evolution. Jo helps us explore the benefits and challenges of the influencer industry, especially for female creators, and the remarkable empowerment women find through social media.
We also discuss the potential need for regulations and accountability in the influencer space, especially regarding parenting, political views, and mental health. Jo also gives us a glimpse into her upcoming novel, "The Sicilian Inheritance," a compelling story set in Sicily that weaves together history, feminism, and mystery. Check out the link below to learn more about the book and pre-order your copy - coming April 2024.
I do believe that this industry gets ignored because it is largely women. It's ignored to everyone's detriment, but mostly because it is women who serve content to other women and a lot of times, moms who serve content to other moms, and we just don't take them seriously.
Speaker 2:
Welcome back to the show. Hope you're all having a great week so far. I have a terrific episode for you today. Today we have on the show Joe Piazza. She has a extremely successful podcast. She's a bestselling author and an award-winning journalist. Her latest book, the Sicilian Inheritance, will be out in April of 2024, so more to come on that. But she's also written other books, including we Are Not Like them. You Were Always Mine. Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win the Knockoff and how to Be Married. Joe's podcasts have garnered her more than 25 million downloads. If you want to check out her wonderful podcast, it is called Under the Influence.
Speaker 2:
We talk about Joe's background, how she got started in the space that she's in now. She was a newspaper reporter and helped launch Yahoo Travel website and ran their influencer network, started writing books and moved into podcasting. We talk about the cultural impact of influencers, especially on women. What has this meant for women, both positively and negatively? And we also talk about the impact of influencers on politics, regulation and future trends. Chalkful of great information and a really interesting episode. We are going to jump right into it, joe, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:
Hi, happy to be here.
Speaker 2:
Well, I cannot tell you how I got sucked in on your podcast Under the Influence. I just went down the rabbit hole because you cover so many topics that we come across working with female creators and influencers. Let's start a little bit by going back. You started as a reporter. How did you get to this point today where you are a bestselling author? You've got the podcast very popular podcast Under the Influence. How did we get here?
Speaker 1:
How did we get here? How did you get to the like? Let's go back in time doodly-doo, doodly-doo, doodly-doo. We know sound effects. Yeah, I've been a reporter for my entire career since I was in college actually, so for more than 20 years at this point and I was a newspaper reporter. I interned at the New York Times. I was at the New York Daily News for a really long time, which I credit with teaching me how to write a lot quickly because I was on deadline, right. So I think that newspaper reporters, especially tabloid newspaper reporters, we don't have time to like marinate over every sentence, we're like just get it in and get it done. So I did that for a very long time. I moved over to magazines for a while and I've just been evolving, as all of the platforms have been evolving. When I started out, I legit thought I would be a newspaper or magazine editor for my entire life. In print, yeah.
Speaker 2:
Well, and that was a sexy. I have to tell you, I job. It was one of the sexiest things I remember. When I started my career, I had interned for the New York Times and I was like, look at these amazing female editors, this is the thing to do, right? But then it all started to change.
Speaker 1:
Then it all changed and it's just changed so quickly, right? So then I was creating the entire website and digital platform for our magazines, for InTouch and Life and Style, and then I was doing all of the social media. And then I launched the website Yahoo Travel, which was a digital magazine for Yahoo, and I started to run their influencer network, which was very interesting Because it was the first time that I was really interacting with influencers, and this was pre the influencer explosion.
Speaker 2:
So yeah, what year was this? Tell me.
Speaker 1:
It must have been 2012, 2013. Wow, okay, so early, early, early-ish days. And then I started. I've been writing books for about 13 years and was doing a lot more of that a lot more novel writing, actually. But I also jumped over into podcasts, because that was the new emerging platform and my first podcast Committed came out with how Stuff Works. And then I Heart Media and I worked with I Heart Media for about four years, developing seven podcasts for them, and this year I'm launching my own independent podcast network and studio. I've learned how to do it. I no longer trust media companies necessarily, so why not just do this on my own?
Speaker 2:
So if you think about going back, let's go back for a second to the Yahoo influencer. We've been doing influencer since 2008 and nobody back then even knew what the heck it was. And so here you are. And, by the way, 2012 wasn't as significant. I mean, people knew what, like maybe bloggers or people who were on social media but the term influencer didn't really get popular till YouTube decided to start calling YouTubers influencers and then put them in their ads, made them front and center, all of that. So you were doing this back in 2012, 13, you said, and I'm assuming the network you were running for Yahoo, that was for advertisers, yahoo advertisers.
Speaker 1:
No, no, it was for Yahoo Travel. We realized that I feel like the travel influencing space was really one of the early influencing spaces, and so we had a lot of travel bloggers who were making the leap over to the socials because travel content is so visual, it's so good with videos, it's so good with images, and so we had this whole network of travel bloggers and travel really grammars. We were calling them grammars at that point, who we would take stories from them and then we would have them help us distribute our content to try to increase our reach. Ah, interesting, this was pre-advertisers coming into it, you know, and we were. We would say that we were doing this to the rest of Yahoo and they're like huh, we don't get it, which is probably why Yahoo isn't around anymore.
Speaker 2:
I want to get your perspective on the cultural impact of influencers, because I think this is something I know you cover this in your podcast. It's something that I find fascinating how women are treated. What do you think the cultural impact of influencers, creators, people who have built up a social media following and maybe somehow have monetized it what do you think the impact is of this, of this space?
Speaker 1:
I mean, I have to say I think that the impact is grossly underestimated in the mainstream media and that it can't really be overestimated. I think it's only going to grow, it's only going to change and evolve, and mainstream media all of the outlets ignore it to their detriment. When I first started covering this in oh my gosh, what year was it? I think 2019., I believe so I knew about influencers. I had also worked with brands to hire influencers, but it wasn't until I went deep into the rabbit hole that I became a true believer. This is the way people will consume content and we're not going backwards from this. The big influencers get more eyeballs than the majority of television shows, right, they're. Also influencers are getting way more eyeballs than any of my books. This is a form of content that reaches people where they are all the freaking time. No other individual is literally reaching people's eyeballs while they're in the bathroom every day.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, let's talk for a second about a couple of areas, because I could not agree with you more. I think it's affecting everything I knew you had tell Lorenz on. That episode was about the hatred of women on social media or on the internet. Yeah, can you talk a little bit? Maybe first about who is Taylor, but maybe more broadly, this idea of how women are treated in the social media and the internet space.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Taylor Lorenz is one of the few mainstream journalists who has been covering the influencer economy for quite some time at a number of different publications. Frankly and she would tell you this herself she's been bouncing around different publications because those publications haven't taken what she does as seriously as they should, and so I consider Taylor a really great expert and resource on the entire creator economy. And one of the things that we chatted about is how, if you are a woman who puts yourself out there online, you are going to be attacked constantly. That's it. You will be attacked. People are going to come after you in comments, they're going to email you, they're going to attack you for your looks, for your words, for your age, for your parenting style, for how you talk.
Speaker 1:
I get attacked for my voice all the time. At one point, a commenter on a podcast said she sounds like she smokes a pack of marbles a day, and I'm like I wish I could still smoke a pack of Parlaments lights a day, Please, at my age I wish. Another one said I was too high-pitched and annoying. No one can agree on why they hate me. Taylor and I talked a lot about how content creators women influencers get the most shit. But frankly, I have to say I do believe that this industry gets ignored because it is largely women. I think the only reason we even evolved into calling people creators was when there were more men hopping on board and they didn't like the word influencer. So I genuinely think, like I said, it's ignored to everyone's detriment, but mostly because it is women who serve content to other women and, a lot of times, moms who serve content to other moms and we just don't take them seriously.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I have to tell you, you just brought something up that reminded me. You've probably been seeing a lot of creators are doing this kind of wrap up of 2023, and they talk about how much they made each month. And I saw a creator we work with who's like a mid-tier, has a couple hundred thousand followers, and she posted how much she made in each of the months of 2023, was totaled into a decent amount of money, and her audience is mostly other moms. Yeah, and one of the first comments that got the most engagement probably not surprise you was someone saying, yeah, but you didn't really get to spend time with your kids. So, you know, was it worth it? Basically, the creator wrote back I spend every day with my kids. This allows me to have the flexibility.
Speaker 1:
This allows me to have the flexibility to be with my children. That's it.
Speaker 2:
That's right. Majority of creators, influencers or women over 80% are women. Why do you think this industry A appeals to women? Why have women basically built this industry? Yeah, I think Goldman Sachs said it's valued over $400 billion, which is extremely high. Gonzo right, gonzo, yeah. Yet we still, at the same time, have people who are constantly decrying what a scam it is, and also the women who have built it are the ones who obviously get a lot of hate.
Speaker 1:
So much hate, so much hate. I want to go back to the first part of that, where we were talking about creators posting how much they make at the end of the year, because I'm fascinated by it and I also love that transparency. I try to be as transparent as possible. I think it also helps all women if we're just honest about how we make our money. I've seen exactly what you saw that when a woman posts about how she makes money, she gets attacked for not being there for her kids.
Speaker 1:
And when I first started reporting on influencers this is something I didn't know until I started the Under the Influence podcast is that this has become a flexible way for women to make money while also being with their children. It's a radical choice. Women are doing it because corporate America is unkind to mothers. Corporate America is unkind to women, but also very unkind to mothers. I think about this all the time. I have a very flexible work lifestyle. I work a ton, but I can write books, I can make podcasts, I can do all of these things on my timeframe and I thought about oh, can I go back into a corporate nine to five job? No, because my kid's school gets out at 250 and 345 and I have a baby who has full-time childcare but my full-time childcare has to go to school at 320 every day. Someone has to be around, even with aftercare, to move the children around to the different aftercares. Don't even get me started about doctors appointments.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Speaker 1:
So the fact that women can be creators and be influencers and still make money to support their family I'm the breadwinner in my family is fucking amazing.
Speaker 2:
I think it's one of the best things that's happened to getting to a point of equal pay. Let's say, right, this is one of the best things that's happened for women in that how many year-long fight we've had, we're still at. What is it like? 80-something cents per dollar that a man in the same position makes. And I think, with social media, with the advent of social and women being able to monetize this and use this as an opportunity to earn income, it's become such a great equalizer for women, huge equalizer, and just starting to see, I think, the impacts of it Exactly, and I think that there's so much that corporate America can learn from how influencers are working.
Speaker 1:
You give me a mother of three kids and you give her three hours and she's going to get so much shit done, and I think corporate America needs to realize that we can do so many jobs but we don't have to be tied to their very male-dominated schedule. That was created in the 1950s when men just wanted to get away from their children.
Speaker 2:
We talked a little bit about the. We talked generally about the implications and the cultural impact of influencers. I think you know we there's no doubt that it's impacting everything from. You know how we might treat our health right. I mean, how many trends, health trends, how many products, how we shop. It's impacting everything how we consume, how we buy things. We have an upcoming election, yeah, about the 2024 election we do.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's down, it's not that far away. How do you see influence or influencers, creators? How do you see them impacting this upcoming election?
Speaker 1:
Well, you know, I do like to say that two things can be true about talking about the influencer economy. One, I think it is incredibly empowering for women. That is a great, great thing. Two, I think that the rise of influencers can be very dangerous in a lot of ways and should be better regulated.
Speaker 1:
I came up in traditional media. I came up in newspapers and even tabloid magazines okay, even gossip magazines. We still had lawyers out the ass at those gossip magazines. We had rules, we had ethics, and there's nothing in the influencer economy. You can essentially say whatever you want about whatever you want about whoever you want, and that's where this gets really dangerous in a lot of places.
Speaker 1:
I see it in parenting advice a lot. I see a lot of really bogus, sometimes dangerous parenting advice. I also see women using their children in accounts in ways that I don't love, in ways that I think are invading those kids' privacy, to be honest. And now, when it comes to politics, we have influencers who have 8 million followers and of those 8 million followers, I'll bet you the majority are not following that influencer for their politics. They're following them because they're pretty and they like looking at their children and they like looking at them baked sourdough bread, but the political views get injected in there a lot. It's happening more and more and there's no check and balance. We have no real version, no robust journalistic system, except for, honestly, what Taylor's doing, what we do in the podcast, to check these influencers are and who exactly they're influencing, and that's very dangerous.
Speaker 2:
Even if you think about some of the traditional media and the rush to get a story live, and how many times do we see corrections and maybe things that should have been corrected, because there's a rush to get it live and it's getting?
Speaker 1:
worse and worse.
Speaker 2:
But with these influencers, to your point, it's not even that necessarily, because you could be talking about a woman who has a million followers, because she's showing you her lifestyle, her kids, what she bakes, whatever in a day. Nothing to do with politics, but infused in what she's pushing out. The content she's pushing out might be oh hey, here's my opinion on X, y and Z.
Speaker 1:
Here's my opinion on vaccines. Here's my opinion on abortion. But it's not and I'm not even trying to say that it's all necessarily on one side of the conservative agenda. It can go on the very, very left wing side of the agenda too. I mean, there's extremists on both sides that are pushing different political views, and I think it's harder and harder for people to parse information coming from an influencer and actual news, because we get them all in the same feed and the same stream, and that is also very, very nervous making for me.
Speaker 2:
This gets me to my next thing I wanted to ask you about what do you think we need to be on the lookout for in the influencer creator space this year? Both maybe a positive trend, and maybe also one that is not, as you're more concerned about.
Speaker 1:
I do think there's so many positives in the influencer space. I think that we've never before seen so many places to gather for community when we're incredibly hungry for it. So many of us isolate ourselves in our own little worlds and we can find people who can help us through really difficult things on social media, and I'm thinking about things like depression, anxiety, postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety. I just did an episode of the Under the Influence podcast today talking about sobriety and sober curiosity. There's so many ways to connect, but then we also get very siloed into an echo chamber where we're only hearing views that we want to hear, that are like ours, and that is also what gets very dangerous, and I think the social media company algorithms perpetuate that. It's like we can't have nice things For all of the good things that social media gives us. The algorithms and the way that the companies are trying to make their money end up messing it up, but then can we complain about it really Because they're giving us a quote, unquote, free product.
Speaker 2:
In some ways, it's kind of genius of them. It's like, okay, they're creating the tool, like the technology, so to speak, and then they've got millions upon millions of people who are actually creating the content that keeps people there, right?
Speaker 1:
Exactly.
Speaker 2:
It's a brilliant model from that perspective. It's a brilliant and also kind of evil model. Yes, you talked a little bit about regulation. I don't know if it's the SEC or somebody who is going to regulate. And also, how do you see that impacting things like TikTok, which we've had lots of conversation about, whether it would be banned or not banned? How do you see that kind of playing out in the coming year?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of different kinds of regulation that would really benefit consumers, brands and all of our mental health. First off, I think there has to be really robust legislation and rules generally around children being on these platforms, and I'm not talking about just posting pictures of your kids, but when kids are clearly working in their parents' accounts, especially on YouTube and on TikTok, and in their videos, there needs to be some regulation around. Are you setting aside some of the money you're making for their future because they're working just like Hollywood actors? We also have to do a better job of limiting children's access to this social media, the same way that we limit kids' access to things like booze and cigarettes, because it is addicting, it is a drug, it is affecting their mental and physical health, and we just have to talk about that way more robustly than we are right now. The other thing that I think needs to happen that this conversation doesn't happen nearly enough is when we talk about expertise on these platforms.
Speaker 1:
You know you get a blue check on some platforms. Now, if you pay for it, or if I had to go through the whole process of getting a blue check for my author account, and that was just like show me some articles that people have written about you, show me you're important. And we have people who are claiming to be doctors, who are claiming to be therapists. How can we vet these people that claim a certain level of expertise Because people believe them, and we've seen a lot of problems. It leads to problems in people getting too much plastic surgery or people taking anti-anxiety drugs that aren't meant for them, and so how do we parse expertise on these platforms? How do we parse actual journalism and separate actual journalism on these platforms? These are all conversations that we need to be having more of that we're not have.
Speaker 2:
Do you see the industry continuing to grow Like that? There will be more money spent on it, more investment in it, more and more and more.
Speaker 1:
More eyeballs are on these small screens than they are on any other screens, and one of the things I'm making myself do this year which is very hard for me, because I have a book coming out in April the Sicilian Inheritance, my greatest novel that I've ever written, and I'm constantly promoting it on Instagram, and a lot of the people that I work with to promote it are on Instagram, so I'm messaging with them and I can't stay off of it.
Speaker 1:
But I am setting time limit reminders to be off of it, and since doing that, I finally watch more TV, I finally read more books. We have to realize that social media has stolen our eyeballs away from other things that we used to watch and enjoy and consume, and it's doing it so passively that we don't even realize it. And on that end, yes, this market is just going to grow bigger and bigger and bigger. Because it's easy, because it is easy to pull your phone out of your pocket, like where am I shopping? Where am I getting style ideas? It's certainly not from magazines anymore, even though I wish it were.
Speaker 1:
I freaking love a magazine, I love a print magazine, and so the business is growing and some influencers are so incredible. I've gotten such good ideas for decorating my house, for organizing my closet, for how to be more sober, curious, from influencers. I get all the stuff that I used to get from magazines now from social media, and so, yeah, it's just, it's going to grow and grow. And it's definitely on Instagram. Tiktok too, although we're going to see what ends up happening in the regulatory market. If TikTok does go away, something new is going to replace it. Let's be honest about that.
Speaker 2:
All right, well, before we wrap up, I want to talk a little bit about the Sicilian inheritance.
Speaker 1:
The greatest book of all time, the greatest novel I've ever written.
Speaker 2:
Well, and I heard, if I understand correctly, it is somewhat based on maybe some real circumstances.
Speaker 1:
It is indeed. Yeah, yeah. For as long as I can remember, my family has told this story about how our family, matriarch Lorenza, my great-great grandmother, was murdered back in Sicily more than 100 years ago. She never made it to America with the rest of the family, but the whole thing is shrouded in mystery. There's like these ideas that she was killed because she was a witch or a healer, or killed by the mob for the family's land, but no one knows. And, frankly, my family is a bunch of Italian Americans, which means they're big storytellers and liars. It's like no one knows anything.
Speaker 1:
But I was obsessed with this idea of what would it be like to be a woman left alone while your husband goes to America, in a Sicilian village where all your told you can do is be a wife and make babies. And so I just I ran with the idea. I created a novel about a woman who's left alone back in 1910 in Sicily. She's told she can't be anything more than be a mother and be a wife, and a modern day woman goes back and tries to figure out what happened to her. She's told that she may have a deed to the family's land back in Sicily. She travels there in the modern day and starts to unravel the story of this mysterious murder that happened in Sicily 100 years ago. And it turns out that the same forces that were working against her great grandmother are also against her. We've got the mob, we've got the patriarchy, and both women are experiencing an awakening of how do you be an ambitious woman in the world. A century ago and now, and let's be honest, not that much has changed.
Speaker 1:
So, yeah, this is so an inheritance. It's also it's everything that I want in a book. It's like it's adventure, it's got so much food and like a little bit of sex. That's not cringy, because I read too many books where it's like really gross cringe and I'm like, oh my God, who wrote all? Get away from me, like, throw it across the room. I feel bad afterwards and then the right dose of like feminism and you fucking go, girl, and I think you feel good at the end of it. So yeah, we're a couple months out from on sale date, but we're running a pre-order campaign right now where, if you pre-order the book, I'll give you a free lifetime subscription to my sub stack over the influence, which is about the influencer economy. I just need people to DM me a receipt and people really love that.
Speaker 1:
Actually it's a great way of because I know books are expensive and no, it's a great way of just giving people a little gift to get the book in their hands and, trust me, like it's coming out April 2nd, it's going to be the best book to read. And ignore your kids on spring break.
Speaker 2:
Well, I'm excited to to dig into it and we will make sure our audience can find a link for that to pre-order. And, joe, if people want to find you, follow you. What is the best way for?
Speaker 1:
them to do that. I do have the sub stack now, which is called over the influence, and the podcast is under the influence, but I'm also on Instagram at Joe Piazza. Author.
Speaker 2:
Joe, thank you so much for spending time with us today and congratulations on all of the success.