Influencers advertising is nothing new. It is often lied about that the beams bend. Marvin Wildhage shows how sly things can be in the industry. Curtain up for the influencer fright!
Influencers are an integral part of today’s world. Because they often have a huge reach, they are of particular interest to advertising companies. But not only! Publishers are also courting today’s new celebrities for marketing reasons.
Influencers flit about the red carpets at film premieres, are welcome guests at parties and bring glamor to the booth. But if you break the whole thing down and face the truth, basically a kind of vacuum cleaner representative is artificially promoted to stars who basically do nothing else but advertise products on their social media channels that are often overpriced and even more so are the purest Tinnef. Dental splints are being peddled, teas and candles and hey, please get the discount code quickly: Verarschehoch3!
For a long time it has simply been ignored how dangerous it can be for our society when influencers penetrate areas of which they have absolutely no idea. The celebrity status attached to many is grossly overblown for the most part. Of course, there are also serious influencers. But there are also many who abuse their reach, lie to their followers and take money out of their pockets. It’s your own fault if you let that happen to you, you might say, dear readers – and that’s why now is the time to present you with today’s issue of “Vip Vip, Hooray!” to introduce my colleague Marvin Wildhage.
Have you never heard of Marvin Wildhage? Then it will be the highest railroad! The journalist is something of an influencer fright and with his wonderful projects shows a mendacity that is present in almost every nook and corner of this industry. When asked, Marvin Wildhage tells me: “The assumption that influencers let their opinions be influenced by money has been around for a long time. I wanted to prove that with my first influencer prank ‘Hydro Hype’ in 2021.”
For this, the successful Youtuber “designed an ordinary-looking beauty cream that promised an incredible anti-aging effect” and, whoops: the influencers were already there and banged the advertising drum vigorously. In fact, however, the product was a lubricating gel.
If the ambassadors had spent even a second looking at the content, they would know that they were being taunted. After all, who advertises cream whose ingredients are said to include “asbestos”, “Pipikaka seed oil” and “uranium”? Instead, some influencers even raved about the before-and-after effect. A number of people with well-known names from the industry fell for the fake cream, including the “Club of Good Mood” candidate Vanessa Mariposa.
Incidentally, Marvin Wildhage is also behind the bluff about a photo that supposedly showed Wendler’s wife Laura Müller with a pregnant belly in a US supermarket. At the time, a number of media fell for the picture that actually shows Nina Reh, Ikke Hipgold’s girlfriend.
As a journalist, he is a good observer. And so it has not escaped his notice that more and more influencers are advertising for new cinema films. He promptly came up with the next great idea: “Together with my colleague Aaron Troschke, I asked myself the question of what to do when you’ve agreed to work together, but the film is anything but good. The idea for born my fake film A HOLE.”
And so the Youtuber, who is feared, celebrated and also sued, has once again led influencers and TV stars with a large reach onto the slippery slope. This time, as the fake director of a fake movie, he invited to its fake premiere. The whole thing was staged in the Berlin Zoopalast, “including the paparazzi on the red carpet”.
Guests invited to the premiere included: Reality TV participant Calvin Kleinen and Princess Xenia of Saxony. Also part of the party: Melodie Haase, who became notorious when she spat in the face of another candidate in the nude format “Adam sucht Eva”. Also present: Christin Okpara, who almost made it to the “jungle camp” this year, but dropped out early due to “disagreements about the vaccination status”.
The fake premiere of the fake cinema film has been causing a lot of conversation for days, because in the publicly accessible cinema, as Wildhage describes, “the shreds flew neatly, even though the participating influencers knew that cameras were set up there.” The film was viewed more than a million times on YouTube alone. A wonderful coup that many a TV maker might dream of.
One of the roles of an influencer is to promote products. Even if the product is bad? While Melodie Haase is the only one who doesn’t fall for Wildhage, the others are busy advertising the “worst film of all time” and boldly lying to their community, but please absolutely storm the cinema halls.
At a time when people are being sold Corona chewing gum, cheap dental splints and the biggest, overpriced crap via social media, someone like Wildhage not only provides a breath of fresh air, but hopefully also a bit of rethinking in an industry that is now not only completely perverted, but seems beyond good and evil.
He himself says that he sees it as part of his “journalistic duty of care to show the misconduct of some participants.” The numbers are a little reminiscent of “Understand fun!” May Marvin’s bag of tricks not be exhausted yet. Until next week!
