With brands tapping content creators for campaigns more than ever before, where does that leave the modeling agency? We tapped Val Emanuel, co-founder of Role Models Management – an ethical model and talent agency – to learn how the industry has evolved, they way her business has shifted and what the pros and cons of these changes are.
Val Emanuel & Anne Therese, co-founders, Role Models Management
The model’s role today
The modeling industry has changed dramatically over the last 10 years, and particularly in the last four. First social media, then booking apps. Agencies have had to change, adapt, shut down and change course again to keep up. We have mostly had to change our views on what a model looks like. This has been a positive in light of social media democratizing beauty with girls who do not fit a sample size now able to get their foot in the door. Social media can turn the average, or even not typically beautiful girl, into a celebrity, while at the same time homogenizing beauty as we have seen with the lips, hips and BBL trend.
In addition to changing our idea of a model's physical appearance, we had to change the role of what a model is and what a model should do. The main job of influencers is to change and influence pop culture and consumer culture. Models were merely an image, many times unknown by name except for a handful of supers. Now, models have more responsibility. It’s almost impossible to have a modeling career without a social media account.
When I first started modeling, it was pretty difficult to get your foot in the door. You go into casting calls with literal Polaroids in your hand and give a photo book to an assistant who would bring the book to the agent... They were judging from unretouched photos and making a decision based on those. These days, us agents are looking at models retouched, filtered and edited photos and sometimes we are disappointed when we meet in person, and so are clients. It’s more possible than ever to be a model with beauty and surgery being more acceptable and available. Pretty soon social media scouting will be a far more common way to be scouted than being scouted at the mall, and post-COVID I don’t know if we will ever do the cattle call style castings at agencies.
Inclusivity and influencer dollars
Model agencies have had to adapt to the model standards changing and expand their boards to be more inclusive, which is a great thing that came out of this. We also have to deal with the fact that clients reach out to models directly on social media. This can be a bad thing for our business, which already runs on such small margins, because we are basically missing out on money that’s coming directly from social media if our clients are not in exclusive contracts (and we all know models and influencers take money on the side that we will never know about it and there is nothing we can do about it but sue). For the influencers, this can seem like a good thing because they are more in control of their careers, but also PR agencies and brands typically offer influencers less money directly than they would if they were going through an agency, just because paid opportunities are few and far between as an influencer sometimes.
At Role Models Management, we are mostly a print and commercial agency, but we do pride ourselves on some of our amazing content creators. We do social media paid posts with our clients, we produce some of their content for podcasts and YouTube as well, but that’s about a third of our revenue, and that number has been climbing since COVID, whereas before it was 10 percent. No agency can survive without getting influencer dollars, and the agencies that are really thriving are the agencies helping create brands and doing product collaborations with larger brands (for example, makeup palettes like James Charles for Morphe, Jackie Aina for Anastasia Beverly Hills, etc.).
Content creators and core values
There are models who want to put in the work to become more of a content creator and some who still don’t see the need to climb that mountain. I find that a lot of models are actually pretty averse to doing the work it takes to become an influencer and content creator and that’s why influencers have taken over: they go above and beyond to build an aesthetic and image that can be sold. Creators see the beauty in becoming a brand in order to collaborate with brands, rather than being the smaller piece of the puzzle, which is a model on whom a piece of clothing is thrown on, unnamed and unrecognizable in some cases. At Role Models, our clients are usually booked as a face of a brand. See for example our collaboration with Timberland for Nature Needs Heroes, our mental health awareness collaboration with Skullcandy and our agency collaboration with Futura Jewelry.
In the past four years, we have had many brands reach out for consultation about how to work with activists to make sure their campaigns land the right way, and they dont look like they are pandering or faking it. Core values can’t be sold in a single campaign: they have to be lived and practiced. Consumers want to know, what are your goals? What is this brand striving towards? And more than that, brands are striving towards fair and just in every aspect of their business, and it only makes sense to work with models and influencers who strive towards those principals as well.
