Jacques Bastien and Dahcia Lyons-Bastien, founders of boogie, a multicultural marketing agency in New York, launched a new agency, SHADE in 2016.
SHADE was launched with a mission to address the lack of diversity within the influencer marketplace. This, being the first of its kind, is a management and talent agency ready to elevate black and brown creators who lead as influencers in the fashion, travel, wellness, lifestyle and technology industries.
DIVERGE talked to the Bastiens to find out more:
Where did the idea for SHADE come from?
For the last few years, we’ve been running our multicultural marketing agency, boogie. boogie helps brands like the NBA, Kinky Curly, Never Settle Show, and more capture the attention of today’s generation. Whether that’s through branding and design or social strategy and viral marketing.
We were running a few influencer marketing campaigns for various clients and we started noticing the lack of diversity in the space. Furthermore, many of the influencers of color that we casted for our campaigns often came back to ask us for advice on ways they can get more consistent, paid gigs with brands.
This piqued our curiosity so we started research and development about the influencer mktg industry. By the end of that 3 months process, we developed the idea for SHADE, an influencer management agency for black and brown social media influencers.
Our goal, through SHADE, is to help influencers of color become self-employed while doing what they love and at the same time, we help brands reach a more niche and diverse audience while helping to increase representation of POC in media and advertising.
Why is multicultural marketing important to you?
Multicultural marketing has always been a department (or an initiative) for certain companies. In the next few years, however, we’ll start seeing that multicultural marketing isn’t only a one-off initiative but rather a major component in a company’s overall marketing strategy. The world has changed and statistics show black millennials have billions (almost trillions) of dollars in buying power, so ultimately, representation and inclusion sells. Multicultural marketing is important to me because it forces companies to go outside of their norms and start being more conscious of other cultures out there.
How is SHADE different from other talent agencies?
SHADE is different in many ways. For starters, we are social influencers first. A lot of companies that manage social media influencers may have started as talent agencies or modeling agencies and eventually started representing their talents’ social media influencer relations as well. SHADE, on the other hand, started with social influencers first. This means that our services and process are a lot more focused and relevant to influencer marketing. Secondly, we’re full service. We work with both the influencer and the brand. For the influencer, we pair them up with a digital marketing strategist to help them brand their social accounts, improve their content, and grow their followers. We also handle contract negotiations, concepts and creative, and reporting for brand campaigns. For brands who hire us, we manage their entire influencer mktg campaign and provide a report at the end of each engagement to show detailed ROI and brand lift as a result of working with our influencers.
Lastly, and probably the most important component is that SHADE only represents black and brown creators.
Why is it important for SHADE to encourage entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurs own businesses that either provides a product and/or a service to their audience. By that definition, our creators are entrepreneurs. They have a niche audience and engaged following that companies are willing to pay for. There are social media influencers who make 7+ figures per year from their influence. That’s the message we try to teach our creators and all other creators out there. Take your talents, audience, and influence seriously so you can make a living from it.
What is your advice for those trying to get into your field?
I have a piece of advice for two groups of people. For influencers looking to become self-employed through your influence, I say: take yourself seriously– your talents, your audience, and your influence. If you don’t, then companies will think they can request the entire world from you in exchange for free products. For those looking to get into the marketing / talent management side of things by representing social media influencers, my advice is to do your research and learn the art of negotiation. Unfortunately, there’s not currently a standard for pricing influencer campaigns. Because of that, you may find one company asking to do a series of tasks and offering you one number then another company asking you to do the same things and offering you free products. It’s extremely important to be able to show value to your customers on behalf of your client (the influencer).
Where do you hope to see SHADE 5 years from now?
Since launching SHADE 6 months, ago, we’ve seen tremendous growth and lots of interest from a few fortune 500 companies. Although 5 years is a long ways from now, we hope to be the go-to-source for brands looking for diversity and brands who are interested in reaching black consumers. Whether that’s though collaborations with social media influencers as we’re doing now, or even through campaigns and placements on blogs, podcasts, media publications, social media communities, and more.
