13 STREAMPUNK OP Talent
Germany, and Chivers helped introduce him to companies at the show. “By the end of the week, Ali half-jokingly said, ‘I need an agent’. And it just hit me. I saw the opportunity. No one had ever considered working with YouTubers, and they were a bit of a threat to the traditional media,” he says. Chivers knew he was on to something. He spent a few months in his spare time, sending out emails and setting up Ali-A with sponsorships with Monster Energy drinks and Alienware laptops. “With Ali-A, we built so many good case studies that other YouTubers took notice of what was going on,” explains Chivers. OP Talent’s next big catch was KSI, with a subscriber tally of 20.1 million. He’s one of the world’s biggest YouTube stars – one of the world’s biggest stars, period. Chivers got the agency up to speed with these two talents and after six months, launched into OP Talent full-time, and never looked back.
ORIGINAL POSTER Liam Chivers (above) founded the talent agency OP Talent, which now represents some of the world’s top YouTubers
NOT INFLUENCERS The YouTube talent Chivers represents are young, enthusiastic and have developed a following based on the pastimes they love – video gaming, fashion, sports and being compulsively entertaining. These YouTubers have developed followings largely based on their engagement as entertainers, but when someone is able to capture eyeballs, there are sponsors ready to piggyback. The term ‘influencer’ was coined by the advertising industry. It refers to someone who is known to have a group of narrowly defined followers over whom they have some cultural sway – and therefore they are a good bet for an advertising spend. Getting a famous person to endorse your product is as old as advertising itself, but
the scale and power of algorithmically amplified influence is unprecedented and has led to giant sponsorship deals for some of OP Talent’s clients. But Chivers is uneasy with the emergence of the term ‘influencers’ for people who originally started out as entertainers. “We didn’t call them influencers in the beginning,” Chivers points out. “We just called them YouTubers. The term ‘influencer’ has more come from Instagram. And ‘influencer’ is a little bit derogatory. They just want to be as big on that platform as possible and have as many people watch them as possible. YouTubers won’t work with a brand just for the money.” He adds: “It has to heighten the content opportunities.”
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