“What would happen if Léna Situations or Squeezie went green? » If these two Instagrammers, cumulating between them 11 million subscribers, promoted train travel rather than round trips to New York by plane, the joys of happy sobriety rather than fast fashion brands? This is the question posed by the Paye ton influence collective in a column published on June 9 on the Vert site.
Created in December, his Instagram account calls on the world of influence to change its “climaticidal practices”. Contest to win a three-night trip to Tahiti, another to win vouchers worth 1,000 euros for shoes or even a weekend at the Coachella Festival sponsored by Heineken… Under each of these posts, Paye ton influence comments on the consequences of these practice. In May, the collective asked in a story to the Etam lingerie brand if it was “still normal in 2022 to order a private jet to get your influencers to travel? »
Behind this initiative, Amélie Deloche, 27, and Carla Monzali, 24. The two young women met as part of the Student Manifesto for an ecological awakening, launched in 2018. Signed by more than 30,000 students, this text, which called for the ecological transition of higher education, gave birth to a collective. Amélie and Carla, then students in a business school, got involved as volunteers.
“Very quickly, we realized that we only talked to people who were already convinced. As consumers of social networks, subscribers to big influencers, we said to ourselves that we also had to ask them to change this model which promotes a consumerism incompatible with the climate emergency”, details Amélie Deloche.
Actions still barely visible
While a French person spends an average of two hours and twenty minutes a day on social media, 70% of the population say they want to receive information about a product through influencers and not from advertising (We Are Social and Hootsuite), the prescriptive power of Instagram stars exceeds that of traditional media. In this context, “If Léna Situations stopped flying, it would certainly have more impact than a message from the government”, imagine Amélie Deloche.
We are not quite there. While Pay Your Influence hoped to achieve the same success as Balancetonagency account, which denounces harassment practices in the advertising industry, its actions are still not very visible. His arrests are drowned by the ocean of comments and heart emojis that influencers receive. “Sometimes we are blocked, and more often than not, we are considered killjoys”, regrets Amélie Deloche.
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