TikTok super home cook Darryl Postelnick a former tech executive with close to 3 million followers on his social media accounts (@cookingwithdarryl) has partnered with Go Luxury Cruiser to tour the Danube River in Europe (October 19- October 31, 2023) will stopping at 3 of the most desired golf courses during the cruise.  Postelnick, an avid golfer who has played all over the world is thrilled to be partnering with the team at Go Luxury Cruiser, “I have been looking to take a cruise on the Danube with my wife for years.  When Go Luxury Cruiser suggested that we build a tour with some of the most prestigious golf courses in the world (Albatross Golf Club, Quellness Golf Resort, Golf Club Adamstal, Penati Country Club, Pannonia Country Club) and we can invite friends, family and my followers, I was all in!  The boat is incredibly luxurious, the food is phenomenal and the golfing will be like no other package tour I have ever been on”.

The 12 night luxury tour including your state room on the AmaMagna, one of Europe’s finest cruising vessels, food, drinks and plus three(3) golf times plus so much more will be offered to Postelnick’s followers at a special price.   The VIP Meet and Greet Cocktail party, private cooking demo/tasting hosted by Darryl and all transfer costs to the golf courses is all inclusive.  If you or your significant other doesn’t golf there will be tours of some of the most historic cities in Europe lead by experts that will show you an insiders look to some of the most beautiful country sides in the world.  

The extraordinary AmaMagna is redefining the river cruising experience while sailing on the Danube River.  Guests will experience the ultimate in luxury, whether you are exercising in the expansive Zen Wellness Center or enjoying views from the full balcony in your stylish suite.  With five bars, four unique restaurants, a sun deck for evening strolls, a whirlpool and heated pool, the AmaMagna is the most luxurious cruise ship on the river.

Included benefits:

• Multiple dining venues
• Hand selected wines and beer with meals, plus Sip and Sail cocktail event most evenings.
• Split level lounge creating pockets of unhindered relaxing on deck.
• Heated sun deck pool with whirlpool and sky bar.
• Multi-functional expansive Zen Wellness studio
• Unlimited free wi-fi.
• Salon services if needed (addl fee may apply)
• Exclusive Concierge golf program.

Staterooms accommodations include:

• Various room designs and level of accommodations available.
• Most rooms include step out balconies.
• Marble bathrooms, multi-jet showers, robes and slippers included
• Generous closet space
• Entertainment on demand with high speed internet, movies, etc.
• Individually controlled air-conditioning
• Connecting staterooms are limited but available.

The tide is turning in favor of creator pay, but is calling out brands for using allegedly plagiarized work actually helpful?

CEO Evan Morgenstein featured in NBC News article by Morgan Sung.

Designer Cecelia Monge found herself in a spat with Converse after she accused the shoe brand of using her designs, which she submitted in 2019, in its national park collection.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence, and it’s kind of just unfortunate when larger companies ‘borrow’ from smaller designers,” Monge said in May in a TikTok video, which amassed 22.8 million views. Converse denied the accusations in a comment on a post on Diet Prada’s Instagram account. 

Monge, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, and the shoe brand, which also didn’t respond to a request for comment, never partnered up.

But months later, in October, Monge was presented with a new opportunity: creating a collection of apparel using her original national park-inspired patterns in collaboration with the underwear brand Shinesty. The collection is nearly sold out.

While some creators may seek legal retribution for work they believe is stolen, few have the resources to go after well-known brands. Calling out brands online, however, is free. 

And that’s why many creators, like Monge, are increasingly using social media to call out brands that they say aren’t properly crediting and compensating them. 

Copyright laws regarding creative work aren’t always clear-cut, and people who post online risks their work’s being plagiarized and distributed without credit. Large companies have long had the upper hand in working with creators, especially those who have smaller platforms.

@ceci.monge

These are seriously so soft, if you like companies that support small designers, GO SHOP FROM THEM!! AVAIL FRIDAY #Shinesty #converse #design #fashion

♬ original sound – Ceci.monge

The tide is turning in favor of creator pay, but is calling out brands for using allegedly plagiarized work actually helpful?

It depends, said Evan Morgenstein, the CEO of the influencer talent agency The Digital Renegades, which manages partnerships between creators and brands.

Publicly shaming a brand may be tempting because consumers tend to trust other consumers more than they would a large company, Morgenstein said.

“Brand to consumer [marketing] is dead,” he said. “If you’re a brand, you can’t advertise to consumers anymore. It has to be consumer to consumer, which is why brands want to start in communities, and hopefully people in the communities talk the product up.” 

Public snark can pay off, sometimes

Public snark can sometimes end up leading to a productive partnership, one that benefits both brand and creator. 

One of the higher-profile instances occurred in 2020 with Epic Games, the parent company of the game Fortnite.

Epic Games ended up working closely with the actor Ana Coto, who went viral in early 2020 with a roller skating routine to the song “Jenny From the Block.” Coto had posted a side-by-side video of her original TikTok video from March 2020 with a clip of Fortnite’s nearly identical dance emote Freewheelin’, which was added to the game that summer.

“Flattered but no dance credit?” Coto captioned the TikTok video. 

A week later, Fortnite attributed the dance as having been “inspired by” Coto, who eventually worked with the game to create another skate-themed emote. 

Epic Games had been criticized in the past, and even sued, for using viral TikTok dances as in-game emotes without crediting the original creators who choreographed the dances. Although Epic Games last year began crediting emotes to creators, like “Renegade” choreographer Jaliaiah Harmon, other TikTok creators still accused Fortnite of using likenesses of their work without permission. 

Now, however, the company is reported to directly pay creators to use their viral dances, and it includes attribution on the emotes’ listings in the game’s online shop, Billboard reported last year.

Coto didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Epic Games, which declined to comment, referred to previous comments it has made to Billboard.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a choice we’re making to correct a past mistake,” Epic Games’ head of partnerships, Nate Nanzer, told Billboard in March of the move to paying creators. 

“When we were thinking about this program, honestly, it wasn’t even a question,” Nanzer said. “We were like, ‘Of course we need to compensate the creators.’ We wanted to make sure that we could tag them in the posts [and] work with these folks from a marketing perspective, as well, and make sure that we’re giving them proper credit.”

Some creators end up taking legal action

Some creators prefer to stir the pot when it comes to calling out brands.

Since it launched as an anonymous fashion account in 2014, the Instagram account Diet Prada, for example, has acted as an online whistleblower bringing attention to the injustices of the creative industry.

The account, which has 2.9 million followers, is known for shaming both luxury fashion brands and fast fashion chains for copying the work of lesser-known marginalized designers. 

Diet Prada’s approach to seeking digital justice has been criticized as bordering on sensationalist and in poor taste — the account known for canceling others was canceled for criticizing Kanye West’s Yeezy collaboration with the Gap with statements referring to his controversial political stances.

The post, which Diet Prada apologized for and deleted, failed to acknowledge Mowalola Ogunlesi, the Black female designer leading the collaboration. 

Diet Prada declined to comment for the story.

How the Outage Has Implications Extending Beyond The Average Social Media User

When users first reported seeing error messages across Facebook’s apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp at 11:40am Monday morning, no one expected an outage of over 5 hours to begin. Eventually, apps started to gradually come back to functionality, however this outage showed just how dependent the world has become on such platforms. At first, people turned to Twitter and Tiktok to make jokes about these apps being down, however as time passed it became a real issue to many who rely on social media accounts for business.

With Facebook already facing criticism for Frances Haugen, former product manager releasing research regarding Facebook knowing the harms their platforms can have on society, this further angered the public. Now with infrastructure responsible for coordinating traffic between its data centers being interrupted and cascaded to other data centers, the servers were immediately brought to a halt. One of the largest groups affected however was businesses operated through Facebook, as they were blindsided as to the outage and were given no reassurance as to when the sites would be back online.

With the COVID-19 pandemic giving influencer marketing an unbelievably important role in online sales, influencers were at a loss of words during the outage. Many influencers took to TikTok and Twitter to share their concerns for Facebook’s unreliability, as the platforms that allowed them to build a career for themselves unexpectedly shut down with no warning. One of the most popular grilling accounts on TikTok Matt Groark (@Groarkboysbbq) was one such participant, as can be seen in his video linked here.

Expanding past influencer marketing, many businesses use Facebook’s apps to communicate with customers, conduct outreach and further make online sales. With Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp out, businesses were scrambling for an alternative way of conducting business. Whether it be in the clothing, food or professional gaming industry, everyone was affected. Those businesses who heavily relied on Facebook and Instagram were unable to reach customers, and suffered incredible losses in sales despite only being offline for just over 5 hours. Businesses which relied on WhatsApp were typically those in the culinary field, which was used to take orders from customers and contact them upon delivery. Another result of the pandemic was the rising popularity of professional video game players, many of which use Facebook Gaming as their sole source of income, causing frustration and fear that another outage could result in drastic consequences for them.

Additionally, the system outage further affected Facebook employees due to their internal communications platform Workplace being non-functional as well. Here their security systems, scheduling tools, internal calendars as well as means of communicating with other employees and clients were rendered ineffective. 

To make matters worse, Facebook also has become the main login criteria for many unrelated apps and services. This included smart TV sign-in, shopping websites and any other internet-connected devices partnered with Facebook. With the sudden outage accompanied with limited knowledge of how Facebook can prevent an event like this from happening again, businesses have realized that having such a dependence on a site like this while being an enormous opportunity to grow their brand, can encounter the occasional problem as well.

Lately, I have been thinking about how being a Talent Agent has evolved. This isn’t to say that there aren’t still some that practice what they have done for decades, still today. Contrary to popular belief, dinosaurs still live and exist. The talent representation business, which I started in by working with NBA players in roughly 1991, was at best a kiss-ass, follow everywhere, and “deal with the groupies” kind of deal. Yes, we had obligations to help negotiate deals and contracts, no question about it, but in that time, there really weren’t any competitors to athletes when it came to who was viewed as being the best spokespeople.

Truth be told, most of the big agencies told their A-List talent to do international commercial deals (such as Tom Cruise/Tag Heuer in Japan) vs. showing the American public a commercial side of who they were. It was so phony and inauthentic. But, that was the game being played in the 90s. I remember being at the Marina del Rey Ritz Carlton when the NY Knicks came to town to play the Lakers and the Clippers. I was working with a few of the athletes in marketing. I came to the hotel and there were 10+ women dressed for a party at 11am waiting for the athletes. (It always amazed me how these people really thought there was anything there for them emotionally, spiritually, etc.)

To be candid, part of why I got out of being a sports agent was the lack of loyalty from the athletes. There was little to no trust, and no shot that they were going to be with you for their entire careers. I have been to 6 Olympic Games, NBA All-Star Games, MLB playoff games, etc. I have seen a lot. I love sports and I love athletes, but I love it differently now. Now, my passion and focus is on the NIL athletes because they are real. They want your help to be their best, and they are so smart!

In February 2020, I had an epiphany about what was happening in the marketplace. I saw the pandemic exploding and realized on-site events were over. Life was going to be turning to virtual events. Virtual marketing. Virtual speaking conferences. Virtual sports. Everything and every brand needed to deliver their messaging via a virtual pathway. Consequently, the social media influencer market exploded. I was signing creators with 200-400,000 followers and in a year they were in the millions. 

Brands were coming out of the woodworks looking for influence and answers. How can they compete? How can they sell their products to a nervous marketplace? The social media influencer became the superstar of the world of celebrity. Stars will be stars, but for my money, social media influencers saved 50% of the companies that exist today in food, fitness, nutrition, beauty and more. With few people going to stores, online shopping became the hub of the marketplace. Uber Eats, Instacart, etc. took off. Who was driving the brand awareness? Social media influencers. 

As a Talent Agent, when all this was coming to fruition, I was servicing moms, retirees, chefs, fitness advocates, etc. Real people that had a skill. One of those skills was creating interesting and compelling content and sharing it on a social platform. I was in the business of building groups of creators that could collaborate together, share ideas and share insights on how to grow their audiences, sales, and income. It was a community like I have never been in before. 

The Digital Renegades and our sub-groups, The Food Renegades and The Sports Renegades, now had meaning. It wasn’t just representing talent that was there for themselves. Now, it was wildly successful and famous creators taking the time to help others grow and be successful. The social media influencer space is one of the hottest growth engines for entrepreneurism on the face of the earth. Most influencers and “micro” influencers are entrepreneurs. Most have no employees. One person shows! It’s remarkable.

I felt I could impact and help creators build their business. No longer was I just there to wipe the ass of sniveling rich athletes. Now, I am helping my clients build their forever. To wrap it up, like I said, I see an evolution for the Talent Agent for those who want to evolve. If you want to stand at the gate and wait for the rich athletes to maybe let you in the party, so be it. For me, I am spending time helping my clients be ground breaking creatives in a market-place full of great people with similar goals and dreams.