Scott Galloway: Vloggers Outshine Celebrities

A clear winner in a digital age: Smashbox. Ending print advertising hasn’t held back the Estée Lauder-owned beauty firm. To the contrary, Smashbox grew double digits this year, making it the second fastest-growing brand in Estée Lauder’s portfolio after Tom Ford. The brand’s innovative digital effort includes projecting images submitted by social media users on billboards during Oscar Week, in addition to opening up their studios to vloggers. The resulting #MadeAtSmashbox playlist has over eight million views on YouTube. In the digital arena, celebrities are fast becoming the losers. Beauty vloggers draw over 700 million views per month and have revolutionized beauty marketing, holding more influence with 13-to-24-year-olds than most mainstream celebrities. Vloggers also have 108 times the subscribers of beauty brands and dominate search. Two-thirds of first page search results for brand terms are vloggers, while only 8% are from brand pages. Another loser: Weight Watchers — and not in a healthy way. With so much free weight loss information available online, the organization’s share price shed $76 in three years, dropping from $80 to $4. There are an average 15,000 weight loss-related tweets per day. “Diet” got five million Google searches last month, a number that is constantly fluctuating. Searches rose 56% between December and January, then dropped 26% the following month as New Year’s resolutions faded away. The uninsured are also winners. Critics like Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, who alleged that Obamacare was the worst thing since slavery, need only look at the data. The ratio of uninsured Americans 18 and older fell to 11.4% in Q2 – down from the high of 18% in Q3 2013 when the plan was put into effect. Conclusion: Obamacare is working. Consistent digital winner Netflix demonstrated yet another winning characteristic recently when police used it to track down a pair of fugitives. In another case, a woman’s claim of a violent attack was r