My promoter friend thought I should get into the ‘influencer’ trade, monetizing, he said, my lived experiences. Marketing my varied experiences would make us both richer. My brother gets these wild ideas about making us financially more stable, usually at my expense. I had heard, nonetheless, about influencers and how they could turn words and actions into dollars or at worse, bitcoins.
He had done some in-depth research, he said and had examples of people who had climbed aboard the gravy train by promoting a product, especially a new product. Take, he said, Lionel Messi: all he had to do was wear a new pair of sneakers and the manufacturers would have a bonanza. Lionel would make another million or so. I said I had never played football and all I ever wore were Nike Airs. Jordan somebody had that one all wrapped up.
Okay, forget football, he says, how about driving? Really, I asked – I drive a Hyundai Santa Fe and a Can-Am Spyder – hardly in the F1 category like Lewis Hamilton. Yes, but you did win the North Parry Sound/Nipissing District Go Kart championship – we could build on that – monetize the race. Don’t you still have the checkered flag?
Bro, that was 60 years ago and I think the Go Kart thing has passed the monetizing stage. I was starting to like that monetizing term. How about fastball, he asked. Well, I could throw a decent fastball but I could not demonstrate that now at my age. All I have left is the change-up, although I still know a fellow from Callander who couldn’t hit it. Wouldn’t we have to have a video or something?
Yes, that’s it. You must have been on TV – we could use that. What did you do? Well, I said, remembering the day even now: I mesmerized a frog for a CTV children’s show. How? I just rubbed its belly and it sort of goes to sleep until you turn it over. I used a leopard frog . . . Nope, I can foresee problems with a person touching anything’s belly: sexual connotations, my brother said. Oh, I said remembering the story about a princess kissing a frog.
Maybe we can do a video of you fishing or golfing. We can use AI to recreate that hole-in-one. We can use your Twitter, your TikTok and Instagram accounts. Uh, says I, I do not have any of those.
Really? I thought everybody had them. Well, you do have Facebook, don’t you? Isn’t that a little passé? He knew I did not have a web page so we pondered for a while about the printed word but the newspaper industry, being in its death throes, canned that idea. It was decided that we would create social media accounts.
Maybe we should give you a new name, my brother suggested, something more marketable. A heated discussion followed. Bill Walton, the basketball player might confuse people, he said. The Waltons were in only in reruns, for the sixteenth time, so that might be a negative. Nobody said “Good night, John Boy,” anymore. He settled on my childhood nickname, Billy Boy. All we had to do was brand me and for a moment I thought he meant like they did to cows. No, all you have to do is let your facial hair grow to get that scruffy, unkempt look. Monetize your beard. Bro, I’ve got to run that by my lady friend, I said. I knew she eschewed whisker burns.
The other little hiccup we had was to find a product to monetize.
You had to watch that it did not offend somebody, and it seems many people take offense nowadays. And then there is the health and safety problem, infringement of copyrights and patents, ethnic and religious concerns and other snakes hiding in the weeds. Who knew you could put too much caffeine in a drink, I said, thinking of my last super-double latte. What do you mean I can’t say ‘snakes’? Environmentalists, my brother says. You better not say ‘weeds’ either because that too has connotations from days gone by. And I thought, weed has already been monetized – just look at all the cannabis stores that are making money on that!
Of course, the cannabis thing had its influencers back in the day. The PM said he tried it. Although he assured us that he did not inhale. You can still see the effects of it when he gets going on an apology or denying something. And that other leader seems to be on a mixture of cannabis and helium when he gets in front of a microphone. And yet they are both influencers according to my brother. They are monetizing politics. Yep, says I, look at our Premier and that old green belt. His friends want to build more cookie-cutter $750,000 homes for lower-income people. They will all have green asphalt shingle roofs to greenwash the belt.
One of the problems with influencers is whether we are looking at the person and their real life or the portrayed image of who we think they are. I mean, Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson seems like a pretty decent guy, and he could likely influence me to buy anything he offered to sell me. Or else. Yet that Logan fellow and his over-caffeinated energy drink influenced too many young people to get buzzed on Prime. What is it in his character that makes him an influencer? A wrestler like Dwayne?
So maybe it is not the influencers we should be looking at as the ones who are driving parts of the economy and our lifestyle – maybe the fault lies within ourselves – those who are too easily influenced to use their good sense when making decisions. We accept as gospel that which we ought to be questioning or investigating. I mean, would you believe anything a fellow who rubs a frog’s belly tells you?
Billy Boy Walton
