“Most brands, when they’re investing a certain level of money in people, they’re doing full background checks, they’re working with P. R.<br />agencies to understand potential risks, they’re doing audits of every piece of content they’ve been in or associated with.”<br />He added, “Influencers are a bit of a challenge that way because they’re creating hundreds or thousands of hours of content,<br />and they take down videos, too, so you have to go beyond the existing content that’s published, really know the person and know what they’ve stood for throughout their career.”<br />With political tensions running high in the past few months, advertisers have repeatedly found themselves<br />online in places where they want no association, from conspiracy blogs to alt-right websites.<br />The Maker unit of Disney, which zealously protects its brand, did not defend Mr. Kjellberg’s videos in a statement last week, but noted<br />that he had built his following “by being provocative and irreverent.”<br />“Brands need to start looking at working with influencers the same way they’ve approached celebrity<br />and athlete endorsements,” said Gabe Gordon, a managing partner at Reach, an agency that specializes in social videos.<br />PewDiePie Dust-Up Shows Risks Brands Take to Tap Into Social Media -<br />Social media has produced its own breed of stars, from the video bloggers of YouTube to the style mavens of Instagram,<br />and major media companies and brands have increasingly turned to this group as a way to reach the ad blockers and cord cutters of the world.<br />Those risks were cast into stark relief last week after The Wall Street Journal reported<br />that YouTube’s most popular personality, Felix Kjellberg, known to his 53 million subscribers as PewDiePie, had recently included crude anti-Semitic jokes and references to Hitler in his comedy videos to the apparent delight of neo-Nazi websites.
