Visibility labour: Engaging with Influencers’ fashion brands and #OOTD advertorial campaigns on Instagram

TLDR

Influencer commerce has grown rapidly, especially among young women in Singapore, where Instagram users emulate influencers through tags, reposts, and #OOTDs, generating advertising content with little compensation. The study investigates the visibility labour of followers engaging with influencer‑anchored Instagram advertorials. The authors conduct ethnographic fieldwork among Instagram influencers and followers in Singapore to examine this phenomenon.

Abstract

Influencer commerce has experienced an exponential growth, resulting in new forms of digital practices among young women. Influencers are one form of microcelebrity who accumulate a following on blogs and social media through textual and visual narrations of their personal, everyday lives, upon which advertorials for products and services are premised. In Singapore, Influencers are predominantly young women whose commercial practices are most noted on Instagram. In response, everyday users are beginning to model after Influencers through tags, reposts and #OOTDs (Outfit Of The Day), unwittingly producing volumes of advertising content that is not only encouraged by Influencers and brands but also publicly utilised with little compensation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Instagram Influencers and followers in Singapore, this article investigates the visibility labour in which followers engage on follower-anchored Instagram advertorials, in an attention economy that has swiftly profited off work that is quietly creative but insidiously exploitative.