Bottom line: Being an influencer sounds great—who wouldn’t want to be paid good money to promote various brands. But make sure you adhere to your contract, or else you might get sued.
Luka Sabbat, the Grown-ish actor who has over 1.4 million followers on Instagram, definitely falls into the ‘influencer’ category, so it’s little surprise that Snap’s PR company approached him to promote v2 of the Snapchat Spectacles.
Snap is no doubt hoping that its second-generation Spectacles prove more popular than their predecessors, which sold only 220,000 units and left the company with an excess of stock. To help it promote the revamped devices, the company commissioned the services of PR Consulting, who signed up Sabbat for an Instagram marketing campaign.
The actor penned a deal worth $60,000, with $45,000 paid upfront. The contract required him to wear the Spectacles in one Instagram post and three Stories, two of which had to be in New York during the city’s fashion week, while the other had to be during either Milan or Paris fashion week. Additionally, two Stories had to include swipe-to-buy links.
Crucially, all the posts had to be pre-approved by the PR firm and Sabbat had to send over their performance analytics metrics. But PRC says he posted only one post, one story, and one swipe-to-buy, and it never got to approve anything or saw any performance data.
For failing to fulfill the terms of the contract, PRC, not Snap, is suing Sabbat to recoup the $45,000 along with another $45,000 in damages. The suit alleges that Sabbat admits to being at fault but refused to return any of the money he was paid.
Last week, Samsung sued a Russian brand ambassador for $1.6 million after she was caught using an iPhone X on TV, thereby violating the terms of her contract.
https://www.techspot.com/news/77205-snap-pr-firm-sues-influencer-failing-promote-spectacles.html
