“Can I have a piece of paper,” a girl no older than 10 asked us.
Standing there, scribbling notes onto our pad, there were a lot of sheets to spare.
“Of course!” We tore off a piece and asked her if she needed a pen.
“No, I have one — But I’ve run out of room!” she says as she shows us her arm, scribbled with various autographs from the “celebrities” in attendance.
She rushes over to ask her internet idol, a young man of indistinguishable talent, but plenty of young followers, to sign a bit of Coconut KL stationery.
Welcome to IN Festival: Influencers 2018, a peculiar choice of moniker for Malaysia’s first, and unfortunately probably not last, influencer festival.
Don’t recognize anyone here? Neither did we, but we also don’t watch a lot of YouTube, so we saw the event as an opportunity to broaden our media horizons, understand what younger consumers relate to, and maybe even make a friend or two.
Unfortunately, none of that happened.
Held for two days in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center, it was an expensive, ambitious project that promised to bring together the region’s greatest influential minds and brands to talk shop. Media press releases told us that there would be “engaging” workshops, secrets of building and winning fans would be revealed, all under the same, very tall roof.
Inside, things seemed a little more disparate: There were three stages, and various brand kiosks hoping to attach themselves to the young minds that visited over the weekend: coffee, travel, beauty, gym, YouTube-ing, gaming — every backdrop was covered, all they needed was a frame.
Walking around, you could practically hear the inside of the boardroom as they planned the event: “I want milk foam bunnies, I want leaves, I want Melbourne, I want bicycles,” an exec ordered, as their staff scrambled to throw the lot together in the three months we’re wagering they had to put this shebang on.
They delivered: On paper it was all there, but looking around the giant cardboard box that is the rented out hall at KLCC, you wouldn’t have been able to tell what they were trying to do.
Our first stop was an ill-advised visit to the event’s resident finishing school-cum-modeling agency-cum-booker, Runway Productions, holding court on one of IN Festival’s many, many stages. A woman with cropped hair had the microphone, and was calling to the audience for a participant.
“Don’t be shy!” she cajoled a silent group onlookers, some seated, others standing.
One woman summoned the courage to take center-stage for an as-yet-unannounced volunteer position. Unaware of exactly what she was doing there, or what she would have to do, her shoulders cowered ever so slightly under the spotlight.
Next to the stage, an image akin to this appeared on a projection screen:
Oh dear, please don’t tell me that this is where we’re going. The emcee pulled out a measuring tape. Yep. Here we are.
Measuring the length of her face, the emcee announced that from her forehead to chin, she measured 19cm.
OK.
The emcee then asked the woman what her height was. The woman informed her she measured 152cm.
Uh-oh. Is anyone good at maths, asked the emcee?
No one was — we’re here to learn how to become influencers, not engineers, lady.
Her head and body don’t match, we were informed. With a 19-centimeter face, this woman needed to be a lot taller. Five centimeters taller, we were informed.
Don’t worry, the emcee told her. You can just wear five-centimeter heels. “You can do that, can’t you?” she said. We were unsure if she had just been asked a rhetorical question. Eventually, the volunteer nodded, and exited stage left.
Things were just getting started for Runway after their live shame demo: Turns out there wasn’t just something wrong with the volunteer, there was a lot of wrong in all of us.
Our waists were in the wrong places for the clothing we buy. You see, these were made for “European bodies,” and not our Asian figures. We need to create dips, and add curves, ladies!
However, it was the least of our worries in the message being sent out that day: We’re broken, but with tips and tricks from Runway, we just might be fixable.
Think about it: It’s not much different from the advice column in your older auntie’s ’90s Cosmo: Pear body-shape? Wear a bold color on top to distract from your hips, girls! Built like a bean? Grab a belt, Wonderbra, and pencil skirt: We’ll trick everyone into thinking you’re Sophia Loren. And if you’re already like Sophia Loren, we have a trick to fix that too. A world where we all had flaws, and instead of celebrating our big a**es, we were figuring out how to hide them.
Isn’t this kind of logic toxic to all the young kids on social media, we asked Swing, our mathematician stylist emcee.
“We’re trying to educate our students to know themselves,” she told us. “When you help someone dress well, you make them look good.”
Agreed, but surely you don’t have to publicly inform them that their body proportions are “wrong”?
“Not everyone understands how to complement their body shape. Everyone wants to look taller. Everyone wants to look slimmer.”
Well, that’s assuming a lot. What about the people who will never be up to your standards of taller, thinner or prettier? Why fight an uphill battle against yourself?
“Everyone wants to look pretty,” we were informed confidently.
Clearly our faces betrayed our desire to hide our emotions, as Swing quickly added that the company’s courses were about finding your own style and being comfortable with who you are.
Right. We thanked them for graciously answering our questions, accepted a flyer offering us a “Hair, Make-up, Fashion Sense and Walking in Heels” deal for RM1800 (US$430), and continued about the business of trying to find the raison d’être for the weekend’s festivities.
Tourism Victoria and Air Asia were at the event, a nod to the social media user’s insatiable need to be photographed in the foreground of picturesque backdrops.
“Come take a photo next to these photos of Australia, hashtag our event and you could win a free trip!” the young kiosk worker explained.
A tempting prospect, until you realize that their only strategy that day for raising Australian brand awareness was to flood feeds with fake photos taken inside an aggressively air-conditioned Malaysian convention center.
“No thanks,” we told them, and went looking for the secret of gaining 10,000 new followers. After all, this is what we came for.
Amir, Fathin, Jun, and Katerina, are a group of early-20s students who we found gathered near one of the event’s other stages.
“How come you guys are here? Are you interested in becoming influencers?” we asked.
“We actually came to support our friend who is dancing,” explained Fathin. “We didn’t actually know about this event — it’s not very well advertised.”
Looking around, the proof was in the punters: It was sparser than John Travolta’s actual hairline.
How important is social media to you guys? “Dependent!” admitted Katerina. Fathin nodded in agreement. “Yes, either consciously or unconsciously,” she said.
Can you teach someone to be an influencer?
You mean, like tips and tricks?
No, we want to know if you can teach someone to have a following.
Silence. Fathin offered a diplomatic response:
“I follow people for their personality and energy. Lifestyle, mixture, fashion — that type of stuff. I look to see what’s relatable, what I could pull off. I look for inspiration.”
Why do you think they’ve put this event on today?
“I have no idea,” said Amir, causing the whole group to laugh.
“Yeah, why?! What is it for?” asked Katerina.
Finally, the group chimed together: Syok sendiri (Malay for essentially, giving yourself a pat on the back).
Babel Fit, quite honestly one of the nicest, most luxurious gyms you’ll find in Kuala Lumpur, known for their beautiful lighting, fancy hair dryers, and penthouse views, had a small kiosk.
What the hell are you guys doing here, we wondered? Event organizers seemed to be checking the gym off their checklist, but why would the gym bother, we wonder?
For the hundredth time that day we wondered: What exactly are these guys trying to communicate to the people who happen to stumble upon this “festival”?
“You’re forgetting to ask yourself the most important question,” said one of our must trusted minds when it comes to popular culture. “Do influencers actually influence?”
“Look around, this is corporate jumping on the fat of an influencer about two years too late.”
We walked by a makeup tutorial lesson. Alright, if we can’t hide our disdain, maybe we can at least learn to hide our eye-bags.
“The more time you spend doing your makeup, the better it looks,” the influencer informed an audience of 12. Right.
Looking around KLCC, it dawned on us that whoever dreamed up this event had taken their eyes off the prize: Unable to differentiate between creative, creator, and person who stands in front of a wall with soft-serve ice cream, they instead gave them all the impression they were of equal interest because they exist with similar metrics on the same platform.
The 18-25 demographic don’t need a checklist to make something cool or not. It is, or it isn’t. To paraphrase young Fathin, who we had met earlier: It’s an “energy.”
Instead of engaging actual creatives and creators to make their own festival, in whatever form that would have taken on, corporate hired out a convention center hall, and tried to dictate to “the yoof” what they liked, and nobody seemed to be buying it.
It was a keg stand hosted by your school narc: Yes, there was beer, sure there were people, but something didn’t seem quite right.
Two weeks later, a PDF arrived mysteriously in our inbox, from an unnamed sender: It was IN Festival’s event deck. Jesus. H. Christ.
Turns out, three months is exactly the amount of time they had to throw something as ambitious as a regional pop-culture festival together. Their projections of vendors, attendees, and general layout were grossly miscalculated. Bean bag renderings will never quite be able to capture how stark, and lonely they will look in artificial, fluorescent lighting.
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