Before We Called Them Influencers

In 2009, bebe Generation—the haircare brand—ran a campaign that in retrospect looks like a proof of concept for everything that followed. Young women competed to move into four brand-sponsored shared apartments in Berlin, Cologne, Munich, and Hamburg, each organized around a lifestyle category: music, fashion, lifestyle, active. The winners were voted in by an audience. Once inside, they made content.

Nobody called it that yet. The music group did karaoke. The fashion group designed a limited edition pair of jeans. All of it photographed, posted, turned into rolling advertisement for a product that was mostly beside the point. The girls were the product—their enthusiasm, their sorting into recognizable consumer types. The vocabulary to describe what that meant didn’t exist yet, so everyone just said it was fun and gave away digital cameras.

What strikes me looking back is how exposed the mechanism was, and how willingly everyone played along anyway. The audience voted, the girls moved in, the brand got content. A simple transaction dressed up as an adventure. A few years later the whole internet would run on this model, and no one would remember that it had to start somewhere.