The Scoop with Jacqueline Kavanagh

On the Age of Alternative Influence.

More from Vogue Business

By Hilary Milnes, Executive Editor, Vogue Business

Dear reader,

Welcome to The Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This week, the Scoop is being guest edited by executive editor Hilary Milnes.

This week’s guest is Jacqueline Kavanagh. Jacqui and I caught up in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel on the Croisette, at the start of the Cannes Lions festival. It was loud and teeming with people, we were both hot and sweaty, and grateful to sit in the well-air-conditioned lobby. It was my first stop at Cannes this week, and our conversation became one I’d reference in others and at events Vogue Business was on-site to host, around the idea of who gets to wield influence today and why.

Jacqui co-founded her company, Figures, just three months ago with Leila McGlew. They had picked up on similar theories during their time working in media and with brands over the last decade-plus, and felt that influencer marketing was stuck in a cycle of relying too much on numbers — the bigger, the better — that ultimately didn’t reflect how much impact a person or post had, thanks to a culmination of factors from bots to AI. They cooked up their company, which bills itself as an “alternative influence platform”, on the basis that there was an underworld of influence out there, where people with real hobbies, interests, talents, and a level of taste that’s not easily surfaced by the algorithm had the power to build real communities.

This was a theme at Cannes. People want to look at their phones less and interact with each other more. One panel we hosted with Pinterest was all about the era of the digital detox, and how marketers need to think about online spend through the lens of in-person, offline touchpoints. Nostalgia plays a factor here, as everyone reminisces on simpler times even as they use AI in their everyday lives. Nostalgia was also on display at UTA’s Tuesday night Executive Soirée at Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, where I scored an invite to see Ludacris perform his many 2000s-era hits. Stars like Paris Hilton, Elle Fanning, Karlie Kloss, Mel Robbins, and Alan Cumming swirled around, while back on the Croisette, it was like a walking TikTok feed, where people you’d only seen before when scrolling appeared in person, almost like a heatwave-induced mirage.

This combination of conversation and celebrity culture fit neatly with my interview with Jacqui. We talked about alternative influence, lateral influence, and what the post-follower era will actually look like.

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Hi Jacqui. What’s the scoop?

The scoop is that Lydia Pang will be joining the roster at Figures. Lydia was the executive creative director at Refinery 29 when I worked there. Now she runs Morning, which is a creative agency in London, and has a production arm called Evening. Lydia is somebody that we’ve admired from afar for a really long time. She just released her book, Eat Bitter. And part of what we do at Figures, which sets us apart from other representation companies in the influencer creator space, is look for new individuals to add to our roster based on their IP. We’re not selling likeness. We’re selling the depth of what they’re creating and the abilities they can capture. It’s about the right 5,000 followers, not the wrong five million.

What’s the difference between investing in IP and selling likeness?

Figures came about because [Leila and I] worked in media for a really long time. What we witnessed is that some of the shining stars, the people who were bringing so much value to these institutions, finally had the tools to be able to set up on their own to become companies of one –– really successful companies. And a lot of these people were our peers, and we saw an opportunity in challenging the idea of looking at influence through a lens of scale. How many followers does somebody have? Does that really signify somebody’s influence?

We landed on building a roster around individuals we considered “alternatively influential”. And that, for us, means not people who usually make short-form content, doing one-off partnerships. We’re looking for people who have grown an audience that’s incredibly loyal to them. And back to the point on IP, who are creating something tangible for the long haul.

Who else is on your roster?

We have Sari Azout, founder of knowledge management app Sublime; Mindy Seu, artist, academic, and the author of A Sexual History of the Internet, who is currently touring her performance across Europe; Kristoffer Tjalve, the founder of Naive Weekly, Tiny Awards and Internet Phonebook; Seb Emina, founder of Read Me; Kim Lê Boutin, the founder of New Ways of Seeing; Lucy Kumara Moore, the founder of The Sensual World; Severin Matusek, founder of co–matter; Kat Chan, founder of Full Serving; James Davis, founder of Drawn Distant; Jaime Perlman, founder of More or Less; and Daniel Yaw Miller, founder of SportsVerse.

Here’s a mini scoop for Vogue Business: Daniel, who’s giving the closing address at the inaugural Lions Sports event, has announced the development of a new sports talk show for 2027. Details to come soon.

So how do you define ‘alternative influence’?

I think the concept of being alternatively influential really hit something in the zeitgeist. Still, it’s not an easy question to answer because it takes so many different shapes for so many people. It can be somebody who’s able to convene a gathering, somebody who is building a product that people are obsessed with, and who is seen as having true expertise, a true specialism. We’re not necessarily looking for people who identify as being an influencer or a creator in traditional terms.

It’s more people who are like, “This is something else that I do.” And for them to want to work with a brand, they have to really feel that the brand understands the world that they’re building.

You’re hosting a dinner at Cannes this week about the post-follower era. How do you expect that to be received?

It’s up for debate. We want people to think about, “What does it mean to truly own an audience in this day and age? How do we define the concept of influence and your relationship with your audience if it’s splintered into multiple places?”

What’s the answer to that?

Where we see huge opportunity is in creators who can bring people together in real life. I think that is incontestable, no matter how big — and in many cases, it’s really actually how small –– that audience may be. We’re seeing people creating gatherings where there’s no content, it’s just being there that’s important.

How will your platform measure success, if not via engagement?

Measurement is a really important part of what we’re working on. We call it lateral influence, and it looks in depth at how influence doesn’t necessarily travel upward at scale but instead spreads sideways into taste communities. So we look at a central individual and we map what we call their “sphere of influence”. So it’s less about how many people you’re reaching, but the individuals, the institutions, and the communities that follow them. And that’s how we track the concept.

There’s not a ton out there for measuring things like the impact of a single post and the DMs that came from it, the conversations that arose in a room. It’s a product we’re building, the collateral influence measurement tool. It’s really challenging, but we luckily have the relationship with the talent to be able to start to look at signals that are often missed.

We’re here at Cannes, it’s hot and overwhelming. What are you looking forward to?

I think the things that we’re really interested in are brought to life, frankly, in the questions that we post around the dinners we’re hosting. I think that every single creator here has a different perspective on their audience, how they monetize their audience, what their audience likes, and what their audience doesn’t like. The thing that we’re most interested in, I would say, is the ownership of the audience, and what does it really mean to have an audience.

You can catch up with last week’s Scoop with Thames MMXX.’s Blondey McCoy here.