That time Olay asked me to be an Influencer... or did they?
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*Show Notes
Hello my friends welcome back to another episode of the Fairface Podcast!
If you have hopes of being a big brand influencer, you'll be particularly interested in what I have to share today.
I'm going to talk to you about how Olay reached out to me and invited me to be part of their influencer program...or did they?
Let me paint the picture for you-
This was a Saturday morning over the 4th of July weekend. We were over in Cle Elum, WA, which is about an hour and a half east of Seattle, with family, for the holiday weekend.
We were sitting out on the front porch at my parent's property, talking and enjoying the beautiful scenery, when I think I heard an order come through, so I opened my business email.
And what should appear at the top of my email thread, but a message in all caps that said, OLAY OFFICIAL COLLABORATION.
And my stomach flipped because are you kidding me, Olay is asking me to do a collaboration with them? What on earth? Are you for real?
So to give you a little back story-
I had been (and still am) posting about using Olay products and tagging them. I am a little unique to their products because of my sensitive skin and more so, the fact that I also have rosacea. So using Olay's retinol cream (and most recently their vitamin c cream), is a little unique to my skin type so I wanted to share what my experience has been like.
So, as I said, I had been posting about my expeirence with Olay products and tagging them on my Instagram feed @FairfaceWashcloths, blogging about my experience on FairfaceWashcloths.blogspot.com, and sharing videos on YouTube of my experience using Olay products (one of the videos has gotten 65 thousand views, as of today).
So Olay reaching out to me, was a huge surprise, but not totally out of the question because of what I had been doing.
So I open the email and this is what it says,
Hello dear,
I am Maggie Chang, brand partnership manager for "OLAY”. So we are just launching our influencer/ambassador campaign and really want you involved. We love the work that you do, we really appreciate your style, beauty and confidence. Your social media profile is great! We think our audience would find your content very interesting. We discovered you from explore page on Instagram and we also saw that you have tagged us on few of your posts and we became interested in your beauty content. You would get free monthly packages (10 items of your choice per month), your own exclusive discount code to share, shoutouts and reposts to our Instagram and website!
We will be sending you out free PR packages every month, this means you will get to show off our newest products completely free with no catch! in return just tag us with the products either wearing them or just showing off the package! You will also be getting a payment of $2000( this is because of your social media engagements) per post for a start subsequently we may increase as you grow your audience and make the best post we want to see. You will be paid via bank transfer or Zelle every time you post a shout-out of our newest brand product, wearing them on your page. We expect a maximum and minimum of ten posts from you in a month.
Note: this is a paid collaboration, and this campaign's payment will depend on your social medias engagements as it is still low but as we work together it will get a lot better. If this first 3 months goes well, we may consider making it a long term collaboration. Kindly let us know if you accept our offer and want to work with us. Thank you.
Kind regards
Olay,
Maggie Chang.
So I'm sitting there talking to my parents and sister about it and we were all in shock and excited and my stomach was still doing flips but in the back of my mind I was totally skeptical. Like I still didn't believe it was actually real.
It's like, am I winning the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes and I don't open the door because I don't believe it's actually them?
What was my hesitation? I'm guessing we might all naturally feel a little skeptical when it feels like an offer that's too good to be true...but then we also think, but it does happen to people. Big brands do reach out to people to become influencers...
But on top of feeling like, did they really just pick me?
There were a few things about their email that stood out to me.
- The first thing was the way I was addressed, "Hello dear,"
My mom, she's so sweet, she was saying, oh that's so nice, it's just a sweet way of saying hello...and I'm thinking, every scam email I've ever received says something a little off, like "Hello dear" or something like that.
- The next red flag for me was the way the email was formatted and it had some grammatical errors.
- There also was no Olay logo, it was worded pretty well, but it was clumped into different paragraphs that didn't follow what normally formatted paragraphs usually look like and read like.
- The next red flag was the fact that Olay was written in quotes "Olay".
- The next red flag was the way the email was signed, Maggie Chang with a period after it. Most people don't write their name and end it with a period, and there was no signature footer to show who she was.
So these things are all making me question whether or not this was a real offer to collaborate with Olay.
My parents and sister are excited and pumping me up and saying, why wouldn't they offer you the chance and complimenting me and I start to kind of believe it and imagine what types of posts I would make and thinking about this extra money coming in...but in the back of my mind I still did not quite believe it.
- So I looked up Maggie Chang, are you real? I looked her up on LinkedIn and sure enough, she's a real person who is the Brand Director, for Olay at Procter & Gamble.
- The last thing I knew that would kind of cinch it for me, was to look at what email address this offer came from.
I don't if you know this or not, but anyone can name their email account anything they want. So you can choose an email address and then you can connect your name to it, so when it pops up in someone's email, it will show the name, but your email address itself isn't always shown.
So for example, someone who is trying to run a scam, might open an email account 123456@emailaddress.com but name it, a well known bank. So you get an email that says its from your bank, BUT it's not from your bank, it's a scammer who named their email address YOUR BANK and wants you to believe that and eventually get you to share your banking information with them.
So one of the ways you can tell whether an email actually came from the source it claims to be, is to hover your mouse over who sent you the email and the email address will pop up.
So if the email came from XYZ Bank and you hover your mouse over XYZ Bank in the heading where the email addresses are, it will show you which email it came from and instead of seeing customer service at XYZ Bank.com, it will show 123456 @ emailaddress . com so you can know that is NOT from your bank, it is fake.
That's why emails you get from your actual bank will always have an email address with their domain name, so like Bank of America .com so you can trust it is from them if you receive an email from them and their email address ends in bank of america . com or whatever their actual domain name is. Someone might call themselves a particular bank, but unless their actual email address is connected to their verified domain, it's not legit.
Anyway, I hope that makes sense and can help you if you need to discern who emails are actually from.
Okay, back to my Olay email.
So I got my laptop, instead of just looking at it on my phone, and I braced myself to see who the email was actually from...
and it was from customerservice.olay@gmail.com.
*So if I believed that Maggie Chang, the Brand Director over Olay for Proctor and Gamble, would address me sweetly as Hello Dear, would write Olay in quotes, and send an email in odd paragraph formatting, with some grammatical errors, who would also end her name with a period, and would also use a random free email account, not her own account, but also a customer service at Olay, no less, then I could believe this was real...which CLEARLY all red flags were flying in fierce wind.
Keep in mind I still had not replied to this Olay email collaboration offer, mainly because I was so skeptical and I didn't want to reply to a scammer.
But at the same time, if you can believe this, we all are sensitive human beings, on the one hand, part of me felt rude for not responding, and not quite believing it because I would never want them to think I was turning my nose up to such an opportunity, and what if they hired people to reach out to potential influencers and they used this free email address? Potentially it could happen, I guess.
My parents and sister still weren't totally convinced that it wasn't real, so I had this teeny tiny question mark in my head, but I was 99.999 percent sure this was not a real offer to be an influencer for Olay.
So not to be gullible, because I was very certain it was fake, the only way to find out for sure was to contact Maggie Chang herself and to email the real customer service for Olay, which I did.
I never heard back from Maggie Chang (Twitter was the only way she had listed on Linked in to contact her directly, which I can understand she's a big wig, so she remains protected, but I did see her redacted email address online and it showed up as pg.com (Proctor and Gamble). So, surprise, she doesn't use free gmail. ha! In case you wondered.
Several days later, it actually took them quite a while to get back to me, Olay did get back to me. Their customer service department, and confirmed the email was NOT from them and that any emails from them would be Olay.com or pg.com and they thanked me for bringing this to their attention. It's upsetting that people are trying to defraud people and act like they are Olay and they are not.
So just to be clear,
- Am I an influencer for Olay products? No, I'm not.
- Did I receive a ligitimate offer from Olay? No, I did not.
- Would I accept a legitimate opportunity to collaborate with Olay? Yes, absolutely.
I bring this funny story to your attention because if you are someone who is interested in being an influencer, and likes to make videos of products and tag companies, in hopes of being found and offered an opportunity like influencing for big brands, just make sure you do your due diligence to make sure it is a legitimate offer.
- Watch for the red flags I talked about and always follow up with the actual company if you have any hesitation at all.
- In all your excitement, do not just respond, do not just accept an offer and start giving out your personal information. You absolutely must make sure it is legitimate.
I was asked, how would I have been scammed by them? They didn't ask me for personal information in their offer. Their approach was a little more believable with the way the offer was written (besides the wonky paragraphs, and all the quirky things) but in order to get paid, the next step would most likely have been them asking me for my banking information. They were coming in friendly, once I was "on board with Olay" they probably would have started to collect personal information at that point.
So watch yourself.
Has this ever happened to you or someone you know? I would love to hear your experience. You can message me on Instagram @FairfaceWashcloths and I'll get back to you. I would love to know.
Thanks for listening! In case you're wondering, I am the real Shannon Sorensen, founder and CEO of FairfaceWashcloths, I promise! I'll see you next time!
SHOP Fairface Washcloths, the best washcloths and face cloths for sensitive skin at:
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