Don’t drink the brand ambassador Kool-Aid

Become a brand ambassador – it’s a great way to gain experience doing nothing, and annoy people on campus.

During the fall quarter of my first year, when I should have been studying for my imminent Chemistry 14A final, I was carousing around Westwood with a bunch of actors in grey shirts promoting WeChat, the direct messaging application most popular in China. A classified ad in the Daily Bruin had promised $25 an hour to be an “on-campus influencer,” or brand ambassador.

I figured that brand ambassadorship was similar to flyering, and that I could make some easy money by promoting WeChat, hopefully among other UCLA students. I was dearly mistaken. My co-workers were all older, out-of-work actors who didn’t know where Ackerman was. Their cheesy ploys and evident out-of-college status did not sit well with students off Bruin Walk.

Though only a first-year student, I felt a bit like I was put in charge of leading these other brand ambassadors around a campus I’d barely gotten to know myself. App downloads trickled in as we handed out solid gray T-shirts with WeChat’s logo. Ubiquitous use of WeChat today, however, is nowhere to be found. As I later remarked blithely to Bloomberg Business, the primary users of WeChat were largely Chinese international students messaging one another or others back home as they had done prior to studying in the U.S., and the campaign did little to change the fact.

Over two years, and various means of gainful employment later, I feel like I’ve been had. As college students, we often hold a variety of odd jobs to earn some cash: campus coffee shop barista, CLICC library worker, UCLA catering worker, SAT tutor and so on. Of them all, brand ambassadorships are the least valuable and most lacking in substance.

In the age of tech startups galore, on-campus brand ambassadorship positions are pitched to unsuspecting students as an easy way to get involved in LA’s startup culture, or simply as a way to earn money. Echoing the bill of goods sold to independent contractors within the greater sharing economy, companies extol the benefits of working your own hours and some offer goal-based compensation, as in LetsHang, which claims to offer “up to $1000” for promoting and Lyft’s differentiation between “referring passengers ($) and drivers ($$$$$$).” A competitive hourly rate that hovers above campus hourly wages is usually what seals the deal.

The reality of the work, however, is just as mundane as flyering on Bruin Walk. In my case, I felt pressured to exploit my own social networks in pursuit of getting WeChat another handful of downloads. This added to the off-the-clock work required, making it distinctive from other typical college student jobs where you are able to truly clock out. The entire experience, and many other incentive-based brand ambassador programs, is not unlike a multilevel marketing, or MLM, scheme – in order to succeed as a brand ambassador, you have to drink the Kool-Aid, and get your friends to gulp it down too.

Though it is difficult to claim most of the low-wage jobs college students hold are of any substantive value in terms of life skills and experience acquisition, brand ambassadorship is uniquely lacking in that regard. Companies only hire college brand ambassadors in pursuit of an “in” to a specific college community, not unlike the vastly predatory nature of well-known MLM schemes such as Beachbody coaching or Avon makeup. To them, students are just a means to an end.

I’m not blaming them. After all, the market potential in the student population of over 40,000 at UCLA is unassailable. From a business perspective, convincing even a small percentage of students to use a service or product is clearly valuable.

Monetary compensation aside, brand ambassadorship is a parasitic and frankly annoying line of work. The creation of the campus influencer position is merely a thinly-veiled attempt to disguise a marketing tactic as a valuable marketing and business experience to the naive. To add insult to injury, in my own experience, I needed to file a 1099 tax form which relegated me to independent contractor status and requires paying taxes out of your paycheck. This probably isn’t made clear to the bushy-eyed college students who eagerly apply for brand ambassador jobs at the sign of $20 hourly.

Incentive-based brand ambassador positions are not only time-intensive and exploitative, they offer little in terms of life experience and value beyond the monetary kind. If you have any other paid job options, they probably will offer you more experience and job satisfaction when compared to haranguing people to download some application or try some service or product they’ll probably never use again. On a resume, you’ll probably be able to proffer skills beyond pleading with an uninterested passerby to “please, please download WeChat,” or as in the case of on-campus jobs, at least feel a sense of community.

Then again, if you’re looking for money, and have the time and energy to waste drinking some company’s Kool-Aid, by all means, go ahead. I’ll be walking by on Bruin Walk with my earphones on.