A celebrity endorsement feels very out of reach and influencers are more accessible: Nicole Concessao of Team Naach

• In today’s episode of Influencer Adda, we’ll be talking to one of the dancing divas of Team Naach, Nicole Concessao.
• Her covers of Bollywood numbers on YouTube not only garner huge amounts of love and traction, it also inspires many to rediscover the joy of dancing.
• We will be discussing her content creation journey on YouTube so far, future of influencer marketing and a lot more.

Accelerated by the pandemic and altered consumer behaviour, we are seeing consistent growth of the creator economy all around the world. Marketers are increasingly tapping on deeper data and technology around influencers to activate product-related influencer marketing campaigns. Over the last decade, the internet has given an opportunity to nontraditional talent to break into the industry and many influencers have made a name for themselves by building content around their area of expertise. Nicole Concessao, a YouTube dance influencer of Team Naach, has also found her niche on the internet. She and her teammate Sonal Devaraj have been using YouTube to help people rediscover their love for dance and make it a little more accessible, one video at a time.

Telling us how the internet has allowed her to find herself and what worked for her, Nicole says, “When we (Sonal and I) started creating content, which was back in 2016, there weren’t many people who were putting out dance content regularly on YouTube. So we started doing that and we brought something new every time -- whether it was experimenting with the dance style or costume -- every video had something different to look forward to. Now that we have reached a certain stage and stature, we look at creating videos that are visually very appealing. You will see the growth of production if you watch our very first video. We make it a point to put out work that we would enjoy watching ourselves.”

Nicole also made a conscious effort to make her tutorials more accessible for everyone, so that more people dance along and soon, people across the world were dancing to their tunes and tagging them on YouTube. “We create choreography pieces which our audience can grasp or be able to replicate. In most of our YouTube videos, the choreography was easy to follow and our community grew because of that; they started watching it, learning from it and creating videos. From then to today, we have always been pushing people to create more videos, dance more and get them more comfortable with cameras -- irrespective of your age, gender or where you come from. People started recreating videos across the world, not just in India. We realised that there was a need for good choreography and to be able to learn from it because people wanted to just show their love for dance,” shares Nicole.

Nicole fell in love with the art of dance when she was a kid and her biggest milestone thus far, she says, has been performing at the YouTube fanfest of 2019. It was at that stage when she realised the power of social media and met her virtual family in person.

Her journey of content creation began accidentally. She went on YouTube to promote her classes in 2014. Soon, students started pouring in for Team Naach’s workshops and they conducted classes with 100 students at a time. And everything else after that is history. Today, Team Naach has 4.5 million followers on YouTube, 705K followers on Instagram and Nicole’s personal Instagram handle also has 647k followers.

And when it comes to brand integrations, her collaboration with Disney India and Will Smith was her favourite, biggest milestone.

In the past, posters, television interviews and press meets were the only way to promote a new movie launch. Today, producers collaborate with influencers to spread the word and create a new dance challenge. There are times when you hear a song in a dance tutorial on YouTube for the first time and wonder, “Which movie is that from? It is quite catchy.” So, the rules of the game have changed and influencer marketing is getting more popular by the day.

Sharing why brands are more attracted to influencers today, Nicole says, “The reason why I think it is working today is because influencers are very accessible as people -- they are not your celebrity status where you feel like you cannot reach out to them. They are accessible to brands and their own audience. Every influencer has a very genuine fandom, where people really enjoy their content and relate to them or they are inspired by them. Brands have also realised that they need spokespeople to talk about them and people who are more accessible because right now, if you see a celebrity you have a perception that ‘it is a celebrity endorsement, it feels very out of reach.’ When an influencer does it, the audience believes that she is actually using the product.”

Through this platform, Nicole wanted to give out one message to brands. “I would really want brands in India to be more inclusive in terms of who they feature in their ads and the kind of messaging they are giving out. I see a few big brands doing that right now but I feel there’s still more scope to feature people across the whole spectrum. So be more inclusive and sensitive towards everyone.”

From her journey so far as a YouTuber, Nicole says that she has learnt that consistency is the key. Reflecting on her journey and sharing a few learnings for budding content creators, she says, “Be very consistent with your work. Don’t put out work and forget about it and be MIA. Be more organised and plan it well because in this content space, everything works in a schedule. Secondly, always aim for putting out quality work. You can create multiple videos but make sure that they are of a certain quality in terms of your content, not the production style. Lastly, find the right people to collaborate with because you get to learn a lot.”