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Your Instagram Picture, Worth a Thousand Ads

Jaimee Dormer, in doorway, who sells vintage clothes out of a van, swaps her Instagram influence for parking spots.Credit...Matt Edge for The New York Times

Alina Tsvor is a 24-year-old freelance photographer who sometimes struggles to make ends meet. But when Ms. Tsvor wanted to charter a helicopter to take her and her friends for a ride over Chicago, she had the currency.

Nikoletta Csanyi, 28, a banking consultant, leveraged her capital for a three-year lease on a 2014 Mercedes-Benz CLA.

Jason M. Peterson, 44, used his assets to get a first-class plane ticket to Iceland, where he stayed for a week at no cost.

These were deals made in exchange for posts on Instagram, where a thriving economy has emerged amid the scroll of pretty pictures. Luxury brands have been hiring bloggers to plug their goods for years. But words are so Gen Y. Now marketers from companies like Burberry, Holiday Inn and Nike are trying to leverage the visual Internet to reach a young generation of consumers that increasingly gravitates toward media in the form of images (emoji, Tinder, Instagram).

These brands are looking to co-opt the Insta-fluence of people posting photographs of their lives and experiences in a way that is interesting to strangers (sometimes tens of thousands of them, or more).

As was the case when bloggers first came to Internet renown, some deals between brands and so-called Grammers are pay-for-play, while others involve an exchange of products for a well-styled, engaging post.

Ms. Tsvor, who likes to post photos of cities and landscapes, afforded herself a chopper ride by drafting an email to Chicago Helicopter Experience and making an offer: If the company treated her to a night above the town, she would snap photographs on her iPhone and share at least one (with a caption including the helicopter company’s name) with her 55,000 Instagram followers. “I got two rides out of it and got a bunch of my friends rides, too,” Ms. Tsvor said.

Among the three in-air photos Ms. Tsvor posted over the next few weeks was an at-dusk bird’s-eye view of the city that she published with the caption, “Just looking for some new roofs to climb @chetours.” It garnered nearly 3,400 “likes.”

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Refinery29, the fashion website, invited 35 influential social media photographers to a New York Fashion Week “InstaMeet” photo-op, featuring a miniature golf course inspired by top designers. Here, Kevin Ornelas photographs Amy Marietta.Credit...Amy Lombard for The New York Times

Ms. Csanyi got her Mercedes by winning a contest that required her to take the car on a three-day road trip to Washington, D.C., and post photos from the trip that included in the caption the @mbusa Instagram handle and the hashtag: #ClataketheWheel.

Among her photos of the car was one lit in the background by the glowing rotunda of the Capitol. In the caption she wrote: “Good night D.C. We had a lot going on today, will share more of the awesomeness tomorrow morning. Sleep tight @mbusa, we will dream with #clatakethewheel.”

For Mercedes, reaching the Instagram community was a central marketing strategy. The CLA went on sale last fall at a starting price of about $29,000 with the goal of drawing younger consumers. For the millennial generation, which spends a lot of time scrolling through social media feeds, Instagram influencers are far more important than celebrities. “They’re more approachable. Celebrity is just not relatable,” said Mark Aikman, Mercedes-Benz USA’s manager of digital marketing. “The prize Niki has with the CLA is not payment for her messaging,” he added. “It’s a prize.”

Mr. Peterson, an advertising agency chief creative officer who has in excess of 308,000 followers on his personal Instagram feed, was sent to Iceland by Dom Pérignon, the Champagne company, in exchange for four photos posted to his page. “I took it as a week’s vacation. The experience was so rad,” he said. Dom Pérignon also gave him $15,000. A representative for the agency working for the Champagne company would not confirm the terms of the deal.

Start-up companies with Instagram accounts are also able to leverage their social currency as capital. Blade, an app-based helicopter service that shuttles people between Manhattan and the Hamptons, used Instagram to help it overcome a significant business obstacle: Helicopter travel is reliant on good weather, and Blade wanted a rainy-day alternative for customers who booked flights in advance.

The company struck a deal with three New York-area Maserati dealerships. When helicopters were grounded this summer, passengers were taken to Long Island in chauffeured Maseratis. No money exchanged hands, said Evan Licht, general manager of Blade. Instead, Maserati was guaranteed the right to provide what amounted to a multi-hour test drive to the jet set, and coverage on Blade’s Instagram account. Blade’s feed has only about 2,600 followers, but they are wealthy media and fashion industry insiders prone to social sharing. “It was a great deal for us. It was the right people in the cars and it was shared all over Instagram,” said Dara Kaplan, a spokeswoman for Maserati of Manhattan.

Instagram influencers say they have fielded significant interest from brands in the last year — and that even large corporate brands agree not to interfere with their creative process. The labels aren’t just looking for help reaching niche Instagram communities. They often also want assistance creating effective marketing images. That means they need the Grammers to present their products to their homegrown audience with the aesthetic that drew the audience in the first place.

“There is a tremendous amount of authenticity and credibility that these photographers have with their followers,” said David Duplantis, the president of global digital and customer experience for Coach, the luxury label that for the last two years has been hiring Instagrammers to promote its goods.

Inevitably, the middlemen have arrived. Corbett Drummey, 24, last year helped found Popular Pays, an app that both connects influencers with businesses that want to hire them to work on marketing campaigns as well as posters with smaller followings who might be happy to get a freebie in exchange for an Insta-plug. Popular Pays operates in 10 cities including New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and has 10,000 active users, Mr. Drummey said. “For a lot of people on Instagram, there are a ton of places in New York City you can go for a free cup of coffee.”

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Jeremy Mitchell takes a photo through the golf hole inspired by Alexander Wang at the Refinery29 New York Fashion Week “InstaMeet” photo-op.Credit...Amy Lombard for The New York Times

Refinery29, the fashion website (also known as R29), engages influential Instagrammers as a key part of its marketing strategy. “For a fashion audience, Instagram is such an amazing medium,” said Piera Gelardi, the site’s executive creative director. “It’s visually inspiring and it’s accessible.”

To try to tap into the followings of Instagrammers geared toward fashion and adventure, R29 four months ago began to host “InstaMeets.” The first brought about 20 Grammers to the company’s studio, surrounding them with models and props like edible Pantone chips, brightly colored candy and disco balls. “It was a playground,” Ms. Gelardi said. The event generated 128 posts tagged “#r29instameet” that drew more than 78,000 likes. That day, 590 followers joined the Refinery29 Instagram feed, more than 50 percent above the usual daily rate.

During New York Fashion Week last month, R29 hosted an Instagram meet-up with the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Thirty-five influential social media photographers were invited to a private viewing of a nine-hole miniature golf course built in a rented SoHo space. Each hole was inspired by the aesthetic of a different American designer.

Jaimee Dormer was among the Instagrammers looking for the perfect photo-op. Her personal feed, @ohhaiitsmee, has more than 170,000 followers. This was her third R29 Instagram meet-up. “There are the best props you can imagine.”

Ms. Dormer, 30, said she knows that R29 hosts these events to leverage the audiences that people like her have built. “I don’t have a problem with it,” she said. “I have my own brand and they match with it a hundred percent.”

She uses her Insta-fluence for her own benefit as well. She is an owner of Coast to Coast Vintage — a company that she and her boyfriend operate out of a 1976 Serro Scotty camper filled with vintage clothes. Driving around the country, they trade Instagram photographs of bars, restaurants and flea markets for the right to park outside the establishments, and offer a pop-up shopping experience for passers-by. “Being able to park, for us, is huge,” she said. “We exist solely on doing these pop-ups and on the generosity of people letting us eat into their traffic.”

Adam J. Kurtz, a graphic designer, was at the Refinery29 event, too, but he left after about a half-hour. He posted one photo and then deleted it. “It felt heavy-handed,” he said.

Mr. Kurtz has more than 36,000 followers on his feed, where he posts pictures of receipts, ticket stubs and other bits and bobs of paper. He also promotes his book, “1 Page at a Time.”

“I am still coming to terms with my Instagram influence,” he said. “All this talk about ‘collaborations’ and taking part in hashtag projects just doesn’t feel honest to me.”

Mr. Kurtz said he has turned down a half-dozen brands in the last several months that wanted pay-for-play coverage on his page. He did, however, accept one gig with a company that makes specialty iPhone cases. The company let him design cases that he would promote on Instagram. On one case, a dictionary definition is printed backward so that it will be readable when someone takes a selfie with the camera cases pointed at a mirror. The term it defines: narcissistic personality disorder.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section E, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Your Picture, Worth a Thousand Ads. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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