From Lassie to Grumpy Cat to Ruby the golden doodle, pets have long captured our hearts—but today, they’re also capturing serious market share. In this episode of Is This Really a Thing?, Dean Paul Jarley dives into the booming world of pet influencers with UCF Marketing expert Dr. Carolyn Massiah and Amber Downs, creator of @orlandoodle. Together, they explore why pets are such powerful connectors, how authenticity and branding drive this unique space, and whether pet influencing is just internet fluff or a lasting force shaping consumer behavior.

• Carolyn Massiah, Ph.D. - Associate Chair, Department of Marketing & Associate Lecturer, Marketing
• Amber Downs - Dog Mom, Pet Influencer, @orlandoodle (Instagram)

Paul Jarley: Smokey Bear told us that only we could prevent wildfires. Rin Tin Tin and Lassie became household names. Boo The Pomeranian and Grumpy Cat sold merch. So here's the question, were these the first pet influencers?

This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I'm Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I've got lots of questions. To get answers, I'm talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, Is This Really a Thing? Onto our show.

At first glance, it sounds like something new. Dogs in sunglasses, cats with their own merch. But if you think about it, animals have been influencing us for decades. Mr. Ed certainly influenced Wilbur. On today's episode, we're asking whether pet influencers are just internet fluff or a real force shaping culture, consumer behavior, and marketing. To help me sort this out and decide whether it's just hype or real and what lessons we can draw from it, I've got Amber Downs, the dog mom, a pet influencer who lives this every day, and Dr. Carolyn Massiah, our resident expert on all things marketing.

Amber, let's start with you. How did you decide to become a pet influencer? Well, technically your pet. So tell us about your pet and how you got into this business.

Amber Downs: In 2019, I adopted a golden doodle named Ruby. She was six months old. My life was changed forever. At that point in time, as we all know, a couple months later, the world changed. During that point in time, I kind of shifted my Instagram, my personal Instagram content to share ways that we could connect with the community, ways we could support small businesses. And as we stayed in that pandemic state for a while, I realized I had this young dog that needed a way to interact with the world, get out of the house a little bit. So I began sharing both dog-friendly businesses and dog-friendly activities in the central Florida area. So during that period of time, I created this new @orlandoodle Instagram account where I share dog-friendly things to do as well as my favorite dog products and my favorite things in the pet industry.

Paul Jarley: Did you just wake up at night and decide to do this, or was it based on something you were doing before you became a pet influencer?

Amber Downs: I've always loved social media. I've always enjoyed sharing my favorite things. I had a blog and a different social media account years before, but it really just happened really slowly. I started out, like I said, sharing about things in the community that we could assist during the pandemic ways we could spend our money to help others, and then just slowly shifted to this dog-friendly content.

Paul Jarley: What do you think it is about pets that captures people's imagination? And is a pet influencer different than a human influencer, and how?

Amber Downs: I think that we connect with the pet part of the account really quickly and we fall in love with this animal, and then we get to know the family and the human around the account and then begin to connect with the account as a whole.

Paul Jarley: So Carolyn's nodding her head. What does the research tell us about how people interact with pets, Carolyn?

Carolyn Massiah: Let's go back to brands in general. When we first started in marketing using brands, we stayed away from using humans or individuals or persons in logos or in brands because they could break your heart.

Paul Jarley: Meaning they could misbehave.

Carolyn Massiah: They could misbehave, yes.

And remember, the main goal in marketing is to build a relationship. And Amber was saying those exact words. That's why I was nodding my head. It's build a relationship, engage. And so this is why professional sports teams, you see a great deal of animals used in the logos, and now let's move forward to pet influencers. And we see that jump now to the pets being used in these accounts. It makes sense now to jump from inanimate animals used in the logos to now live pets and pet influencers. It's that same thing, that relationship. Pets don't break our hearts.

Paul Jarley: Well they're certainly authentic.

Carolyn Massiah: They are authentic and we can engage with them. The most followed pet influencing account, Jiffpom, right now has 9.9 million active followers. Do you know that pet passed away in 2019?

Paul Jarley: So what makes that pet so awesome? Why does it have that many followers? Is there something distinctive about it?

Carolyn Massiah: I think it resonates with individuals and particularly in the time period that we've gone through. As soon as you said 2019, I knew before you said it what the next phrase was going to be ... because then COVID came. Jiffpom passed away 2019, but gained the bulk of the followers from 2020 on when we were looking for something to hold onto, something to connect with that would not disappoint us. And that's also why I think you see such a major growth in the pet influencing accounts during the 2020 to now period.

Paul Jarley: I just assumed they were cheaper than human influencers. What's the contract for a pet influencer look like?

Carolyn Massiah: Actually, it's not that much cheaper. There's a tortoise right now, it has 3 million followers, and its pet parents gross $400,000 annually from that account. And mostly that comes from the sponsored post and the brand collaborations. The lowest brand collaborations you're seeing with that tortoise is starting at $1,500 to $2,000, and those are for small mentions, so it's actually not that much cheaper.

Paul Jarley: So Amber, when did the revenue start coming in? Talk a little bit about that.

Amber Downs: So after 2020, I kind of began doing this account more and more and started connecting with brands. Brands would reach out to me and say, oh, we'll send you a collar and a leash if you post about it. So I did little very small gifted collaborations like that.

Paul Jarley: So you weren't reaching out to them, they were reaching out to you?

Amber Downs: At the beginning? Yes, yes. As I got to wise up a little bit, I realized I can charge for this. If I want people to share using my platform and my energy and my time, I need to charge. So then I began working with brands that reached out to me in a more of a paid partnership level. And I'm a smaller influencer in this space, so I obviously can't charge what the tortoise charges, but there's still four digit numbers being thrown around in my small account. I had to just do some math there real quick. And so I also began reaching out to brands and kind of pitching just like your human influencers do. So I began pitching as well and reaching out to brands that resonated with me and resonated with my audience that I felt would be a good fit.

Paul Jarley: So what do you think it is about your pet that stood out? Why do you think they reached out to you?

Amber Downs: Well, I'll be honest, it's not the pet, it's the human. My dog is cute, she's adorable, people love her. But at the same time, I'm the person who's making sure the photos look good. You can have an adorable dog and post content that's not great, and it's not going to sell the same way. In my content, I share high-quality images and videos of my pet, and I include myself in that content because again, while yes, we're connecting with the pet, the human is oftentimes doing that selling and actually making that final connection later on. So we work together to create content that really stands out.

Carolyn Massiah: That's the point there. So when people began and say that, okay, I want to be a pet influencer, I have this great Jack Rabbit here, and

Paul Jarley: I have a dog named Sneaky Pete. We'll come back to that.

Carolyn Massiah: Sneaky Pete, okay, so I have a great dog, Sneaky Pete, and I want Sneaky Pete to be a pet influencer. Well, Sneaky Pete's not taking his own reels and Sneaky Pete isn't doing selfies. So it is going to take a pet parent like Amber to take some time to learn about whichever channel they're on, whichever media they're using. Also, if I'm the viewer, in order to form that relationship with Sneaky Pete, I also want to see Amber's relationship with Sneaky Pete so that I can envision myself also playing with Sneaky Pete in that same positive way. It can't just be, take a picture of Sneaky Pete and post it up there.

Paul Jarley: It seems like a very human-centric approach that you're talking about here. So look, Sneaky Pete has a pool. He has a swing. He is unbelievably good at catching balls. He believes the entire world was created just for him. So he has some animal magnetism, I would be the first to say that. Now, on the flip side, he doesn't particularly like other dogs or other people. And I'm not going to be taking reels of pictures of Sneaky Pete. I have other to do. But does personality matter here? Does authenticity matter?

Carolyn Massiah: I think it absolutely does. And actually you just told a great story of Sneaky Pete to tell to others, right? And so it's going to take, if you'll allow me to use the pun, it's going to take a "pawesome" parent here to tell that story. So people can relate to a Sneaky Pete.

Paul Jarley: Could Sneaky Pete get an agent? I'm not really good at this. But could he get his own agent? Are there such people?

Carolyn Massiah: Yes, there is.

Paul Jarley: I assume Mr. Ed had an agent back in the day.

Carolyn Massiah: Mr. Ed had his own agent.

Paul Jarley: How would you go about doing that if that's what you wanted to do?

Amber Downs: There are actually several people now that are influencer managers for pet families and pet parents. Obviously, you need to build a following with Sneaky Pete on your own and get him to have 20,000 followers on your own first, and then you can partner with an agency that will help you make collaborations in deals. Now, oftentimes, you're still going to be the number one content creator. Now, you're bringing in all this money now with these brand deals, you may hire a crew to come in and help with your filming, with your video editing and with that content creation side. But we do have, now I actually know some people that they are an agency that will get those deals. I hate the back-and-forth negotiation process. I don't like doing that, but I can have somebody else do all my negotiations, say, Amber, here's the option. Here's the price. Do you want in or out? And then I can just take that and then do the content creation, which for me is the part that I enjoy.

Paul Jarley: Is there an issue here around the ethical treatment of these pets?

Amber Downs: It's a good question. I know we see that.

Paul Jarley: Does he get better food? What does he get out of this deal?

Amber Downs: I know for my dog, her quality of life has improved because of our partnerships with these brands. Right now, she's at doggy daycare that she doesn't pay for - I don't pay for it either - because of these partnerships and these brand deals that we've done. She eats top-quality, organic, raw dog food. Again, that we have a partnership process, we work with this brand, she gets this great product. There have been times that I've stepped away from deals or opportunities that didn't fit for our dog. I do a lot of hotel collaborations, and I went to a property once, that I did not feel was up to snuff with our expectations. They sold it to me one way, and then I went to do the deal and while the property allowed dogs to stay at the hotel, it was not pet friendly. And I said, nevermind, I'm leaving. And so we do have to advocate for our pets, just like we would advocate for our families or our children, but it is up to the individual at this point in time.

Paul Jarley: Yeah. Carolyn?

Carolyn Massiah: Yeah, and I think that, going back to, what I mentioned about the tortoise, and you think about that pet parent. First of all, you love that pet well enough to establish the social media presence around that pet and then have it come to fruition that it starts to produce this revenue for you and for your household. I believe wholeheartedly that pet is going to be taken well care of.

Paul Jarley: You know, I think the "Tiger King" probably started out with good intentions.

Carolyn Massiah: Well, unfortunately, there are always outliers on there. Yes, there are. Unfortunately, there are always those outliers.

Paul Jarley: Are there animal rights groups that are active in this space? I'm kind of curious.

Carolyn Massiah: Unfortunately, sometimes as always, technology sometimes moves ahead of laws. And this is one case, and I actually was looking at that just recently. So, right now, those animal protection laws do not currently cover pet influencing cases. Do I foresee at some point, probably sooner than we might even imagine, that some case may come up that then we will rewrite a law somewhere along the way? Yes.

Paul Jarley: Let me take you in a little bit of a different direction here. A few years back, we did one of my favorite podcasts on backyard chickens, and you were on that podcast.

Carolyn Massiah: Yes, yes.

Paul Jarley: And we joked near the end of it about whether Kelly could put up cameras and how many people would watch her chickens. And your answer surprised me because you talked about it as a form of meditation. Talk a little bit about that dynamic and whether you think that exists in a lot of these kinds of cases.

Carolyn Massiah: I think absolutely. I think that's actually why we saw that growth. That's exactly why we saw, and it's --

Paul Jarley: The selling of simplicity, right?

Carolyn Massiah: Yes. That's exactly why we saw that peak start to occur in 2020 of pet influencing. We all went into our home caves and we were looking for something very simplistic and calming. We start to go on the web and skip over the COVID counts and look for something that was calming. And all of a sudden I see a cat or a dog that reminded me of something from another time period. And that period, you can look at the numbers of the growth in pet influencing accounts 2020, 2021. And now as of January 2025, 3.5 million active pet influencing accounts globally.

Paul Jarley: So pets pass on.

Carolyn Massiah: Yes.

Paul Jarley: And I wonder if the influencer stops then or whether they see themselves as lifetime pet influencers. Amber, what do you think? You're in the middle of it.

Amber Downs: Yes and no. We saw with the Pomeranian, the Pomeranian passed, but they still share a lot of content.

Paul Jarley: It's a tribute to the Pomeranian to this day. Yeah.

Amber Downs: A very popular account. Hammy and Olivia, I believe Olivia passed away last year, and they still post, and they still share Hammy's perspective on life. I don't know if they've gotten another Corgi or if they just still have they Olivia in their name, and maybe that's a tribute to her. But oftentimes, your pet influencers may adopt another dog if they plan to keep on the legacy. I know my dog is six years old. I'm not planning on adopting any dog. My husband won't let me adopt another dog right now. But I also realize that that may be the end of this chapter, and I'll have to decide if I choose to adopt another dog to carry on this, to just make this into a tribute page or my plan. I will have to think about that if I want to continue this project.

Carolyn Massiah: So how long is too long to continue the account, the pet influencer account? I want to know your thoughts.

Paul Jarley: Well now AI is bringing back dead people, right? I mean, really. Well, I will say the lawyers are going to get rich.

Carolyn Massiah: Yes.

Paul Jarley: I don't know if they'll get rich on pets, but they're certainly going to.

Carolyn Massiah: Yeah, that's an interesting, I mean, when I found, I literally did not know, because I've watched some of Jiffpom's videos, I did not know until I was looking into that, that pet had passed away. I did not know that. And six years ago, I did not know.

Paul Jarley: Well, if I recall right, there was more than one Lassie.

Carolyn Massiah: Well, yes.

Paul Jarley: Yeah. So there's a long history of this here. So how do you decide what to schlep?

Amber Downs: Every content creator has to make a lot of these decisions on what matches their content. I do with partnerships with a lot of hotels and travel aboard type things. Just share pet friendly travel because everybody right now wants to bring their pet. We've got the biggest market of Gen Z through Gen X group that oftentimes don't have children and choose to travel with their pets. We also have the empty nesters now that more and more are spending their time and energy on their pets. So for me, I like to look at my market. And again, that 25-to-45-year-old probably doesn't have children, probably female. And again, more and more, the 55-plus that is an empty nester that has the disposable income to spend on their dog and the time and energy to focus on them.

Paul Jarley: Ah. So now we're getting into whether pet influencers are really part of a luxury market.

Amber Downs: I look at brands that are more elevated brands and brands that my followers are interested in. Probably not something you're going to pick up at Walmart. If a bottom-of-the-shelf puppy chow reached out to me and said, Amber, we're going to give you $2,000 to do a quick post on our food. I would have to say no, because that doesn't align with my brand and my product. My followers would consider that whiplash.

Paul Jarley: You would dilute your brand by doing that.

Amber Downs: Exactly.

Paul Jarley: Yeah.

Carolyn Massiah: Amber, I've just fallen in love with you. You are absolutely speaking my marketing language.

Amber Downs: I love it.

Carolyn Massiah: Yes, because this is it, right? And I think whether you're a person influencer or a pet influencer, you need to find your niche. And your niche first needs to be led by a particular segment.

Amber Downs: Exactly.

Carolyn Massiah: Find your segment and then target that segment and find that positioning. And you have found the perfect target market. We call it the DINK, right? Dual income, no kids group, right?

Amber Downs: DINK-WAD, with a dog.

Carolyn Massiah: Right? Right, with the dog. But this is so important that anyone who's going to be in social media, period, cannot be everything to everyone.

Paul Jarley: Pete's a little bit of a junkyard dog. I'm not really sure that it'd be appropriate for the luxury -

Carolyn Massiah: We can still tell Sneaky Pete's story.

Paul Jarley: for the luxury market. So Carolyn, what should students learn?

Carolyn Massiah: So many students want a presence and a future in digital media marketing, or to be influencers of some kind. First and foremost, you cannot be everything to everyone. So find your niche and be consistent with that niche, and then be consistent with who you collaborate with so that it makes sense to the market that you're targeting.

Paul Jarley: BrandU for dogs?

Carolyn Massiah: BrandU for dogs.

Paul Jarley: Amber. So if I had one of my cute and cuddly students walk up to you and say, I think I would want to be like you someday. I want to be a pet influencer, what would you tell them?

Amber Downs: I would tell them to start creating content. Pull their phone out and don't be afraid to film the dog, film the interaction, film the walk. Take the content. You can decide later if you're going to post it, or what to do with it, but the more that you're practicing and creating now, the easier it's going to be down the line. It's not easy to just walk out when you're 30 something years old, pick up a phone and start filming. Our youth obviously have been filming their entire lives at this point, but practice this, make the content, do the post and see what sticks. And then maybe this pet influencing won't stick around for them, but they've learned so many great skills that they could take into maybe a different type of influencing project or their career.

Paul Jarley: How many hours a week do you put into this?

Amber Downs: At least five, sometimes 10, depending on the week. Between going out and doing activities, editing videos, responding to messages, interacting with followers, editing more content, reaching out to brands, the emails back-and-forth, creating proposals, creating something in Canva to do that proposal.

Paul Jarley: So there's not a standard pet influencer contract.

Amber Downs: There are many that you can start with, but every brand's going to ask for something a little bit different. If I work with a hotel, they're going to ask me to not post any other hotel collaborations maybe a month prior or a month after that collaboration to not dilute their brand.

Paul Jarley: So the final question, is pet influencing a thing? Yes or no, and why? Carolyn?

Carolyn Massiah: Absolutely. It's a thing. We all want a relationship that's not going to disappoint us.

Paul Jarley: Amber?

Amber Downs: It's definitely here to stay. Pets are cute. The internet is a great way to share your cuddly family member and pet influencers, and the industry, is definitely here for the long-term.

Paul Jarley: It's my podcast, so I get to go last.

Jiffpom, like Elvis, may or may not be dead. But it's estimated that he pulls down $32,000 a post. Some creature named Tucker Budzyn earns $20,000 a post. Nala Cat gets about $15,000. Her estimated net worth, by the way, is $100,000,000. In this sense, pet influencers are most certainly a thing. But why?

I reached out to a friend who works in the pet business and he told me this. There is an increasing role in companionship that pets are playing, often replacing children as the target of love and adoration for people with busy lifestyles. Especially for generations that postpone housemaking, marriage and such. For professionals, it's all about connection and connecting to profitable subculture moments that prompt consumption through association. As cars were to many teenage boys in the 1930s to 1980s, so now are pets to millions of teenage girls that, unlike their mothers or grandmothers, are not obsessed with finding potential mates in their teens or 20s. Plenty of time for that later while I snuggle with my cat or pup for now.

That said, for every Jiffpom, there's some poor pet whose owner just isn't very skilled with the camera. Maybe, just maybe, someone can eek out a side hustle, but it's not likely to reliably pay the rent. Fame, my friend, is a fickle mistress. As for Sneaky Pete, honestly, he just wants somebody, anybody, to throw him the damn ball. What do you think?

So what's your take? Check us out online and share your thoughts at business.ucf.edu/podcast. And be sure to follow us on social media to be alerted when our next episode airs. I'll be joined by UCF Hall of Famer Jim Balaschak, UCF Entrepreneur in Residence Michael Pape and alumnus and former JOUST winner Derek Saltzman to learn if you can really generate $1,000,000,000 from a PowerPoint. Ehhhhh, this doesn't sound good. Special thanks to my new producer, Brent Meske, and the whole team at the Office of Outreach and Engagement here at the UCF College of Business. And thank you for listening. Until next time, charge on.