Charli D’Amelio’s PR Team Needs to Go Back to School and Learn PR again

All publicity is good publicity, right? WRONG! This phrase is what Charli D’Amelio’s team repeats to themselves at night when they can’t sleep. Charli D’Amelio started posting on TikTok around May 2019 and rapidly rose to fame when COVID-19 hit. She became the first TikToker to reach 100 million followers.  

As the story goes, Charli D’Amelio quickly started gaining a lot of hate forher videos. With 100 million followers and everyone being in quarantine, everyone was watching her every move. People started wondering what made Charli so special. With a little digging, everyone became aware that Charli loves to dance and dances professionally. Her PR team could have done a million things with this. They could have had Charli D’Amelio collaborate with a professional dancer on a dance video. They could have had her teach a dance in an intermediate dance class which would have showcased her passion, her connection to dance and gave her a personality. 

Instead, her PR team decided it was a good idea for the D’Amelio sisters to cosplay as Walmart workers for a day. This backfired on them so badly. Pretending to work a minimum wage job was so tone deaf, specifically because these sisters will never have to lift a finger in their lives while many people work minimum wage jobs to survive.

My biggest question was why anyone thought it was a good idea, ESPECIALLY IN THIS ECONOMY? I am all for giving her some personality and humanizing her, except this was the worst way to do it. I assume that the PR team wanted the viewers to think, “Wow Charli is just like the rest of us, let me keep following her.”

EXCEPT NO ONE THOUGHT THAT AT ALL.

In fact, she lost millions of followers, and she ended up being shadow banned on TikTok.  

In recent times, no one is really keeping up with Charli due to her Walmart incident, nor do people care about her anymore. She went from being popular to just average, which is unfortunate because I believe this was just a PR problem. Charli herself has a lot of potential if she sticks to what she believes in. For example, when she first started blowing up, she was a big fan of Dunkin Donuts and eventually went on to get her own drink.

If her PR team were to go back to school, relearn everything, and come back, would it even be possible to get her to the top again?