Why Pakistan's influencer industry is stuck on the frame

Starting before there was a name for it

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Hemayal Attique and admitting upfront that he doesn’t want a structured conversation today. He wants to wander. The first question is the simplest one: how is life, really, beyond the Instagram grid? Hemayal is direct. “Instagram par thori zyada, asal mein thori kam hai,” she says. Life is good, just not as gleaming as the feed implies. She is satisfied. She is grateful.

From there Muzamil pulls the timeline back. Hemayal started in 2016, during a gap year, after walking away from a medical degree she had cleared the first two years of but could no longer carry. She failed the third-year repeat, took a break she insists was emotional as much as academic, and quietly turned her personal Instagram profile public. The traction surprised her. She had no thesis, no funnel, no creator handbook. “Mujhe pata nahi tha where this is headed to. I was like, chalo yaar, karte hain.” She and her sister Hira built a proper blog around the early posts. She enrolled in International Relations and Politics at the same time, finished the degree in three years because she believed a bachelor’s was non-negotiable, and let the social media work expand alongside it. Muzamil names the inflection point: the LSAs. Both sisters were nominated. Both got pulled into a churn that, in his words, “blew everything up.”

What Pakistani brands still get wrong

Muzamil pushes Hemayal on the current state of the work, and she lands on the structural problem before he has to name it. “Creative freedom nahi hai,” she says. “Brands aate hain. A to Z kehte hain yeh bana do. Aur woh idhar se hiltay nahi hain.” The brief is the post. The creator is the delivery vehicle. She has watched this from the inside for long enough to know it is not the global default. “India is very progressive,” she notes. “We’re going to lag as an industry.”

Muzamil agrees and adds his own frustration. He had been on the phone with his brother, who works at Facebook, complaining that Pakistan has been left behind on Reels and on Instagram music. The tools that make short-form work creative are simply not available here. The format the country is stuck in is the static feed post, and the static feed post is the one place a brand can credibly demand frames, watermarks, and a recycled TVC sensibility. “Pehle TVCs bante they,” Muzamil says. “Ab woh kya kar rahe hain ke sastay mein das different TVCs banwa rahe hain.” Hemayal completes the sentence. “There is no content. There is only the brand.”

Her counter-argument is also structural. “Bhai pandrah second ki video, agar das second aap brand dikhao gay, toh aagay content kya rahega?” The math of short video does not allow for the old aesthetic of saturation branding. If the industry insists on it anyway, the work fails on the format.

Saying no, once

The most concrete piece of advice in the conversation is also the most quietly subversive. Hemayal tells newer creators to refuse a campaign — once. Just once. “Say no for once. Kya hoga? Ek deal jayegi. Ek deal jayegi, soyengi. Ek do na karke dekh lo.” The point is not principle for its own sake. The point is that a creator does not learn how the industry actually behaves until they have walked away from one deal. The brand comes back. The same brand. With the same frame. And the negotiation that was impossible the first time is now sitting on the creator’s terms.

She is honest about why most newcomers cannot do this. Insecurity. The belief that a missed deal is a closed door. She remembers being there. “Hum bhi jab nayi thi, hum bhi yehi kehte the.” But the charm of brand association, she says, has worn off for her sister and her. “Hamein woh nahi chahiye. Hamein kaam chahiye. Achha kaam karke dena hai humne.”

Muzamil names the disappointment underneath this. He had assumed that the next generation of creators, walking into a market the early cohort had already opened, would push back harder. Instead, he says, they walk in and ask to be taken on terms older creators had to fight to leave behind. Hemayal does not argue with that. She just shrugs at the loop.

The half-million and the price of scale

Muzamil pulls up the follower count. Four hundred and seventy-three thousand. Half a million is in reach. He uses the number to make a quality-floor argument: at that scale, a small dip in the work hits differently than it does for a creator with twenty thousand followers. A team has to be sustained. Cameras, phones, production hands, managers, agents. Hemayal nods through the list and adds the part the audience does not see. “Logon ko lagta hai yeh aap ne ek picture hi to lekar lagani hai. Kehti woh nahi behan us picture ke peechay jo poora setup hota hai.”

The team is not vanity. It is the only way the work can scale past the three-year window where one person can do everything themselves. After that, Hemayal says plainly, “agar wohi hum sab kuch wohi karne baith jayenge to phir hamara kaam bohat slow ho jayega.” The frame the audience sees as a single image is the output of a small business with payroll, and the commercial decisions that feel like sellouts from the outside are often the decisions that keep the small business alive.

The global goal, from Pakistan

When Muzamil asks Hemayal what she is actually building toward, the answer is more specific than he expects. “Going international is big,” she says. She wants to compete on a global platform, alongside the creators she looks up to. But she does not want to leave Pakistan to do it. “Pakistan ne jo humein diya hai woh Dubai se humein nahi milega.” The plan is to represent the country from inside it.

She is clear-eyed about the obstacles. “We’re completely disconnected. As an economy, we’re disconnected.” She names the religious and cultural friction around fashion in particular — her primary category — as an additional drag. The five-year picture she offers is intentionally undramatic: the same work, done better. She catches herself before saying more. “Aapko batana nahi chahiye. Aapko karke dikhana chahiye.”

The pay gap, and the price of pushing back

Muzamil asks about the disparity between male and female influencers. Hemayal does not soften it. A male creator with fewer followers gets paid more for the same campaign, because the assumption that men have households to run still travels into the rate card. “Bhai, hamein bhi ghar chalana hota hai. Hamare bhi ghar hotay hain.”

Muzamil offers a piece of data from his own work that complicates the picture further. Most online buyers are women. Most followers of a female creator are women. The conversion math runs in favour of female creators, not against them. Hemayal accepts the data and adds the social explanation. “Jab ek mard kuch kehta hai, log usay bohat seriously letay hain. Jab ek aurat kehti hai, log soch letay hain ke chalo yeh to bolti rehti hai.”

She also names the cost of refusing this on the creator side. “I have been labelled that with everybody,” she says, of being called rude, arrogant, difficult, simply for holding rates and refusing terms. “Yeh mujhe sab kehte hain. Upfront kehte hain.” Her response is consistent. “Mere set rules hain. Aur is ke ooper main rahungi. Chahe tum mujhe jo marzi keh rahe ho.”

The LSA hate cycle, seen from inside

The hardest section of the conversation is about the wave of hate that followed the Lux Style Awards and the Prime Minister’s meetup. Muzamil names it carefully. Hemayal corrects the framing. The worst of the hate did not land on her. It landed on Hira. “She only had one night of happiness when she won. After that she said get me out of the house, take me to the village, take me somewhere away from this.” Hira had pre-existing anxiety. The pile-on made it worse. She could not eat. She could not sleep. The picture on the screen, Hemayal says, is a person — and the people sending hate forget that on purpose.

She extends the same observation to the meetup. The girls — Hemayal, Hira, and a small number of others — were attacked for being in the room. The boys from tech in the same room, doing the same work, were not. “Aap ne to nahi dekhi unki journey,” Hemayal says of the senders. “Aap ne to nahi dekha ke yaar unhone kya kaam kiya hai.” Her sharper point is economic. The fashion industry in Pakistan is, by her recollection, a nine-billion-rupee business. The women in the room were called there on the strength of the foreign exchange and revenue their work generates, not as decoration. “Karan Johar bhi apne award shows par yehi bol raha tha ke itni bari industry hai, aur aap usay aise like you don’t take men seriously in that industry. Inn larkiyon ko seriously nahi liya.”

And inside the meeting itself, she says without hesitation, there were people who said openly that the women should not have been invited. “It was a room filled with ninety-eight percent men. Three girls — main na, Hira, aur ek aur.” Representation is not a slogan in that sentence. It is the only mechanism by which any of the rules made in that room would acknowledge that half the country exists.

The frame, the platform, and Gen Z

The last platform pass through the conversation is about TikTok. Muzamil admits he finds the format intimidating — a millennial reflex he names cleanly. Hemayal has worked through that block. She cannot do the dances. She found a different lane on the platform anyway, using its sound library to build work that fits her own aesthetic. Three videos a day is the rhythm the algorithm rewards. The VPN-and-battery overhead of running TikTok during a Pakistani ban cycle is real. The audience she pulls there is different from her Instagram audience, and she can now tell, before posting, which video belongs on which platform.

Her broader read is that Instagram’s monopoly is ending. “It is becoming too monotonous and it will fade away like other platforms did.” Facebook’s pivot, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels — all of them, she says, are reactions to TikTok. The generation behind her has a three-second attention span. They will not sit through a minute of branded content for the same reason an older audience would not. The industry that keeps demanding the frame is solving for an audience that is already gone.

Safety, hope, and the example that has not been set

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest. Hemayal is twenty-eight. In thirty years she will be fifty-eight. Where will Pakistan be?

She does not give him a comfortable answer. “I want to give children hope, but I’m in a hopeless situation right now.” She has seen what happens behind the closed doors of the rooms she has been in. The change she was waiting for has not come. Inflation is eating the floor out from under everyone. Some sectors — tourism, parts of the creative economy — are growing. Others are sinking. Corruption, she says flatly, is the variable. Not corruption at the top. Corruption at every level. “Every person that we interact with is corrupt.”

The safety conversation lands in the same place. Hemayal travels alone. She keeps a taser in her bag as standard protocol. “Reflex action hai, koi andheri sarak aati hai, haath taser par jata hai.” The Motorway case has faded. The Noor Mukadam case is still being dragged. Until one example is set — one serving sentence, one moment of consequence — the calculation does not change. International female bloggers visiting Pakistan, she notes, get full security and are left alone. The repercussion for harming them is known and credible. The repercussion for harming a Pakistani woman, in too many cases, is not. The gap between those two facts is the safety problem, stated plainly.

Muzamil ends the conversation at the fifty-two minute mark, where he usually does. The closing observation is the one Hemayal returns to throughout the hour. The work is on the creator. The understanding has to come from the audience. And the industry will only move when both sides stop pretending the frame is enough.