“When I first outed the restaurant on TikTok, it reached the wrong audience of non-creators and influencers who didn’t understand what was happening,” the influencer told news.com.au.
“People sent extremely rude comments that I am just an ‘entitled influencer’ who just wants ‘free’ stuff and I am complaining about it all.”
Patsy’s owners Mathew Guthrie and Clinton Trevisi have backed up their “blunt” reply to May, telling news.com.au: “I think judging from her reaction to me being blunt about her unsolicited marketing reach out, she was surprised that we were not interested working with her.”
“Obviously, the reason we did not want to collaborate with her is quite easy to understand when you glance through her profiles on various sites. Her followers are not really people that we have in the venue often and probably not the market that we are looking to engage with.”
The chefs, who own a number of popular eateries in the region, went on to say that while they didn’t want to “add to the pile on”, they thought her TikTok was a marketing strategy to boost her personal brand.
“I think she was just hoping to increase her visibility with these outrage posts,” he said. “It sort of has worked already but I am not sure how it will be able to be monetised as marketing.”
In the screenshots shared by May, which showed Patsy’s response via Instagram, the restaurant wrote: “You don’t seem to have any followers, maybe you should approach us when you have over 100k,” the message read.
After she responded, accusing the eatery of being “extremely rude”, she received a second Instagram DM that read: “Perhaps... but you are pretending to be influential on social media and that’s just not true.
“Rather than me just saying that you are lying and pretending to be beneficial to our business, I just said come back when you are actually able to do what you think we should engage you to do.
“Is it rude to question something that is obviously not true?”
May quickly blocked the restaurant on Instagram, but later took to TikTok to slam the veggie eatery in a video that has amassed nearly 25,000 views.
“I had no words, I am disgusted someone could say that to another person,” she shared.
“Your follower count does not define you! You might have 10x better content than someone with 1 million followers!!
“I wanted to create this video to let all other content creators know that this is extremely unprofessional.”
