The ever-laughing Bas Smit and Nicolette van Dam had stopped laughing by then

Cheerful couple, Bas Smit and Nicolette van Dam. They have every reason to happily skip through life. Play a bit of celebrity, run a bit of business, influence a bit online, check your bank balance at the end of the month and then uncork a bottle of your own brand of rosé with some satisfaction. Just let Bas and Nicolette slide.

This week we got a rare insight into the financial dealings that lie behind all those cheerful videos that the media couple posts on social media every day. Smit and Van Dam are at loggerheads with Coca-Cola because they believe they are still owed 2 million euros by the company.

What is going on? A marketing manager from Coca-Cola, who happened to live near Smit and Van Dam and ‘knows them from the schoolyard, but is not friends with them’, promised the two 2.6 million euros if they could work in the summer would advertise the soft drink giant around five events from 2023. Agreements about this were made verbally, via WhatsApp and by e-mail, but there was no contract. Sounds shady, and so did Coca-Cola, which summarily dismissed the cheating employee. Rightly so, the judge recently ruled.

The ever-smiling Smit and Van Dam had stopped laughing by then: they had already received six thousand euros for promotional work at a festival in Belgium (not a bad daily wage), and in 2019 and 2020 they had also received 1.25 million from Coca-Cola, but they could whistle about the other two million. RTL Z delved into the lawsuit and reported that the influencer duo had ‘adjusted their annual planning and spending patterns because of the job’: among other things, they had taken on an au pair for daughters Lola-Lily and Kiki-Kate.

Smit and Van Dam now claim up and down that they are not to blame. Their spokesperson told RTL Z that the lawsuit will show that they did not act in bad faith and that they are entitled to those two million. “But more importantly, their reputation remains intact.”

That last sentence is fascinating: an immaculate coat of arms is apparently worth more than two million euros to Smit and Van Dam. At the same time, it is a logical consequence of the astronomical amounts that large companies nowadays pay for a few posts on Facebook and Instagram, and it illustrates the tilting relationships in the advertising world.

A few years ago, Smit was interviewed in Het Parool asked why his rates are so high. “I supposedly want to be the hottest girl in class,” he replied. “I’m not dependent on deals, so I can be like the hot chick who says no to everything, making her a trophy.”

Whether this is a successful metaphor is debatable, but in the meantime Lola-Lily and Kiki-Kate do have a nice au pair, and that is also worth something.

About the author: Roelf Jan Duin has been writing for Het Parool since 2014, first mainly about politics, now about social themes and popular culture. In his Sterrenstof section he analyzes the media landscape every week.