Photographer has work canceled by Canon

In a recent interview for the online entrepreneurship education platform The Futur she talks about how to be a professional photographer in the world today. At 17.5 minutes of the video, she tells the story of losing the biggest job of her career.

Let’s talk about followers and followers mattering. I’ll tell you that I booked a huge job — it would have been the biggest job of my career, commercially. I’ll just say it: with Canon. To shoot an ad campaign for them. I got the job, it was amazing. And then literally 20 minutes later, after I had already started making calls to start booking a crew because it was coming real fast, they called me and said, “Oh my God, we can’t hire you.”
And I said, “Why?”
And they said, “Because you don’t have 50,000 followers on Instagram.”
Roman, who currently has about 1,000 followers on Instagram, was understandably confused as they originally told her that her work and style would be perfect for this job. But she was informed that this was an HR decision rather than a creative decision.