Your Weekly Influencer Marketing Update
21.09.2020 / #46
☀️ Happy Monday! ☀️
Welcome to this week’s edition of Your Weekly Influencer Marketing Update.
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🏊 The Deep Dive
Charlotte Tilbury ramps up TikTok influencer marketing in a bid for Gen Z
Charlotte Tilbury has been previously successful with celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Amal Clooney, but now it’s focusing on Gen Z and TikTok. By teaming up with beauty TikToker Abby Roberts.
Abby is a 19 year old self-taught makeup artist with nearly 12 million followers on the Gen Z platform of choice. According to her, the key to a successful brand-influencer partnership is staying true to an influencer’s style.
“I got to decide on the entirety of the content, based on what I think would work for Charlotte Tilbury’s brand, but also what my audience would respond well to,” she said. “From what I found, the most successful [partnerships] are where I have full control. The influencer, 100%, knows their audience better than anyone else does.”
“Gen Z does not like being advertised to, whatsoever. A lot of times, we’ll find that a brand comes across and gives us a really specific brief, and it just doesn’t work. It’s not flexible enough — the audience knows that it’s an advert and doesn’t respond well to that.”Charlotte Tilbury was bought by Puig in June and is utilising influencer marketing to make sure they can win over the hearts of the future twenty-something year olds through TikTok.
Charlotte Tilbury herself said to Glossy: “I’ve always believed it is essential for us to have an active presence across all channels; each has its own specialities and attracts its own unique audiences that we want to engage with.”
🌡️ Our OpinionI fear that I may sound like a broken record, but many of you should know by now that I firmly believe that creators know (much, much better than even those of us who are lucky enough to work within the influencer marketing space) what makes their audiences tick. Many practitioners (through “play-it-safe” and stringent briefs) inadvertently tend to stifle the creator's voice and alienate their audiences in the process. I think this goes doubly for Gen Z, as they are the first generation to have been brought up with social media starting as early as elementary school.
Recently, I wrote the following: “It’s my goal to participate in influencer relationship marketing and not influencer advertising. This means that the goal for me is to set up (as frequently as possible) activations that go beyond a pay-to-play mechanic and focus on authentic, long-term relationships with an aim towards increased brand awareness, advocacy and trust.”
In order to drive advocacy and trust, influencers and their audiences cannot and should not be treated as “rented space” - and doing so (in my opinion) showcases short-term thinking and erodes trust within the entire influencer marketing ecosystem.It’s my hope that more brands will take a leaf out of Charlotte Tilbury’s book and put more effort into relationships and trust. After all, if you can’t (or simply refuse to) trust your creators, then how can you expect them (and subsequently their audiences) to trust you as a brand?
Trump agrees to Oracle deal for TikTok in US
The U.S. President has given the go-ahead for a potential deal to come through where Oracle (and Walmart) will “take over” TikTok’s US operations, also indicating that TikTok will remain on the Apple & Google app store until September 27 in order to give the companies involved time to finalise a potential deal.
ByteDance will spin-off TikTok’s global business into a yet to be formed, U.S.based company that will be majority owned by the Chinese tech group.
Oracle & Walmart will take a stake of up to 20% into the new company, which will have an estimated value between $50-$65bn dollars.
Under this agreement, ByteDance will keep control of the algorithm and its “secret sauce” that brings users the unique “for you” feed.
Oracle/Walmart would be “in possession” of the new company, without commenting about what level of ownership or control they would in fact have.
Trump has also claimed that $5bn will be donated by ByteDance to an educational fund in the U.S.
🌡️ Our Opinion
I think that the majority of the reporting on this has been very clickbait heavy, and it’s important to understand that there is in fact no deal between TikTok and Oracle/Walmart yet.
Secondly, it has to be noted that no one is actually buying / taking over tiktok, and that within this deal Oracle + Walmart would only own up to 20% of this new business.
In fact, reading through the lines this sounds more like the U.S trying to strong-arm itself into getting itself a seat at a very coveted table. Like we said in a previous version of this newsletter:
“It appears that perhaps the question is no-longer about safeguarding and data collection, but instead it seems that we should ask ourselves “Who am I more comfortable with having access to my data - the U.S or China?”
Keep your eyes peeled, this will be a very important week when it comes to TikTok.
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📰 Headlines
General Mills’ Arjoon Bose on the merits of TikTok and influencers in content marketing
Collaborate, don't dictate. I’m a big believer in letting influencers be their best creative directors and really leaning into their aesthetic. Every time we’ve done that, we’ve seen very good results because they understand their audience. As with all things influencer, taking a multiplatform approach and taking a real clear tiered strategy, knowing which tier works best for what for your brand, is probably the right way to go. There are obviously a lot of love lately for nano-influencers, and some brands have managed to activate that at scale. But again, that’s not really for everyone. That release certainly allows you to democratize influence. But again, if you’re a luxury brand, that may or may not be the right choice for you. It’s also down to what you stand for as a brand authentically.
TikTok Is paying creators. Not all of them are happy
One month after the program formally launched, some TikTok influencers say they’re disappointed with how the Creator Fund has panned out. Creators have complained on social media that they’re earning only a few dollars a day, even if their videos rack up tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. TikTok has not explained exactly how it calculates payouts.
Why brands need to get with livestream shopping
Livestreaming is entrenched across Asia, driving sales in Southeast Asia’s recent 9.9 Super Shopping Day and even forming part of government policy in China; with Amazon and Facebook also exploring livestream shopping opportunities, brands everywhere will have to think about how they can create effective livestream commerce content.
Investment in games and esports zooms but will the party last? Er, yes.
Everything changed with the ascension of social game company Zynga because it wasn’t a project, it was built on Facebook’s platform, something that investors really liked. Between 2007 and 2011 the company went from angel money to Series C in a series of nine investments that totalled $866.66m (£647m).
Amid the Pandemic, Influencers Are Getting Real
While it’s too soon to bid adieu to the aspirational influencer, it’s clear that the pandemic has humbled many of even the most polished creators….
TikTok Deal Exposes a Security Gap, and a Missing China Strategy
TikTok illuminated the scope of the new competition. The United States wants to have it all. It seeks to reap the benefits of a global internet yet limit its citizens to made-in America products, ensuring that the data that flows through American networks is “clean.” In fact, the State Department has begun what it calls “the clean network initiative,” making sure that data is not tainted by adversaries, starting with China.