Your Weekly Influencer Marketing Update 🚀
28.09.2020 / #47
☀️ Happy Monday! ☀️
Welcome to this week’s edition of Your Weekly Influencer Marketing Update.
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🏊 The Deep Dive
Colleges Are Hiring Their Own Students as Covid-19 Safety Influencers
This week we’re looking at a New York Times article that was published a few days ago.
U.S.-based colleges have started to collaborate with students to help share and spread COVID-19 safety messages.
Historically, brands have often teamed up with college students for more “traditional” influencer marketing campaigns, in order to reach the much-coveted youth demographic. This is changing, however, and educational institutions are starting to see the benefits of collaborating with enrolled students who have sway over their peers.
The University of Missouri has enlisted six of its own students to serve as influencers, distributing content created by the college.
“We’ve never tried this before,” said Christian Basi, the director of media relations at the University of Missouri, “but we felt that this particular situation was so important that we wanted to make sure we were reaching students in a format, on a platform that they would most respond to.”
Missouri paid a Canadian influencer marketing firm over $10,000 to “hire” the six students. The firm’s CEO, however, declined to disclose how much each student was being paid, simply stating, “We pay really competitive market rates based on how many followers they have, and the engagement that they get”. The New York Times also tried to reach out to the influencers to find out how much they were getting paid, but none of them replied.
The firm was given engagement rate targets by the college to help identify relevant influencers. Qualifications included being a current students well as a requirement around “really high engagement” on their posts and displaying “diversity” in their style of content. So far, the campaign has produced 18 pieces of content (three from each influencer) and has reached 25,000 students & employees. In addition, the number of active cases on campus has been on the decline (680 on Sept 5 vs only 95 last week).
The firm discloses that the captions were written by the school’s marketing team, working together with the agency and the students. The firm adds that they “certainly have oversight of the content that’s out there” adding that “this is an advertising campaign, right?”
Some students have shown to be more skeptical of the approach, commenting that the content felt shallow & performative, adding that the images didn’t mix well with the anxiety and frustration that students have been feeling around attending school in the midst of a pandemic. To make things worse, one of the influencers was found to have posted back in July about hanging out with large groups of people, without wearing masks.
Some other (perhaps more positive) examples of colleges collaborating with influencers.
Influencer twins Brooklyn & Bailey McKnight are being paid by Baylor University (which they attend) to promote the school as a destination for prospective students.
Temple University has created paid positions and has shared content created by influencers across its owned social media channels.
The University of Maryland is planning to pay students to share relevant COVID-19 safety information, as part of a larger student ambassador programme. The way they’re paying is slightly different from the norm, too. They won’t be paying creators based on follower count or engagement rates. Rather, a post would count as “15 or 30 minutes” of work towards an hourly wage.
🌡️ Our Opinion:
Let’s start with the positives. It’s fantastic to see colleges and universities all over the world clueing up on social media and influencers; tapping into the huge value these creators can offer in terms of bringing in new students, but also in terms of broadcasting safety messages and other relevant content. In addition (and I’ve been reading a lot on the @influencerpaygap lately) it’s interesting to see the example of one college taking a different approach to payments, with the concept of an hourly rate instead of a performance-based pricing scheme.
I do want to highlight some thoughts regarding the main focus in this article, the University of Missouri and its #MaskUpMizzou campaign.
There seems to be a huge (purposeful?) lack of transparency. The fact that the agency is unwilling to share what they have paid the content creators, in addition to putting apparent gagging rights on said creators, is worrying. There could be a wide variety of reasons as to why, and I don’t wish to speculate too much - but if we want the industry to mature, transparent pricing models and transparency towards audiences (disclosure) are an absolute must.
The apparent focus on content approval, in addition to the emphasis on it being an “advertising campaign”, in my opinion, shows a disconnect with the concept of trusting and understanding that influencers know best what resonates well with their audience. From what I can tell, these influencers don’t have much (if any) paid experience, and the campaign content almost feels like a copy-paste job.
We’ve spoken about this trust element quite frequently, and “using” creators simply as a performance channel is not typically aligned with our philosophy on influencer marketing.I have my doubts regarding the influencer vetting process for this campaign. It’s clear that crucial steps in this process were missed; considering that one of them (I won’t say which one) recently posted content where they were shown in a big group, not adhering to social distancing, nor mask-wearing guidelines.
What was the goal? The article discusses “engagement rate” targets, and while this is a relevant driver towards content performance, achieving high engagement rates alone is not a target by itself (in my opinion). I was recently interviewed on the importance of context when it comes to influencer marketing.
I wanted to be able to add a bit more context to the above, so I dived into some of the influencers behind the campaign. I used ZenPanda (with full disclosure that I am directly connected to the product, and that this is a piece of tech that is the result of my partnership with Dutch influencer tech company, JOIN).
In the table above, you can see @ekmarquino’s #MaskUpMizzou campaign posts.
The first thing I noticed was a lack of the more common #sponsored or #paid / #advertisement disclosure. While not a must in the U.S., I do feel that these keywords help to clarify the paid relationship between the college and influencer towards the audience. Looking at her three campaign posts, the only disclosure that I can identify is in her second campaign post where she notes that “It's also been great partnering with them (the college) on this campaign to bring awareness to their Renewal Plan!”
In a post from another influencer that was part of the campaign, one of the below comments can be seen.
From a transparency perspective, I would argue that these posts could have done better, especially because we know that influencers have been paid to create this content (we just don’t know how much) In addition, the CEO specifically said that “this is an advertising campaign, right?” I can’t stress enough the fact that agencies should take a leading role on this, and offer best practice solutions when it comes to disclosure and transparency.
The second thing I noticed is that @ekmarquino has only worn masks (only once, actually) during the campaign. Looking at her previously created content, there also doesn’t seem to be much of an alignment in terms of health-related topics, which makes me wonder why this influencer was specifically selected. I can relate to the comment in the original article noting that the content is fairly shallow and seems to show a disconnect with previously created content.
The agency has definitely done well when it comes to the performance piece, she has an average engagement rate of above 20% which is definitely high - and it’s clear that the agency has done their research when it comes to this aspect. One creator that was part of the campaign even touched a 30% average engagement rate figure.
When it comes to engagement rate targets, her (and other influencers’) campaign content seems to be performing above their own averages.
Another interesting thing to note here is that when we look at the different content types, her carousel post is performing best in terms of absolute engagements as well as engagement rate. This holds up when we look at all of her posts- with carousel posts taking up the top 3 best performing posts in terms of engagement rate.
When we look at Caleb Poorman, we start to see a pattern:
1) A high average engagement rate of + 20% against 1.7k followers.
2) Out of the three campaign posts, only one has a somewhat clear “I partnered with” explanation.
3) Carousel content is seemingly outperforming static content.
Having reviewed these influencers, it’s clear that while the intention may have been there - I feel that this could have been done more authentically, and above all, more transparently. From what I can tell, this campaign seems heavily focused on identifying influencers with above-average engagement rates, and less attention was paid to the other aspects of influencer marketing.
Even in 2020, it’s clear that there is no one-size fits all influencer marketing approach, and I hope that Mizzou will continue to collaborate with these influencers throughout their academic career, instead of simply “renting” their audience through an agency that has now been paid, without any incentive to be authentic & transparent towards Mizzou’s students in the long term.
📰 Headlines
How TikTok's uncertain future and COVID-19 are transforming influencer marketing
"We're in a moment when you cannot be silent on the point of view you have on the world," Silverstein said. "It's really important to convey your values as a brand and to back those up with action."
Values-based partnerships will only gain importance as influencers become more deeply integrated into campaigns — especially as election season and the holidays approach, Silverstein predicts.
A Rise in Mobile Gaming Is Changing Influencer Marketing
“Mobile has really opened up the landscape for creators and influencers to connect,” said Chris Hewish, president of Xsolla. “We’re allowing people to get those direct relationships with influencers, which obviously is much more immediate when you’re on mobile because you can do that from anywhere.”
When Marketing, Don’t Forget the Influencers
“Influencer marketing is not like purchasing advertising. A brand cannot hire an influencer or pay them to promote its products. The brand must invest in developing a relationship with that influencer, with the hope that the influencer will choose to promote a brand’s product or service for the benefit of his or her audience. Some influencers are paid, while others are not.”
Triller Launches Crosshype, A First Of Its Kind Brand Growth Program Combining A CPM Model
“This first-to-market “Crosshype” platform allows influencers to offer a complete and predictable media solution for brands of all sizes. Influencer agencies can now offer their brand partners a complete media solution and media agencies can now purchase influence just like they would purchase any other piece of media. Triller’s ability to guarantee views allows influencers to post across multiple platforms, and the effective CPM will be lower than any other influencer purchase to date. Brands can now shift their dollars to influencer and organic brand integrations that drive higher conversions and growth with the predictability they deserve.”
The TikTok Fiasco Reflects the Bankruptcy of Trump’s Foreign Policy
“At first glance, the Trump Administration’s decision to ban the popular Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat had the look of hard-nosed diplomacy. China, after all, already blocks more than ten of the largest American tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, out of fear that they facilitate unmanageable levels of free speech and organization.”
TikTok’s saga isn’t stopping brand campaigns (for now)
“TikTok is our No. 1 priority for reaching our Gen-Z consumer and acne sufferers,” said Peace Out Skincare CMO Junior Pence. “A ban would definitely have an impact on our business.” Despite all of the uncertainty, the brand has already planned out its TikTok strategy through 2022. “We aren’t running ads on TikTok at this point, but we’re actively engaging on the platform and running our own marketing campaigns, which we are only increasing.”