Your Weekly Influencer Marketing Update 🚀
22.02.2021
☀️ Happy Monday! ☀️
HBO's 'Fake Famous' Documentary Gets Influencer Marketing All Wrong
This documentary has been causing quite the debate and this week we’ll dig into one of the response pieces. The author of this piece, Jason Falls also has a frank discussion with Nick Bilton, the writer of the documentary on his podcast.
We’ve taken the piece and recapped it / added our opinion into the mix, so make sure you read the article/podcast for additional information.
The Set Up
The precedent of fake famous is a thought that most of us in the industry have probably had at one point. The thought that you, with your expertise (or money) could make a small-time creator blow up and go famous. In the case of Fake Famous it translates to taking a random person, buying them followers and engagements, work with them on their content - and prove that you can fake it.
After many applications and deliberations, they settle on Dominque Druckman (@dominiquedruckman) and she decides to go all-in. They manage to grow her audience from a modest 1,000 to a whopping 250,000. When the brands become interested in her profile, the film concludes that all influencers are fame-obsessed, unemployed wannabes. Perhaps an alternative view and possible build on this thought would be to put more pressure on more agencies/brands to take due-diligence more seriously so that fake influence can be curtailed?
Influencer Fraud
Buying fake followers and fake engagements have been a thing in the industry for years, but the so called “comment pods” are much harder to identify and snuff out. Within these pods, real people (genuine engagement) group together to consistently comment/like each others posts in order to inflate engagement rates and unlock brand deals.
The key learning is here to always dig deeper, and look at a variety of different metrics. The article mentions tools such as Hype Auditor and Tagger that offer these types of insights. The article suggests to look at the simple but effective “growth rate” metric to identify out suspicious audience gains.
The issue with Fake Famous
The article highlights two main things
The documentary has opted to steer away from offering brand-side marketers and strategists a platform to provide context around why they’re spending money on influencers, and why it works (best practices). It’s clear that due to the lack of input from “both sides of the aisle” and a hyper-focus on dubious influencers/creators, the documentary is a little unbalanced. We have to bear in mind that brands/advertisers are the main reason why most influencers are in the position to unlock budgets to begin with.
The documentary consciously decides to use the words all, most, and majority when referring to influencers who have caved to dubious practices, but they are by no means the majority. However it is mostly these types of influencers that tend to take the spotlight. The influencers that have have worked tirelessly and authentically to build audiences and create brands and often easily overlooked - and under-indexed in these types of documentaries.
In the article, a few people have shared their opinions around the topic - with Qianna Bruneteau Smith (founder of the American Influencer Council) noting the below:
“There are millions of fake, duplicate and bot accounts on various social media platforms,” Smith says. “Influencer fraud is an industry issue. However, there is a distinction between creators who enter this market to scam, and full-time career creators who are committed to professional standards and business ethics.”
The Data
The author reviews insights from both Julius and Tagger, from an aggregate perspective and an individual perspective. The main takeaway is that the data around identifying and pin-pointing fake influence is by no means perfect - again emphasising the need for a more intense, deeper look into influencers on a per-case basis.
The Conclusion
I do believe that the creator of Fake Famous comes across much more nuanced on the podcast. He does also indicate that he doesn’t mind the criticism, as long as it allows there to be a conversation and a dialogue - which I’m a big fan of. He also indicates that the documentary took quite a few years to make. Influencer tech has developed rapidly over the past few years and specific tech focused on identifying fake influence when this documentary was being created was less much less advanced than it is now.
The author of the article highlights that it bothers him that a former New York Times reporter and contributing writer to Vanity Fair would leave such holes in his portrayal of influencers - and I’d have to agree. The optimist in me would like to think that perhaps the documentary maker has opted to tell its version of the story in order to spark the conversation it is currently creating.
There is one paragraph from the creator of Fake Famous that I would like to highlight - as it resonates with me and pin-points some of the issues the industry is having currently.
“I think that there is an aspect of this industry that that needs to either lean in one direction or other and say, Hey, we’re advertising. And that’s all we are, or were authentic, and we’re going to be authentic. But the thing that’s in the middle, this tiptoe of two worlds, I just don’t think is, it just doesn’t make sense to me.”
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