Your Weekly Influencer Marketing Update 🚀
09.11.2020 / #53
☀️ Happy Monday! ☀️
🔍 This week’s Deep Dives
🤔 Why most people don't understand influencer marketing
I’m a big fan of catchy titles within opinion pieces - and I’ve certainly more than once tried to write one myself!
I enjoyed reading this piece a lot. Here’s a recap in my own words:
To understand the difference between traditional and influencer marketing, the evolution of influencers as media should be considered.
In pre-social media days, you would sit in a pub and discuss views on a recent purchase. This news (your recommendation) would then travel. However, this is considered small scale word-of-mouth marketing. The arrival of social media has changed everything.
Social media allows you to build an online presence, share your thoughts with the world, and grow your audiences as time passed. Instead of reaching five of yourfriends at the pub, thousands of people can be reached. And because you don’t work for any brands, people trust you more than they would an “owned” message.
Traditional marketing means purchasing space and eyeballs, but it’s generic; it’s not personal, and it’s not targeted. “Influencer media space” as the author puts it, allows you to pay for someone’s honest opinion, their content creation skills, and their specific audience.
Ideal influencer strategies focus on the influencer being involved from the strategy stage all the way through to the sales & re-engagement stages. The article notes that only a few brands “use” influencers in this way, with the majority of people still approaching it simply as a media space to distribute specific messaging.
💡 Our Opinion
This article resonates extremely well with me - my own journey into influencer marketing started at an agency where we provided everyday (or nano) influencers with experiences that enabled them to amplify their voice online. As I’ve mentioned on LinkedIn, I feel that the phrase “using influencers” feels a little negative and very much reads as one way traffic, where we piggy-back on the hard work that influencers have put in to simply amplify our message. More authentically perhaps than traditional advertising, but as long as we treat influencers as a media buy (instead of humans), it will prohibit us from paving the way for influencer marketing to be a more collaborative, inclusive and purpose-led practice that goes beyond eyeballs & content.
What we really want to do is empower creators and influencers - find mutual values and build partnerships that will allow both parties to benefit and grow. THAT is successful influencer marketing. If we continue to “use” influencers, they will continue to rent/sell their audience to the highest, inauthentic bidder and wait until their audience has grown large enough to start their own brand, or find alternative and more authentic routes to monetise their audience.
🏎️ If you can’t beat them, join them: football and F1 team up with esports
A very insightful, long read that we’ll break down and analyse.
Last month, the Gfinity Arena (the UK’s first dedicated esports arena) hosted a digital Formula One race, broadcast live on Sky. There are potentially billions of dollars in broadcasting and sponsorship at stake, with 443m people tuning into esports in 2019, of which the majority are younger than 35.
“One of the biggest barriers to gaming going mainstream has been the reluctance of broadcasters to put it on air. Covid-19 and the lockdown blew this sentiment out of the water,” says John Clarke, chief executive of Gfinity. “If you are a sports rights holder, you have a choice. Embrace the gaming culture and find a way to play in it authentically, or watch your audience get older and older.”
In addition to F1, the Premier League held an esports tournament back in April, and the NBA joined in, hosting its own competition for real players.
Investment into esports is flooding in at the same time with renowned (ex) athletes investing heavily into the scene, including David Beckham , Michael Jordan, and many others.
“[Esports] is a sector I’ve been monitoring for a while,” Beckham said in October. “We are committed to nurturing and encouraging youth talent through our academy systems . . . and we want to be the number one esports team in the business.”
According to F1, their audience fan age is 40 - with esports being a tool to reaching out to a younger audience.
FIFA, Football’s world governing body has outlined plans to free up $4.4m in prize money for esports competitions.
However, some are questioning the ability for esports to build genuine loyalty. Established sports have built their audience over decades, and industry experts believe that there is only limited potential in promoting esports versions of traditional sports. Games such as League of Legends, Counter Strikes, and DOTA 2 are currently dominating the esports arena in terms of viewing hours.
“Fifa is a good game, many people play the game but no hardcore esports fan will tell you, ‘I’ve been watching Fifa for years’,” says Carlos Rodriguez, a former League of Legends gamer and founder of the G2 Esports team, which counts McLaren F1 racing chief Zak Brown as a shareholder.
Another problem for potential investors is that it’s hard to quantify the size of the market, and claims were made that League of Legends viewership was bigger than that of the Super Bowl.
“That was the big, headline-grabbing stat but when you get down to it they were comparing the average audience of the Super Bowl in the US versus total unique viewers of League of Legends around the world,” says Nicole Pike, YouGov’s head of esports and gaming. “It’s just apples to oranges completely.”
💡 Our Opinion
It’s a shame that Formula E’s Race At Home initiative wasn’t featured, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this article is 100% worth a read and my breakdown doesn’t do the piece justice. There is a lot of interesting information in there.
Considering Fornite wasn’t around three years ago, it’s very challenging to predict what will come next, but it’s becoming clear that younger audiences are not reliant on the sports that are being offered on TV. Instead, there are myriad options to choose from, and legacy sports are competing for that attention.
Something that wasn’t mentioned in the article is that Lando Norris, an F1 driver who grew his Twitch channel astronomically on the back of the virtual F1 races earlier this year, has since launched his own esports team, called Quadrant.
With technology advancing rapidly, my gut feeling says that we may well end up in a time where virtual versions of “the real deal” are competing for the same audiences - which must be frustrating considering some sport entities have been building their brand for 50+ years. In my own experience as a teenager, FIFA was still being challenged firmly by Konami’s PES. In addition, the current format (roughly) of online competitive play was only introduced as recent as FIFA 11 (2010). Who’s to say where we’ll be in 2030?
📰 Headlines
FMCG influencer spend is on the up but 85% report negative experiences
Looking ahead, Hamilton said: “We are seeing increasing demand from brands to investigate influencers’ online activity and identify potentially sensitive issues, including those posted many years ago, to allow brands to establish whether or not an influencer’s values match their own, and ensure they are making informed decisions about their influencer programmes.”
David Dobrik redefines the celebrity fragrance launch
In order to sell a scent online, the key, said both Lekach and Dobrik, is to convey the lifestyle associated with it. “You’re kind of trying to sell the vibe,” said Dobrik, saying the commercial was created to convey “what it feels like when you’re wearing the perfume. Obviously it’s not as cool as getting to smell it in person,” he noted, “but it’s the next best thing.”
How The Most Creative Brands Use Live-Streaming Video To Their Advantage
“Sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses is yet another way to thank your biggest fans and enable them to help share your brand story. When done well, these approaches have generated returns for brands in the areas of publicity, engagement, downloads, lead generation, and influencer marketing.”
The “Fin-influencer” boom: Why Instagram and TikTok are the new battlegrounds for digital banks
Indeed, fintechs are now focusing their fight for market share and customers online, paying social-media influencers to post endorsements across Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Tik Tok.
Several other consumer-fintechs are also experimenting with influencer marketing, according to a review of social media. These include Plum, digital mortgage-broker Habito, Gen-Z banking app Zelf, Germany’s Vivid money, SME-bank Penta, and Klarna.
[ The below articles feature platforms heavily ]
Streamloots raises $7.2 million for influencer monetization
After six months, the founders gave up and started Streamloots in January 2018 with a different idea: a platform for content creators. The creators, or influencers, can easily set up ways for fans to engage with them and pay money to them. As an example, a Hearthstone influencer could charge money for a brief interview or create a winning deck for Hearthstone, Martínez Guerrero said. This time, Streamloots didn’t create a cryptocurrency.
What marketers need to know about authenticity in influencer marketing
Marketers should use as many metrics as possible to identify proper influencers, even creating internal or industry metrics based on the influencer’s visibility at industry events as well as public speaking and media appearances. Once that group of influencers are identified, then begin the authentication process, ensuring that you are measuring all influencers with the same variables to make the proper hiring decision.
In the quest for scale, brands are turning towards macro-influencers
Over the past few years, micro-influencers have become the darlings of the social media community. Their followings — which account for 10,000–50,000 users — have been known to exhibit unusually high engagement. But over the past several months, there’s been an unexpected uptick in the emphasis brands are placing on influencers with larger audiences.