By day two of Instagram hiding likes in Australia, Jules Lund had already felt compelled to post a “rant” smacking down the media for deriding influencers. After the news from Instagram broke, it naturally led to a wave of commentary, both from new and old media, on how it impacts creators, many gleeful the move would be the end of influencers.
The theory was that Instagram had taken away their source of power – likes – rendering them valueless to brands. Now, there would be no need for creators to post outrageously flawless gym shots or vapid brunch snaps every day.
These predictions were not only untrue, but also unfair, says Lund, the founder of influencer provider Tribe, and the result of a few bad actors in the influencer category who are picked up and amplified, tarnishing the image of all influencers.
“Influencers aren’t much different to any group [that] people enjoy bashing for their own enjoyment,” Lund says.
“There’s certain behaviour that frustrates anyone, and a lot of those influencers leave themselves open to that criticism. At times it’s constructive and reasonable, and I too would agree with it.”
Ridiculing influencers has been a trend not just in the public, but also within the marketing industry. For example, asking creatives and social media experts to review influencers’ Instagram posts for brands, led to comments labelling them as “embarrassing”. One creative turned down the opportunity to review them, saying they had nothing positive to say, while Glenn Dalton, ECD at Hardhat, boldly said he “hates most influencer marketing” for its inauthenticity.
Marketers too have downplayed the rise of influencers, or predicted their demise, none more prominent than the former Unilever CMO Keith Weed who said the industry needed to “take urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever”.
Detractors’ view is that the meteoric rise of influencers has taken away the very thing that made them valuable – authenticity – or has been built on empty metrics, with transparency around reporting and measurement the biggest concern.
In addition to these challenges, influencers also take on the issues of social media, the environment in which they still live, which has big brand safety complications.
Following the Christchurch terrorist attack in March, both Facebook and YouTube were criticised globally for failing to promptly remove the livestream of the attack which left 51 people dead.
In another case in the US, a young man posted images of his murdered victim across social media.
While platforms can work to take such content down, the reality is that they can’t keep up with the volume of content being uploaded online every day, and brands that choose to advertise on social media risk appearing near “violent, abhorrent” material – nothing any marketer wants to associate their brand with.
BBC StoryWorks Australia boss Jelena Li warned that many marketers who rely on social media are stuck in short-term thinking. “Quality of content is one thing but if you’re not pushing out that content on the right platform then it can’t really shine, it can’t really unleash its full potential,” Li says.
This string of criticisms has driven the skepticism around influencer marketing, but the opposing, more positive view of influencers, which Lund subscribes to, is that they’re creative geniuses who used a free platform to turn themselves into advertising powerhouses and are only going to grow from here.
Taryn Williams, The Right Fit CEO, points out that while influencers are paid less than creative agencies, and often given less credit, they’re also often producing the same work.
“All the things that the brands would pay for, such as hiring a studio, a model, photographer and stylist, are included in an output an influencer delivers,” Williams says. “An influencer is really a creative director, a stylist, a producer, and an editor all in one.”
Still, the common perception of influencers is that they are lazy and entitled people who make their way off free products for reviews on YouTube or a selfie on Instagram. Hardly difficult work from the outside looking in.
But the reality is that influencers are also immensely popular personalities, joining the ranks of big name celebrities. And for those “micro-influencers”, with 5,000 to 50,000 followers, they can still have an incredible pull for local businesses. Notice the correlation between your local cafes with waiting lines to the number of Instagram Stories they’re receiving from people in the community.
Multinational brands that once used US celebrities now also opt for influencers because they are both less expensive and more personalised.
One example of an “influencer celebrity” is Sydney-based Sammy Robinson, who has more than 600,000 followers on Instagram and roughly 720,000 on YouTube. Robinson has been tapped by make-up brand M.A.C, Swarovski, which also pulls in heavy-weights such as US model Karlie Kloss, and GHD Hair. Her attraction isn’t limited to Australia, with her attending an event in New York with US model Gigi Hadid as part of partnership with another make-up giant, Maybelline.
Influencers have also created big brands from scratch, such as Iraqi-American beauty mogul Huda Kattan who started by filming YouTube make-up tutorials and now runs a billion-dollar business, Huda Beauty. Then there’s Australia’s fitness influencer Kayla Itsines who co-founded the Bikini Body Guide and the SWEAT app off the back of her followers, which has now grown to 11.6 million. She, along with her partner Tobi Pearce, is estimated to have a wealth of $486 million.
The value of influencer marketing is hard to pin down, largely due to uncertainties around metrics, but it certainly shows no signs of slowing down. A 2018 study by the World Federation of Advertisers showed that 65% of multinational brands planned to spend more of their advertising budgets on influencers. Another PwC report estimates that “personality-driven marketing” will reach $240 million this year in Australia alone and up to $10 billion across the world by 2020.
The most popular platforms for influencers are still Instagram and YouTube, as suggested by a study of 3,000 kids aged between 8-12 years which found being a YouTube star was more sought-after than being an astronaut.
The arrival of new platforms and their influencers is already upon us. In August, fashion label Superdry used three Australian TikTok influencers, or TikTokers, to launch its newest store. Between the three TikTokers, they had 7.5 million followers with 20% of that audience in Australia.
“We had 300 people line up just to meet the TikTokers, which is definitely higher than we’ve had for store openings but in saying that we had no expectations,” Superdry’s Marketing Manager Matthew Iozzi says.
“We had people leave school early. One lady I spoke to had pulled her daughter out of school at 11am so that she could drive three hours to meet the TikTokers at 3.30 pm.”
Iozzi says Superdry opted for TikTokers because it was more innovative than Instagram. “TikTok allows users to inject a little bit more personality than Instagram given that it’s primarily video-based,” Iozzi says.
“It encourages both users and viewers to engage in an honest conversation, rather than just a static image and post. There’s a very strong and unique flavour that comes with TikTok in terms of a social platform and we’ll be utilising this as a more organic way of presenting information to our audience.”
The Chinese-owned platform, which has an estimated 500 million daily users, hasn’t yet figured out how to monetise the platform, although it has started to roll out advertising. TikTokers aren’t making a significant sum from brand partnerships either, with payment per post floating around $500 mark. However, Born Bred Founder Clare Winterbourn says this is starting to change.
“Brand partnerships have risen hugely,” Winterbourn says.
“Now we’re doing a lot of product placement, organic partnerships and clothing hauls.
“So I see brand partnerships amping up to be very similar to what we’re processing through with Instagram.”
Currently, TikTokers are making their money from TikTok Live, where that can be “gifted” money, usually in exchange for a shout out. There are also other entries from new categories, with Twitch, owned by Amazon, leading the gaming influencer space with a reported 15 million daily active users. Microsoft’s Mixer is on its heels after poaching one of its top gamers, Ninja, who had close to 15 million followers and has already climbed to one million on Mixer.
The emergence of influencers across different categories doesn’t surprise some, with Yash Murthy, Social Media and Creative Director at Switched On, saying influencers are no different to brand advocates, product spokespeople and celebrity endorsements.
“The innate human need to seek reassurance and ascribe aspirational value to the consumption choices they make hasn’t changed. It’s just the delivery mechanism that has,” Murthy says.
“In our current media environment, the value of influencer marketing lies at the intersection of accessibility and authenticity. Viewed as such, as online communities continue to scale and diversify, the opportunities for growth are massive.
“Influencers’ aren’t just YouTube beauty vloggers and Instagram fitness models any more. It will be interesting to see where TikTok goes from an audience growth and monetisation standpoint, while the continued sophistication of esports and other rapidly emerging sub-communities only serve to create more opportunities for brands and platforms alike.”
When Ninja departed from Twitch he made the announcement through a video posted to YouTube. The minute and a half clip included a product placement for Red Bull and received 3.5 million views within a week of being uploaded. The energy drink brand also plastered his face on its cans.
Big tech is also recognising the value of influencers and making moves to pull in more revenue from them. In Australia, industry bodies such as the Audited Media Association of Australia (AMAA) are also snapping into action to implement best practices.
These updates from big tech and local bodies are about to inject even more authority and legitimacy into the space, ensuring it continues its steady rise. As it does, “influencer celebrities” will simply become the celebrities of the future, morphing into something more akin to creative agencies with their own audiences to reach consumers.
Lingering issues around reporting
Instagram wasn’t built with influencers in mind, so from the start it was ill-equipped to deliver creators the right reporting tools to communicate with brands.
Influencers overcame this by screenshotting their metrics, giving social media managers “read access” to their personal account to view their insights, or by simply self-reporting. All of these methods are less than optimal and some of them are still used today.
However, reporting has improved immensely within Instagram and YouTube. Outside of the platform there’s also a long list of third-party tools – – Tribe, Vamp, Hyetap, The Right Fit and Fluency – – which provide their own reporting.
Cal Guyll who heads up the recently-launched MSL Fluency, which is run by Publicis’ PR arm MSL, says new technology, such as AI, has played a big role in improving reporting.
Like most third-party tools, Fluency is end-to-end. It helps match brands with influencers and provides marketers with real-time campaign reporting. Fluency has more than 165,000 influencers in Australia and New Zealand.
“Marketers are used to having large-scale media spend with data available to them in real-time,” Guyll says.
“They can make really smart, fast-paced decisions. But influencer marketing it’s not as simple. Marketers are relying on data that comes from a third-party source, i.e. the influencer, and there can be all sorts of reasons why that data is unavailable at the time. They could be away, unresponsive, busy, etc.”
These third-party tools also help to detect fraudulent activities, such as fake engagement and bots which inflate a person’s follower count and diminishes trust in social media. According to AMAA’s 2018 Media Trust Study, social media has now eclipsed even programmatic trading as the channel that needs the most oversight, with 63% of the industry saying it needs more. This is compared to 56% for programmatic trading and 45% for online video. The study spoke to 407 marketers and media agency professionals, with an even mix between client-side marketers and media agency professionals – 41% were C-level/senior level and 59% middle/junior levels.
But while the study showed a greater need for oversight for social media compared to last year, media buyers are pleased with the improvements from third-party tools, saying it will help strengthen influencer marketing spend in the long-term.
“As people become more au fait with the process of evaluating them effectively and there are more trusted third-parties like The Right Fit or Tribe, I’d expect solid and consistent growth in spend on influencers,” Ogilvy’s Head of Social Alex Watts says.
“Not the explosion of the past couple years, but more constant growth year on year.”
Watts also says the space has reached a level of growth that means he expects consolidation. “While growing, the market is cluttered, and there’s only so much space for differentiation,” he says.
But while transparency around reporting has come a long way due to these third-party entrants, we can expect to see the issue continue to rear its head while the sector continues to develop.
Understanding metrics
The noise created after Instagram revealed Australia is one of seven countries trialing the removal of the likes count showed the level of misunderstanding around what brands actually look for when they look at influencers’ metric.
Likes has already fallen away as a significant measuring tools, both because it doesn’t necessarily mean business results, and because people are simply engaging less on social media.
“Previously you would have said getting a million likes on a post is great but realistically, what does the business want to drive?” says Guyll of MSL Fluency.
“Now brands have to consider if it wants likes on a post, to drive people to the brand’s website to make purchases, or make people fall in love with the brand.”
Speaking with The Right Fit’s Taryn Williams, Bernice Averion, growth marketer at Koala.com says she doesn’t look at engagement rate when searching for influencers to partner with to grow the mattress business.
“Engagement rate doesn’t really matter to me, it’s really about what their true audience is,” Averion says. “So if they have 100,000 followers but only 50% of that audience is within Australia I will only really want to pay for that 50%.”
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