When new technologies are introduced to marketers, they tend to start their journey into the organization lumped somewhere in a place often called “innovation.”
“Innovation,” though, is really just shorthand for “stuff that seems important but we’re not quite sure of yet.” Some of it - search marketing, programmatic buying, social media - become pillars of the marketing strategy, commanding time, attention, and spend.
Innovation inside major companies today has many different faces, and many of the technologies are things like virtual reality, 3D printing, and bitcoin, which while very promising, aren’t mainstream enough for brands to do more than dabble.
One area that is quite the opposite is influencer marketing.
On the one hand, there’s nothing new about tapping influencers to give your brand clout, credibility and reach. Celebrity endorsement is a tried-and-true strategy for advertisers across categories.
The thing that’s changed is that social platforms have democratized influence. In open channels like Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, and newcomers like Wattpad, Shots, and Musical.ly, the people who create the best content have a chance to get known and grow their followings, regardless of where they start.
While they have some things in common with the celebrities of yesteryear, this group actually offers something decidedly different. They are both creative masters of their mediums, as well as distribution conduits to large audiences. For the past several years, this intoxicating combo has attracted brands to experiment with new types of campaigns, and startups to arise to help facilitate the process.
Perhaps because it was easier for brands to mentally jump from TV to digital video, YouTube has been the network where influencer marketing matured the fastest. For years, the network didn’t spend much time or attention cultivating the users who were trying to build their careers around the platform. From that vacuum emerged the ‘multi-channel networks’ like Fullscreen and Maker Studios. These companies knew how to aggregate talent and distribution and package it in a way that made sense to advertisers. No surprise, many of the largest MCNs have subsequently been fully or partially acquired by the last generation’s media giants.
Content creators on other channels have seen brand interest, but perhaps not the same pure spend that has flown to YouTubers.
One of the platforms that has been instrumental in helping brands tap those types of social influencers is TheAmplify. Like competitors, TheAmplify has a large network of aligned influencers with massive reach into diverse audiences. The company is unique in the suite of power tools it gives brands to engage and activate influencers at scale in near automated fashion, and to measure the impact in ways that transcend basic engagement metrics like clicks and likes.
In the video above, TheAmplify’s CEO, Justin Rezvani, discusses what he thinks the next phase of influencer marketing looks like. Specifically, he argues:
1. Influencer marketing will become a pillar of marketing strategy, deployed across every type of campaign as a matter of course.
2. Measurement will evolve from ‘vanity metrics’ like clicks and likes, to measures of sentiment in discussion around the brand and other actionable ROI
3. In the same way specific experts run strategy for other marketing tentpoles like search marketing or experiential, brands will have in-house or via agency partners people who have built their career focusing on how to work with the combination of creative and distribution represented by social influencers.
Of course, as CEO of an influencer company, Rezvani has an incentive for this to be the case. From the vantage at the intersection of brands and startups where my company Partnered sits, the reality is that he’s dead on.
First, every campaign we see gives at least lip service to its influencer strategy. It’s no longer an if but a how. Sometimes this still hues relatively closely to the older model of having a small handful of close influencers, but even that is changing, with more and more advertisers trying to figure out how to leverage a network of smaller influencers instead.
Second, every social platform emerging today is conscientious of cultivating its own influencer community. Unlike YouTube, Instagram, or Snapchat, which mostly left influencers to their own devices (or to third parties), the new class of emerging social platforms is dedicating time and resources to supporting those groups and getting them involved in brand campaigns from a much earlier stage.
A great example is Wattpad, who in April announced Wattpad Studios, an LA-based office that helps the platform’s more than 2 million creators partner to get their stories produced in film, TV and digital video.
Taken together you have two forces driving to a shared middle: brands that want to sync more resources into groups of influencers all at once, and new platforms that want to build up their influencers and better package them to work with brands. That combination is driving exactly the sort of changes Rezvani is talking about, and it’s hard to imagine that in the next few years, we don’t think of influencers as “innovation,” but just a normal part of the marketing stack.
