Tag: Influencer Marketing

Bengaluru, India – In order to aid brands in working out their ideal influencer marketing campaign, Qoruz has launched India’s first-ever comprehensive influencer search engine, which indexes hundreds of thousands influencers, from celebrities to macro to micro and nano-influencers, from various social media platforms.

Qoruz Search Engine enables marketers to discover millions of relevant influencers in seconds, filter by influencer attributes, category, region that fits their target audience. Marketers can discover, identify, filter and make a campaign plan as per their requirements. Advanced features like filters, detailed analytics, insights and campaign planning tools will be available for a small license fee.

Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, co-founder and CEO at Qoruz expressed his excitement regarding the search engine launch, and believes that the Qoruz search engine, starting with India and then internationally, will help marketers to discover relevant influencers for their objectives by giving them data, deep insights, and campaign management tools.

“We envision a connected Influencer ecosystem; where influencers and creators are not looked upon as ‘vehicles of reach” or ‘human ad banners’ but a world where brands and marketers forge tighter mutually beneficial relationships with influencers, beyond ‘money’ or ‘reach’,” Bhuvaneshwar said.

According to Prabakaran B., co-founder and CTO at Qoruz, the search engine utilizes data from top social media like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs; and across diverse categories such as fashion, beauty, photography, food, lifestyle, comedy, family, music, films, technology, and games.

“There are also ready-to-use curated lists available on Qoruz with the most popular searches done for influencers and creators like ‘Top Content Creators in Instagram’, ‘Top Food Instagrammers in Delhi’. For clients who require deep data, insights, advanced filters and campaign management, these can be available for an annual license fee,” he stated.

Qoruz is currently mentored by Nitesh Kripalani, former director and country head at Amazon Video India, and serves brands such as Omnicom Media Group, Goibibo, Marico, among others.

Singapore – Martech startup Affable.ai has announced that it has raised US$2m in total funding, which will be used by the startup to bolster its influencer marketing platform to more clients globally who seek aid on running high-impact influencer marketing campaigns.

The funding was backed by venture capital companies Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital, and SGInnovate.

Founded in 2017 by Nisarg Shah and Swayam Narain, Affable’s end-to-end Influencer Marketing Platform allows brands and agencies to streamline their influencer strategies throughout the planning, discovery, activation, and reporting phases. Affable uses advanced machine learning and big data analytics to help brands find influencers, manage and measure campaign performance. 

With the influencer marketing process being extremely manual, time-consuming and completely based on guesswork, Affable provides brands with data-driven insights and analytics to help streamline their micro-influencer marketing process.

Affable also utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to create accurate influencer-brand mapping and measuring campaign ROIs. In addition, Affable indexes all the social media users and identifies potential influencers that a brand could work with. 

Using Affable, marketers can find influencers, manage them campaign-wise, and measure post-campaign analytics such as engagement from in-target audience, influencer success(as a group and individually), measure the overall effectiveness of the campaign, as well as measure clicks and sales.

According to Nisarg Shah, CEO and co-founder at Affable.ai, they see a huge opportunity in working with brands to enable the much needed, data-driven influencer marketing campaigns, as the brands and agencies, they work with reinforce their belief in the need for analytics to streamline the micro-influencer marketing process. 

“Prime brings a depth of experience in scaling global SaaS companies, operational expertise, as well as a strong network that we can leverage during our growth phase and we are very excited to partner with them. At the same time, participation from our existing investors is a great endorsement for us,”

Affable currently serves a multitude of over 45 top brands and agency clients including Huawei, Wipro, Pomelo, Fresh, Omnicom, dentsu, and WE Communications. The company tracks more than three Million Influencers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.

Stockholm, Sweden – Global software Bambuser, which primarily specializes in interactive live video streaming, has announced the acquisition of global martech company Relatable, as both companies are vying to use their combined resources to empower the future of live video shopping as well as influencer marketing campaigns.

The acquisition, valued at US$24m, will also help enable brands and retailers to scale high-impact livestream shopping implementations and drive business results.

Bambuser’s recent move follows after a year of remarkable growth for Bambuser and widespread adoption of the company’s SaaS solutions for interactive e-commerce. The two companies will operate and service customers independently, yet collaboratively. 

In line with the acquisition, Relatable founder Martin Garbarczyk will join Bambuser’s executive team as chief revenue officer (CRO), contributing his extensive experience building high-performing sales organizations to further accelerate Bambuser’s global growth.

“Bambuser and Relatable are a match made in heaven. I’m excited to build a global sales organization that leverages the enormous market demand and fuels growth to our SaaS business,” Garbarczyk said.

As a first step in the new relationship, Bambuser will add creative and strategic services from Relatable to its customers, enabling them to amplify campaigns before, during, and after Live Video Shopping events. Teams will be co-located in Sweden, the U.S. and U.K., where each company has an established presence, to enhance synergies and drive opportunities for cross- and upselling.

“By joining forces with Relatable, we increase our market pole position with an unrivaled SaaS offering that clearly differentiates us from the competition,” said Maryam Ghahremani, CEO of Bambuser.

Australia – Global beauty brand L’Oréal in Australia has joined marketing board Australian Influencer Marketing Council (AiMCO), to support transparency and best practices in influencer marketing.

AiMCO is an industry body that brings together the expertise of a diverse group of industry professionals, marketers, and content creators who are committed to elevating influencer marketing best practice, campaign measurement, and industry knowledge. Its members are the guiding force behind its mission, principles, and industry codes.

Through the partnership, the members of the beauty brand, namely Emma Williamson, director of customer and social media governance, and Jenna Adamson, corporate legal, will be joining the newly formed AiMCO Marketer Advisory Council as the first fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) beauty brand.

According to AiMCO, this move by L’Oréal Australia proves the importance of influencer marketing, as large brands are now getting on board with the council whose members are drawn from influencer marketing tech, social media, and talent agencies, as well as legal specialists, along with influencers and content creators. 

Commenting on the partnership, Williamson said that they are thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with AiMCO and other leading Australian influencer marketing businesses to help shape the landscape in an ever-evolving marketplace.

“Influencer marketing is here to stay. We recognize it is a critical lever in how to engage new audiences, reconnect with our existing consumers, and tap into forms of content that drive consumer trial and purchase. As an ever-present component in our media mix, it’s crucial that we get influencer marketing right. Consumers are savvy and if we want them to trust our brands, we need to ensure that the influencers we work with share our values and are authentic and transparent,” said Williamson.

Meanwhile, AiMCO’s chairman Detch Singh shared, “We’re excited to welcome L’Oréal Australia as the first of many brands to be joining AiMCO as a member. Influencer marketing is core to the media mix and it’s natural for leading and innovative brands such as L’Oréal Australia to want to play a role in shaping its future. The newly formed AiMCO Marketer Advisory council will be essential in ensuring we are addressing the needs of brand marketers with our initiatives moving forward.”

Influencers are being upended by virtual influencers – computer-generated influencers that operate like real-life ones. Brands are increasingly seeking to partner with them, or even create them, to tap into their fan base through endorsement deals. Virtual influencers have emerged in the last few years as, arguably, the next big thing in influencer marketing. 

Characters like Lil Miquela (3.1 million Instagram followers) and Knox Frost (791,000 followers) who are both Instagram-verified, have worked with all sorts of brands and entities, from Calvin Klein and Dior to Samsung and the World Health Organization. According to an analysis published on Bloomberg by OnBuy, a U.K.–based online marketplace, Lil Miquela is estimated to make over $10M per year — for the company that created her. With 3.1 million followers on Instagram, HypeAuditor, an analytical platform for influencer marketing, estimates that she charges around $12,500 per sponsored post, making her the highest-paid ‘robot influencer’.

Virtual influencers have quickly gained traction within the industry. Technology is enabling studios and advertisers to create virtual influencers that seem almost real, giving them personalities and lives that they share with consumers, to try and form a connection with people. And brands have found that they offer certain advantages over real influencers. 

First, they are cost-effective, and content can be produced relatively quickly — it is very simple for a graphics designer to give a virtual influencer a new wardrobe and place them in any location on Earth, compared to having to fly or drive a real influencer to a specific location for a photoshoot. 

Second, they seem to be relatively effective. Influencer marketing is already one of the most effective methods to bridge the gap between a brand and its audience by leveraging an influencer’s authenticity and engagement with their fanbase. Our research finds that virtual influencers have almost three times the engagement rate of real influencers, indicating that their followers are more likely to like and comment on their content compared to the content produced by their human counterparts. 

Third, and perhaps most important, is that they are controllable and pose a significantly lower risk to a brand’s reputation. Given that virtual influencers are scripted and controlled by their creators, there’s much less chance that they will embarrass their clients by posting something offensive or controversial on their social pages. So in many ways, virtual influencers may appear like the safest option for brands.

However, brands would be wise not to get too caught up in the hype, as there are some issues around virtual influencers. 

While virtual influencers have a higher engagement rate than human influencers, HypeAuditor’s research found that 48 percent of virtual influencers had negative follower growth in 2020, meaning that they are losing followers. This may be because the accounts were losing bots, or that their audience simply did not like the content and were unfollowing them.

Another concern is around regulation. Many have questioned if virtual influencers conflict with the rules set by advertising watchdogs. For instance, the Australian Association of National Advertisers Code of Ethics requires an influencer to disclose that a post is a paid endorsement of a product or service. And this is complemented by the Competition and Consumer Act which covers ‘misleading and deceptive conduct’. Obviously, virtual influencers have not and can never try the products they promote themselves, which can be viewed as misleading and deceptive, even if they disclose the paid partnership. 

The fact that some virtual influencers look so life-like could also potentially mislead the public. HypeAuditor’s survey of Instagram users in 2019 by consultancy firm Fullscreen found that 42 percent of millennials and Generation Z have followed an influencer on the platform without realizing that they are computer-generated. 

Because of this, it is predicted that the rising popularity of virtual influencers will also lead to calls for them to be regulated, so that they don’t deceive the public or mislead their followers. 

And while virtual influencers are less likely to go off-message, brands do need to carefully consider what kind of biases a virtual influencer or their creators might have, as this could still cause damage to their brand’s reputation. Diversity and inclusivity are also highly important to consumers today, so brands must be careful when hiring virtual influencers instead of real human ones. French fashion house Balmain received criticism in 2018 for using three ‘diverse’ virtual influencers in a campaign, rather than hiring actual diverse human beings. 

Influencer marketing has huge potential in the advertising industry, as it enables brands to form much more human connections between themselves and their audiences. While there is certainly a place in ad campaigns for virtual influencers to create engaging content, brands would be wise not to forget about their human counterparts. 

This article is by Alexander Frolov, CEO and co-founder of HypeAuditor.

HypeAuditor is an analytical platform that helps brands manage the effectiveness of their influencer marketing campaigns.

Customers are now finding the call of the ordinary as most trustworthy and genuine as opposed to celebrities who attracted brand limelight of the era gone by.

Imagine you go to a shop to try a new coffee variant recently launched by a fairly well-known brand. You come home, try it and are overjoyed with its taste and aroma. What is the next thing you do? Make another brew or share your joy with your family? Perhaps both.

For most consumer brands, the simple act of sharing your experience about a product for its quality, sales service, or price point makes case for a massive marketing opportunity. It is not new to realize that people do business with people and buy products from brands they trust. So when you give a high-five to a brand, the noise moves across the room, making others tempted to trust your first-hand feedback and buy the same product on their next visit to the supermarket. The distinct way to grow any business is to make your customers chatter about your product.

Voice of the common man

Think gossip is negative. Well, indeed it is not. It is as crucial as our voice on things that matter. In the seeds of gossiping lie humanity’s power to bond with others socially, influence decisions, foster life-long friendships and create powerful communications. This was unique to homo sapiens that allowed the species to cooperate with strangers and helped them gain an edge on the animal kingdom.

Gossip is one of the unheralded foundations of our species and its survival, concludes Yuval Noah Harari in his best-seller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Consumers were always leaders of opinions, sometimes in whispers and at other times aloud.

The times we are going through provides a very fertile ground for consumers to use opinion to manoeuvre market trends. The numerous social media platforms give consumers access to share their gossip with the world at large, influencing purchase decisions and changing the purchase funnel from linear to circular.

An active customer is uniquely positioned to give brands social proof on their superior product or service, getting more interested customers and benefiting the brands with good returns. These customers or brand advocates are in no way forced to speak highly of any brand and this gives them true power to speak what is best in a brand.

The strength of such brand advocates lies in their authentic enthusiasm to endorse a brand and it is because of these truths that people trust their reviews and pay close attention to words. Eight in ten customers (83%) believe that trust is the first emotional metric that influences brand loyalty, according to the 2019 Deloitte study ‘Exploring the value of emotions-driven engagements’. Just as the world’s strongest brands are built upon a few core sets of truth, the same thing can be said about powerful brand advocates.

Times of trusted advisors

Traditionally, brand advocates have always been popular superstars with a mass appeal. But changing consumer sentiments showed a shift towards user-generated authoritarian content that has appeal to a targeted audience, making way for the rise of internet celebrities–they are none other than you and me with expert knowledge of industry product types and ability to spin a convincing tale of her own experience with the brand.

The power of storytelling in marketing cannot be emphasized any further. New-age influencers are compelling storytellers pushing the brands they endorse by the sheer force of their belief and the fan followers they possess. They are not just loyal to brands but actively champion their products to influence the buying habits of others. And that is why influencers are the most valuable customers that a company can have.

These are the same people who got an opportunity to broadcast their water cooler conversations on their social media handles. Not all of them have a follower count in millions but what they lack in reach, they make up with their intimate personalization of the brand. When these netizens recommend a product on Instagram, their words seem as genuine as those from a friend.

Call for meaningful conversations

These digital natives have emerged in interesting times. They are nudging brands to take a step back and focus on quality and service of products to drive conversations rather than mindlessly putting their money in large-scale paid marketing campaigns.

Brands are forging strategic partnerships with influencers to change buying habits of whole communities. But once brands orchestrate the social talks, it shakes the very foundation of trust and authenticity that had actually made these netizens’ murmur effective.

To have customers become cheerleaders, brand managers are tasked with finding innovative ways to delight buyers and nudge them to become advocates. It is only when advocates create buzz out of a genuine desire to underline a brand’s product or service can they be called truly trustworthy.

Asif Upadhye director at SPRD
This article is written by Asif Upadhye, director at SPRD.

Stories.PR.Digital is a public relations firm in India that provides brands reputation management, thought leadership, and corporate communications, as well as content, media tracking & digital influence.

Singapore – Technology company AnyMind Group has announced that it will be forming a strategic partnership with Japan-based multi-channel network (MCN) UUUM with an objective of rebuilding the creator and influencer industry in Japan through mutual utilization of the resources from UUUM and AnyMind Group’s technology and data for influencer marketing and direct-to-consumer (D2C) offerings.

As an initial part of the partnership, both parties are looking at creating the largest influencer network in Japan for marketers, with a launch date set for the second quarter of this year. This network will enable marketers and agencies in Japan to tap on the largest-combined pool of content creators available, combining UUUM’s creators, expertise, and reach with AnyMind Group’s proprietary software, along with creators from AnyMind Group-owned GROVE.

In addition, UUUM will look to launch influencer D2C brands by tapping on AnyMind Group’s tools including AnyFactory (for cloud manufacturing) and AnyShop (for e-commerce), with further details to be announced later this year. 

For Kosuke Sogo, CEO and co-founder of AnyMind Group, their partnership with UUUM is all about “creating the infrastructure for next-generation businesses in Japan.”

“AnyMind Group has been creating intrinsic value for individuals and businesses across 13 markets around the world, with a focus on developing and providing technology and data-driven platforms, along with supporting businesses in the D2C domain. [This] will become a core foundation for rebuilding the creator and influencer industry in Japan and the world. We will continue to create synergies with UUUM and provide even more value for influencers and brands,” Sogo stated.

Meanwhile, Kazuki Kamada, CEO of UUUM said, “We are convinced that this partnership will enable us to realize a completely new influencer marketing across industries and to propose an evolved marketing plan by promoting data utilization. Together with AnyMind Group, we will open up a creator-influencer-driven future.”

Sydney, Australia – HypeAuditor, an AI analytics platform for measuring effective influencer marketing, has today released a new competitor analysis tool called Competitor Grid, which allows brands to check the reach of influencer marketing campaigns of their competitors.

Through the new tool, Competitor Grid gives marketers the ability to easily analyze the performance of competitors’ influencer marketing campaigns. Arming them with important information, such as the full list of influencers they work with, analysis of the creatives used, and amount spent per post on a campaign. HypeAuditor’s aim is to help marketers make more strategic decisions for their brand’s influencer marketing activity. 

Furthermore, the tool gives users full access to analytics on how competitor brand’s influencer marketing campaigns are performing, including a close analysis of the following criteria namely engagement rate, audience quality, influencer quality, cost per engagement, and reach.

Competitor Grid’s development comes in response to the demand from marketers, as highlighted in research conducted in January 2021 by HypeAuditor, which found that 1 in 3 marketers (31%) are unaware of the influencers their competitors are working with, whilst almost half (45%) do not know the audiences their competitors are targeting through influencer marketing and with 87% finding it helpful to get a list of Instagram posts with competitors’ mentions.

“As influencer marketing matures, brands are reevaluating how they work with influencers. Instead of one-off deals with hundreds of influencers, all using the same copy, marketers, and agencies are now looking for more long-term, authentic partnerships that give influencers more creative control.” said Alex Frolov, CEO of HypeAuditor. 

Following the release of Competitor Grid, HypeAuditor conducted a research analysis of Australia-based brands and measured them against each other based on Instagram influencer marketing.

In the study, HypeAuditor noted that Australian home-grown brand Chemist Warehouse is the highest performer in influencer marketing in Australia, in terms of beauty brands. HypeAuditor notes such strong performance due to the brand achieving 1.51% average engagement rate for the quarter, an average cost of $0.32 per engagement, and 89 sponsored and likely sponsored posts from 61 Instagram influencers such as Sophie Monk, Christina Sikalias, and Jules Robinson.

The research also noted that global beauty brand Sephora failed to compete against its Australian local counterparts, with home-grown brands like Bondi Sands and Priceline Australia still taking the lead in influencer marketing reach.

“To do this effectively, they need data that they can rely on when developing influencer marketing campaigns. Our new Competitor Grid answers these new needs and helps marketers make the right decisions when looking at implementing an influencer marketing strategy, based on valuable information gathered about competitors’ strategies,” Frolov added.

Singapore – Parenting-focused platform theAsianparent which has presence all over Southeast Asia, has launched its VIP Parents platform (VIPP), which comprises of its most vocal and influential parents, enabling brands to engage directly with this segment of parents across the region.

The VIPP platform has been officially launched six months ago, and according to theAsianparent, the VIPP has a base of over 40,000 moms and dads, giving marketers the opportunity to tap this audience. Brands can use the platform to let parents participate in surveys or polls, create original and meaningful content, and even have them review their products and attend brand events, with the possible opportunity of bringing parents on board as official brand ambassadors.

On the side of parents that are part of the platform, VIPP provides an opportunity for them to learn and earn. The women-led VIPP team has a training program for registered VIPP moms and dads to help them increase and maximize their social capital. 

Founder and Group CEO of theAsianparent, Roshni Mahtani Cheung, commented that the reality of parenting such as messy homes, spit-up, tantrums, and eyebags are rarely reflected in ad campaigns that target the mother audience, saying that engagement begins with “understanding.” 

“With VIP Parents, brands can get direct feedback from our parent community at their convenience, whether that’s a quick poll to gather first impressions on a new product or a massive survey that could help fine-tune a local campaign. Enlisting our moms and dads, who are already talking about these brands anyway, to both amplify and ground their campaign messages, is that sought-after authenticity every digital marketer talks about,” said Cheung.

Auckland, New Zealand – The New Zealand arm of media investment company GroupM has announced that it is now launching INCA, GroupM’s influencer marketing platform, in the country as part of INCA’s ongoing expansion in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

INCA works as a brand-safe influencer marketing network that gives advertisers access to a data-driven brand engagement tool that connects them with trustworthy and relevant influencers at scale.

Through the expansion, New Zealand advertisers can now leverage INCA’s artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled technology to partner with a vast network of relevant and authentic creators to plan, execute, and measure content-driven campaigns that bring their brand stories to life and deliver results. 

Furthermore, the launch solidifies the company’s efforts to uphold brand safety in the industry as more brands are allocating budgets to influencer marketing to drive brand engagement across social platforms. 

“New Zealand is such an exceptional market for creators. We feel very privileged to be able to connect our brands with the best creators through this new platform. Our people, technology, and partnerships put us in a unique position to sit across the intersection of creativity, media, data, and commerce and we’re excited to bring this value to our brands and strengthen the influencer eco-system in New Zealand,” said Nick Henderson, head of product and solutions at GroupM New Zealand.

INCA also deploys other features in the platform, including INCAtech, which provides unique creator and audience insights, workflow tools, content amplification, and detailed campaign reporting dashboards; and Genuity Score, which enables brands to check the proportion of real versus fake audience on a creators profile, which drives authenticity and effectiveness.

“Advertisers are faced with the challenge of connecting more deeply with consumers in social media platforms. INCA allows us to access thousands of authentic and relevant content creators in a highly cost effective way. This technology has simply changed the game in terms of how we can now plan, implement and measure our influencer content campaigns for clients,” said Chris Riley, chief executive officer at GroupM New Zealand.

INCA in New Zealand will be available to clients from all GroupM agencies which include media agency Mindshare, marketing and advertising company MediaCom, media company Wavemaker, and others.