Article 13, or Article 17 as it’s now formally known, is very likely to have the single, greatest impact on the internet than any other law we’ve seen passed to date.

On the surface it seems relatively simple: the responsibility for checking copyrighted content now lies with the social platforms (Facebook/YouTube/Instagram etc) instead of the individual uploading the content. The platforms will now also be the ones held liable in the case of a law suit. This seems to make sense, right? For years the major tech players have been building vast business models off the back of stolen content, so surely they should pay for that? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, and the implications could be devastating to millions of creators, thousands of smaller businesses, and ultimately rock the boat on the very foundations the internet has been built on: freedom of speech.

Let’s focus on one platform. Take YouTube, for example. YouTube have undoubtedly built the most sophisticated content ID platform in the world for scanning for copyrighted content. However, despite this sophistication, scanning for copyrighted content is an unbelievably complex technical challenge, which means there are still countless cases of YouTube getting it wrong. For example, Sebastian Tomczak uploaded a 10 hour video of white noise and was hit with five copyright infringement claims from record labels claiming it was their track. Pre-Article 13, this would’ve been Sebastian Tomczak’s problem. Post-Article 13, it’s YouTube’s. Which means if they want to avoid facing a constant stream of potential legal action against them, they’re going to have to be a lot more strict about what can and cannot be uploaded. Realistically, at this point in time only a human (in collaboration with technology) could safely vet content to ensure it is copyright free. Now factor in that 400 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we start to understand the scale of the issue on our hands.

What will happen, exactly? Only a small number of pre-vetted channels allowed to upload content in the EU? Blanket content block for all content in the EU? Now that the major media corporations (music labels, film studios, news conglomerates etc) have managed to push this through in the EU, will the rest of the world follow suit? Will legal and financial implications be so great to social media platforms that they crumble entirely? I have no idea. No one does.

The irony of it all is that whilst the powers that be — including the very individuals and organisations who pushed through Article 13 — are trying to break up the big tech giants and remove some of their power, the inverse might actually happen. Building sophisticated enough content ID systems is such an incredibly cost-prohibitive endeavour, that only the tech giants will have the resources to build them. Guess who will the be licensing out these expensive systems to the smaller platforms…

One thing is for sure: the internet is about to change, in a big way. We have a couple of years for countries within the EU to implement the changes, and — much like GDPR — no one knows exactly how strictly enforced these regulations will be, or how severe the punishments will look for mishaps. But for countries outside of the EU not paying attention: it’s like seeing your neighbours house burn down and saying “Meh, it’s next door so we don’t need to worry about it”.

The micro influencer debate was bad enough, but now the “nano influencer” hype is getting silly. Let me share a case study…

A very well known brand conducted an experiment: 1 video with a “macro influencer”, and 20 with “micro influencers”. The cost balanced out. The aggregate engagement for the micro influencers outperformed that of the macro influencer. They affectively achieved lower CPMs (Cost Per Mille/Thousand) and CPEs (Cost Per Engagement). Hurrah — micro influencers are better!

But wait… Out of the 627 products sold, 626 of them came from the one macro influencer… Oh.

Why might this be? A couple of possibilities:

• True “influence” only comes from those you really trust, and that trust only comes from years of following someone’s journey (the time it takes to become “macro”)?

• At the micro end is where the fake followers and engagement fraud is rife. It’s the quickest, easiest way to start getting paid brand deals from people who get all hot and sweaty purely over engagement metrics?

We also need to take into account that influence is contextual.

Imagine this: person X has 10,000 followers. Micro influencer or macro?

To L’Oréal, micro. If the person has a rare skin condition that requires a special shampoo, they might be the biggest influencer in the world.

Then there’s the volume issue.

Marketeers need scaleability. To achieve a meaningful level of impact, at the “nano influencer” end of the spectrum a brand would have to work with a huge amount of individuals to make up viable numbers. Anyone who’s worked in influencer marketing knows how time consuming it can be to work with even one individual. Now multiply that by 100.

This means one thing: something has to be sacrificed.

Let’s bring back the old favourite price, quality, time triangle.

You can do the job well and quickly, but then it will be very expensive. Or you can make it low cost and high quality, but then it will take a long time. Or what’s much more likely to happen, is you make it quick and cheap, and then you sacrifice on quality.

Unfortunately, the sacrifice that gets made in the influencer space all too often is authenticity. Sorry, I hate that cliché term too, but it’s the most accurate word.

By having to work with so many individuals, it becomes a spamming exercise to anyone who is willing to post an ad for cash, rather than carefully picking people who are a great fit for the brand. That’s when you end up with sponsored posts like the one below.

For some reason, this Forbes article which discusses “3 Hot Trends in Influencer Marketing” *sigh*, includes this post in the article, I’m presuming to set a shining example. It doesn’t take 2 seconds to review this and realise that this is not how “normal” people take photos or speak to their friends. If my genuine friends started doing this, I’d either quickly stop seeing them or at least ask them to pay for the next round of drinks from the money they made from polluting my social feeds.

The risk this approach has is that it destroys the very fabric this industry is built on: trust.

Everyone has a trust spectrum. At one end are your closest friends and family, at the other, probably politicians right now… The reason influencer marketing is so powerful is because influencers sit much closer to the friend end of the spectrum than a brand itself. If we destroy the trust that influencer marketing relies on, we can say bye bye to this incredibly powerful channel.

Below is another example. A post that I found on an influencer marketplace’s website being used as a brilliant case study.

1. Brand positioned alongside influencer — ✅
2. Product beautifully and clearly shown — ✅
3. Decent level of engagement — ✅

Lovely jubbly.

Oh, wait.

It took two seconds of scanning the comments to realise that, mind-bogglingly, audiences don’t respond well completely in-authentic content.

Trust broken — ✅

The best example of them all though, is Mark Ritson’s brilliant experiment. He tested whether micro influencers on a marketplace platform would be willing to say a picture of his arse was “his best work ever” in exchange for cash. Spoiler alert: they did.

I’m not saying “don’t work with micro/nano/next-fad” influencers.

I’m also not saying “only work with macro”. The marketeer has a suite of tools to pick from, and each method has pros and cons making them suitable for different situations.

What I am saying is that we need to stop this debate about what level of influence is better or worse by considering only vanity metrics like followers and engagement.

With engagement as the focus, we fall down a slippery path towards spammy sponsored posts that destroys everything this industry is built on. We risk losing this incredibly powerful channel, which done right, can greatly benefit brands, creators and audiences.

Unless someone can truly influence the way someone thinks, feels or behaves, they’re not an influencer. They’re a creator who’s good at creating content people like.

Huge difference.

“Why isn’t my influencer marketing campaign delivering an ROI?” is one of the most common questions I’m asked.

A client of ours began an influencer campaign before they started working with Peg. Yesterday, they received the results. From an awareness perspective it delivered very well. From an ROI perspective? Not so great.

The CEO asked why I thought this was. Just hours later I had another client ask a very similar question. It dawned on me that this is a common problem for everyone. So with the anonymised client’s permission, I thought it might be useful to share my response.

Hi [Client],

Here are my two pennies worth on the ROI question.

Instagram

Instagram has (understandably) become the darling of the influencer marketing world: tonnes of influencers, beautiful content, very easy for a brand to integrate into photos/stories and get in front of impressive amounts of eyeballs.

Personally, I’m not a big fan though. If you’re after bottom of the funnel metrics the flaws start to show:

• Lack of support for basics like sharing links as Instagram want to keep you on the platform. Can be used with swipe-ups in Instagram Stories, but not very effective and the stories only last for 24 hours so the window is tiny.

• With almost every traditional ad format you’re paying for a window of time. The beauty with the likes of YouTube is you can pick up the long-tail value because your content can sit there indefinitely. As YouTube is a search engine + they surface the most relevant content for you rather than just most recent, it gives you the opportunity to continue racking up views/value over many months. With Instagram you’re basically going back to the old ad model of paying for a small window.

• If you have a low purchase-consideration product it can be enough to show a sexy photo of it and get results, but if your product benefits from telling a story (e.g. the quality of your products, the ingredients used, the history of the brand etc) then longer form video (e.g. YouTube) is better. We wrote a whole article about the human psychology of it here.

• Big limitations with basic but important data from the platform e.g. no audience demographics of specific posts etc which makes it harder to know what to optimise for future campaigns.

• Users tend to have more of a “lean-back” approach than “lean-in”. In other words, they’re usually just browsing and skimming through stuff, rather than the likes of YouTube where you’re specifically searching for content.

In conclusion, it doesn’t surprise me that this content did well from a reach/impressions point of view, but not from an ROI point of view.

Lack of incentive

If my maths is correct, the results meant [Client] paid a CPM of [£X], which is pretty damn good for an influencer campaign if you’re viewing it through the lens of an awareness piece. If you’re looking at it through the lens of sales ROI, then I don’t believe there was enough incentive for the audience to buy the products.

As you’ll know, the customer conversion funnel can be pretty lengthy and take multiple touch points before someone buys a product. I’d imagine it’s unlikely that any other form of marketing is expected to deliver a sale from one impression, unless you’re basing it on last-click attribution with performance marketing. So if we want influencer marketing to deliver in this way, and effectively dramatically widen the bottom of the conversion funnel, we need to add additional incentives for the audience to click and buy immediately.

This is where our Influencer Productisation Marketing framework comes in that we’ve shared with [Client] (and will be testing with you soon). In a nutshell, it’s packaging the product with influencer related exclusives to increase the interest people have to buy the product, and the urgency to buy it now (using a trackable link). If the average product is around £40, you only need to sell 100 to break even at a £4k spend. So try something like including a signed, hand-written note from the influencer to the first 100 customers who buy using the link: additional incentive, and increased urgency.

The most common incentive brands try is “buy now and get X% off”. Unless you’re saving £££’s it’s unlikely to be enough of an incentive to stop what you’re doing, click the link, leave the platform, and buy the product now.

Based on one influencer

Again much like other ad channels, it’s highly unlikely that with one attempt the approach will be nailed. There are many many factors to get right e.g. messaging, target audience, platform, time of post, product being sold etc etc. With influencer marketing this is only amplified because there are more moving pieces than a traditional piece of media e.g. audience fit, brand fit, creative execution, tone of voice, purchase incentive etc etc. All of these things need to be tested and then optimised before landing on the scalable formula. So it’s very hard to judge the success or failure of a campaign with one influencer, and one type of execution.

Conclusion and suggestions

I’m not sure what the KPIs or objectives were of this campaign from the start. If it was a traditional awareness piece or PR angle, there’s actually some very impressive results there in terms of how many additional pieces of content [Client] managed to secure (especially from someone of the calibre of [Influencer]) and the overall impressions and reach for the budget. If the objective was a sales driver, then I’d suggest a number of different strategies as above.

• Try YouTube vs Instagram.

• Bake in additional incentives to increase both interest and urgency to click on the link and buy the product.

• Experiment with more than one influencer — create a hypothesis, keep it as narrow as possible, and test it. Use that as the line in the sand, then optimise and repeat.

• Test retargeting marketing — retarget everyone who either clicked the link but didn’t buy, or who viewed the content but didn’t click the link — split these into cohorts. A/B test both cohorts, one with normal [Client] branded ads, and the others with the influencer included to see if their association increases engagement. Compare the results of the retargeting efforts against standard (non-influencer related) retargeting results to see if the “warm association” with the influencer makes a difference or not. If it does, then even if your influencer pieces don’t lead directly to sales it’s potentially still adding a lot of value by increasing the pool of warm leads in your funnel.

Ultimately it comes down to how much potential you believe the channel of influencers has for the business, and therefore how much you’re willing to test and invest to get it right. I often describe the world of influencer marketing like going to a planet that looks identical to earth but where the laws of physics don’t apply. In other words, often the things that seems so obvious have very strange behaviours and it can be quite unpredictable. But at the same time, it’s no coincidence that there are a tonne of brands like GymShark, LootCrate, MVMT Watches etc who’ve largely built their entire businesses on the success of influencer campaigns, so it’s about deciding whether you believe it’s worth continuing to invest until you hit this sweet spot or not.

One way I like to think of it is like this: Imagine a trust spectrum. At one end are your closest friends and family. At the other end are probably politicians right now… Brands vary, but certainly towards the politician end. Why would you trust what they say, as they’re trying to sell you something? Influencers, on the other hand, are much closer to the friend end of the spectrum. Find a way to truly harness that, and you’re onto something very powerful.

We’ll be testing all of these assumptions with the campaign Peg and [Client] are working on together, so it will be a great campaign to learn from — both the good and bad.

Best,

Nic

If you’re at a high-growth, analytically-minded company working on influencer campaigns and need a tool to help measure the ROI, visit Peg.co/performance. Or if you need additional resources to help you manage your campaigns, visit Peg.co/agency.

Best of luck!

Everyone has missed the point when it comes to influencer marketing. The world is caught up with fake followers, engagement rates and anyone who’s been on Love Island.

What has been lost is the fact that influencer marketing is a way of causing action and that although metrics and price are important, it’s the way we behave as humans that is key to success.

In the 1960’s, Edgar Dale theorised a model of learning titled: Dale’s Cone of Experience.

It looks a bit like this:

Obviously the way in which we absorb information has changed somewhat over the last 50 or so years, but Dale’s cone is somewhat of a goldmine when it comes to influencer marketing & specifically the battle between YouTube & Instagram.

There is arguably a lot of cross over in both platforms. They each offer a visual and sound output, thus, according to Dale’s Cone ultimately prove that 50% of what consumers may see from creators and influencer campaigns should be retained.

What makes YouTube different however is its ability to fall deeper down the cone. Although not the same participation Dale heroes, but one of a more modern skew.

YouTube is what you can call a lean in platform.

Unlike Instagram, YouTube is more than just a content feed. It’s a search engine. In fact it’s the worlds second largest search engine which in turn gives its content a longevity that other platforms don’t have. This removes the immediacy required by viewers to act in the moment and extends the time for an action to take place. As a search engine that boasts an average viewing time of 40 minutes, YouTube is a comparison tool, an educator, an escape and most importantly a portal to a universe of longer form, in depth creative magic.

It therefore not only creates a sense of participation, but allows for a connection to real experiences and deeper dramatisations and demonstrations. According to Dale, this means YouTube could offer up to a 90% retention rate. Something a more passive tool like Instagram cannot give provide for either brand or user.

‘We don’t have 30 seconds to be interrupted, but we have 30 mins to hear a great story’

Edgar Dale’s theory wasn’t just plucked out of thin air. His research was a combination of both first person study and psychology. The latter of these two has been in a marriage with all forms of advertising since it’s birth. From the principles of story telling and the human mind, to how we navigate social platforms in the 21st century.

One of my favourite quotes summarises the great advertising from the atrocious. “We don’t have 30 seconds to be interrupted, but we have 30mins to hear a great story.” Jon Thompson. Not only is story telling a beautiful gift we need to embrace, it’s also one of the major differences between YouTube and Instagram.

Instagram often lacks storytelling. This has caused a colossal issue with sponsored and/or paid-for content saturation that is driving people to see through and ignore the potential ‘influence’ it’s creators may have.

Instagram opens the door for people who wouldn’t always fall into the category of creator. Celebrities and TV stars can earn thousands by selling their feeds to multiple brands with no real justification of why and no story for their audience. As an example and result of this kind of activity, Jess Shears account is a great prove point.The reaction for one of Love Island’s 2017 contestants was somewhat of a boycott with her feed, at one point having her Instagram account described as ‘an eBay for teeth whitening’.

Jess Shears is by no means the only culprit of this kind of content. Instagram is riddled with sponsored posts and ads that feel incredibly out of place and lacking in any sort of creativity. Given the image based nature of the platform and the limited need to truly consider want you’re creating, aided by the passive nature of platform use, it’s incredibly easy to see why these transactional and lacklustre deals happen.

Columnist and marketing professor Mark Ritson also highlighted this issue and others when he tasked ‘influencers’ to share an image of his own bum, claiming it to be art. Many were more than happy to simply sell their channel just to make quick money. The negative impact of this is well documented and impacts both consumers and industry personnel.

Although there can be bad deals, the creative conscious of which YouTube and it’s creatives operate significantly reduces this over saturation of product in a feed. YouTube creators are more inclined given the tools they have, to find creative ways in which to integrate brand(s) and content together.

When it comes to ROI, that lean in mentality, creativity from influencers and intentional viewing from people using YouTube also drives a higher CTR and often engagement.

YouTube = 3%

Instagram = 0.5%

That’s no surprise when by its design Instagram lives in the immediate. IGTV will create a catalogue of longer lasting content, but ultimately everything is shared in the moment. The feed, 24 hour stories and even live videos encourages consumers to click then and there, with any longevity being limited.

YouTube being a search engine and engagement tool acts like a primary screen. Thus even with high CTR it also drives greater increases in search and brand retention after the content ends. Unlike Instagram there is no need to act now. People can finish what they are doing and then pursue a search or action. This makes non-attributable so important as a metric, but also in this battle.

There is obviously an argument for this kind of action from Instagram, however the psychology of use of the platform as discussed lends itself towards a shorter window and action taken from the content.

The benefit for brands when using YouTube is a channel where content can live and serve a role for far longer than other creator platforms.

There are clearly so many factors that affect the success of influencer marketing campaigns, especially when it comes to platform. But when you move beyond just seeing your campaign as a single post and look to create something tangible with storytelling and human behaviour at its core, YouTube is the best platform for creators, increasing ROI for brands and most importantly for consumers remembering your content.

If you’re looking to get started on something more than transactional influencer marketing, you can get a list of the 20 fastest growing YouTube influencers for your chosen topic by clicking here.

Influence, noun

‘The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself.’

By its very definition, influencer marketing is the art of cause and effect. In the case of advertising, it’s the leveraging of a creator that drives a trackable and measurable action from their audience.

That said, there are cases when creators can be used as a pure media channel in order to obtain large scale reach. By all accounts they do offer this for brands. But if this is your primary belief of how you should work with creators, then you’re missing out on some incredibly impactful business-driving ROI.

This has been a major issue with influencer marketing to date. For many, creators have offered a new brand building channel with success measured around vanity metrics. Performance marketing has sat, both literally and figuratively, in a different room. Influencer marketing is the middle ground. A channel by which one can create brand awareness, but more importantly drive effective business ROI.

So what is performance marketing?

Performance Marketing is a comprehensive term that refers to online marketing and advertising programs in which advertisers (a.k.a., “retailers” or “merchants”) pay marketing companies (a.k.a, “affiliates” or “publishers”) when a specific action is completed; such as a sale, lead or click.

If you were to combine this with influencer marketing it would mean two things;

1. There is more focus on KPIs & ROI that prove actual influence and partnership success.
2. It offers a chance for brands to have more control over their money, whilst giving creators an incentive to earn more money via a performance related revenue share.

The first of the two points is incredibly important. Those industries that already focus on performance marketing with influencers can afford to spend up to 4x that of others. Many of my clients who work in this way are consistently increasing their spend month on month. This is because they are tracking, analysing and optimising on tangible results where they can see everything from lead generation to revenue uplifts, both attributable and non-attributable.

Performance marketing also encourages you to dig deeper into the data you collect. This process does not only allow understanding of the immediate campaign, but can also uncovers insight around UX and audience behaviour. This all contributes towards a greater ROI.

As noted above, performance driven influencer marketing enables brands to clearly understand what they should be tracking at different points within their marketing funnel. The added bonus is the ability to focus on a single success metric and utilise additional guiding metrics to optimise accordingly.

This is by no means a new way of thinking. Applying this model across all of your campaign outputs gives you a structure that ensures there is equal comparison. When you have clarity in what your success KPI is and a way of measuring both attributed and non-attributed data for all channels, you can optimise your entire budget.

The second of the points made is that a performance marketing approach can be incredibly beneficial for your budget. As with traditional models of performance marketing, affiliates are paid based on the delivery of specific action. Translating this mindset to influencer marketing opens up new avenues of driving success.

A performance approach means you can pay your creators based on the actual ROI they drive.

For example:

1. A creator could be offered either £5,000 as a flat fee; or
2. A creator is offered £1,500 upfront and then 20% of all the sales they actually drive with no limits* to what they could earn. (*Alternatively you could cap their earnings but remember it has to feel like a better & achievable offer for them to take it).

The key thing here is that performance marketing not only provides you with clarity in what you have gained from your campaign, but also a new payment solution that benefits all involved.

A success fee model removes the frustration of ‘creator package deals’ that provide no indication with what you’ll gain from the partnership. What it does however, is motivate the creator to work harder given the ability to earn higher rewards.

A performance marketing based approach is quite simply the best way of executing and measuring influencer partnerships. It creates clarity in what is working and the ability to optimise on demand, whilst also incentivising creators to work harder.

Not sure where to start? For a free cheatsheet of the key performance marketing metrics you should be tracking, click here.

Unlike many genres of creators, those who produce gaming content know exactly who they are and what their audience love. That is one of the reasons why many of these creators are able to broadcast to millions of subscribers on a daily basis. They have self built communities who share their passion for gaming and the innovative ways in which they play games and create content.

The content gaming creators make can vary by type (gameplay, reviews, walkthroughs, tips etc), but they all provide their audience with value. When gaming publishers work with these creators in the right way, they too can add something special for their players that’s not obtainable through other marketing channels.

In addition to contributing to the content, smart brands and gaming publishers can leverage these creators and build them into a full marketing strategy, from user acquisition to continued game play and ongoing purchases.

There are three major benefits to working with a longer term strategy;

One: clarity in what you’re tracking in order to determine what success actually looks like.

Two: longer term partnerships with creators who deliver the best ROI for your game.

Three: multiple creative options for different stages of your game and user life cycle for you to leverage.

All of the above benefits are incredibly important when it comes to generating revenue for your game. When you find creators that are trusted players and advocates for your game, the possibilities are endless.

PUBGMobile has demonstrated this over recent months with Powerbang Gaming. He’s long been a keen player of mobile games and recently focused his playing time and content on PUBG. He’s fast become one of the best players and top creators for the game, as well as a creator for PUBG directly.

Their recent update introduced a whole load of extra goodies for its players, from new outfits to weapon skins and Powerbang has used his prestige and partnership with the publisher to his advantage. He’s given his community the chance to win items from him, as well as encouraged his fans to share the outfits they buy and wear. The result for PUBG is money being spent in-game and continued encouragement to play.

The golden thread in this partnership is how trackable everything that Powerbang does for PUBG is. This is where gaming publishers can start being more creative and results driven than many other sectors using influencer marketing can be.

Firstly, PUBG can track the uplift in the in-game sales, social content and private game entry that Powerbang promotes. This is great in understanding his actual influence on a granular level and as an overall revenue generator.

The second innovative element to this partnership is a consideration of any payment that may be on offer. Given the elevated clarity in tracking (and attribution) in gaming, an incentivised payment structure can be used, allowing the creator to earn as little or as much as they desire. This could be through the pushing of in-game features or exclusive influencer-created items available for purchase within the game.

Ultimately, gaming publishers have a catalogue of ways in which they can leverage gaming creators, from using the content they already create, to fully integrating them into a game’s life cycle. Content and strategy need to work together to generate the greatest ROI possible, but creators also offer games publishers a unique portal to global communities with shared passions.

Cannes Lions is not only a great platform for celebrating advertising’s greatest work, but also a chance for the big names to lay down their initiatives for the coming year.

2018 was no different. Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Unilever made an announcement around how they would now be approaching influencer marketing and what they wanted to see from it.

‘Transparency from Influencers: We will not work with influencers who buy followers.

Transparency from Brands: Our brands will never buy followers.

Transparency from Platforms: We will prioritise partners who increase transparency and help eradicate bad practices throughout the whole ecosystem.’*

Firstly, it’s great to see a large brand shine the light on what is fast becoming an incredibly murky industry.

That said, I’d argue that this belief and initiative comes from a place of fundamentally misunderstanding how to approach influencer marketing.

Fake followers are an issue. However, in reality it’s only an issue if you’re selecting creators based on their following.

This is one of the industries’ biggest mistakes when it comes to influencer marketing. When brands and agencies select creators in this way, they are not doing their due diligence. What they are actually doing is something incredibly counter intuitive and that’s adding fuel to the fire by encouraging them to buy fake followers.

If brands are throwing money around in this way, then it is a no brainer for people to buy followers to get a piece of that pie.

In truth there really is no issue with fake followers. The problem is one of how we’re approaching influencer marketing as a whole. Of course these bots cause a problem, but size of following isn’t where we should be looking.

What we should be focusing on is the actual influence these creators have from a performance perspective (revenue, click through, website traffic increase etc). If we do this, fake followers becomes an almost redundant problem.

Example;

£25k spent per creator

Creator 1–2 million followers, 40% bots / sales driven = £55,000

Creator 2–2 million followers, 0 bots / sales driven = £10,000

Which would you rather have?

The point is two fold.

1. Brands & agencies need to be selecting creators on their actual influence and stop focusing on follower count.
2. and where I agree with Keith Weed — brands & agencies need to force creators and platforms to be more transparent with data and about actual influence.

So what’s the solution?

As Keith Weed and Unilever made clear, transparency is key. By all means, platforms should focus time on the issue of bots. This information can be of help, whether fake followers or paid-for engagement. That said, if you believe engagement is success, you’ve more than likely missed the point of why you’re doing influencer marketing in the first place. They do need to do that at some point, but the burning need is to provide data and insight that proves actual influence and ROI.

Along with that, brands need to step up their game when it comes to transparency also. Their unwillingness to share key data from campaigns (such as sales figures) with creators and management is also a huge barrier to the success of influencer marketing and one of the main reasons there is currently a lack of transparency.

Transparency works both ways and in this case brands take an equal share of blame for the mess this industry has become.

Along with transparency, brands & agencies can also force the hand by only working with creators who can show proof that they can drive performance based results, not just vanity metrics. This in turn will/should put pressure on and encourage creators to think differently about how they sell themselves (this is a living for many, which to date they’ve been stealing).

This approach will be a benefit to all. Those who can prove they are effective in driving results will be in higher demand with brands willing to invest more money in these creators, which we discuss the importance of here.

Our focus should be on greater transparency from all parties. That includes platforms, creators and brands (however big or small), a better way of working and improved understanding of what influencer marketing is and how powerful it can be for your brand when leveraged the right way.

Sorry Keith, fake followers are not a major issue for influencer marketing. A lack of focus on ROI is.

It’s every marketer’s dream to have a way of efficiently and consistently delivering campaigns that are guaranteed to generate a positive ROI. The biggest issue for many brands in achieving this however, has been the lack of distinctive metrics that help shape effective strategy.

Influencer marketing has been no different to this during its early existence. Partnerships to date have often lacked proof of their overall business impact outside of just media metrics. This focus has driven many to measure influencer marketing success as just being a well-received video, whilst neglecting the real identifiers of consumer action that truly benefit the brand.

When it comes to mobile gaming, things are very different.

Mobile gaming has always been one step ahead of other industries when it comes to tracking results. They do benefit from having a clear route to download/purchase (iTunes + Google Play stores), but they have also invested heavily in tracking wider metrics to understand consumer value on a more comprehensive level.

On a surface level, link clicks, downloads, search and so on are shared metics (where possible) with most other brands. What makes mobile gaming the billion dollar industry it has become, is their ability to leverage multiple data points and insights. This is why mobile gaming marketing spend is estimated to reach the heights of $105 billion by 2021.

So how do they do it?

Their first point of call is understanding every piece of data available to them. With that, rather than just acknowledging the top-line data, they break it down in as much detail as possible. Device, gender, platform and region are but a few. This allows them to create an encyclopaedic view of their consumers and optimise their strategy to deliver a greater ROI.

In order for mobile gaming companies to optimise even further, they track their customers’ activities constantly. Attribution companies such as AppsFlyer and Chartboost provide gaming companies with the tools to track how players interact with their games. They can therefore break players down into different groups; free to play, pay to play and in-game purchasers. The outcome is knowledge of a consumer’s Lifetime Value (LTV). In addition to LTV, gaming companies can also understand how players contribute to bringing in new players and what key drivers (in-game offers for example) are assisting with this process.

Understanding LTV is a massive contributor to why mobile gaming companies can spend so much on marketing. These insights allow them to see the true cost of user acquisition and overall revenue.

So why is this important for influencer marketing?

When it comes to gaming, it’s said that almost 95% of gamers go to YouTube for tips, gameplay, reviews and more from gaming creators. Like gaming communities, creators of every genre have incredibly engaged audiences themselves. Add to that, the fact that influencers have a CTR that’s double of other channels such as Facebook (influencers 2%, Facebook 0.9%) and you’re looking at a win-win when influencer marketing is done right.

By looking at the mobile gaming industry processes and applying them to your brand’s influencer marketing strategy, you get two things;

1. More clarity in the impact of your work and an actual ROI.
2. A detailed view of how influential the creators you work with are and the actions and revenue the consumers they attract bring into your business, thus allowing you to make a true comparison with other marketing channels.

Influencer marketing has been screaming out for a way to measure its impact and provide those leveraging it with a way of justifying their investments. Mobile gaming’s approach to tracking campaign results offers a solid solution to this major issue.

If you’d like to know more about how you can bring this thinking into your influencer marketing campaigns, drop us a line and we’d be happy to help.

Unlike other industries, when it comes to gaming on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch, these creators have a truly engaged audience. Gaming influencers have single handedly created an immensely captivating ecosystem of content types that gamers love. This makes it incredibly easy for gaming publishers to not only get content seen by the right people, but also have clarity in the types of content that work.

The combination of a specific audience and achievable user generated content guidelines is a dream come true for those looking to market their games in this way.

Although other creators and genres offer a similar thing, they cannot compete with the specificity of the audiences gaming creators have. It’s often the norm for ‘universal’ vloggers to flirt with multiple outputs, say going from fashion to make up to healthy eating. This consequently makes their content incredibly generalist, with a lack of focus on a single narrative.

Gaming rarely does this. Of course there are divisions by game genre and device, but ultimately viewers are there for one thing and that’s gaming. This means that although there is an affinity to certain creators, viewers are on the hunt for content about games they play, before then focusing on specific creators they like.

For years, advertisers and marketers have been looking for an easy route to reach a specific audience. Unlike TV, Facebook, Instagram and other digital outputs (programmatic), the followers of gaming creators on social channels such as YouTube and Twitch are as precise as you can get. Millions of consumers all seeking the same thing — a marketers dream.

Gaming is also growing in a big way. The global games market is forecasted to reach $137.9 billion in 2018, with mobile accounting for 50% of that. In 2017 the UK spend on gaming was over £5 billion alone. This makes marketing in the gaming sector highly valuable, with high potential returns if done correctly. When you marry that with gaming influencers who have engaged and relevant audiences, it’s a no brainer. Whether it’s about introducing a new game by leveraging creators of its genre, or driving spend and play through a specific gaming creator, you’re not short of options.

The rapid growth of the industry also means that more and more influencers will continue to appear, adding to the expansive reach and audience that already exists.

One of the things that makes mobile gaming so profitable is the industry’s refined ability to track results. Unlike much of the digital and social landscape of other brands, where measurements are often incredibly media heavy, mobile gaming has clarity in what success is and how to drive actual revenue. Additionally, they also know how to achieve this with incredible accuracy time and time again.

Thus far, gaming has leveraged digital channels, but has not yet fully committed to online content creators. Influencers can offer gaming an incredibly distilled audience like no other. Add to this their ability to drive results, and influencer marketing becomes the perfect channel to deliver gaming success. From game launches to exclusive game skins, influencers are an untapped resource that can support the continued growth of mobile gaming.

For more information on influencers and mobile gaming, drop us a line and we’d be happy to help. And if you haven’t already, check out our previous post introducing our new Peg Gaming platform.

At the beginning of 2018, Peg set out to find where and how influencers can be most effective. We explored results from multiple campaigns, delved into a vast number of industry sectors, cross referenced brand attributes and established a key tipping point for truly effective influencer marketing.

As a summary of our findings, we noted three key things that make a brand perfect for influencer marketing:

1. Digital first brands/products with measurable and trackable metrics;
2. Brands that have mid to high consideration (a competitive market of similar brands/products); and
3. Brands that have a high customer life time value.

There is a growing number of brands that fall into this category. Online-only fashion ventures, subscription services and health apps are just a few of the segments that stand out. However, it is the gaming industry, mobile in particular, that truly epitomises all of the mentioned attributes.

On the back of these findings, we’ve focused our time on building a platform specifically for mobile gaming. The idea was to enable mobile gaming publishers to optimise their influencer marketing by finding creators and an audience in the most efficient way possible.

In addition to mobile gaming having key brand attributes, the creators they can choose from are also of great value. Gaming influencers have single handedly created an immensely captivating ecosystem of content types that gamers love. This makes it incredibly easy for gaming publishers to not only get content seen by the right people, but also have clarity in the types of content that work. We’ll discuss this more in later posts.

Our main focus with Peg Gaming has been creating a streamlined process that finds the right creators fast but with relevance. In order to do so, we have stripped back features from our brand platform and leveraged the vitality of information and criteria mobile gaming offers.

The gaming audience is less segmented by age than typical brand sectors, and thus we have created a search function to reflect this.

In the first instance our search function is focused on games and genres. Given the engaged audience mobile gaming has, this enables us to find creators already talking about specific games or games relevant to the search. We have opted to centre the platform in this way in order to provide better matching for both the publishers and talent.

In addition to a specific owned game search, we have also built in a competitor match. The role here is to ensure that genre, publishers and platforms all play a role in building a list of appropriate creators. Additionally it also allows for one to understand how people are interacting with games and the type of content they are creating, with owned and competitors’ games alike.

The information provided at this stage becomes part of a weighting system that allows us to find and build a recommended list of gaming influencers. This list reduces search time, whilst effectively directing you to the best options for your campaign. Additionally, given the way gaming communities are built, the audience relevancy score will also be of high value.

As with the traditional Peg platform, users can delve deeper into the creator insights in order to understand their content and audience breakdown in more detail.

Peg Gaming is very much in beta at the moment, but we’re excited by the potential and positive feedback we’ve already had. If you’d like to trial our platform, do let us know on hello@peg.co. We’d love for you to get your hands on the tool and help us develop and improve our offering over the coming months.