Search results for: “influence”

Influencer endorsements + more stuff

Influencer endorsements fail to influence purchase decisions | WARC – Influencer endorsements play only a small role in affecting the purchase decisions of their followers, according to research from influencer endorsements platform Influencer and GlobalWebIndex. In their survey of consumers in the UK and US who follow influencers on social media, just 15% said influencer endorsements motivates them to make a purchase – the tenth most common response. In comparison, more than half of consumers who follow influencers say free delivery (57%) and offers/promotions (52%) would motivate them to make a purchase. – Interesting in light of the high amount of spend put around influencer endorsements by the likes of Unilever personal care and beauty products. Is this a lack of ‘influence’ or being more budget conscious that is the driver? There might need to be a readjustment of charges for influencer endorsements. Also as WARC notes, a long term test is required.

Jailed WeChat User Says Chinese Police Monitor Overseas Accounts Too – Jin Chun, a former big data engineer at Huawei’s Nanjing Research Institute, meanwhile recently told reporters that all Chinese communications companies and internet service providers companies are required to monitor users on behalf of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Faced with an official request for data, no company will resist, because they would cease to operate, he said. More on China here.

Will Blaize Trailblaze Edge AI Market? | EE Times – what people tend to miss about this is the pushback against the cloud, even with 5G connectivity

Puncturing the paradox: group cohesion and the generational myth – BBH Labs – yet more evidence against generations

Google giving far-right users’ data to law enforcement, documents reveal | Technology | The Guardian – Saira Hussein, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, said in a phone conversation that EFF was concerned about the “vast amounts of user data” Google appeared to be voluntarily passing on to law enforcement, but questioned Google’s goal in doing so. “Are they expecting law enforcement to do something, or is this just a way of covering themselves? Does Google see its responsibility as simply reporting this to law enforcement and moving on?”

Automated assistants – Wunderman Thompson Intelligence – limited but coming

China drought, heavy rains spark concern over grain supply as Xi Jinping launches campaign against food waste | South China Morning Post – interesting when one reflects on this in conjunction with the Chinese government ‘clean plate’ initiative in the news last week

She Helped Wreck the News Business. Here’s Her Plan to Fix It | WIRED – TL;DR brand safety is destroying online advertising in news and current affairs

New Cold War With China Demands Radical Industrial Rethink for United States – Since March alone, China has threatened to withhold medical equipment from the United States and Europe during the coronavirus pandemic; launched the biggest cyberattack against Australia in the country’s history; hacked U.S. firms to acquire secrets related to the coronavirus vaccine; and engaged in massive disinformation campaigns on a global scale. China even hacked the Vatican. These incidents reflect the power China wields through its control of supply chains and information hardware. They show the peril of ceding control of vast swaths of the world’s manufacturing to a regime that builds at home, and exports abroad, a model of governance that is fundamentally in conflict with American values and democracies everywhere. And they pale in comparison to what China will have the capacity to do as its confrontation with the United States sharpens

Miss M: Guarding the City We Call Home | We Are HKers – Like many of our forefathers, Mainland Chinese flee to Hong Kong and even overseas for obvious reasons.Among the younger students in my school, 80% have Mainland Chinese backgrounds (they are either from China or they speak Mandarin at home). Many treat learning English with disdain and fantasise that China will rule the world in the near future and foreigners will have to learn Mandarin to please the Chinese. This is a tragedy. Their parents send them to Hong Kong to study despite all the hardship, but the kids fail to forego their conservative Chinese mindset. This happens not only in Hong Kong, but also in Canada. The CCP have already gotten their hands on Chinese language newspapers such as Mingpao and Sing Tao Daily. Lennon Walls in Canadian universities are destroyed within days by Mainland Chinese students and their physical attacks on Hong Kong students are common – the degree of population change is quite phenomenal

Why marketers should embrace Share of Search as a metric | WARC – “The SoS calculation itself is simple. Calculate a rolling 12-month average of the various brands to be analysed, including your own. Total this. Divide each individual brand’s 12-month rolling average by the total and turn into a %. This is Share of Search, using Google Trends data.”

August 20, 2020
Influencer marketing – what does the future hold
What does the future hold for influencer marketing was an event organised by PR Week that I got to attend last week. Below are some of the thoughts and key points that came out of the event.

The Competition and Markets Authority

They are responsible for enforcing The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Act (2008) (paywall) which governs transparency and claims across all marketing including social media influence campaigns.

In terms of jurisdiction they have a reciprocal relationship with the FTC to enforce the law on campaigns that are being run out of the US that would affect the UK and vice versa. Geography can no longer be considered a defence.

In terms of compliance, there is an emphasis on brands needing to monitor influencer campaigns and enforce disclosure. The legal responsibility falls equally across brands, agencies and influencers. All three are obliged to go through content and retroactively apply the act if the content is likely to be resurfaced in the future. So you are less like to have to alter tweets and Facebook posts than say YouTube videos and blog posts.

In general they felt that brands (and their agencies) were too naive and trusting with regards influencers.

False and misleading claims at the corporate brand level (a hypothetical example would be gold mine claiming its a green sustainable company) aren’t something that they would deal with, but they acknowledged that this kind of incident would likely breach the law.

At the moment the Competition and Markets Authority is considering the role of platforms as agents of influence, but isn’t looking at items like Amazon’s recent algorithmic change.

Unsurprisingly the Competitions and Markets Authority have no desire to get involved in regulating political campaigns on social. The whole area is radioactive. Whilst there would be societal benefit, it would call into question the independence of the civil service and a host legal / constitutional issues.

Judging by the reaction of the audience, more of them were up to speed and complying with GDPR than The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Act – not for profits seemed shocked to find out that they weren’t exempt

Content crowdsourcing platform Tribe

Tribe talked about how Logitech used Instagramers to create photos for their paid media campaign to drive direct sales.

Ad creative was lasting a week and a half on Facebook (Facebook & Instagram) before ‘ad fatigue’ set in. From my own personal experience, traditional creative lasted appreciably longer. Tribe didn’t indicate whether they had an opinion on the cause of this premature ad fatigue. Factors that might be responsible include context collapse (lower usage, with less time per session on the platform by consumers) that has been afflicted the Facebook platform for a few years

Logitech internal division of labour on social influencer marketing campaigns

One of the perennial questions that is asked is where does PR stop and (digital) marketing teams start with regards social media influencers. Logitech’s approach was a common sense approach to this question. High follower number influencers were dealt with by the PR team just like members of the press or celebrities. Micro and nano influencers were co-opted by marketers as part of the process to drive sales. It makes sense, but it was the first time I had heard it broken down explicitly by a brand in public.

MSL research on the future of influencer marketing

They had wanted to explore both consumer and influencer attitudes to extrapolate insights; given the codependent nature of influencers on agencies and brands.

The research involved surveying 1,000 consumers and 100 influencers. So take the insights with a pinch of salt. The slides weren’t shared but I’ve reconstructed the data from photos I took at the event.
- 1,000 consumers were asked about their thoughts on the influencer landscape
- 100 influencers were asked on their views on brand partnerships
Influencers don’t like to be pigeonholed as influencers, according to consumers the title has become a dirty word

This conclusion is counter intuitive. The common wisdom is that:
- Gen-y and gen-z are happy to ‘sell out’
- Professional v-logger (YouTube, Twitch, TikTok etc) are desired professions in the same way that DJ, rock musician or celebrity were previously
Yet the influencers surveyed think that they are changing the world for the better. For instance some of them are dealing with fans who share their suicidal thoughts. But the label of ‘influencer’ was considered to have lost its currency.

Influencers that other influencers respect. People who have demonstrated resilience; they have gone through trials and tribulations and triumphed. Zoella and Lilly Singh were among the most popular cited.

Influencers feel that they are being treated like a channel and the process has got too transactional. Yet one of their key motivations to stay in their career as influencers is to pay the bills.

Panel discussion

If you’d have ran this event ten years ago. The panel discussion would still have been very similar. Measurement was considered very immature, but then the panel bifurcated. Measurement is much easier when you are using advertising and tracking through to a purchase. The discussion got muddled as paid and non-paid measurement strategies were discussed side-by-side without differentiation or explanation.

Social agency Goat made an interesting disclosure. They’ve worked with about 100,000 influencers and found that the vast majority did not work in delivering sales. But there are no data or heuristics about which influencer is likely to work, or the reasons why?

What was missing in influencer marketing discussion?

The main item that I felt the discussion missed was the role of social platform algorithms in creating social bubbles and reducing campaign reach. OgilvyOne’s paper on considering life after the demise of organic reach doesn’t seem to have factored into PR agencies (publicly expressed) thinking some five years after it has been published.

Secondly, I was surprised at the lack of progress. Whilst the platforms have changed over the past ten years. The issues don’t seem to have altered at all for communications agencies. Whilst some agencies like Edelman (and 90TEN where I am currently working) realise that a blended PESO* media mix is required – there was a large faction of earned media only practitioners in attendance. Ten years later, advertising and creative agencies have learned many of the techniques that PR agencies considered to be their domain in order to improve ‘talkability’.

This is out of step with clients requirements for two reasons:
- Clients want to effectively measure their success and the tools available to paid media are more complete
- As OgilvyOne proved in their research a number of years ago, we’re heading to a demise in organic reach
Brand marketing is in a resurgence after marketers had fetishised technology-based performance marketing for at least the last decade and a half. Influencer marketing may now be too important to be left to the the PR team…

*PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) – different media types.
September 29, 2019
The influence post
Mark Ritson wrote an op-ed over at Marketing Week on influence and influencers. Whilst it lacked nuance on the subject area, a lot of what it said is true. Go over and have a read; I’ll be waiting for when you come back.

Whilst I disagree on the finer points, what Ritson wrote needed to be said. There needed to be a turning of the tide on influencers from boundless optimism to a greater degree of sobriety and critical analysis of the influencer opportunity.

I first noticed this boundless optimism when I attended the In2 Innovation Summit in May last year. Heather Mitchell on a panel. Mitchell worked at the time in Unilever’s haircare division where she is director, head of global PR, digital engagement and entertainment marketing. I asked the panel discussing influencer marketing about the impact of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and the answer was ducked. ZBB requires a particular ROI on activity, something that (even paid for) influence marketing still struggles to do well.

This was surprising given the scrutiny that other marketing channels were coming under, I couldn’t understand how influencer marketing merited that leap of faith.

This time last year I noted:

Substitute ‘buzz marketing’ for ‘influencer marketing’ and this could be 15 years ago. Don’t get me wrong I had great fun doing things like hijacking Harry Potter book launches when I worked at Yahoo!, but no idea how it really impacted brand or delivered in terms of RoI. Influencer marketing seems to be in a similar place.

Just five years ago we had managed to get past the hype bubble of social and senior executives were prepared to critically examine social’s worth. In the meantime we have had a decline in organic reach and massive inflation in both ad inventory and influencer costs. What had changed in the marketers mentality?

Onward with Mark Ritson’s main points.

Ritson’s Three Circles of Bullshit

A very loose reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy trilogy; but for modern marketers

The First Circle of Bullshit: Are the followers real?
- Are they bots?
- Are they stolen accounts?
- Are the user accounts active any more?
- Has the account holder padded their account with bought followers and engagement. Disclosure – I ran an experiment on my Twitter account and still have a substantial amount of fake followers. More on this experiment here.
The Second Circle of Bullshit: Are influencers trusted?
- Ritson did an unscientific test that showed (some) influencers would post anything for a bit of money
The Final Circle of Bullshit: Do they have influence?
- Some influencers are genuinely authoritative; but this is a minority of influencers out there
- Ritson alludes to the lack of organic reach amongst an ‘influencers’ followers which is likely to be 2% reach or less
Trends in influence

I looked at Google Trends to see what could be learned in the rate of change in searches over time. Consider Google Trends to be an inexact but accessible measure of changes in interest over time.

Global interest in influencers have been accelerating

There has been a corresponding rises in interest around paid influencer marketing

There hasn’t been the same interest peak in organic (PR-driven) influencer work

All of which supports the following hypotheses:
- it’s become on-trend from the perspective of marketers, agencies and ‘influencers’
- A significant amount of influencers are in it for the money – which brings into question their (long term authority and consumer trust)
- A significant amount of influencers have an exceedingly good idea of their value (more likely overly-inflated)
- Ego is less of a motivator for becoming an influencer than material gains
What would influence look like?

Propagation of the content by real people. Instagram, a particularly popular influencer channel, has made sharing posts difficult for followers historically. Re-gramming was a pain in the arse for the average Instagram user.

If we look at the mainstream media and how it is shared on Facebook we see that only five media brands are consistently in the top ten most shared media properties. ‘Traditional’ influencer status isn’t necessarily a garrantor of consistent successful propagation either, if Newship’s data is to be believed.

Attributed sales. Some luxury brands in China have had success collaborating with influencers and selling through their channels; the post child being Mr Bags collaboration with Longchamps.

How is the best way to use influencers in marketing?

Assuming that you are using influencers in the widest possible sense at the moment.

Treat the majority of influencers as yet another advertising format

That means that reach, the way the brand is presented, and repetition are all important – smart mass marketing following the playbook of Byron Sharp.
- Viewing your influencer mention in that prism, it means estimating what the real reach would be (lets say 2% of the follower number as an estimate) and paying no more on a CPM rate than you would pay for a display advertising advert
- Ensure that the brand is covered in the way that you want. Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the placement
- Get repetition with the audience by repeating the placement with other content that delivers the same message with the same high standard of production
All of this might work for a luxury brand, IF you found that the amount of agency time and creative work made commercial sense. It is less likely to work for normal FMCG brands. What self-respecting influencer is going to be bossed around by a breakfast cereal?

Thinking about micro influencers, probably the area that has had the most interest from marketers recently due to them appearing to be better value than macro influencers.

Brown & Fiorella (2013) explanation of micro-influencers:

Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.

Brown & Fiorella focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion.

This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances; where there is low friction to conversion (e-tailing for discretionary value items).

It starts to fall apart when you deploy their approach to:
- Consumer marketing
- Mature product sectors
- Mature brands
You would also struggle with many B2B segments where social provides a small reach and little social interaction.

Work with real influencers on long term collaborations
- There is more likelihood of having audience trust if they can see and understand the long term relationship between a brand and its influencers
- Better brand placement easier, with an influencer that ‘gets’ the brand
- You’ve got a better chance of being able to get access and fully understand the underlying analytics of their accounts (which should be a prerequisite for long term relationship)
- You can look at collaborations and attribution payment models that raise all boats
- You can lock out rivals out of relationships
More information

Mark Ritson: How ‘influencers’ made my arse a work of art | Marketing Week
Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading
Instagram Marketing: Does Influencer Size Matter? | Markerly Blog
Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella ISBN-13: 978-0789751041 (2013)
Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach
Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks – Stanford University and Facebook Data Science
PLOS ONE: Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks by Lorenzo Coviello,Yunkyu Sohn, Adam D. I. Kramer,Cameron Marlow, Massimo Franceschetti, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler
Senior Execs Not Convinced About Social’s Worth | Marketing Charts
Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy – Cha et al (2010) – (PDF)
Visualizing Media Bias through Twitter. Jisun An. University of Cambridge. Meeyoung Cha. KAIST. Krishna P. Gummadi. MPI-SWS et al – (PDF)
Mr. Bags x Longchamp: How to Make 5 Million RMB in Just Two Hours | Jing Daily
It’s time that we talk about micro-influencers
June 25, 2018
Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert M Cialdini
Cialdini’s Influence is now over ten years old and still stands up. It is a good guide on the psychology of why people say “yes”. The accessible style of Influence reminded of Douglas Rushcoff, or Malcolm Gladwell. Ok Malcolm Gladwell is a poor analogy, Cialdini’s work isn’t candy floss for the mind. This is deceptive as there is usually an inverse relationship between value and accessibility. Exceptions to this heuristic would be the likes of Sun Tzu – The Art of War.

Cialdini hasn’t been researched within an inch of its life in the same way Byron Sharp’s books have been.

Cialdini provides planners and strategists with starting points for customer experiences. The book isn’t a how to guide for digital journeys but provides first principles. Psychology is not channel-specific.

The Journal of Marketing Research described it as

…among the most important books written in the last 10 years.

The book’s style allowed me to pick it up and put it down, to fit in with my holiday schedule of train travel and family time.

Why should you have Cialdini’s Influence?
- If your work includes marketing planning or strategy, your bookshelf should have this book. If you are thinking about customer interactions, this book outlines the first principles that you need
- If you’re a consumer and want to know how you’re being sold to; read this book
- If you want to get on better with people ( your kids or co-workers); buy this book
My copy is well-thumbed and stuffed with post-it notes around the edges as I go back and forth into it on a regular basis. More marketing related content here.

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April 2, 2018
Machine learning sublime influence
Scott Galloway talks about the way brands are using AI (machine learning) and the examples are very much in the background. Welcome to the sublime world of machine learning where the impact on the customer experience won’t be apparent. In many respects this is similar to how fuzzy logic became invisible as it was introduced in the late 1980s.

The Japanese were particularly adept at putting an obscure form of mathematics to use. They made lifts that adapted to the traffic flows of people going in and out of a building and microwaves which knew how long to defrost whatever you put into it. Fuzzy logic compensated for blur in video camera movement in a similar manner to way smartphone manufacturers now use neural networks on images.

The Japanese promoted fuzzy logic inside products to the home market, but generally backed off from promoting it abroad. The features just were and consumers accepted them over time. In a quote that is now eerily reminiscent of our time a spokesperson for the American Electronics Association’s Tokyo office said to the Washington Post

“Some of the fuzzy concepts may be valid in the U.S.,”

“The idea of better energy efficiency, or more precise heating and cooling, can be successful in the American market,”

“But I don’t think most Americans want a vacuum cleaner that talks to you and says, ‘Hey, I sense that my dust bag will be full before we finish this room.’ “

This was also the case with the use technology companies made of Bayes Theory. This was used by the likes of Autonomy and Microsoft Research.

A second technique was rules, put simply IF then THAT. This kind of technology has been used to drive automated trading models and credit card approvals for decades. Pegasystems are one of the leaders in developing rules based processing. Rules based systems could even be built in an Excel macro and would still count as a form of machine learning.

Finally machine learning needs to think about a number of things with regards the models being used:
- The importance of accuracy in the use case
- The level of precision required and ways to indicate that precision means
- The cost of generation versus other methods, this is very important in terms of computing power and energy consumption
More information
The Future of Electronics Looks Fuzzy | Washington Post (December 23, 1990)
September 24, 2017

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