Episode 1 of The Influential Times – A roundup of the top 5 insights, movements and changes in the influencer marketing industry in June 2019.
Keith Weed, ex-CMO of Unilever, has invested in Australian Influencer Marketing Platform Tribe – a platform that links up content creators with B2C brands. Keith Weed has spoken out on numerous occasions about the need for greater transparency in influencer marketing. Some may have taken Weed’s comments about influencer fraud to mean that he was sceptical about Influencer Marketing, however, with his recent investment, it’s clear that influencer marketing is here for the long haul and backed by one of the world’s best-known B2C marketers.
It was reported in TechCrunch that a Mumbai-based influencer marketing platform, Chtrbox, had exposed private data from as many as 49 million Instagram accounts that it had scraped by leaving them on an unsecured AWS server. In this post-Cambridge Analytica and GDPR-sensitive world of heightened data sensitivity and mistrust of social networks the story was widely covered. Following an investigation by Instagram it has since been confirmed that the database contained records for about 350,000 accounts and that private data was not leaked from Instagram.
Philip Morris got burned following an investigation by Reuters that showed they were working with underage influencers to promote their heated tobacco products. With laws on age-limits for smoking varying around the world and the company making promises that they would not promote their new product to consumers under 25 the choice to work with influencers to promote the new product came with considerable risk. Investigators from Reuters were able to find several examples of influencers around the world who were below 25 and PMI had to pull their whole campaign and apologise.
One of our favourite blogs here at Onalytica is the TopRank marketing blog. Influencer Marketing isn’t all about fashion and beauty influencers on Instagram! There’s lots of exciting and forward thinking influencer marketing campaigns happening in the B2B world too. This blog post, written by Lee Odden, outlines a number of key trends in the B2B influencer marketing space – for example should you treat key B2B influencers as mini-publishers? – well worth a read!
Research from Social Bakers revealed that sponsored content on Instagram is up 150% on the previous year. Beauty and Fashion continue to dominate as the categories with the highest level of spend. How much of the increase is due to more money being spent by brands vs influencers and brands having to disclose the partnership where previously they might not have done is unclear. I suspect the increase is probably an even combination of both but mainly due to a switch from ‘macro’ to ‘micro’ influencers, bringing the cost-per-post down.