We’ve been putting aside real content gems to provide you all with a round up of what’s been going on throughout August. Instagram came up quite a few times again this month! This time it wasn’t a quite-so-peachy situation and has ended up in investigations and blocking of Ad partner Hyp3r. Listen to get the whole story!
Instagram Blocks Ad Partner Hyp3r
Facebook has again come under criticism for lax data security after a BI investigation uncovered that marketing partner Hyp3r was gathering Instagram users’ location data by scraping stories and posts and storing them in their database. Hyp3r would then offer this location data to clients to enable highly targeted location-based campaigns. Facebook has issued a cease-and-desist order against Hyp3r and removed them from it’s ad partner program. The Irish Data Protection Commission is also now investigating Hyp3r to determine to what effect GDPR rules have been broken by the company. The story is particularly embarrassing for Facebook as yet again they have come up short when it comes to protecting user’s data and the backdoor that Hyp3r used to scrape the data has been know about for a couple of years already.
Facebook investigates data scraping on Instagram
Following on from the Hyp3r investigation, Facebook have proceeded to suspend a number of other marketing partners over fears of widespread data scraping against their terms and conditions. Where the story is of particular relevance for influencer marketing is in the fact that many audience analysis tools and some influencer marketing platforms rely on scraping techniques similar to those deployed by the suspended partners. In the case of the marketing partners, Instagram has some leverage as the partners will be using a combination of scraping and official Instagram APIs to provide their services – so Instagram can ‘punish’ the partners by turning off their access to official APIs. Instagram have already made some small changes to how their web pages are accessed, but not enough to prevent further scraping.
75% of digital budget on influencers: Estee Lauder
A report from The Drum shows that Estée Lauder has significantly increase their overall digital marketing spend and now spends 75% of the digital marketing budget on influencers. Whilst there are various concerns about influencer marketing as a practice, ranging from influencer fraud to data privacy to measurement and consumer fatigue it’s clear that the practice is still proving highly effective for brands compared to more ‘traditional’ alternatives. Announcing the increased spend in a quarterly earning calls the company’s CEO, Fabrizio Freda, explained the increase in influencer marketing spend was on the back seeing better returns from influencer marketing due to better targeting and improved quality of campaigns.
TikTok grows in popularity as influencer channel
Hero Cosmetics, a startup cosmetics brand, reported far better results working with influencers on TikTok compared to Instagram. As Instagram gets increasingly saturated as a platform for influencer marketing and as it tries to monetise, for itself, the brand to influencer exchange engagement rates on sponsored posts on Instagram continue to drop across all sectors. Brands like Guess, Ralph Lauren, Google, Coca-Cola, the NBA, and Chipotle are all getting in on the act. TikTok offers a fresh alternative with its quirky, amateurish short-form videos that many consumers are finding themselves drawn to at the expense of Instagram which is feeling increasingly stage-managed by many of the top influencers and risks losing it’s authentic feel for many Gen-Zers.
Dell’s success in B2B influencer marketing
Our recommended blog post this month is actually a post about a podcast interview with one of the B2B world’s influencer marketing greats – Konstanze Alex, Director of Influencer Relations at Dell. Amongst other gems in the interview is this one from Konnie: “[Dell’s] No. 1 rule is we don’t pay for opinions. And that is a really, really important distinction. We may compensate for time spent, like if somebody speaks at an event, there’s prep time, there’s time away from their business. There are fees that we are happy to pay if it makes sense. It is never, however, for their opinion.”