By Jt Nisay
EARLY last year, American retailer Lord & Taylor tapped 50 fashion bloggers or “influencers” to simultaneously post on Instagram a picture of themselves wearing the same dress, an asymmetric paisley piece.
Some posed wearing the frock with afternoon tea in mind, pairing the dress with a combination of lovely heels and dainty shoulder bags. Others, however, went for a tougher look, going with leather jackets and gladiator sandals. Most posts got no fewer than a thousand likes.
Within days of the post barrage, the dress sold out.
The Lord & Taylor campaign was meant to introduce the company’s new Design Lab collection targeted to women between 18 and 35 years old, and as its CMO Michael Crotty told the weekly advertising trade publication Adweek, “The goal was to make her stop in her feed, and ask why all her favorite bloggers are wearing this dress and what is Design Lab? Using Instagram as that vehicle is a logical choice, especially when it comes to fashion.”
But absent from the choreographed poses, the hair-and-makeup stylings and photo enhancements in the entries, was a heads-up to “followers” and everybody else that the post was, indeed, an advertisement.
Ted Murphy, founder and CEO of IZEA, a company that acts as middleman between brands and social-media influencers, told Market Land that the Lord & Taylor campaign was a clear violation of the digital advertising guidelines of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTI), a body that protects America’s consumers from deceptive or unfair businesses. “Acceptable disclosures include language like ‘#ad,’ ‘sponsored’ ‘brought to you by,’ ‘I’ve partnered with.’ It’s really difficult being in this space today to claim that you didn’t understand that that’s how things were supposed to be done.”
The FTI released a statement that revealed the 50 select fashion influencers were not only given the product for free, but were also paid between $1,000 and $4,000 each for the post, which “reached 11.4 million individual Instagram users over just two days, and led to 328,000 brand engagements with Lord & Taylor’s own Instagram handle.” The matter has since been settled.
Such case is a display of the dynamics of marketing’s burgeoning variety called influencer marketing, with flashes of its simplicity and potential, as well as its complexity and pitfalls.
In a story published in Forbes.com, John Hall, cofounder and CEO of Influence & Co., another company that bridges companies and influencers, writes that “marketing always has a trending buzzword. Several years ago, it was content marketing. Before that, it was social marketing. Regardless, as soon as the buzz grows, so does the number of brands investing in it. We’ll call this the Gold Rush.”
In the story, Hall talks about influencer marketing, defined as “a nonpromotional approach to marketing, in which brands focus their efforts on opinion leaders, as opposed to direct target-market touchpoints.”
Over the past years, which saw the rise of social media and the directly proportional growth of influencers, much has been made about it. “Influencer marketing is evolving at a breakneck pace, making it challenging to navigate for both buyers and sellers,” said Misha Talavera, cofounder and CMO of NeoReach, a technology and data analytics company helping brands and agencies run influencer marketing campaigns at scale, in a story published in Adweek. In another story that appeared on the trade publication’s web site, Kimberlee Morrison said that “influencer marketing is the way forward for revenue generation in the digital age.”
And why wouldn’t it be? At a time when “people expect brands to talk with them rather than at them,” as another piece on Adweek puts it, Buensalido and Associates Digital Communications Director Monique Buensalido said, “Social media has realized and concretized word of mouth.”
Buensalido worked in the marketing industry for an international brand before joining one of the more renowned public-relations firms in the country, which was founded by her mother, PR maven Joy Buensalido.
She says social media has made it possible to create a dialogue not only among the consumers regarding a product, but between them and brands, as well. In turn, it has streamlined the connection between the two parties—a limitation of the more traditional media marketing, which utilizes the platforms of radio, television and newspapers.
That being said, Buensalido emphasizes that digital marketing should not be viewed as an entirely different science from traditional marketing but, rather, as a tool with the same foundation but of specific usage.
“Marketing is about creating and delivering value to answer the need of a targeted audience, whether you do it digitally or not,” she said. “However, the unique thing about the digital platform is that the data it provides allows for incredible profiling and targeting. With it, marketers can customize communications to hit markets as specific as they want.”
Buensalido adds that with social media, everything is measurable and traceable, which allows people to use data, when analyzed correctly, to know specific markets better and how to best interact with them.
The president of public relations and marketing agency Bridges, Annie Ringor, agrees with digital marketing’s funnel function. In an interview, she said traditional marketing is macro in scale, utilized to let the public know of a new product. Meanwhile, digital marketing is increasingly leveraged for the purpose of communicating specifics in real time to different sets of people.
“For example,” Ringor said, continuing, “if we want to tell the whole world that there is a new smartphone coming out, we may seek traditional marketing interventions, like billboards or TVCs. But when we want to, say, let them know how to make this phone relevant to them, even though the phone may be seen more as a businessman’s product, this is where social media comes in.”
Asked whether they see digital marketing overtaking traditional media marketing down the line, both PR pros offer the same answer. “Eventually, digital may become the newest form of traditional media, as the landscape shifts more and more into mobile,” Ringor said. “It’s desirable, because it is cost-efficient for the reach it’s able to generate.”
For Buensalido, “Digital will definitely be the primary platform for interaction and promotion, especially as access to the Internet is increasing steadily. Interestingly, social-media penetration in the Philippines is practically equal to Internet penetration—which means if you’re a Filipino and using the Internet, you’re most definitely using social media, as well.”
According to a report on Adweek, a joint study by Twitter and analytics firm Annalect revealed that around 40 percent of respondents said they’ve purchased an item online after seeing it used by an influencer on major social-media platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, Vine or YouTube. The same study states that 20 percent of respondents said they shared something they saw from an influencer, while one-third of millennials say they follow a creator on Twitter or Vine.
The same story quotes Twitter Vice President of Market Research and Insights Jeffrey Graham as saying that “a generation ago, marketers would put household names on the front of cereal boxes. Now that online influencers can sell other products to anyone with a smartphone, household names have evolved into ‘handheld names’—people who are highly influential and well-known based on their social-media presence.”
Taking that into account, the future certainly looks bright for these so-called influencers.
But what qualifies them for that “title” in the first place?
Buensalido says there is no minimum number of Instagram followers for a person to be considered an influencer, which Ringor describes as “word of mouth to the highest power.”
“An influencer is someone whose tastes, knowledge, interests, experiences, and/or lifestyle are admired, respected and trusted by a certain group in the market, and can influence their opinions, behavior and—more important and ideally to most marketers—purchase decisions,” Buensalido said, adding that while the term is often characterized by a significant online presence, the size of followers doesn’t necessarily equate to an influencer’s clout and effectivity. Neither should it be the lone qualification for brands to hire an influencer: according to Ringor, while it’s one thing to have an army of followers, it’s also important that these people are considered “thought leaders” in their space. “Sometimes, you can get an influencer with a following of less than 10,000 but can fully engage with a majority of their followers.”
Buensalido agrees, citing an “authentic connection” between the brand and the influencer as a major factor that should determine tie-ups. “Is it believable that the influencer uses the product or the service?”
She says she’s seen “too many influencers muddle their feeds with square versions of regular posters, coupled with generic captions that don’t sound like them at all, or super-pilit executions, where influencers are obviously just fulfilling a checklist.”
On the flip side, Buensalido says brands must view influencers not as channels where they can dump their promos or ads onto, but rather as content partners.
According to a research conducted by Pennsylvania State University College of Information Sciences and Technology last year, 90 percent of users of Instagram, which has 500 million monthly active users, are younger than 35. Given that the demographic of digital marketing are the youth, influencers and “influencee” included, what then are the upsides and downsides of youth-oriented marketing?
“It is always very exciting and energetic,” Buensalido said, adding the age group is the “zetgeist of cool” that always shapes culture and conversation, and the market to tap into if brands want a fresh and relevant image. “They are eager ambassadors, and will readily promote you in their various social-media channels if they love you—and if you deliver social capital for them. In other words, if you make them look cool.”
Speaking of the complicated dynamics of being cool, or at least trying to be one, she added that “brands have to be careful though, because trying to get on the bandwagon of the bagets tends to make you look like you’re trying too hard. Authenticity is one of the most important things for the youth.”
The challenges of youth-oriented marketing, consistent with the advantages, reflect the characteristic of that age group. Ringor said, “The downside is they are very trend-driven. If the trend changes and your brand doesn’t catch up or becomes irrelevant in that time, there’s a very real chance that you will lose their attention and their business.”
Buensalido underscores the point, saying the youth “can be quite fickle and move on to the next cool thing if you’re not consistent.”
Ironically, given that climactic mood of the marketing practice, the same can be said about the structure of influencer marketing, in general. ✚