Influencer Marketing's ROI

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Issue #120 | Your reading time this week is 5 mins. 50 secs.

Welcome back to the Creator Briefing. Here’s just some of what we’re looking at this week:

• Influencer guarantees reach & partners with ThisThat on built-in brand lift studies

• Just 9% of UK news consumers pays for news content - and why influencer marketers should care about that

• An Irish uni offers a degree in influencing - and everyone has something to say about it

• Forbes announces top creator earners

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Influencer doubles down on measurement launching two initiatives

It’s been a busy week for Ben Jeffries’ Influencer. Not only has the firm become a certified B Corporation it’s also launched two measurement initiatives.

Efficiencies & guaranteed reach

Influencer now guarantees reach, efficiency and results through its Amplify initiative. We know that much of the influencer marketing workflow is front-ended in terms of identification, selection, and contracting with the most appropriate creators to match briefs. With Amplify the Influencer team handles these time-consuming aspects so that clients need only provide a basic brief, whilst passing those efficiencies back on to the client by guaranteeing cost-effective results.

“Our hope is that by offering a solution built on efficiency, we can work in tandem with our clients to produce tight turnaround and even last-minute campaigns, with rapid deployment in as little as two weeks, allowing them to jump on trends or seize a moment quicker than before possible” - Ben Jeffries

Built in brandlift studies

Influencer is now offering Brand Lift studies on major campaigns through a partnership with data and market measurement company, ThisThat.

Influencer will utilise Natural Exposure, which measures the impact of a campaign on the people within the creator’s audience who actually saw it. Other solutions typically rely on Forced Exposure which shows content to people who have been recruited to take part in related research studies via a mock scenario.

Steph Money, VP Client Services at ThisThat was my guest on last week’s Influencer Marketing Lab podcast. She spoke at length about the power of brand lift studies and creating a gold standard for influencer marketing measurement.

Will Meta’s new sunnies be a hit with creators?

This week at Meta Connect, Meta launched its next generation of smart glasses with Ray-Ban. The specs boast a better camera, better battery life, and better sound quality compared with the 2021 version.

They also allow users to live broadcast to Instagram and read livestream comments as they come in. Plus they’re Meta AI integrated. Colin and Samir seem to be fans. They posted an explainer Instagram Reel from the Meta Connect launch event - I assume it was organic content … there were no ad markers.

But will the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses be a hit with creators in general? Indusry publication ‘Media Leader’ asked me this very question - you can read my thoughts here.

The glasses will be available to buy online and in shops in selected counties including US, Canada, Australia and Europe starting 17 October.

Digital advertising industry contributes £129bn GVA UK economy

The digital advertising industry contributes £129bn gross value added to the UK economy and supports 2 million jobs across the country according to IAB UK.

For every £1 spent on digital advertising, £4.80 was delivered back to the economy in GVA.

As noted in Creator Briefing #116 

• UK adspend is expected to reach £35.7bn this year according to AA/WARC Expenditure Report revised figures.

• Digital ads are now forecast to account for 76.7% of all spend in 2023 – and 77.6% next year ­– in comparison to 75.1% in 2022.

France’s influencers improve ad declarations

89% of sponsored influencer posts targeted at French audiences in 2022 carried at least a partial label of the commercial partnership. 53% of audited posts were found to be in full compliance. A further 36% of studied posts contained at least partial disclosure. These are the new findings from ARRP - France’s advertising regulator.

This marks a significant uptick on previous years. In 2021 checks, 83% of sponsored content published to Instagram, YouTube or TikTok carried some form of ad marker identification. In 2020 the rate was just 73%.

Creator Briefing readers whose understanding of the French language goes beyond knowing where my aunt’s pen is may wish to read the full report.

Just 9% of UK news consumers pays for news content - and why we should care

UK news consumers come last in a table of countries which pays to receive online news - according to a Reuters Digital News Report published this week.

Partly as a result of good supply of high-quality free news, partly through habit just 9% of UK news consumers pays for news content.

In the US, a pioneer of digital news business models, around a fifth of our sample (21%) say they have paid - Australia is slightly higher at 22%.

Free, ad-funded digital services - social media and online news - are worth an average £14,600 per year to every UK household in consumer surplus, indicating the high value that people place on having free online access, according to a new study by the IAB UK.

The cost-of-living crisis is throwing the value of the ad-funded internet into sharper focus says teh IAB UK study. 70% of UK adults say it’s important to them that online services are provided for free, while over a quarter of people have used free online entertainment more in the last year as a result of budgets being squeezed.

WHY IT MATTERS: Half of us turns to influencers for mainstream news stories ahead of journalists across TikTok (55% vs 33%), Snapchat (55% vs 36%), and Instagram (52% vs 42%) - on YouTube the split is 45% vs 42%. This is according to The 2023 Reuters Institute Digital News Report.

Influencer marketing plays a pivotal role in shaping consumer behaviour. The trust our sector enjoys can only be maintained and earned more fully if creator content is accurate and transparent.

This week on the podcast …

This week on the Influencer Marketing Lab podcast Steph Money, VP of Client Services at ThisThat talks: influencer marketing measurement. We discuss:

• How measurement and evaluation can be put into harness for go-to-market strategies

• Why effective measurement of influencer marketing will become table stakes in a matter of months

• A call to standardise measurement within our sector

Where to listen

You can always listen to this week's Influencer Marketing Lab podcast from the show notes on the website. But if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:

• If you're on an iPhone or iPad, just tap this link.

• If Android is your thing, you can find the Influencer Marketing Lab in the Google Podcasts app by tapping here.

• Or, if you enjoy listening to podcasts on Spotify you’ll find the Influencer Marketing Lab there, too. Tap away.

Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online is published

Tech reporter Taylor Lorenz has published her first book - Extremely Online.

The book presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet -- revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off.

Don’t take my word for it read the reviews in Bloomberg, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post.

ICYMI: SocialChain reshapes business proposition

Social Chain has rebranded as SocialChain. It’s finessed its business proposition with a new creator-led model. The Brave Bison-owned agency has updated its org. structure, too. Prolific North and Performance Marketing World have more on the changes.

Forbes announces top creator earners

Forbes analysed estimated earnings, follower counts, engagement rates, and entrepreneurial activities of thousands of creators using data supplied by Influential to come up with a list of the global top 50 creators.

MrBeast heads the Forbes list again this year. I gotta say I’m confused by the earnings tally. MrB (real-name Jimmy Donaldson) is reported to both earn $82m and $54m this year - The entrepreneur’s Forbes’ profile page places his earnings at $54m whilst the larger figure features in the main article. Perhaps the $82m is his forecast end-of-year earnings and $54m is the earnings at end of September?

Dylan Mulvaney comes in at number 50 despite (or perhaps because of) the brouhaha over her Bud Light campaign (see Creator Briefing #102, #104, and #107).

Big whoop: Irish university to offer degree in influencing

A university in Ireland is to offer the country's first degree in social-media influencing according to the BBC.

LinkedIn and that bastion of common sense, ITV’s This Morning aren’t convinced.

No doubt, the same nay-sayers will be those condemning influencers for failing to declare ads. The degree is a sign that the creator economy is professionalising - this should be applauded.

Other countries have offered degrees in influencing for a while. Devoted readers of Creator Briefing will recall that in #39 we covered the phenomenon in China. There, vocational colleges across the country including the Communication University of Zhejiang (CUZ) are training young people to become professional influencers. The courses aim to professionalise the Chinese influencer industry making it a recognised career path.