#infleuncers

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Influencer measurement company Instascreener, formerly known as Points North group recently published some data on Influencer marketing. The data touched on influencer marketing spends, budgets and its results. The data revealed that P&G and Disneyland were among the most fooled brands. According to Instascreener, these two companies have wasted their advertising budget reaching fake followers and bots.

Influencer marketing has gained a lot of popularity lately with many brands doubling their spend on influencer marketing. Brands and advertisers have almost doubled the amount they’re spending on Instagram influencer campaigns in the US and Canada since 2018. But in the past three months alone, $65m has been wasted reaching fake followers. Instascreener’s report shows that companies like P&G and Disneyland are among the advertisers which have been duped.

About Instascreeners Report

To gather this data on influencer marketing on Instagram, the measurement company measured the investment using its own spend data for non-Instagram influencer spend in addition to analysing almost every sponsored influencer posts on Instagram.  They then used AI to estimate fake followers. According to their data, North American advertisers allocated a $478m slice of their budgets to influencers in Q3. The data revealed that Instagram took most of the budget. Instagram pooled in $340m worth of the spend (an increase of 95% on the same period last year).  The data showed that $65m was funnelled into reaching fake followers.

P&G and Disneyland among Most Fooled Brands Reaching Fake Followers on Instagram

According to Instascreeners report, P&G’s Febreze was the “most fooled” brand. The brand apparently invested in influencer campaigns that reached bots instead of people. The analysis from its sponsored Instagram posts indicated that of the accounts that had engaged with the post 54% were fake. Another brand which was fooled was Multimedia kids’ business Baby Einstein. It came in second place with a fake follower rate of 51%, followed closely by women’s sanitary business Carefree. Disneyland, Green Chef and Zappos also made it into the top ten most duped advertiser.

The report also revealed the biggest spenders on influencer marketing. The crown for biggest spender went to retailer Fashion Nova who invested $9.7m on influencer campaigns in the past quarter. Controversial laxative tea brand Flat Tummy Co came in second with a spend of $5.1m. Fendi, Ancient Cosmetics and Walmart completed the top five.

What Instagram is doing about Fake Followers?

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YouTube is an unique space. It’s a place where one goes to find a music video they haven’t seen in years, watch a funny video, or learn how to do something among countless other things. Content is being uploaded and watched every second of every day. Some YouTube users upload and share content that has already been published, while other users create their own content and have developed a following. These creators post content frequently to their thousands or millions of subscribers. This has lead to a unique opportunity for marketers.

Connecting and collaborating with these creators can be effective. But just how effective, exactly? Sanjay Nazerali, the chief strategy officer of Carat Global and his team worked with YouTube and Nielsen to analyze just how well influencer marketing works.

When it comes to recall, 73% of viewers remembered the brand the influencer was promoting. This number indicates high recall, although it was not as high as marketing from celebrities, which came in at 84%.

Another insight that the article notes is when it comes to celebrity marketing and influencer marketing—the purchase intent among both groups was the same. This indicates that the participants were just as likely to buy a product marketed by an influencer, as they were to buy a product marketed by a celebrity.

However, when it comes to brand familiarity and truly understanding the brand, YouTube influencers were shown to have the upper hand. The data showed that influencer marketing was four times more effective in comparison to celebrity marketing.

While deciding if influencer marketing is the right path to take, it is important to note that there are several routes one could veer onto. It could be something as simple as running ads on their YouTube videos. Other routes taken could be creating an ad featuring the influencer or a product endorsement, which were both shown to have positive results for brand affinity. However, the best results came from when the brand and the influencer created a deeper collaboration. Nazerali states in the article, “our research found that deep thematic integrations with creators drive the highest results for brands. These are more involved integrations where the influencer plays a role in creating a piece of content—such as a demo—with the brand.”

So what exactly is the appeal of these YouTube creators? The article states that the viewers perceived these creators as being likable, successful, funny, irreverent, and social media savvy. Nazerali notes the importance of irreverence, which he links to credibility and trustworthiness. He also notes that humor reflects a sense of community. Viewers creating a bond with the influencers that consists of trust and community will only be beneficial to the brand involved.