The new gen.video

The next great challenge for influencer marketing (IM) continues to be tracking, understanding, and articulating the value and ROI of programs. The industry justifiably continues to explode and defy the expectations of marketers who don’t appreciate that IM is the culmination of more than 20 years of trends seeking to embrace reviews, word of mouth, user generated content, ‘mavens’ and social media.

Those microtrends set the stage for the now-clearly-inevitable influencer megatrend which potently combines a fierce independence from traditional media (aka – authenticity), a sense of achievable aspiration and the limitlessly renewable energy of new participants in a world where Tweens #1 aspiration is “to be a YouTube star.”??

IM will become impregnable for the indefinite future if ROI can be proven but there are some pretty serious impediments: one of the most important is that even the largest influencers are tiny in the business context. Mr. Beast shocks us with $50mil in revenue but that’s a small business by any definition. We can’t expect these amazingly talented creators to be focused on the commerce ripple effects of their work. Their attention is rightly focused on creating sought after content and pricing its consumption at the market clearing price. If sponsors are clamoring to pay $200,000 to sponsor a video, why would any creator slow down to justify that price? That’s the right decision for every individual influencer but it’s a big impediment for the industry.??

Why? Because economics teaches us that eventually prices will be set rationally and that if there isn’t pricing justification, substitutes will emerge. That’s where gen.video comes in. As a platform sitting between brands and influencers, we know that brands won’t continue spending if we aren’t delivering both better performance and insights than other influencer platforms. We’re entirely focused on: 1) building tools that better tracks performance starting with down-funnel traffic and 2) optimizing programs hand in hand with our customers based on multi-channel sales impact.??

Today we launch the NEW gen.video platform with a suite of self-service product solutions to manage creator partnerships, collaborate on content production, syndicate product videos to Amazon and track sales performance. To read more specifics about the features in our revamped platform, please see our blog here. Feel free to message me on LinkedIn if you'd like to hear more from me personally.