Why Influencer Marketing Is Arguably The Most Important Shift Since The Advent Of TV Advertising

Marketing has changed significantly over the last 20 years. What used to be a world dominated by buying mass awareness is now a world effected by proliferated media and alternative ways to target your audience. If marketing used to be one way (talking AT your audience), there is now an opportunity to micro target your audience and talk WITH them.

We have seen over the last 20 years, the emergence of social media as a platform to reach and engage with your audience. We have also seen the rise of science based marketing where you can leverage the powerful data that sits behind some of these emerging platforms versus the more instinctive based marketing we saw many years ago.

And we are now seeing a move away from an awareness based model to a TARGETED REACH and INFLUENCE model which makes far more sense if we are to genuinely understand the relationship between investment and return. Reach is essential as you simply have to be in it to win it but making it more targeted cuts the amount of wastage you see with wide reaching TV campaigns. Influence is the ability to form or alter an opinion in favour of a potential monetary transaction and thats where I would like to focus this piece.

Today, Way To Blue proudly announced its new Influencer Marketing department called iN@waytoblue. Working with influencers is something we have done for nearly 10 years but it is only now beginning to dominate the marketing news agenda. Influencer marketing is a very simple concept but its challenge is the complexity of where it sits in the marketing mix and that's what makes it so important.

Influencer marketing essentially sources individuals with reach and influence and asks them to promote brands or products within the editorial tone of their creative voice. Where it becomes complicated is who owns this and where the budget sits on the client side. 

• Is it EARNED (PR)? - Technically yes, as often influencers are happy to promote a particular brand without any form of monetary transaction and we are not just buying space here, we are negotiating a targeted editorial voice
• Is it PAID (Bought Media)? - Again, technically yes. As this world grows and the power of targeted reach and influence becomes more real, influencers are asking for money in return for their ambassadorship. These are not journalists who get paid by publishers, so they need to earn their keep somehow
• Is it OWNED (Social)? - Yup! More often than not, these influencers set up shop through a social platform whether its YouTube, Instagram or Vine so we have seen budgets owned by social leads

So what we see now is a fight for ownership and often when that happens, the loser is the brand. Our opinion? IT DOESN’T MATTER WHERE IT SITS. It is all 3 and essentially thats what we love about this world. A truly integrated marketing tool that allows you to micro target your audience, reach them in an authentic and relevant environment and therefore influence opinions. Influencer marketing makes TV advertising look like the ice age and whilst that still carries reach and influence, its time a new metric model was created to compare cost efficiencies. Make no mistake, influencer marketing is the future, taking what is essentially a traditional form of PR and bringing it into the 21st Century, a world led by integration and convergence.

The reason we as a business have invested in this space, is that it fits our model of integration. Too often, opportunities such as influencer marketing, PR, social media and even paid media are looked at in isolation. This has to stop. Only through integrated messaging will we see a truly cost efficient model, a marketing nirvana if you like that delivers value for clients and brands versus the current model which often serves to devalue.