Major Brands Believe in Bloggers and Opinion Leaders
When allocating advertising budgets these days global brands spend less on TV advertising, and increasingly pour resources into digital outlets. This is a powerful new trend — but the internet can impact advertising in different ways, not all of them beneficial. For example, overkill can burn out an entire target audience with millions of hits. Or, vice versa it can work strictly on a KPI basis. However, there is a middle ground that can achieve both coverage and results — native advertising from opinion leaders and video bloggers. Major brands are increasingly taking this path.
The Stubbornness of Statistics
Forbes Agency Council assures us that the old marketing channels are dying. One of the trends of the future is precise work with influencers and opinion leaders. The main reason for this is that they are trusted by the target audience. Placement of ads with bloggers will yield not only loyalty but sales. Internet influencers aren’t just people — they are fully fledged media channels with their own audience, distribution models, opinions and way of communicating with the world.
According to John Gumas from the Gumas Advertising agency outdated methods of sales are no longer working. Marketing through opinion leaders on the other hand means that the audience doesn’t feel that products and services are being shoved down their throats.
“If the blogger is interested in the product before the start of the partnership, integration of the brand into video and social networking posts will be more effective and brand support will continue after the end of the campaign,” says Dmitry Malyanov of AdHive.
Kendra Bracken-Ferguson of The BrainTrust notes that opinion leaders are both creators of original content and a channel for its distribution. Each of them has their own audience, which has a positive effect on promotion through proper targeting.
A few notable statistics on this issue: more than half of marketers are confident that video content gives the best return on investment. 71% of buyers are more likely to buy the product if it is recommended by a friend and subscribers on social media. 86% of the most watched videos on the subject of fashion and beauty are created by video bloggers. On average, for every dollar spent on influencer marketing, the advertiser receives $ 6.5. 11% of marketers are sure that in 2018 their main channel of advertising will be influencer marketing.
The market for opinion leaders on Instagram alone is already estimated at a billion dollars. This is predicted to double in the coming years.
Prices are rising accordingly. Marketing Network states that in 2017 prices rose by 30–50%. Brands are already willing to pay $90,000 for videos on YouTube, $100,000 for a post on Facebook from a celebrity or $70,000 for a post on Snapchat.
In their article “Five Things We Learned About Influencer-Marketing in 2017” Digiday notes that contracts with opinion leaders have become stricter and clearer — and more profitable for the customer as a result. Data collection and calculation of efficiency has also improved — it’s now easier to understand the effectiveness of each placement. Marketing bloggers have already moved beyond serving as tastemakers on social networks — they are being used in programming, podcasts, e-commerce and even on TV. At the same time, unfortunately, more and more cases of dishonesty and bad practice are coming to light.
For example at a dinner with one of their advertisers, Bryce Gruber of luxury lifestyle magazine The Luxury Spot asked: “What results do you expect for your $1500?” The advertiser looked at her in bewilderment and told her that for placement in The Luxury Spot, the agency charges $10,000. It turns out the remainder of the sum is skimmed off by intermediaries or makes its way into advertising agencies’ pockets.
Top Five Cases of Big Brand of Integration on YouTube Channels
In first place on our list is the partnership between Dude Perfect, Pringles and Oreo
1. Dude Perfect is a channel with 25 million subscribers. In their video, a company of five friends loftily procrastinate as they throw basketballs into a basket and ping-pong balls into glasses. This content is incredibly “sticky”, so the guys quickly collected millions of views and even moved to their own large headquarters.
Unsurprisingly, the channel has a lot of sponsors as the most popular video on their channel has gained 133 million views. Throughout the almost 6 minutes of video, the Pringles logo almost constantly flashes in-frame. The audience remembers that Pringles are cool, because they support cool dudes.
The video, sponsored by Oreo, scored more than 100 million views and ranked third in this list of advertising videos on YouTube in 2017. Oreo is promoted via the placement of the logo on props, bundles of products and a giant cookie.
2. Dude Perfect and LG
In second place is Dude Perfect again, this time for the story of its new channel headquarters sponsored by LG.
The flagship phone LG G3 periodically flashes in-frame. In addition, some of the tricks are filmed on the camera of an LG smartphone — the audience knows this from the signatures on the frames. At the end of the video Dude Perfect thanks “our bros from LG” for the phone, briefly mentioning that it has a cool camera and the result can be seen directly in the video.
The representative of LG refused to disclose the amount of the contract and the result of the placement, but noted that “What Dude Perfect does is the same as the ideas of our brand. Their audience is the youth we want to reach.”
3. Smosh Games and Ubisoft
In third place is Smosh Games. To promote the game Assassin’s Creed Origins, Ubisoft chose the channel Smosh Games (7.1 million subscribers) and took them to Egypt where, according to the developers, the game is set. The result was three videos from the series “Operation: Open World.”
During the trip the owners of the channel, Joshua and Marie play the new Assassin’s Creed while learning more about the culture of Egypt which inspired Ubisoft to create the game- mummies, pyramids, archery, all of which the assassin encounters on his travels . The result is about 2 million total views and the attention of gamers around the world.
4. “Khach’s Diary” and BMW
In fourth place is Ubisoft’s “Khach’s Diary”, the Russian-language channel of Amiran Sardarov with 2.4 million subscribers. The author writes a diary of his life and periodically interviews famous people. BMW sponsored the channel and in several videos described some of their car lines. The blogger and his friends conducted a test drive. The videos with the integration of BMW scored more than 20 million views in total.
And finally, the most interesting case for analysis is the beauty blogger Michelle Phan’s partnership with L’Oreal:
5. Michelle Phan and L’Oreal
Michelle Phan is one of the most popular beauty bloggers in the world. Currently she has almost 9 million subscribers. In 2013, together with L’Oreal, she launched her own line of cosmetics which she had been developing for several years. The campaign failed. No one bought her cosmetics, because they were too expensive for Phan’s subscribers. L’Oreal simply did not take this into account. Recognized the failure of the experiment the company severed their relationship with the blogger in 2015.
Present and Future
With the development of AI and blockchain technologies new solutions are emerging that allow automated work with bloggers. One example is AdHive, a platform for the automated placement of native advertising in video blogs, where AI is responsible for selection. Not only quantitative, but also qualitative indicators are taken into account, thus excluding irrelevant channels. The advertiser only needs to place an order for a campaign.
The influencer of marketing market is growing so quickly that even Google has taken note. In 2016 the corporation bought Famebit, a platform that connects YouTube bloggers and advertisers. According to Google representatives the deal was conceived to make it possible for content creators at any level to contact brands directly to earn money — and so that companies could get placement in videos to reach their target audiences. AdHive performs the same function.
