Influencer Marketing and Its Development in Recent Years
For my blog this week, I have decided to stay on the theme of influencer advertising and the different degrees that it can spread to. There are tens of thousands of influencers out there, many of them with brands backing them, and it leads one to wonder how much research and personal thought go into these ad partnerships with influencers. Do they really look into the brand and see what it stands for and if it aligns with their beliefs and morals, or is the price tag much more important to them? Today I will be going over several influencers like Cristiano Ronaldo, a world class, championship winning, soccer superstar, and his partnerships with brands. I will also look into smaller influencers like Livvy Dunne, who is by no means a small account, but in comparison to Ronaldo’s 624 million Instagram followers, the brand deals can be quite different.
To start off with Ronaldo, for the sponsored posts or ads that he does, it costs the advertisers roughly $3.2 million for his appearance in their ad or sponsored post, depending on what he says or does. Annually, Nike pays Ronaldo $24 million for his ads for the brand, which is an insane number to think about considering the large number of athletes that Nike sponsors. This can only lead one to think about the type of funding they have going towards their influencers and athletes for their brand.
A smaller scale influencer Olivia Dunne or “Livvy” as she is better known online, has done a number of brand deals, from short one time pieces to long term brand deals, that have helped her launch herself further into the spotlight over her college gymnastics career at LSU. One of the one time brand deals that she did was with a chicken finger fast food chain called Raising Cane's, which has grown in popularity recently due to the partnerships they have done with influencers like Livvy over the past couple years. Some of her more long term partnerships are with brands like American Eagle clothing or Forever21. These are just a few of the many examples of influencer marketing that we see in the world today, and with the way that ad space is growing and sponsored endorsements are becoming more and more apparent all the time, it makes sense that brands are allocating more of their funds to this type of marketing. Simply put, it works, and brands are beginning to take notice. The younger, more easily influenced people who they are trying to advertise to love these influencers, and that is the way that they are able to get more brand awareness and traction for themselves, which in turn is changing the way that marketing is done all over the world.
