The Rise of the μ-Creative Director
A couple weeks ago we were invited to spend the week at Martha’s Vineyard with the H crew. When you’re immersed in such a diverse, inspiring and smart group you learn a thing or two.
Starting a new business requires talking to as many potential customers as possible. You get unique perspectives and unveil exciting opportunities. H is a coalition of some of the most inspirational people in the creator community. They wake up at 4 AM to catch the sunrise, they meticulously play with light to find the perfect mathematical pattern and they go on adventures like Indiana Jones. So while you may think this is just a group of photographers, models and personalities, I challenge you to see the planning, correspondence and thought behind every piece of work.
Creative work is hard. The biggest challenge we’ve heard from Fortune 500 marketing departments is creating relevant, new and exciting content for their audience. Typically, these companies pay ad agencies a lot of money to solve this problem. They figure out where to put their money for the highest impact according to the goals of the client. A majority of the ideation and creative execution is the responsibility of the creative director. They devise plans, understand consumers and try to see a future where they can deliver happiness.
“Advertising is based on one thing: happiness” — Don Draper, Mad Men.
Creators, influencers, photographers, models all have one thing in common — they deliver experiences loved by audiences around the world. That’s what’s special about H and the community they’ve been building. Similar to how Airbnb disrupted the hospitality industry, at Dovetale we think we can do the same for the advertising industry and it starts with communities like H.
At Dovetale, we’ve been thinking about social influencer marketing for a while. Our team has collectively worked with Vine, Twitch, Beatport and seen the rise of stars in these networks. Working alongside rising celebrities at these companies we’ve learned that they’ve found a way to build very strong relationships with their followers. So much so that their followers trust them like a best friend of many years. This is the secret to how they’ve grown to be so popular and why their followers love them so much.
There’s a common goal that exists between brands and influencers. Both of them want to deliver an immersive, thoughtful and touching experience to their consumers. But the modern world is much more complicated than in the days of Sterling Cooper, and 21st century consumers have ever-changing and multi-faceted needs.
One of the things we’ve noticed is brands reaching out to influencers trying to promote products that have almost no alignment with their audience. We started Dovetale in January with the idea that we could deliver a better way for brands to reach their customers and a much more simple way for influencers to work with the brands they love. We also noticed all of the existing infrastructure in the world of influencer marketing and thought: why did they do it like that? In fact, while we were at Martha’s Vineyard, many of the H crew received template emails from automated crawlers trying to get them to sign up to some influencer marketing platform. It’s pretty easy to see that these tactics don’t work.
A lot of the time, brands try to take advantage of these guys. Getting an offer for posting pictures and videos online seems like a pretty sweet deal for most influencers and it appears easy enough to just make a few posts to your account for money from brands. However, if you consider a group like H, many times they do more than just take pictures. They’re professionals. They think about every detail, what their audience likes, what excites them, what makes them tick, etc. With everything they do, there is a very thoughtful approach that takes time.
Thoughtful content production is exactly the way native advertising should be executed, especially when brands are looking to promote the best content for their products. Marketing teams should be working side by side with creators to cultivate amazing content for their customers. Coming up with a great idea and transforming it into a successful campaign requires true creative collaboration amoung internal teams, partners and clients, often separated by geography, time zones and firewalls. Though there are oodles of digital tools at our disposal, they don’t always make things simpler or more secure.
The battle for consumer hearts is constantly evolving. New mediums, platforms, arbitraging, advertising, promotions, contests you name it and it’s been thought of. Here’s the thing, consumers are smart and many times much smarter than the brands trying to get their attention. In the age of information it’s clear that if people don’t care, banner ads and poorly targeted platform ads are falling by the wayside. If we put the customer first we need to think about ways to give them things they want. It’s a tough nut to crack because you need a lot of data, but if we think about the power of influence, the equation becomes much simpler. Influence adds a component of desire and that drives a new and more exciting form of advertising that is based on the content and who tells those stories.
Lots of people think that these relationships can be “transactionalized” into a “DFP for influencer marketing”, but the problem with a focus on this approach is that brands get a quick fix and no long lasting results. This also seems inauthentic. Where influencer marketplaces make sense is when a brand is looking for great content. Tons of opportunity exists to build tools around the ecosystem that help brands and influencers work together for longer periods of time. Think about how big sports brands work with influencers (celebrities) and how the internet has reshaped the idea of a celebrity.
Companies like Nike, Adidas and Under Armour have focused countless resources to find athletes that will influence people to wear their clothes, use their equipment and become exclusive advocates for their brands. They spend big money to ensure the loyalty of these athletes. This form of advertising and promotion has existed for years, but in the age of information, micro influencers on social platforms aren’t lagging far behind their reach. They all have their niche groups to inspire everyday and at scale they collectively have a larger impact.
Here’s where it gets complicated. How do you find the perfect influencer for your brand/ project. How do you find someone that fits your budget, how do you find someone that fits your style and how do you find someone that believes in your mission? That’s where technology can help. If there was a place to organize your brand’s mission, objectives and core values alongside your relationship with influencers there could be a new class of software that helps unify the relationship between influencers, brands and agencies. Most technology saves you time. So while you could hypothetically forge relationships, build a strategy, process payments and organize projects yourself it would be a lot easier to have a helping hand. This is the basis of why my co-founder and I started Dovetale. We want to remove the transactional nature of influencer marketing and focus on building relationships.
If you’re excited to learn more about what we’re up to follow us on our journey to help brands and creators work better together.
