Social Video: User-Generated, User-Driven
Balancing value for video creators, promoters and brands.
In 2015, Nike Air Jordan sales soared over $3 billion in the United States alone, with two of every three pairs of basketball shoes bought that year carrying the Jordan brand. Arguably, Nike’s 1984 discovery of Michael Jordan spawned the most legendary and by far the most profitable celebrity sportswear franchise of our time.
Celebrity endorsements can influence brand appeal to an extent that launches little-known brands into cherished heights in the consumer psyche. In the hopes of experiencing the midas touch, countless brands have for years paid fortunes to star athletes, TV personalities and entertainers.
Then along came social media. With platforms for people to broadcast conversations across vast audiences, this new sphere of influence gave rise to a different kind of celebrity — the social media influencer. Through their Instagram posts, Vine videos and YouTube channels, internet personalities like Vine superstar King Bach built massive audiences of dedicated fans (with almost 16 million followers at the time of writing, Bach is often referred to as the ‘King of Vine’).
This was new terrain.
Brands quickly grew their handles to impressive follower numbers and began to interact. But transforming an abstract concept into an engaging social person wasn’t as straightforward. They needed to find a relatable yet authentic voice in which to speak with consumers. So, resorting to extend their trusted endorsement model, they found what seemed to be a solution in these influencers.
Aren’t We There Yet?
With sufficient access, global trends invariably make their way into local cultures. The Nigerian cultural renaissance that began with Nollywood and continued into the music industry, and then fashion and other arts, intensified with the growing penetration of social media. There had never before been a medium for such unbridled and unapologetic self-expression. Through opinionated and often satirical social commentary, insightful business perspectives, and boisterous parody videos, the megaphone effect of Internet Inc. fostered a crop of culturally relevant Nigerian influencers.
And, as their Instagram and Twitter followers numbered into the tens of thousands, predictably, brands came knocking.
However, a 2009 report published by Razorfish, one of the world’s largest interactive agencies and part of Publicis Groupe, suggested that the continued expansion of social media would render traditional top-down marketing increasingly impotent. So, instead of an influencer, a bottom-up approach would mobilise hundreds or thousands of everyday consumers, each chipping in their bit of a much larger jigsaw that would define the brand’s story. And brands wouldn’t need to actually do the telling of the story, they would just curate it.
With millions of young Nigerians craving the self-actualisation opportunity that social media represented to them, a shift in this direction made perfect sense. It sounded like a brave new world!
Influencer marketing isn’t truly bottom-up. Yes, it brings brands a step closer to consumers in terms of relatability. But reverse-funnelling brand messaging through a single influencer to massively broad consumer audiences is technically still top-down, or perhaps midway-down, if we must.
Furthermore, spotlighting a single prominent endorser comes with major risks. Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscars selfie was quite a subtly brilliant marketing gimmick for Samsung. But, on the same night, the famous talk show host carried on her tweeting backstage… from an iPhone! And, embarrassingly for Samsung, the internet was paying attention.
In another example, Tiger Woods’ widely publicised infidelity woes ultimately cost his sponsors somewhere in the range of $5–12 billion collectively, according to researchers from UC Davis. Contrast this with the gloriously successful Jordan story and you get a sense of the scope of this risk.
There is also the risk that the chosen influencer could overshadow the brand. Late 2015, there was a humorous video of Craze Clown making the rounds on WhatsApp. It depicted him as a parcel delivery man that had been sent by a disgruntled girlfriend to deliver a slap to her wayward partner. Well, deliver a slap he did! And proceeded, without missing a beat, to politely ask the dazed young man for his signature acknowledging the delivery.
It was actually quite funny and I watched it several times, so I remember it in detail. Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the delivery service he was advertising. All I remember is the best of Craze Clown: his effortless delivery, trendy square spectacles and bow-legged swag. It may well be that the video served other short-term objectives and the investment actually paid off, but as far as I’m concerned…
It is confounding that social media has given us the resources to dive deeper into the pyramid, mobilise advocacy within broad consumer populations, and build true bottom-up engagement, yet some brands still appear to be trying to make do by adapting ill-fitting traditional marketing approaches to this brave new world.
Razorfish, aren’t we there yet?!
Well, here’s where the happy folks at Skits come into the picture.
User-Generated, User-Driven
Skits is a video sharing service that unobtrusively promotes branded experiences via user-generated video content and incentivised social sharing.
To users, Skits is an opportunity for self-actualisation. But being an influencer isn’t a prerequisite—anyone can get involved.
Jill
She’s a budding comedian and has some decent content. But she just started getting into social media, so only has a few hundred followers here and there. The truth is it will take some time before her dreams of Instagram fame and fortune begin to translate to food on the table, because brands won’t notice until she at least breaks 50k followers. So she can go ahead and take down that “for enquiries call 0813…” notice she has on her profile. There’s no one calling.
However, on Skits, all that matters is how engaging and relatable Jill’s content is. She could be a social media newbie, and still get featured in a major brand campaign. All she has to do is post a fun video.
“But, views! If she has no followers, where do the views come from?”
Jack
Over the years, he has built a network of friends and followers on one or two platforms and often enjoys sharing fun content that he discovers online. Could he be considered an influencer? Probably not. At least, not of the juicy 100k-follower variety. If he doesn’t actively create content and hold sway over a large network of consumers, brands may neglect how pivotal he could be.
On Skits, Jack would play the crucial role of promoting Jill’s videos by sharing them with his friends, family and followers across all his networks. He would do this because he found her videos hilarious or relatable, or simply because we pay him to. For each view he generates by sharing a video, Jack gets a little bit of value, and it quickly adds up.
For every Jill, there are a thousand Jacks. So her videos reach far and wide into the networks of thousands of people, generating hundreds of thousands of views for her and for the brands she promotes.
Simply put, on Skits users get paid to create fun, branded videos or to drive viewership of such videos by sharing them across their social networks.
Contrasted with some of the risks previously discussed, Skits diminishes the brand’s exposure to any negative media that may arise surrounding any one influencer. Since a brand can feature dozens of user videos in a single campaign and have thousands of users promoting them, ultimately the brand’s messaging remains at the forefront, with all the videos working together to create hype that, inadvertently, supersedes each individual video.
Hype that the brand can totally own, in one simple and catchy hashtag.
Thus, video creators hone their content to be as engaging as possible, promoters actively drive as many views as they can and the brand achieves enhanced engagement through non-intrusive social video. It’s simple, balanced and result-driven.
Please share thoughts, insights and criticisms in the comments or tweet at us @skitsapp. If you’d like to give Skits a trial run, you can reach me directly at ugo@skits.com. We’d love to start a discussion!
This is the very first story on Inside Skits. We appreciate everyone that helped us make it worthwhile. If our approach to social video makes any sense to you, please hit the steely blue heart to recommend it and help us push forward.
