You Still Care About Influencers?”
Five top CMOs tell us what they really think about #influencer marketing. A live session recorded at Betaworks Studios, New York City.
We recently held a roundtable of some of the best CMOs in the business here at Betaworks. Joanna Lord of Classpass, Pam El from the NBA, Emily Culp, former CMO of Keds, Linda Boff from GE and Christina Carbonell, co-founder of Primary were hosted by Rich Greenfield from BTIG.
The panelists spoke freely for nearly an hour and a half. A lot of topics were covered, from how ROI changes from market to market, how attribution is a ‘hot mess’ for every CMO, how some people get lazy when it comes to platforms (‘ So this platform is for this, so this is what people going to do. So let me just throw something on there.’), what happens when Alexa becomes more predictive, (‘I want Alexa to know I had wine and pizza the night before and automatically cancel my class’) and the difference in TV spending between public and private companies.
As you can imagine, when you get these smart people in the room you get some magic. Luckily for you, we have captured that magic. You can hear the first hour of the conversation between Joanna, Pam, Emily, Linda, Christina and Rich in the latest episode of our podcast, Builders. It’s a fantastic episode for anyone interested in marketing.
Somewhere towards the end of the session when we got into Q & A someone asked a great Q; “No one mentioned influencers. You still care about influencers?”
The responses to this question were extremely interesting. I was fully prepared for all five to say that influencer marketing was over, that it was a fad and didn’t lead to anything meaningful. After all, there had been a ton of bad press around influencers in the few weeks preceding the event. Possibly this was more noticeable here in New York because of New York Fashion Week and the glut of negative stories about influencers covering — or trying to cover — the catwalks. But, as is often the case with the best marketers, this group of CMOs went in the other direction.
This is part of the conversation:
Pam El, NBA:
“Where we use influencers the most is probably around our All Star game, which is always in February. This year it’s going to be in Charlotte last year it was in LA. So we will go to Charlotte and find the most influential influencers in Charlotte, who are real true, true, basketball fans and we will utilize them and you know, what they want, they don’t want a big check. They want front row seats, they want to be able to shake LeBron’s hand and they want to, you know, get up close and personal with Adam Silver.
So I’m, I’m telling you, we love influencers. We vet them, because you got to be careful. It’s your brand against another person that’s not on your payroll. So you got to be really, really careful about that. But we just launched a campaign last week where we actually put one of our influences that we used last year in our national advertising campaign.
And if you’re a global brand, you absolutely need these influences. So in Latin America our influencers or those who not only love basketball, but they love soccer and they have millions and millions of soccer fans. So we go after those guys like crazy, girls and guys, not just guys.”
Joanna Lord, ClassPass:
“Influencers and activation channels, absolutely the future. And it’s fun. Actually entering Southeast Asia, that has been our strategy. We have done very little of what we do traditionally in the US and Southeast Asia is growing really well for us because we’re going through the influencer channel. It’s more and more of what we think about at all times. And to me it’s just, it’s an extension of that audience development.
It’s like it when it’s aligned, when it’s a beautiful alignment of ethos, they don’t want money, they want you to help them be known, to be part of your ethos, like they get credibility for that. And then we also get the credibility of the fact that they’ve been harnessing this beautiful audience. So I’m excited about that.”
Emily Culp:
“I think about influencers at this point from a media allocation, or I should say, overall budget allocation as a brand. Whether you like it or not, you’re a publisher. I mean brands who don’t think they are publishers are wrong at this point. That’s what you are. So one of the things you need as a publisher is an amazing lens, tight brand positioning — all that. You need content and distribution. Influencers, whether they are micro, macro, celebrities, ABCD, tier, whatever you have, they actually provide you both. They provide you with content and distribution.
So when I look at budget allocation, some of the biggest budget allocation areas, at least for brands that I’ve overseen, is around content and influencers because that’s how you can keep the flywheel going. And I’m not saying the media is fabulous, but your influencers are feeding you, especially if you have a tight lens, the lens is the most important part because otherwise it’s detrimental. It’s a liability to the brand, but your influences are feeding you amazing content that you couldn’t necessarily go shoot in Latin America, APAC, or EMEA. They’re feeding it to you and then you get their distribution, so you’re amplifying it and you can use it across on a global asset basis. So I think there are of the utmost importance.”
Linda Boff, GE:
“I would also add, it’s worth thinking about, for those of you who have more niche brands, influencers for micro audiences. So we’ve invited YouTube stars, influencers, to go tour our labs, or see how our experiments work, or even take over our YouTube channel and it’s okay, amazing. Everybody has different currency. I wish we all had Lebron, but we have really cool labs and the right kind of influencer is going to roll up their sleeves and get super excited about that and use their distribution channel and use their storytelling skills. So that’s something we’ve done for quite a while.”
We then had a question from the audience about how to manage and scale influencer marketing.
Joanna Lord, Classpass:
“We have two full time people on a very, very small marketing team. So we’ve worked with agencies. We just did Class Pass Getaways. It was an event out in the Hamptons. It was our first true activation. It was very successful. We’ll get the full read out this week, but I think we interviewed a lot of agencies. There’s a number of them that could have done access for us. We wanted to try direct first, to see what we could do and I think, you know, we’re five years old, but we have some clout behind us and I think using that worked for us.
Now, when we scale that program out — which it looks like it will be — will we have to partner with an agency? Probably. But having in-house, full time headcount, I’m looking two people of the eight, that’s a big investment! Right? But that’s us saying, ‘That’s where we’re putting our bets.’ Is that an easy conversation to have in the boardroom, at the exec table, or constantly defending it in the different comments that come up around the company? No. But that’s our job and we choose to do it for that reason.”
So these guys are pretty bullish on #influencers. Much more than I thought.
It does seem that there are some patterns emerging though:
Influencers are particularly useful for global brands entering new markets. I imagine that is to do with trust and the ability to test something out with a group of influencers to see if there is some traction before launching an expensive national campaign.
Trust and Control. Earlier in the session there was a lot of negativity around Programmatic buying. Maybe it’s a case of once bitten twice shy. They want to know exactly WHO these influencers are not just buy blind numbers. And keeping a tight ‘lens’ on all content is imperative.
The tension between in-house and agency resource is no different with influencers. Brands will use agencies in a pinch but would prefer to use in-house if the numbers make sense.
One other thing struck me. I’m currently reading a book called ‘Becoming Wise’ by Krista Tippett, in it there is a chapter on Faith. She does a great job of divorcing the idea of faith from religiousness. Often we hear marketing likened to sporting metaphors, or sometimes military, maybe construction, but as I was reading on the subway and thinking about what these CMOs said about influencers it seemed like it was about faith and the fun of it not being an exact science.
A Socrates quote from the book:
‘I’m wiser than everyone else because I know I don’t know.’
And the Vatican astronomer (cool job! cool name!) Brother Guy Consolmagno:
‘ The awareness that we don’t know. If we had all the answers , boy, we’d have nothing left to do. It’d be a terrible universe.’
So perhaps influencer marketing is all about having a little faith? In a world that is fixated with performance marketing, facebook and google buys, influencers are a role of the dice. I have a hunch that most great CMOs like rolling the dice. They don’t want to know what the outcome is going to be every time, because a) that will only lead to marginal gains, but b) how boring is that?
Thanks again to Rich Greenfield for hosting and our fantastic speakers. Listen to the whole session here. Subscribe to Builders here. And find out what’s going on at Betaworks Studios here. Why? Because if you had all the answers, that would be a terrible universe.
