What if marketers, by viewing influencers merely as a short-term sell, have been overlooking their real brand-building potential? Andrew Tindall excitedly dissects research that will change how you think about social media’s role in the media mix.
For 10 years, marketing’s been a ship without a rudder drifting wherever the latest algorithm blows.
Every few months, another platform promises to reinvent brand-building. It takes years for the truth to come out; they often only sell shoes to people already halfway to the checkout.
With this in mind, it is clear that there has not been a convincing playbook for how to build a brand online.
Until now.
At this morning’s IPA Effectiveness Conference, WPP’s Jane Christian dropped the most important digital marketing finding in the past decade: creators are digital’s first true brand-building channel. Not via the usual “they’re authentic” guff we’ve been fed for years, but in hard econometric terms that should make any CFO weak at the knees.
We finally know how to use creators
Analysis led by the IPA has combined 220 econometric studies across £133m of creator spend, covering 28 markets, 36 categories, and 144 brands. It treats creators like a media channel for the first time, building on WPP’s award-winning £2bn econometric channel analysis in Profit Ability 2.0.
It found that creators roughly return the same return on investment in the short term to TV. For every dollar you put into creators, you get about the average amount back within 13 weeks. Better than general paid social. Although it’s still a small new channel.
The real kicker is when you look at the long-term lasting returns, creators blow all channels out of the water. Over two years, they deliver the highest total ROI of any channel. The largest long-term media multiplier, a measure of how good a channel is at brand-building.
Creators are the first digital channel with clear and massive lasting advertising effects. No one has been talking about this until now.
The time for intervention is now
Les Binet’s new IPA research, Go Big or Go Home, also released today, shows media ROI increasing 4% since 2018, but incremental profit down 11%. As I shared last week, we’ve never spent more on advertising, and it’s never done less.
Marketers recognized that eyeballs moved to phones (with phones now getting more attention than TV sets) and chased it with media cash. The issue is that most social and digital media is fleeting and struggles to create a lasting brand impact. It’s only when you pause to review this new Newsworks chart that we realise just how far we’ve drifted.
Brand builders, not salesmen
The devil is in the details here, though, as there are a few caveats that must inform our strategies moving forward. Looking at the short-term ROI of creators, there are plenty of other channels that can return you cash in 13 weeks. Stop briefing creators to land your latest news and sell your wares. Even if the data shows they are slightly better than general paid social at it.
We’ve been measuring and judging creators wrong this whole time.
Remember when that Snoop Dogg campaign got Solo Stove’s CEO fired after a couple of weeks? What would have happened if they judged the campaign over a long enough window?
If you judge creators for long-term effects, you get more dollars back than any other channel. This doesn’t mean we should cancel on TV yet, as it still generates the most long-term ad ROI for brands, and creators just 6.2%. But this is an opportunity for early movers to get creators right and scale their use.
The opportunity becomes even clearer when you compare the long-term multiplier of creators v other channels.
You may find this too hard to believe, despite this research not being funded by a digital platform. But all new analyses from different datasets are saying the same thing. In my research with System1 and Effie’s global case library studying $140bn of marketing campaigns and analyzing which media touchpoint impacts brand-building effects, I also found that creators are the strongest touchpoint in leading to long-term brand effects. I was nervous about releasing that chart when I first saw it, but now it feels obvious. This shows how quickly the industry is changing.
Creators not influencers
You’ll notice that I have refused to call them “influencers,” despite the research and charts calling them that.
This is because I don’t believe creators know how to influence people. They haven’t studied marketing, done Mark Ritson’s MiniMBA or read Thinking Fast and Slow. But they have a deep knowledge of the platforms they are on and their audience.
Marketers need to decide the creative and media strategy and let creators adapt the ideas for their channels and create. We’ve been giving them too much say in things. You can see this clearly in this new mega research, as Jane Christian is truly one of the brightest stars in media right now.
Currently, expecting creator campaign success can feel like buying a lottery ticket, while, in contrast, TV can feel like a safe bet. The distribution of amazing to terrible campaigns is wild.
Trained marketers will assume the fix is the right boosting strategy, quality and CPM, reach and spend levels and length of campaign. That would be true if we’d cracked how to execute creator campaigns properly, but we clearly haven’t. We’ve let “influencers” have their way to the point where there’s no relationship between these media factors and outcomes. You could spend £700,000 and literally lose half of it.
Enter creativity and big ideas
I wager this is because of creative quality. In fact, I don’t wager; my research with Josh Fruttiger, System1 and TikTok (The Long and the Short (Form) of it) shows creative quality has a dramatic impact on the brand-building power of short-form campaigns. With emotional distinctive creator ads uniquely growing brands of any size v adapted TVCs. Again, different data sets agreeing.
This explains why we aren’t seeing these repeated guaranteed results; the creative quality when we let “influencers” crack on is too varied. System1 testing shows creative variance for creator content v edited TVCs put on to short-form is almost double.
With the most obvious issue that creators refuse to brand early despite piles of evidence that this seriously improves impact. Who can blame them, though? They aren’t marketers!
Don’t act surprised.
We’ve been picking “influencers” at random for each campaign. Letting them make whatever content they like, ignoring what’s going on in other channels. And letting them brand when and how they want. It’s the opposite of what we know is creative effectiveness best practice.
For an industry that appears to feel like it’s losing its purpose, this is the digital lifeline no one expected. It’s time to put our big marketing pants on and get to work. Marketers and agencies to bring their brand-building expertise into the creator world, treating them as part of the mix for our big ideas. Just like we would all channels. And holding them responsible like we do all channels.
And refreshingly, it’s nothing new. Marketers must lead the process, understanding the business and marketing strategy. We must develop a creative platform to deliver upon that. Understanding what that idea looks like in each channel. And how we can be distinctive (early enough) in each channel without damaging the emotional appeal. Only then do we approach creators to create. If you skip all that, then you outsource your job to an “influencer” for an easy life – minus the results.
It’s astounding the meticulous level of feedback we are happy to give creative agencies, time and time again. Why then is it that when we see an unbranded creator asset, we wave it through?
Instead, we should treat creators like a brand-building channel. Treat it like the rest of your advertising choices. Get distinct, emotionally consistent content to reach the audience it deserves through proper planning. And you just might see consistent brand growth.
This all sounds rather like TV advertising, doesn’t it?
You’ll be able to sign up to watch and download the new research on the IPA website in about a week.
Get in touch with Andrew on LinkedIn.
Read more opinion on The Drum.