Top blogger said she is ‘surprised’ no brand has ever asked for evidence of campaign reach
A leading blogger has said she has never been asked by an agency to provide hard proof of either her audience or the reach of a campaign.
Speaking at the CommsCon conference in Sydney, Sam Jockel, creator of the popular School Mum blog, said: “I am surprised no-one has ever asked me for screenshots either of who followers currently are or how a campaign did.
“It’s just me filling out a form I was sent, which I could put anything on if I wanted to.”
Speaking on a panel looking at how to track the return on investment in influencer spend, Jockel said no-one had ever asked her for a breakdown of where her audience was from, joking she could be huge in the US with only 5% of an audience in Australia.
“The question is how did that following get built to begin with,” she added. “If it was from a viral video of a puppy doing something there’s a good chance most of that audience isn’t in Australia, as something can’t really go viral here.”
Looking at how much brands should be paying for influencer content, Amy Luca, marketing director for VAMP, said brands had to remember they were buying access to a media channel, which carries a monetary value.
She added: “The real thing is the creativity factor. There is a creative product our best influencers are creating and there’s a sliding scale because of that. It performs better because it’s a creative product. That’s why we treat influencers as talent.
“The best influencers aren’t posting 10 times a week for a brand, and you’ll pay a premium for that.”
School Mum’s Jockel said: “We’re content creators, it’s not just putting a picture on Instagram it is content on our site.
“It may involve things like camping trips with families for whole weekends. We may have to spend a week or more on that content, then when you’ve got it what do you do with it? We may spend a week or month amplifying that content.
“Our average Facebook reach is 2.3m, that’s how many people watch Sunrise. How much would they pay for that?”
Alex Hayes
I smell BS. How do you get away with that?
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Thank you Pru for leading an insightful panel and my fellow panelists for a great discussion on what brands and agencies need to consider when adding an influencer marketing strategy to their marketing mix. It’s not just a media channel. It’s an opportunity to surface innovative and transformative content from professionals all the way through to grass-roots creators. The creative x-factor is the differentiator and the talent should be celebrated and compensated for their art, creativity and effort.
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BA haaaaa – just read that comment twice, what does it even mean. surface innovative and transformative content… reaching for my BS button…
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Great session and enjoyed what Amy and Sophie spoke about as it relates to identifying which content has traction with target consumers prior to a media buy but it also raises a ton of questions. How can agencies take advantage of the creativity and ideas that influencers bring to the table and more importantly for our model…how do we make money from it? What’s stopping our clients from going direct? The biggest takeaway for me was that we as an industry need to evolve much faster than our current pace.
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Err, Sam – you’ll probably find no-one’s ever asked you for any evidence of your reach, because they’ve done their research, found you, seen the amount of followers you have, taken a screen grab of your page and had the budget/ROI of using you as an influencer approved by both the agency management and the client, before you were even considered being sent the form to fill in.
I do wish people in the online space would stop considering everyone else to be only as intelligent as they are.
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Great idea Amy. Coming up with a columnist persona to pierce the bullshit of marketing jargon. You could blog on surfacing, grass roots, transformative content, influencers, x factor and buzz words. Going forward you could get real traction as an influencer in the marketing mix and bring real x factor to the table.
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Yadda Yadda.
Does anyone outside the industry really care?
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