I think we've all seen enough of these stories to know that influencers take the piss etc etc - and articles like this always get coverage because we love to be outraged, but I don't know why more businesses haven't adapted.
My brother works for a brewery - they often get influencers asking for free beer. They respond - "yeah absolutely, of course. Pay for this order, here's a code to give to your followers. When we've covered the costs of your order we'll refund it and send you some extra stuff."
Some people take them up on it, others don't. Which I assume separates the wheat from the chaff.
In Sweden, influencer deals have been deemed as exchange of services by the tax authorities. In the example above the influencer has taken payment for rendered services in the form of goods. If there isn’t a corporate entity formed, that’s getting taxed as income.
An influencer sending a cold email asking for free cake seems pretty analogous to a company like Yelp making a cold call looking to sign up a restaurant for premium features. Or in decades past the Yellow Pages reaching out to local businesses to sell ad space.
I suppose the difference is that traditional advertisers are looking to be paid in money, while influencers are often looking to be paid in free goods and services. Also, while I have never dealt with an influencer personally, it sounds like many of them may come across as unprofessional or lacking courteousness (to be fair, many traditional salespeople do too). It's a seemingly glamorous career with a low bar to entry, which probably attracts a fair amount of hacks.
I would have to imagine that the most successful influencers out there do tend to favor monetary transactions, and can afford to hire dedicated sales people to handle their business dealings.
Outside of certain niche areas, there doesn't seem to be any real evidence of "influencers" having measurable impact on sales.
The strongest areas where they can make a difference is in makeup, styling products, and some fashion brands, but you really have to look hard at the demographics in order to figure out if your products are going to fit in the market that the "influencer" is catering to.
Influencers seem to work well in their own niches. Gamers can influence other gamers to buy gaming tech. Computer people can influence people to buy computer services.
But that's because they attract the right market. If you're watching a gaming video the chances are you're at least theoretically interested in gaming technology.
No, marketing is doing this for decades, it definetly works. The overall problem is more that most Influencers are laymen with no clue about proper marketing, and so are the people who fall to their ploy.
Influencers can have significant impact on sales in every area, if they wield their fame rightful. The real problem is that most influencers are only fame for themself, their personality, the entertainment they offer, but hardly for their expertise in any specific area. So the crowd they gather is to diversified to be useful for a specific product, outside of generic stuff.
But you see the effects more clearly when you look at tech, gaming or weeb-stuff, where people who are fame for their general expertise or specific expertise in some game, tech or weeb-area.
It honestly scares me to hear my nieces and nephews, all around the 10 year old mark, talking about aspiring for internet fame more (and in some cases exclusively) than any other actual profession or healthy aspiration.
And the education and affluency of the family has no bearing on this, which scares me even more. That this need for wide audience social acceptance is so ingrained in humans that no matter the nurturing environment that the kids grow up in, they will still heavily latch onto this as anything worth aspiring for.
Obviously they will not all (or even any) attempt to go this route when they grow up, yet I can't help wonder if this is closing off some part of their minds to all the other paths in life which wont get them direct public audience appreciation.
Yeah, really. I don't think young people are really doing this for free food, I think the main reason is that they want to feel appreciated and treated well for once in their lives.
Edit to add: Walking into a store and asking for free stuff because you're So Important is a power trip. It's a small chance to act like a celebrity. But just think of all the kids pinning their hopes on the slim chance of being Influencers because they don't have more promising opportunities. It's sad.
It seems like a doable side project to generate a bunch of followers with their own names, faces, posting history, and relationship graphs, even for a beginning student of ML. It wouldn't surprise me if one had already done this in order to get freebees like the ones discussed in the article.
There's probably already serious efforts to weed out such people.
The hard part isn't the ML. It's automating account creation etc without getting shut down by Twitter, Instagram, etc, all at a lower cost than the businesses who already sell social media followers at rates like $5 for 8,000 [0].
I get the feeling we are seeing the social media shake out start. The Facebook boycott was noticeable for brands that don't do well from that channel (ie the big winner in Facebook is Walmart - because facebook puts effort into tracking of a advert for an item results in that phone walking into a store and buying that item)
So unless "influencers" can drive sales (and show they can) we will see more of this :-)
Just imagine a world where you only see an advert that you are extremely likely to buy. That might be nice :-)
> Just imagine a world where you only see an advert that you are extremely likely to buy. That might be nice :-)
One way in which that scenario could arise is if advertising can effectively get you to buy whatever it's peddling, even if it's not in your interest to do so.
I fear we're somewhat there already, and that it may only get worse.
Just imagine where you can be directed to valuable high quality independent information about products you might be interested in without having to be strongarmed, manipulated, or cargo culted into spending your money on them.
> Just imagine a world where you only see an advert that you are extremely likely to buy. That might be nice :-)
Firstly, the entire Web of the past 20 years is a failed experiment for that (or success, depends on your perspective). Secondly, to really reach this goal, imagine a web with 10x more invasive tracking than today's web...
Most of the time they're not even influencers, they're "influencers"
If you've only got a few thousand followers, most of whom would also be begging for free stuff, or don't live near the restaurant you're claiming to advertise, then you're not an influencer.
They are an influencer, but they're deemed a micro-influencer. These are still an important target for marketers to hit, as often micro-influencers have a more supportive and interactive userbase.
I run a website that would appear to have a ~100k to 1 million visitors/yr if you looked it up on Alexa.
That said, the difficulty to funnel someone into clicking a link is insane and unpredictable.
Influencers may have 1M followers, but the visitors are not there for the human. They are there for the eye candy, the comment section, or information.
An advertisement is none of these. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to funnel someone who is barely interested in the content they are subscribed to, to buy something from an Ad.
But hey Nike figures out a way to turn this into profit.
I'm honestly more surprised by how few followers the influencers need to be able to do it for a living, 180,000 followers seems rather low.
The "professional" influencers likely isn't the issue, I suspect. If you're doing social media for a living, you don't care about free cake, you want money. The problem is more likely to be the wanna be influencers, with a few followers, who just want free stuff and forget that they need to pay taxes on their free stuff, and correctly label it as an ad.
I've seen a company spend as much as $80K for an influencer to make videos of its products, even though some of these videos broke 1M views very little of that engagement made it back to the sales chart.
The big view counts are because the viewers like the individual, not really because they care what product they're talking about.
Also important to remember that a “view” doesn’t mean someone watched the video at all. On a 5-10 min video they may have watched 30 seconds of it. A view is basically as worthy as a click - not much at all.
Most women these days have no clue how to bake a cake or how hard it is not to bake from a box so of course they're completely neglecting the time and work it takes to do that. Maybe somebody should try educating them about that we could call it "home economy"
The point of the article was not about the quality of the product (cakes) but about a model of small-time abuse in which she has first-time experience. She is allowed to state the situation and give an opinion.
Secondly - comparing BBC journalists to people selling personal lifestyle as a product is insulting. Journalists are in obligation do declare "opinion pieces" if they're writing them, while influencers are basically only doing opinion pieces, and have a business model of convincing manufacturers that their opinions is worth paying for. Their positive opinion is probably worth just a bit more money (yes, that's also an unsubstantiated insult, I just like to blend in with the crowd here).
If a TV station wants an interview of you in your cake shop do you say smeg off you have to pay me for my time, which might be travel, overtime, prep and the products the cast might consume?
I guess some people might. Whatever, that's up to them.
It depends on how much you value the advertising you get from it. In this particular case, the "influencers" didn't bring in any revenue, so they stopped giving out free samples to them.
I suppose you have to decide who is giving who the favour.
I don't know, businesses seeming to expect free advertisements like some in the article feels a little bit disrespectful towards influencers. it's okay not to give away stuff and i never would, but I suppose the assumption that influencers will just put your stuff into the spotlight anyhow is likely mistaken.
As far as I understand, it is the other way around: The business does not ask influencers to make advertisements in return for free cake.
No.
The influencers ask for free cake in return to make an advertisement.
I have heard this before from a befriended (fairly new and "hip") restaurant owner in Amsterdam. Weekly requests come in from influencers for free diner (Approximately €150,- per person). But they wont come alone of course.
[+] [-] iamben|5 years ago|reply
My brother works for a brewery - they often get influencers asking for free beer. They respond - "yeah absolutely, of course. Pay for this order, here's a code to give to your followers. When we've covered the costs of your order we'll refund it and send you some extra stuff."
Some people take them up on it, others don't. Which I assume separates the wheat from the chaff.
[+] [-] brtkdotse|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|5 years ago|reply
Of the people who take them up on that offer, how many manage to generate sales? How many generate enough sales to actually cover the costs?
[+] [-] freetime2|5 years ago|reply
I suppose the difference is that traditional advertisers are looking to be paid in money, while influencers are often looking to be paid in free goods and services. Also, while I have never dealt with an influencer personally, it sounds like many of them may come across as unprofessional or lacking courteousness (to be fair, many traditional salespeople do too). It's a seemingly glamorous career with a low bar to entry, which probably attracts a fair amount of hacks.
I would have to imagine that the most successful influencers out there do tend to favor monetary transactions, and can afford to hire dedicated sales people to handle their business dealings.
[+] [-] darkcha0s|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tallanvor|5 years ago|reply
The strongest areas where they can make a difference is in makeup, styling products, and some fashion brands, but you really have to look hard at the demographics in order to figure out if your products are going to fit in the market that the "influencer" is catering to.
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slightwinder|5 years ago|reply
Influencers can have significant impact on sales in every area, if they wield their fame rightful. The real problem is that most influencers are only fame for themself, their personality, the entertainment they offer, but hardly for their expertise in any specific area. So the crowd they gather is to diversified to be useful for a specific product, outside of generic stuff.
But you see the effects more clearly when you look at tech, gaming or weeb-stuff, where people who are fame for their general expertise or specific expertise in some game, tech or weeb-area.
[+] [-] netcan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrDresden|5 years ago|reply
And the education and affluency of the family has no bearing on this, which scares me even more. That this need for wide audience social acceptance is so ingrained in humans that no matter the nurturing environment that the kids grow up in, they will still heavily latch onto this as anything worth aspiring for.
Obviously they will not all (or even any) attempt to go this route when they grow up, yet I can't help wonder if this is closing off some part of their minds to all the other paths in life which wont get them direct public audience appreciation.
[+] [-] btrask|5 years ago|reply
Edit to add: Walking into a store and asking for free stuff because you're So Important is a power trip. It's a small chance to act like a celebrity. But just think of all the kids pinning their hopes on the slim chance of being Influencers because they don't have more promising opportunities. It's sad.
[+] [-] lordnacho|5 years ago|reply
There's probably already serious efforts to weed out such people.
[+] [-] dmurray|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/05/16/buying-twitter...
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
So unless "influencers" can drive sales (and show they can) we will see more of this :-)
Just imagine a world where you only see an advert that you are extremely likely to buy. That might be nice :-)
[+] [-] _Microft|5 years ago|reply
Wouldn't it be easier if they shipped it directly to your place and debited your credit card automatically? /s
[+] [-] DoofusOfDeath|5 years ago|reply
One way in which that scenario could arise is if advertising can effectively get you to buy whatever it's peddling, even if it's not in your interest to do so.
I fear we're somewhat there already, and that it may only get worse.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|5 years ago|reply
That might be nicer.
[+] [-] clouddrover|5 years ago|reply
That sounds awful.
[+] [-] segfaultbuserr|5 years ago|reply
Firstly, the entire Web of the past 20 years is a failed experiment for that (or success, depends on your perspective). Secondly, to really reach this goal, imagine a web with 10x more invasive tracking than today's web...
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|5 years ago|reply
Only for the vendor, personally I don't want to see adverts that are more likely to influence my behaviour.
[+] [-] ChrisRR|5 years ago|reply
If you've only got a few thousand followers, most of whom would also be begging for free stuff, or don't live near the restaurant you're claiming to advertise, then you're not an influencer.
[+] [-] FindMySocks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marketingPro|5 years ago|reply
That said, the difficulty to funnel someone into clicking a link is insane and unpredictable.
Influencers may have 1M followers, but the visitors are not there for the human. They are there for the eye candy, the comment section, or information.
An advertisement is none of these. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to funnel someone who is barely interested in the content they are subscribed to, to buy something from an Ad.
But hey Nike figures out a way to turn this into profit.
[+] [-] mrweasel|5 years ago|reply
The "professional" influencers likely isn't the issue, I suspect. If you're doing social media for a living, you don't care about free cake, you want money. The problem is more likely to be the wanna be influencers, with a few followers, who just want free stuff and forget that they need to pay taxes on their free stuff, and correctly label it as an ad.
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|5 years ago|reply
The big view counts are because the viewers like the individual, not really because they care what product they're talking about.
[+] [-] binarymax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|5 years ago|reply
When was the last time you or anybody you know turned on the tv or went to the cinema to view ads?
[+] [-] nix23|5 years ago|reply
https://www.instagram.com/angesdesucre/
[+] [-] freetime2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lumberingjack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_scrapping|5 years ago|reply
The point of the article was not about the quality of the product (cakes) but about a model of small-time abuse in which she has first-time experience. She is allowed to state the situation and give an opinion.
Secondly - comparing BBC journalists to people selling personal lifestyle as a product is insulting. Journalists are in obligation do declare "opinion pieces" if they're writing them, while influencers are basically only doing opinion pieces, and have a business model of convincing manufacturers that their opinions is worth paying for. Their positive opinion is probably worth just a bit more money (yes, that's also an unsubstantiated insult, I just like to blend in with the crowd here).
[+] [-] frequentnapper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomgp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|5 years ago|reply
I guess some people might. Whatever, that's up to them.
[+] [-] coopierez|5 years ago|reply
I suppose you have to decide who is giving who the favour.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lovethyneighbor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timwaagh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BozeWolf|5 years ago|reply
No.
The influencers ask for free cake in return to make an advertisement.
I have heard this before from a befriended (fairly new and "hip") restaurant owner in Amsterdam. Weekly requests come in from influencers for free diner (Approximately €150,- per person). But they wont come alone of course.