Agencies strive to bring order to the chaos of the creator world to earn money for clients

By Michael Bürgi

This article is part of a cross-brand Digiday Media series that examines how the creator economy has evolved amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Explore the full series here.

If you build it, they will come.

The famous line from Field of Dreams applies pretty perfectly to the need for data and quantification when it comes to agencies investing clients’ dollars into the burgeoning world of creators and influencers. The flow of ad dollars will jump up to more than $4 billion this year, as three out of four marketers plan to use influencers in their marketing efforts.

The relationship between creators and the agencies that negotiate how to fold their talent into clients’ marketing efforts is maturing. Fading fast are the days when fistfuls of dollars were handed over — guided mostly by hunch — to see how influential marketing would perform. Agencies, and their clients, want data that demonstrates the impact of creators.

This trend has grown up alongside other industry truths: creators have more sway as the platforms they occupy have also grown in terms of audiences. From Snap and Tik Tok to Meta’s variety of copycat products that mimic them (Instagram Reels, for example) — to even YouTube’s generous revenue share with creators — this cohort’s clout is no longer subject to debate. And agencies have stepped up their expertise in these areas, from Horizon Media’s Blue Hour Studios (which in mid-April announced the creation of an upfront market of sorts for influences, called the Infront) to shops like CreatorIQ.

“Creator content at its basic element is creative, so once we took the stigma off of it of being influencer content and just thought of it as creative, we were able to then unlock all the different methods of measuring creative and just apply that to the influencer space,” said Monika Ratner, vp of content marketing and business development at Blue Hour Studios.

The agency is doing full-funnel influencer campaigns that are “really outperforming traditional creative in a lot of ways,” Ratner said, adding that creator content has performed well in a variety of areas, including media mix model driving awareness, ROI, signups, and e-commerce sales.

The creator space is only predicted to expand, particularly with Gen Z — a cohort that has grown up with digital devices at their fingertips.

“Creators selling merchandise, or doing advertisements for fans, are just a lot more engaging and lot more authentic versus a display ad, and Gen Z’s brains are just attuned to ignoring those ads,” said Borui Wang, CEO of Polarr, a photo-sharing operation that helps creators make their content. “[Agencies are] all trying to help brands connect with a wide catalog of creators. We’ve seen that exploding.”

In this growth period, Wang has observed agencies focusing less on creators with millions of followers in favor of using comparatively cheaper creators with smaller followings who — theoretically — have a stronger and more trustworthy connection with each of their followers.

The problem is, it’s far more laborious to work with …read more

Source:: Digiday