Village Marketing founder Vickie Segar predicts shifts in influencer marketing, other trends after WPP acquisition

By Kristina Monllos

With the rise of platforms like TikTok as well as the burgeoning importance of social commerce, marketers and agency execs are looking to influencers more and more. It’s no surprise then that an agency holding company like WPP would look to acquire an influencer agency like Village Marketing as the company did so late last month.

Digiday caught up with Village Marketing founder and influencer marketing expert Vickie Segar to learn more about the acquisition as well as the state of influencer marketing and social commerce.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Village Marketing was recently acquired by WPP to become a division of Wunderman Thompson. What does that actually mean for the agency?

Village is a full-funnel influencer shop. That means that we build brands and we drive growth, we do all of it. So first and foremost, finding an agency that aligned with our vision and that saw where Village fit within it was crucial. What does that mean for the agency? It means that we get to be a part of a broader platform, but we also still get to be Village. We’re [now] a division of Wonderman Thompson, which means that we are running the influencer marketing division, which previously hasn’t existed and we get to work with the different arms of Wonderman while also maintaining the work that we’re doing and the vision that we have just within the broader platform. That’s gonna help us achieve the global scale.

There are a number of influencer marketing agencies that brands often work with for influencer marketing rather than traditional creative shops. Why is that?

Influencer marketing has traditionally been very siloed. We really haven’t seen influencer marketing fully integrated into a broader agency the right way at scale. [Village Marketing becoming a division of Wonderman Thompson] is a huge signal [that influencer marketing is becoming less siloed]. What this signals is [that] not only is influencer marketing no longer meant to be a siloed part of your media mix or your creative approach but that broader creative agencies are going to start to figure out how to integrate influencer marketing in a different way into full plans. That’s a huge shift from what’s traditionally been happening. Even when creative agencies have an influencer division, it has almost always been an add-on. We haven’t seen strong integration of an influencer shop. We’re now gonna see that. And I think we’re gonna continue to see it over the next year.

Do you see a shift in the perception of influencer marketing overall?

Influencer marketing has traditionally been looked at as media. Or even worse, it’s been looked at as just [communications]. It is so much more than that. As influencer marketing becomes a channel for commerce, meaning that you will be able to shop brands all the way through the entire funnel on Instagram and on TikTok, that is now going to change the way that we think about social media and creator marketing in …read more

Source:: Digiday