Ad Tech Is Giving Influencer Campaigns a Programmatic Boost
Technology helps automate and cut down lengthy processes
Microinfluencers, meanwhile, are more amenable to make the shift from paying for content to paying for quantifiable performance.
While Forest declined to share much about rates for the roughly 5 million content creators on his platform, a recent survey from influencer marketing hub Tribe found that 97% of these small-scale influencers charge less than $500 per sponsored Instagram post while 84% charge $250 or less.
Automating authenticity
Regardless of the metric a particular brand is searching for, authenticity is paramount.
“Our M.O. a lot of the time is to give guidelines for a creator [that] they should do shout-outs or giveaways, but how they ultimately do it is really up to them,” Damiano said. Even at scale, he added, “the key is not to hand out a script and tell a bunch of influencers to do that. The audience sees right through it, and it ends up doing a lot more harm than good.”
When influencers lend their stamp of approval to a particular product, brands can reap big rewards. A 2019 study from Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten found that roughly three-fourths of global consumers would spend up to $629 on an influencer-approved purchase, with the lion’s share (42%) saying they’d spend up to $100 on one product.
Brand-centric programmatic platform Spaceback allows marketers to upload an influencer’s public Instagram posts and receive an ad tag in return, turning each of these posts into stand-alone ads for their own programmatic campaigns, complete with likes and comments that update in real time. Brands that previously spent weeks trying to recreate a particular Instagram post can now take their ads to market in a matter of minutes, according to Spaceback CEO Casey Saran.
“It’s not only about preserving that look and feel, but it’s also about preserving that engagement,” said Saran. “It can really let people choose their own adventure on how they want to engage instead of just stuffing them into a purchase funnel.”
Authenticity aside, platforms like Saran’s have another added bonus: the power to programmatically pull the hard numbers behind a campaign.
“Back in the olden days of Instagram, if you wanted to know, say, how many people saw an Instagram story, you’d need the influencer to screenshot how many people saw it,” Wiley explained. “Now we’re able to get all sorts of data automatically, which really helps take some time off of our hands.”
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watched the Super Bowl this year. But 50 million people tune in to watch the Macy’s parade on NBC. (For younger viewers who don’t know what a TV set is, Verizon does a 360-degree livestream on YouTube, which adds plenty more.)
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