Superstar Session: Influencer Marketing Sucks (and Some Best Practices)

[Music] alright hey guys my name is Tim I'm the CEO and co-founder of jet fuel we if you don't know what we do we do paper result influencer marketing or in the context of mobile apps we do pay per install influencer marketing and it's probably spent the last two or three years of our life trying to figure out influencer marketing and a big take away from it was influencer marketing kind of sucks which is that the purpose of my talk as well as some best practices so after taking probably well let's let's start with a question of the people in the room how many of you have tried to do your own sort of in-house influencer marketing efforts right and then keep your hand up if you would say that it went well okay and then let me let me

let me kind of dive into that a little more and actually define what I mean by well keep your hand up if you it has become a significant part of your overall user acquisition spend we got maybe two or three people we started with about half the room which i think is pretty common right so to give a little bit of background we started as an app development team to introduce myself as well as a company where a group of X Facebook people I myself was on the instagrams I sort of claim to fame there was immediate boomerang which is the forward backwards looping video app which tends to be somewhat controversial so for some people you're welcome for other people I'm sorry we we joined up at some point we decided that we wanted to try going out on our own and we want we've launched about 20 apps together one thing I would say if you're here you probably came to the same conclusion that we did which is that distribution is very important in this day and age I think we were kind of disillusioned by Kevin or Mike's Instagram story of you know they put an app on the App Store and woke up the next morning with 10,000

installs that was not the case for us we would spend a lot of time making these apps and put them on the App Store and it was just crickets no one would discover them so we as many of you probably did and it's actually very well established and known in the gaming industry you need to figure out distribution which kind of led us into influencer marketing we heard some good stories before we get into that you can see the color at all anyway whatever there's color in this before we get into that I want to define what we what what we think about when we talk about what we'd call a successful marketing campaign which is kind of like or influencer marketing in this context uh is it ry+ that's obvious if it's not bringing revenue you're not gonna do it does the ROI justify the time spent this is this one in the next one is kind of what gets thorny or with influencer marketing is that sometimes you can get it all right positive but because it's so manual and there's so much back-and-forth relative to other things like Google or Facebook which you can just kind of effortlessly scale it ends up being just not something your user acquisition team prioritizes by many when it doesn't scale which again is very difficult to achieve and influencer

marketing so this is what I would define is the traditional model of influencer marketing and and this is where we started and where I'm guessing most of you started and what most people do the the biggest part of it the biggest in sort of thing that people focus on is finding the right influencers and and it's all about selecting the right people to match your game or that match your your brand then once you've found them you typically go out you manually negotiate rates you schedule posts and you send payment this is all kind of done via chat platforms and then the big thing that underlies all of it isn't typically a paper post model I have a lot of complaints with with this as I hope or I would guess many of you do as well I'm gonna roughly bucket them into two two segments the first one is that communication is really hard this is becoming less of a problem but at least when we started there was not a good way to discover influencers to find people that could actually do anything or at you know that had followings which amazingly like none of the major platforms support any sort of thing like this there's now this proliferation of

these kind of like influencer or CRM and discovery tools does anyone here work for one of those or has started one of those no okay then at least starting about three years ago when we started getting into this there was nothing that we were particularly happy with in the market the other thing is in particularly I'm by the way for the sake of this conversation of component on Instagram but a lot of these things apply across it's very hard to get in touch with people so amazingly still on Instagram kind of the state of the art in the best way to get in touch with people is just to slide in through their dams and hope for the best probably some fraction of influencers have emails attached to the thing but we find that influencers tend to be younger often high school or college kids and they aren't using email so still our best channel for getting in touch with people is just damming them which you know a lot of these people have hundreds of thousands millions so there in boxes just full of all sorts of garbage from their fans and I say when we send about a hundred of these we'd be lucky to get about 15 to 20 back in any sort of reasonable timeframe the other thing is this so as he wouldn't seen this screen no okay what if you see the

screen that means you're doing it right if you actually try to scale the amount of people you're reaching out to on Instagram Instagram will block you right which is actually an important thing that we did it Instagram to prevent spam which is part of the why there isn't a lot of spam happening in the interim DMS but if you're actually trying to scale in for this campaign this is really frustrating so our kind of influencer onboarding wraps have to go all sorts of crazy stuff like a lot of them will have like five to ten different interim counsel it'll switch between and go to the limit until they get this limp braids limit and then go to another one so anyway that's very frustrating this is a great so the other thing is even after you've established communications so you see in this kind of screenshot I'm now in telegram so I actually have a direct line of communication with this person it can be very slow and you can actually get no response even after you work with them again because a lot of these people tend to be younger right so this is a great conversation is an actual conversation I had with someone this is like a major partner of ours someone that we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with and I was like hey can I get a post up in the next few hours etc etc didn't reply me message me back

about an hour later and say hey it's a bit time-sensitive can you let me know and then didn't get a response message back about an hour later and said okay didn't hear from you I'm gonna have to go with a different influencer can you go ahead and refund that payment and about half an hour after that he said oh hey sorry I was at basketball practice right which is kind of indicative of like a lot of these people are incredibly young and what we would I guess assume as a professional they don't like for many of them it's not a job they're still in school or they still have another job and it's kind of their side thing so if you're trying to operate normal business hours it can be very difficult the other thing that is probably the worst part is that Hughes only variable outcomes and I'll boil that down to this thing which is that pricing is still mostly based on the number of followers which isn't sort of an inherently bad concept but it ends up being bad for a couple reasons particularly on most of the social platforms the the obvious thing is just a huge amount of fake followers in views so I googled earlier this week at Google by Instagram followers and within a second you can find a place where you can buy a ton of followers at a very low

price and is very common behavior the other thing that that is even more frustrating is that when you're trying to do advertising is that we most social platforms now are governed by some sort of newsfeed ranking algorithm which is actually generally a good thing for the customer experience but if you're trying to use it for advertising can be frustrating so this is another screenshot of one of our accounts where this is an account with over a million followers is very popular page I post kind of funny videos from around the internet and you'll see that kind of around the perimeter we have native content or actual content that they're posting and then the the top center one is an ad and this account which routinely is putting up hundreds of thousands of views on content when the ad gets posted it only gets about a thousand views and this because these algorithms look at things like watch time and how many people are liking it and how many people are commenting on it and ads tend to do poorly on that relative to to native content this is a fun kind of anecdote so one thing that that Instagram is testing the outcome of

these two bits is that basically a lot of influencers are massively massively overcharging for the value that they're actually delivering a fun anecdote to add on to that one thing that Instagram is testing right now is this paid concert sponsored thing where if you're doing a sponsored post you have to tag the sponsor which is great for us because when an influencer this influencer is posting about Volvo and his tagged Volvo when when when an influencer does that the advertiser gets analytics on how the post actually does so you'll be able to see how many impressions of god as well as how many likes and comments at got which is really great I've recently got coffee with VP of Facebook that oversees the ad products and I was asking about this and among other things I was like why isn't this out yet and part of the reason it's not the only reason there's a couple couple problems but part of the reason why they haven't rolled this out yet is because they have a lot of creators on their platform that they know are charging way too much and they're worried that if they give the advertiser access to that information it'll hurt their influencers because they won't be able to charge as much basically so they're kind of worried

that like particularly in light of like other social platforms emerging they don't want to take away their top creators income and that they're worried if they actually give the truth about how few impressions a lot of these ads are getting that that'll kind of dry up which is bummer on alright so let's go back to that that sort of framework that I introduced first in the traditional model which is a thing that's kind of paper Post of like manually finding influencers and putting a big influence on selecting the correct influencers asking same three questions is it alright positive and the answer is maybe sometimes it is sometimes it isn't in a lot of cases we would see kind of like all right like Omo like we'd see something that did really well and then we have a bunch of other ones that didn't do well so we can we could tell that there was some opportunity here but we weren't we weren't able to consistently or consistently reproduce it does the ROI justify the time spent I would say almost absolutely not this is an incredibly manual process that ends up taking a lot of time and even when you are able to get good ROI it's rarely really worth the time spent and then the final question is does it scale and again like kind of absolutely not like

unless you're gonna unless you're able to put together a media buying team of like hundreds of people it's very difficult to achieve any sort of remote scale with this method the same way you can with something like a Google or a Facebook right so what we've what we ended up doing after kind of failing and having moderate success with this for a while is we're not totally flipping the model and coming up with a new model for influence and marketing that that I would kind of advocate for and and encourage you all to try or try with us which is that being an app development team we built an app and this is kind of what it looks like but the general idea here is that we want our offers we want to build a destination for influencers to get offers and we want them to come to us to promote things rather than vice-versa so this is kind of what looks like I'll run you through all of it kind of piece by piece but the most important thing is that we track everything everything is going through some sort of MMP tracking link so we're actually measuring for every post that an influencer does how many installs they're generating so it's not just like a paper post model where you don't really know what you're getting everything is tracked and they only get

credit for four installs that come through their link the other thing is we pay people per install so it's not per post they're actually only get compensated if they if they deliver installs the other thing that we've done really nicely is we make it incredibly easy for them so influencers are used to being attached approached by advertisers and then having a ton of back-and-forth we make them in this interface we actually produce ads for them so in many cases they don't even have to create any sort of creative they can just come in grab one of these things post it on their story put in the link put in their interim feed and they're making money right so it's incredibly easy and fast for them and then the kind of biggest part is that it's self-serve so instead of us having to go push our campaigns onto influencers the influencer has actually come to us and can kind of run whenever they want and as much as they want so kind of comparing and contrasting it the traditional model has a huge focus on finding the right or correct influencers then there's an incredibly manual part

of negotiating rates and actually going back and forth and it's paper post model in our model any influencer can promote so instead of trying to find people you just make your offer accessible to everyone and let whoever wants pick it up and run it there's no inner commuter community individual communication in many cases you actually don't know who's running it or where they're running it and it's a pay per install rather than the pay per post so a few of these things in particularly the top two you in our model can be a little bit scary for an advertiser because you are seating some amount of control you don't necessarily know who's running it or where they're running in but we think that the kind of the kind of benefits of it strongly outweigh that and to go back to that sort of success metrics is it all right positive the answer is a hundred percent yes because you're basically bidding what you know that you can afford for your app so you'll set that you know I'll pay an influencer or fifty cents or a dollar for every install they generated and provided that you understand the economics of your game or your app you basically guaranteed I mean there's varying

downstream and one thing that we've kind of added as time has gone on is that we will automatically adjust people's payout up and down depending on the value of the users that they're generating but almost guaranteed to be re positive does the ROI justify the time so and again I would say absolutely yes we have campaigns going back to the you know we started and have developed eeeem we have campaigns that have been running for two years that we haven't looked at and they're just delivering profitable users on the back burner and we don't have to do any sort of any sort of management or anything that we basically just set bids that we know are economically profitable and influencer marketing is just happening without as touching it at all which is pretty for most people that do influence or stuff that's that should that should seem really refreshing because for us at least there was a lot of very manual kind of tough communications and then does it scale again I would say this is yes it's really a function of how good the offer is but we see that when an offer comes in that that influences are excited about that actually pays them a lot so most influences have some amount that they want to make on a per Post basis if when you have something that's paying on

a per install basis that exceeds the amount that they expect they get really excited about it and we'll see influencers running it again and again and again over weeks and then also sometimes multiple times per day there's also a very tightly there's a very tight network of influencers they many of them know each other or work together so if someone comes in and runs an offer and is very happy with the amount that they've got paid they will typically tell other influencers so sometimes we see these effects where like all of a sudden like thousands of influences across the internet are promoting given offer because board has kind of gotten out that this is this is something that works or this is something that you can get paid really nicely for so yeah I'd say that we've been able to unlock scale and influencer marketing in a way that very few other people have done besides like maybe like the Kardashians or something if you can afford to work with them but we're able to basically scale campaigns across thousands and thousands of influencer accounts which is not something that is kind of previously possible cool yeah so I would recommend you do this if it can

be kind of difficult if you don't want to build it yourself you can just work with us and we'll do it for you yeah I'll land on questions cool any questions can take a question okay cool yep hi what's the between you and fame bit oh that's an interesting question yeah they're in the UK right they're here they don't do this my understanding is fame famebit is largely at the moment last time I heard from them they were focused on kind of like music campaigns are you do you work at fame bit okay my understanding is that they'd kind of moved away from the CPI stuff and we're more focused on working with like record labels to promote new artists and songs interestingly when we started the company we would run into them and they were doing something similar but I haven't heard from our scene their stuff in a while so I don't really know what's going on with them so I guess that I don't really know most of your

influencers based what where are most of your influencers play us the audiences of us oh yeah I mean it's interesting question they're kind of all over the world honestly mostly us-based there's also a pretty big contingent in the UK all right cool really I'd say no questions but yeah if you have question if it's a mature show you can find him around the event he's also on another panel later on so you can find him there so thank you so much Tim you you [Music]