Winfluence with Jason Falls

We’ve probably over-done the conversation on this show lately about fake influencers -- at least in the context of those who fraudulently buy followers and engagement to appear more influential than they really are. But there’s another kind of fake influencer out there that is potentially more frightening than the first.

In case you aren’t aware, there is an emerging niche within influencer marketing of literally fake influencers … avatars. CGI-manufactured versions of what appear to be people. I’m not talking deep-fakes, though I’m sure that will come into play soon, too. I’m talking about photo and video realistic, computer generated people. Who companies … mostly the graphics and CGI companies themselves … build social media accounts for. 

These fictional influencers, though, carry with them non-fictional influence. A survey from a company called Fullscreen in 2019 found that over half of those surveyed, in consumers ranging from 13 to 34, over half … had purchased a product, researched a product, attended an event or followed a brand on social media thanks to the recommendation and influence of what amounts to a modern day cartoon. 

CGI influencers are a thing. LilMiquela on Instagram is a computer avatar Photoshopped into seemingly real world adventures just like a real influencer would be placed. She has over 3 million followers. The company that created her is also responsible for LilMiquela’s pal … or rival … there’s apparently a storyline I didn’t have time to suss out … but Bermuda at @bermudaisbae has 291,000 followers. 

Brandon Brown is not a CGI influencer. He is the CEO and co-founder of influencer marketing platform Grin. He and I sat down recently to talk through the idea of CGI influencers. What are the risks, the fears, the dos and don’ts? Is there a place for them? Should they be considered a part of influencer marketing for strictly entertainment or branded content?

We also talked about several other things, including Brandon’s company. Grin is different from a lot of the other influencer marketing platforms in that it’s built for a direct-to-consumer business. They integrate with e-commerce partners to allow revenue attribution and ROI to be more easily mapped for influencer programs. Ironically enough, their e-commerce and D2C focus comes from a CEO whose philosophy is that influencer marketing is focused on building trust. 

We’ve talked before about the continuum of influencer marketing philosophies and how it runs from Transactional … e-commerce … to relational … more trust focused and relationship based. Grin seems to have a nice mix of both.

Lots of interesting conversation here, but the headline of this episode is going to be our fun banter back and forth. What in the world is up with CGI influencers?

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We’re up to over 60 episodes of this podcast since it shifted to be totally focused on influence marketing and in that span we’ve talked to a lot of the executives at various influencer marketing software platforms. We asked many of them point-blank questions about how they’re dealing with influencer fraud. Most of them put on their sales hat, telling us how their proprietary thingamabob has a transverse positive quotion in the 98th percentile of whatchamajigger or some such nonsense.

When I asked Caroline Duong, the founder and CEO of Zine about fighting influencer fraud, she was surprisingly candid about it. The fact is, fighting influencer fraud is hard work. And it doesn’t stop. She told me there are probably more new ways to cheat the system being created every day than there are influencer marketing platforms. And that’s saying something.

Caroline and I chatted recently about how Zine deals with that issue, but also discussed how the company got started, what all features and services it provides and beyond. Caroline hinted at some interesting changes to come for the industry and steered me away from a rabbit hole around the recent regulatory statement by the Advertising Standards Authority, which is sort of the Federal Trade Commission in the United Kingdom, saying it’s not cool for beauty influencers to use photo filters. Seemed like overstepping to me, but she course corrected my thinking, which was nice.

Zine started in 2015 and began with a focus on bloggers and providing content creators with demographic information about their audiences. In fact, to this day if you sign up as a content creator with Zine, they give you the pleasantly perfect gift of an automated media kit. You connect your channels, answer a few questions and you get a nifty PDF you can share with potential collaborator brands to show off your audience.

Caroline and Zine are great resources for influencers and brands alike. We had a great conversation I know you’ll enjoy. 

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There are a handful of books in the market now about influencer marketing, beyond my humble entry into the space. We’ve talked to Neil Schaffer and Amanda Russel who both have books out on the topic. A few episodes back, we even spoke to the Professors -- Joyce Costello and Sevil Yesiloglu, who edited the first known college text on the topic.

Gordon Glenister has thrown his offering into the mix, now too. His book is called Influencer Marketing Strategy and in it, he sources perspectives on the topic from myself as well as other interviewees in a useful and refreshing take on the topic. The book is a very practical, how-to guide for influencer marketing strategy and execution and is well worth the read.

I invited Gordon to come on the podcast to talk about the book, but also to really dig in to talk philosophically about the industry. Gordon comes from the background of association management in the United Kingdom. He was actually the head of the British Promotional Merchandise Association when he started connecting the dots to influencer marketing.

You’ll hear some familiar themes here. He and I think alike on influencer marketing’s connection to word of mouth marketing, that it goes beyond online influencers and there’s a different in influencers and people with actual influence. 

The diagnosis he gives of the mistakes brands often make with influence marketing is spot-on. And the topic of influencer fraud surfaces as well. I ask him how much of the industry is actually committing fraudulent behavior. Good discussion around that topic, too.

Perhaps the best part of what Gordon brings to the table is his research and exploration of influencer marketing around the world. He connects those dots for us.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influencer Marketing Podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you look at what is happening with the upper echelon of social media content creators --- influencers if you will --- they’re beginning to seize opportunities to return to the older mediums. Vikrant Mathur is facilitating that return. His company Future Today partners with high-volume YouTubers and content creators to build branded apps for distribution along channels most people consume on their home televisions as opposed to mobile devices or computers. 

Think about all the apps you probably haven’t heard of on your SmartTV, Apple TV or Roku. Those apps often include ESPN, National Geographic, Netflix and content channels mainstream consumers are familiar with. But they also include apps like the custom one for Lego. Or one called Kabillion. And a food one called The Food Channel. 

Future Today has just launched new apps for these distribution networks for Pink Fong - the South Korean education channel most known for the Baby Shark song. The’ve also added a channel for YouTubers Nastya, Gabby and Alex and Ruby and Bonnie. The last one—Ruby and Bonnie—is two little girls to post videos with their cats. So these are individual content creator channels, not big media companies.

Think about that for a moment from the perspective of an influencer. They can get big enough on YouTube to launch a custom channel that appears on Roku, Apple TV or on SmartTVs all over the world? Think about it from a brand perspective. The influencers you partner with could be available in hundreds of millions of households for those incidents of longer viewing consumption, as well as on the shorter, snackable content platforms online. 

Or, like Lego, what if your brand can build its own content platform that is big enough to have that kind of direct to consumer penetration!

Vikrant and I chatted about the mechanics of it all, the opportunity and challenges for content creators and for brands and how branded content channels are a powerful mechanism to take influence to a different level ---- ironically via the good, old, trusty television.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kelsey Formost spent a decade or so in an out of movies and television. She was in a film with Zac Ephron, had a guest spot on Modern Family, was also a successful screenwriter in show business as well. Today, she’s the director of content strategy for Tagger, an end-to-end influencer marketing solution. 

It was that perspective of a successful Hollywood actress that begged me to ask her what she thought of the fame-monger, wanna-be influencers—the kind that buy followers and engagement just to get free stuff. Her response was powerful. And unexpected. It was one of many points in the discussion I found exhilarating.

Kelsey and I talked about Tagger, of course, but then dove deep into philosophical discussions around why most influencer marketing companies don't use influence marketing themselves, her place as an advocate for mental health issues, how her screenwriting experience helped her reverse engineer acting to land on personal branding and influence. It was one of those delightful conversations that will make you think, surprise. you and leave you thinking differently about the space.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The world of talent management can seem a little unsettling if you don’t understand its function. I know the first time I ever reached out to an influential person online and was passed off to an agent-type, it was kind of a turn off. But as I grew to understand the role of a talent manager — to handle the busy work of influence as a business and let the creator do what the creator does well — I realized talent manager serve a valuable function in the ecosystem.

Now, you might think that talent managers really only come with influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers. And you might think the influencer in question is going to cost a lot more money since they have to pay the people who represent them. Neither of those perceptions are necessarily true. And one talent management firm that highlights the nuances of exceptions to the perceptions is Shine Talent. 

Jess Hunichen and Emily Ward founded Shine a few years ago when the two public relations pros grew tired of pitching clients as independent consultants collaborating. They started Shine as a public relations firm, then gradually shifted to fill the gap they saw in representing the online influencers many of their clients were hoping to connect with.

Shine’s roster of talent includes a number of lifestyle influencers, so parenting, fitness, food and the like. But they aren’t all half-a-million followers and up mega-influencers. In fact, Shine has several who have less than 50,000 followers. For them, follower count isn’t the only threshold to need representation. Sometimes the talent for creating great content and the desire to grow are a part of the equation, too.

Both Jess and Emily joined me recently to talk about the various ways they advise their talent on working with brands, how they handle the issues surrounding influencer fraud and what a good brand-influencer partnership really looks like. I found it quite refreshing that there are firms out there like Shine that aren’t just looking to make a good commission and are focused on connecting the dots between brands and the audiences of the great talent they represent.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yet another signal that the influencer marketing space is growing and maturing has emerged. The practice now has its first dedicated college text. The aptly named Influencer Marketing published in November and is edited by professors Sevil Yesiloglu and Joyce Costello, both of whom originally connected as lecturers at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.

Unlike the influencer marketing books you typically find in the business section of your local bookstore or on Amazon, this text is a compilation of academic statement papers from a variety of both academicians and practitioners from all of the world. T he multiple perspectives actually bring a holistic read of the industry to the table. Frankly, I found the book to be quite useful, even beyond the context of teaching college students.

Both Yesiloglu and Costello are Europe-based college professors. Costello is also a public affairs specialist for the U.S. Army and is now based in Germany. Yesiloglu is a senior lecturer in advertising at London College of Communication at the University of Art in London. They joined me a few weeks back from their respective COVID outposts to discuss the book, their learnings and the insights they gleaned from pulling together so many different perspectives on influence marketing for the industry's first college text.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you've ever talked to an influencer at length about working with brands you inevitably hear horror stories of being asked to work several hours to create great content only to be offered free product samples as payment. That, coupled with the more insidious problem of unfair pay among races and genders and the influencer marketing industry is just screaming for some equilibrium.

Enter Lindsey Lee, a former model and workwear fashion influencer who was fed up up with brands undervaluing the contribution of influencers and content creators. She started a new site in late December called F*** You Pay Me. She calls it like a Glassdoor for influencers.

FYPM, as she refers to it for polite conversation, is an effort in transparency. Influencers review the brands they've collaborated with, including how much they were paid, what they were asked to do and how the brand was to work with. They also give their demographic information. Brand report cards then show up that reveal how they pay and behave.

Lee has safeguards built in so no influencer is outed—all reviews posted are anonymous—and no brand is unfairly railroaded. A brand's report card doesn't get unlocked until it has at least 10 reviews on the site.

The app is brand new … its minimum viable product launched in late December … it eclipsed 500 brand reviews in late February. 

Lee joined me on Winfluence to talk about the reasons behind it, who it benefits beyond just influencers and, of course, the controversial name. I even asked her if the abrasiveness of it concerned her as she thought about ways to monetize the site and potentially partner with brands.

We also talked about her insistence on having site users share their demographic data so FYPM could be a tool to help close the influencer pay gap.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What do you think of when you hear the word “empathy?” The definition of the word is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Now, some might equate empathy with psychology and touchy-feely emotional moments. But would you believe that empathy can actually drive better business results? It can even drive more successful influence marketing.

Sarah Panus is a veteran brand and social media marketer. She spent years on the digital team at Sleep Number and not long ago spun off on her own to start Kindred Speak, a brand storytelling and content marketing strategy firm. She also hosts the Marketing with Empathy podcast. 

Influence marketing is a big part of what Sarah does and we get into the nitty gritty about how brand storytelling frameworks can extend out from the brand to influencers and influence marketing. She explains how empathy can drive business metrics and results in marketing, content, influencers and … get this … even SEO. 

We also talked about the highly competitive space of mattress and bedding since she has experience in that space.

You brand and agency folks out there should take notes. Sarah has some brilliant ideas you can borrow from to build more empathetic brand content and activations. For you influencers out there, put yourself in the position of being a brand and listen to Sarah as well. She’s about to help you better define who you are and what you want out of your life as an influence.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

At Winfluence, we like to talk to people who have multiple perspectives on the influencer marketing space. Someone who is an influencer but who also does marketing consulting and understands having to select and manage other influencers for brands. Or someone on the brand side who makes those decisions, but is also an influencer for some interest of theirs. 

Kelly Olexa brings more than a couple of perspectives to the table. She is probably best known for starting Fitfluential, the first real network of fitness influencers. So in that role she was both a fitness influencer, but also a talent manager of sorts, connecting brands and agencies to the influencers in her network. She also has experience on the agency side where she was before Fitfluential, then again as an agency entrepreneur with Socially Fit services.

Now Kelly heads up sales and business development for Lumanu, an influencer marketing software company that helps influencers and the brands they partner with white list the influencer’s account with the brand. This enables the brand to put paid spend behind the influencer’s content which turns the influencer marketing channel for the brand into a paid social channel complete with targeting, look a like audiences and beyond.

We talk about the opportunity and challenges with Lumanu, her perspective on the influencer marketing space and a whole lot more.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.