Facing audience fragmentation, decreasing organic reach on social media platforms, brand safety concerns, and even ad blocker impact on display, publishers are continuously exploring new ways to effectively reach audiences, enhance engagement and diversify revenues.
Publishers and broadcasters sit at crossroads between advertising, content creation and audience engagement. This makes them perfectly positioned to enable influencer marketing campaigns. Just like any other consumer brand, they’re seeking ways to reach consumers in more native ways to be as credible and relevant to their audiences as possible.
But what makes influencer marketing even more attractive to publishers is that they already have the data and know their audience demographics as well as interests to create content that works. In that regard, publishers have shown an increasing interest in content studios, which develop branded content for marketers that can reside on the publisher’s owned sites, as well as be distributed across other digital platforms.
The New York Times acquired HelloSociety back in 2016, a digital marketing agency, to augment its branded content arm, quickly ramping up the influencer capabilities that it can offer to its own advertisers; while Time Inc. partnered with YouTube fashion network StyleHaul.
Times CEO Mark Thompson said T Brand Studio will lay the foundation of what the brand will do in the social space going forward, including some experiments with influencer marketing, for both Times Inc. and its clients:
“We now want to accelerate T Brand’s development and broaden the range of creative and marketing services that we offer clients from content ideation and creation to distribution,” Thompson said.
Influencers can efficiently bring creative concepts to life, adding insights and producing original text, photo or video content that can be shared through their networks but also leveraged across both publisher’s and advertiser’s platforms.
Example: Complex Media & Mountain Dew create Green Label [Influencer Activation through Youtube]
Take Green Label, an established digital lifestyle brand created by Mountain Dew and Complex Media as an example. They turned to Epic Signal to create their very own multi-channel network. Their goal? Driving video views, and building awareness of Mountain Dew as a content brand and destination on Youtube. And to accomplish that, they signed an exclusive roster of talents to multi-year endorsement contracts. “We’re paying them upwards of six figures,” Epic Signal’s managing director Hallie Harris said of the talent inside Green Label’s MCN. “We want to make sure we can use them not just as a distribution partner but also as creative and production partners.”
If you think that’s money wasted, think again! In less than a year, the MCN has generated:
The Green Label MCN has paved the way for how brands and publishers should work together with digital influencers and has created a sustainable advertising platform for Mountain Dew to engage millennials and generate revenue for years to come.
The creators produce branded content around impactful moments for the brand, focusing primarily on sports, music and male lifestyle (Super Bowl, Dew Tour, etc.).
A well chosen influencer will provide instantaneous relevance and increased credibility within a targeted group, which will reflect on both the publisher and the brand involved.
Example: Galore.com [Influencer activation through Instagram] Galore, a media company that also owns a talent agency called Kitten, enrolls its influencers into creating video series, hosting events, and serving as raw material for stories and content written and produced by a small team of staff writers.
The founders, Prince Chenoa and Jacob Dekat, a creative director and photographer duo, oversee editorial content, as well as sign talent to its in-house influencer agency Kitten. For instance, they manage curvy model Dounia Tazi who models with Kitten and is the host of an editorial video series called ‘Dounia Debunks’ for Galore. com. The publisher also worked with Tazi to star in ad campaigns for lingerie brand Adore Me.
Mike Albanese, Galore’s CEO, explained that the publisher’s target readers are 16 to 26 year-old multicultural women: ‘‘In the peer-to- peer world of our audience, we are an outlet for them to create with — whether that is editorial or branded content’’. In fact, most of Galore’s influencer pool also happen to be fans and readers of the publication.
The creators that appear on Galore and Kitten have an audience that reaches 40 million people across Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. Brands including L’Oreal, Guess and Buffalo Jeans have signed on to do branded content
Carefully selecting influencers also means that publishers are most likely to reach their target audiences through the influencer’s blog or social media channels. That immediately amplifies content and provides a greater platform to engage and monetize audiences.
Example: Disney Digital Network [Influencer Activation through Pinterest]
To create awareness for littleBits products and generate creative uses of the range and gift ideas, Disney Digital Networks partnered with Pinterest influencers to pin 6-8 pins from the littleBits Pinterest board into their own gift ideas board.
Pinterest allows users to create collections of images or articles from around the web in ‘boards’ specific to a research topic or area of interest. For example, an article about the London Marathon can appear on different boards relevant to each user, from general fitness boards to someone else’s board for New Year’s Resolutions.
In this specific case, Disney was able to use Pinterest influencers to reach 10 million people, and generate social engagements of 78K and 3.4 million total Facebook views.
The Eh Bee family created content around littleBits that was shared through their social media channels of over 7 million combined subscribers
“Great content doesn’t just come from within our walls. We’ve found a way to tap into the best of [user-generated content] while still being very careful to own and curate our brands.” Regina Buckley, Time Inc.’s senior vp of digital business development
Thought leadership can be nurtured in two ways:
First and through a publisher’s internal staff. They too can become effective influencers for brands given their association with the publisher.
Second, the publisher can use a network of external contributors or a speaker’s bureau to create and distribute content that’s aligned with their editorial DNA.
Example: Forbes [Influencer Activation through own platform]
Forbes’ BrandVoice program allows brands and individuals to reach the publication’s massive audience with their own content via Forbes.com and Forbes’ social channels. The program doesn’t come free of charge and has been running for more than 8 years now.
Essentially, the platform allows content marketers to become influencers themselves. They’re vetted and are required to create a certain number of pieces a month. This content is often paired with promotion and the guaranteed impressions through Forbes ensure that campaigns are successful from all sides.
Forbes took it a step even further and got people to pay the publication to become influencers through their own platform.
