Month: November 2019

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

As an influencer, what does your job actually entail?
It’s a weird mix of things. I’m both a writer, photographer, marketer, advertiser and my own PR. I also run my own website, so I have to deal with website issues. I do a little bit of everything. I’m spending a certain amount of time on social media per day, and I try to limit it so that I don’t get overwhelmed with all the little tasks that I need to keep doing to keep running my own business. 

Would you compare being an influencer to being a small-business owner?
I 100% feel like a small-business owner. I have to chase down invoices. I have to sign contracts that are given to me, which means I have to review contracts. I write my own contracts for some campaigns. You’re doing all sorts of things. It’s not just posting photos. Also, when I work with a brand — let’s say it’s for a specific campaign to promote a sale or a deal — I’m usually given their campaign guidelines and their brand guidelines, then I have to shoot the content or write it, send to them for approval and then actually schedule and post it on my own accounts. You’re really doing brand advertising work, so you have to follow a lot of steps to make sure everything gets done. 

What’s that dynamic like? How do you handle requests for them to retain the rights to your content?
A lot of the time if a brand reaches out to me to promote something, we’ll quickly agree to general terms. Then they’ll send the contract over. I’m creating content following their brand guidelines, but within my own creative control within my own brand because it’s my own channel and my network. It has to be a balance of both. Sometimes when they send over the contract before the work starts, it might include a clause that they get the rights to use the content I produce [in perpetuity]. If that wasn’t in the initial discussion, it can incur an extra cost. They could’ve just hired a photographer to create something for them, but when you work with an influencer, you’re theoretically getting two-in-one: You’re getting original creative content that they can use for their own marketing plus promotion to an additional outlet and network. I closely look at contracts and make sure I still retain rights that are fair for the amount of money I’m paid.

Do you go back and negotiate when you find surprises in the contracts?
You have to go back to the negotiating table. A lot of my influencer friends do the same. We all look at the contract. We are small-business owners, and we’re afraid to give away too much of our own intellectual property without being fairly compensated. I do think sometimes it’s easy to overlook, but the more active and engaged as an influencer I become, the more closely I pay attention to this stuff. I will say, there have been times where a brand has refused, but a lot of times they are happy to amend the contract. Sometimes they don’t, and then you don’t go forward. You do see that other influencers do take the deal.

Because I work in mostly travel and tourism, some of the perks are amazing, like a trip to a destination or a hotel stay. Sometimes it might just be an in-kind payment where flights, hotels, restaurants and activities might all be comped, but if they send a contract that has all rights to the content posted by X amounts of dates, that’s far too much for what they are providing me in-kind. There’s always a negotiation.

What’s your biggest pet peeve about how people view influencer marketing?
People love to make fun of influencers. The word influencer is used pretty loosely. But the most professional ones take their work very seriously. Sometimes it seems that brands don’t take the work of influencers very seriously. Or they might lump the work of influencers alongside people who aren’t really influencers but are just trying to get a free gift. I essentially see my outlet as a publication. I am producing content for that. I also have to produce ads so that I can continue to produce content. That’s how it remains sustainable. Sometimes a brand will say they only have so much budget, and if it doesn’t meet my minimum for what an ad should cost on my outlet, my publication, my channel, I would say no.

Could you give us an example of how brands might not take influencers seriously?
Brands might use micro-influencers because they charge less. Brands might be trying to get the rate that works best for them without acknowledging that the work varies from influencer to influencer. There are times where a brand may offer a flat rate for every influencer no matter what their audience is like, what their engagement is like, what their niche or specialty is. I cover LGBTQ issues and content, and really speak to a specific LGBTQ audience. It’s a valuable audience because it’s not as well represented and can be a challenge for some brands to reach LGBTQ consumers, so there’s a certain value you can attach to that. But if brands are using flat rates and not thinking about each individual influencer as their own individual business or outlet, it’s hard to make it work.

What’s your rate?
It varies. I don’t have a flat rate. Everyone now can set their own rate based on what they are able to get. But brands have reached out to me through an influencer network asking to pay a flat rate of like $150 to every influencer they were working with. That’s lower than what I would normally get. It’s clear it doesn’t matter to them what the audience is like.

So mass blasting messaging through influencers will happen with flat-rate agreements?
There are certainly more brands now that are closely looking at influencers and actually building up relationships, but there’s still plenty of mass blasting to a mass-market happening. I get those kinds of things all the time and it’s pretty easy to say no to marketing spam. There is a trend of brands looking to get more targeted outreach with influencers, but the other stuff still happens, and I don’t see it ending. It’s so easy for people to take $150 and do something quick. 

What would you want brands to understand from your perspective on how they should be dealing with influencers?
My biggest challenge is finding brands that value me and my content. I didn’t actually start my website or Instagram with the intention of it being a business. It happened organically, and that’s the case for a lot of influencers. You build up an audience and learn how to turn it into more developed content. There’s a lot of work. You’re paying for the experience and the audience. Some brands do get that. Some PRs get that. Everyone is overworked and underpaid, so I can see how people might just be trying to get quick wins at the lowest cost. But if everyone respected each other’s work a bit more and people took the time to listen to what each of our goals were, then it would work better.

The post ‘Brands don’t take our work seriously’: Confessions of a travel influencer appeared first on Digiday.

The latest entrant? Little-known French company Fimalac. This week Fimalac acquired a majority stake in U.K. digital agency Jellyfish, a Google specialist, which will be merged into its data agency Tradelab. Jellyfish generated £53.7 million ($72 million) in revenue and £8.5 million ($10 million) in profit from the start of the year to March 2019 and has a headcount of around 780. The Tradelab-Jellyfish combo will have a market cap of around £500 million ($643 million), Fimalac said.

In an interview with The Financial Times, Véronique Morali, the president of Fimalac’s digital media subsidiary, said, “We want to create this new kind of agency that Martin Sorrell started. … Now we are in very good shape to be a real competitor.”

Fighting talk straight out the gate — and a slight tinge of déjà vu as another French holding company prepares to lock horns with the former WPP chief executive — Sorrell told me that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and that time will tell as to whether Fimalac can go head-to-head with his new firm S4 Capital. For now, he’s optimistic that moves like this will broadly “expand demand for what we do and stimulate interest in the digital model.”

Simon Nicholls, partner at GP Bullhound, which advised Jellyfish on the Fimalac sale, concurred and expects M&A activity in the space to accelerate. “Clients have come of age in starting to realize that [digital] is such a big part of the puzzle. The complexity, the fragmentation and technology demands of digital channels and managing them is such that you need a different sort of player that is much more focused and able around areas like technology and data,” he said.

Here’s an interesting nugget (or should I say “nut”) to chew on: S4 and Fimalac have already been sparring behind the scenes. Fimalac unsuccessfully bid to do a similar deal with U.S.-based programmatic media practice MightyHive last year. Meanwhile, Sorrell’s firm also took a look at Jellyfish but instead acquired MightyHive for $150 million in December.

The post The Rundown: The holding company is dead, long live the holding company appeared first on Digiday.

Like most referral channels, the upside varies from publisher to publisher. A Vice spokesperson said that Vice was “excited” about Discover as a place to find more audience, calling it a “valuable” and “steady” referral source, while a source at a search-focused publisher, who asked not to be identified while discussing Google, said that while Google Discover was intriguing, that traffic from the channel came erratically.

“No one is counting on it yet,” that second source said.

A source at a fourth publisher said that the gains they’d seen from Google Discover were promising, but they were difficult to predict, partly because they’d been unable to detect different behavior among the visitors they were getting through Google Discover.

Those caveats aside, publishers said they saw a prospect for long-term stability in Discover, which they saw delivering relatively loyal audiences and monetization that, through AMP, could at least be somewhat steady from a monetization standpoint.

“We all know the risks with algorithms,” Marshall said, adding that it seemed as though Google was still experimenting with it. “But I think this is here to stay.”

Though there are no clear explanations for why Discover has been a bigger hit abroad than in the United States, Marshall and Shehata believe that the mobile device and browser markets play a role. In countries where Discover is starting to drive the strongest results, Android has staked out a dominant share of the mobile market. In India, for example, Android dominates the mobile phone market, with a 94% share, according to Statcounter data. In the U.S., by comparison, iOS accounts for a slim majority of the mobile ecosystem, and Chrome, Google’s browser, has a strong, but not dominant, share of the mobile browser market — 45%, according to Statcounter.

Teasing out which traffic comes from Google Discover, as opposed to another corner of Google — like Google News — is still difficult. Two months after launching Discover last year, Google changed where Discover’s referral traffic came from, moving it from discover.google.com to a few different areas, including the Google Quick Search Box and a separate domain, called Google APIs. Publishers with large Discover audiences are able to get certain insights about their Discover traffic using Google’s Search Console, such as information about which of their content performs well there and how often their content appears in Discover. But the insights are proprietary and are delivered in the form of a report, rather than raw data.

“It underscores the ways in which Google is acting more and more like an aggregator,” said Kelsey Arendt, a senior market analyst at Parse.ly.

But that traffic is worth teasing out. On average, 27% of a site’s visitors that come through those Google channels are return visitors, a higher percentage than any social channel, according to analysis conducted by Parse.ly.

Despite the unpredictable nature of the traffic, publishers appear to be most excited about Discover because of its ability to build familiarity and habit among readers. Early data compiled by publishers suggests that each user’s Discover feed is personalized based on content users have searched for or read in other Google products, such as Google News. Google Discover could potentially turn into something that builds habits and loyalty to a certain brand. Out in India, Vogue’s editorial team writes content optimized for both Google News and Google Discover.

“It’s nascent,” Marshall said.

The post Publishers see mobile traffic spikes from Google Discover appeared first on Digiday.