One of the more unexpected topics discussed at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in New Orleans this week was the creator economy. But during a fireside chat with Gaz Alushi, president of measurement and analytics at creator commerce company Whalar, it turns out that influencer marketing and creator campaigns actually have the potential to be amplified and measured in a similar capacity to programmatic campaigns more so than previously realized.
Creators are “actually people who have cultivated communities. And so when we think about where these creators are building these communities, it’s not in a silo. It’s on other media channels where brands are already participating,” Alushi said during his on-stage session. “A lot of brands and marketers I work with consider creators as a PR play [but] they’re showing up right next to your ads, they’re showing up right next to all other content [audiences are] consuming.”
“We kind of reverse engineer the programmatic component of it, where it’s less about finding the right audiences for the brands, and it’s finding the right brands for the communities. … You can’t just find one creator, you have to find literally a community of creators for each brand.”
Gaz Alushi, president of measurement and analytics at Whalar
It’s not the lack of technology needed to automate the business that’s preventing marketers from thinking of creator campaigns as direct response opportunities, he continued. The operational silo-ization that keeps influencer marketing separate from programmatic marketing, and subsequently keeps those budgets separate, is the biggest challenge that Alushi faces when educating brands and marketers about why they should be amplifying their creator campaigns beyond the confines of a direct, one-to-one influencer relationship.
