Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Marketers have realized that influencer marketing is not going away anytime soon. As they spend more and more ad dollars on it, many brands have started creating internal influencer marketing teams to take more control over their relationships with social stars and campaign performance.

“Brands building in-house influencer marketing teams is probably the No. 1 trend in the industry right now,” said Gil Eyal, CEO of influencer analytics platform Hypr. “It started around last year and is really taking off this year, especially in the fashion and beauty categories. This is largely because more and more brands want to nurture long-term relationships with influencers.”

Much like ad tech, two models exist for moving influencer marketing in-house: Brands either assemble a team to manage influencer campaigns independently, from influencer outreach to campaign setup and execution to measurement; or they hire an in-house influencer czar to strategize influencer marketing, using tools to manage influencer relationships, but those brands still rely on agencies to execute campaigns, according to influencer marketing executives. And since many brands want to at least control influencer relationships — if not the full campaign — themselves, many influencer marketing platforms are pivoting to call themselves “influencer relationship-management platforms,” according to Eyal.

Either way, brands seem to be aggressively hiring for influencer marketing roles. For instance, HelloFresh is looking for a senior associate for influencer marketing to support its “rapidly growing influencer marketing efforts,” while L’Occitane seeks an influencer marketing manager with “extensive knowledge of the influencer marketing landscape,” existing relationships with content creators and the ability to execute campaigns and analyze results. Nike, on the other hand, is recruiting a brand manager responsible for identifying influencers.

At Birchbox, its senior manager of brand marketing oversees influencer efforts, with assistance from the company’s social content and PR teams. This is because Birchbox’s business model is complex and the brand actually resonates most on social with women who are not into beauty, so finding this group that is not inherently looking for Birchbox is challenging, according to Jenna Hilzenrath, director of public relations for Birchbox. “Managing influencer marketing in-house allows us to be nimble and take a really hands-on, nuanced approach,” she said. “That said, we do occasionally work with agencies or other platforms on a project basis.”

Eyal said that around half of his clients are bringing influencer marketing in-house. Small companies typically have one person, while big brands have a team of six to 10. “Don’t feel surprised if you see a 25-year-old be in charge of a brand’s influencer marketing that represents a pretty significant amount of the company’s ad budget,” he said.

Adam Rivietz, co-founder of influencer marketing platform #Paid, has also noticed an uptick in brands bringing influencer marketing in-house. He said that in Canada, 80 percent of his clients are agencies and 20 percent are brands, while the split is 50-50 in the U.S. “Brands in the U.S. have a bigger budget,” said Rivietz. “They are more willing to test influencer marketing on their own, and they want to take more control.”

Rivietz said brands like Nike and Mars have run influencer marketing internally for a while. One big benefit of this for brands is the ability to curate their own lists of top performers and then maintain longtime relationships with those individuals. “Influencers are more interested in long-term partnerships — like traditional sponsorships — than one-off deals. And they look more genuine to their followers this way,” he said. “On the flip side, brands don’t need to go out and find influencers every week or every month. They can also get a better price with long-term deals. Economies of scale apply here.”

Eyal and Rivietz both believe the cost of an ad campaign for a brand could skyrocket when an ad agency is involved. “Sometimes, our proposal for a brand gets lost in translation when an agency relays our message to the client,” said Rivietz. “Of course, for us, a big advantage of working with agencies is they introduce us to many other clients.”

Steve Buors, co-founder and CEO of digital marketing shop Reshift Media, thinks that while brands could use a variety of self-serve influencer marketing tools, agencies have more in-depth knowledge of measurement, as it’s hard to calculate the return on investment of influencer marketing.

“When you work with the right agency, you bring in another level of sophistication,” said Buors. “Influencer marketing is not the same as a Facebook ad where you can draw a direct line between your messaging and sales, but marketers always want to create some degree of connection of, if I do this, what can I get from it?”

The post Brands are bringing influencer marketing in-house appeared first on Digiday.

Since launching “TommyNow,” a series of fashion collections made immediately available for purchase worldwide as they sashayed down the runway on co-designer Gigi Hadid and her crew of models, designer Tommy Hilfiger has never moved faster. For one, the collection goes from design to market in six months, a clip three times faster than traditional collections.

“If you fall behind, catching up isn’t an option,” he said during the NRF Big Show conference last week in New York. “Listening to the customer is very important, and what the customer wants is immediate gratification. I want them to see something on the runway, click and buy it. I want the fastest delivery and the most incredible experience. If there’s no risk, there’s no reward, and our risk was changing our entire design and production process.”

With the exception of Burberry, other designer brands have failed to launch see-now-buy-now collections on Hilfiger’s scale, but the need to speed up the production process is industry-wide. As brands work to eliminate inefficiencies in the production process, artificial intelligence, in particular, is playing an increasingly critical role in not only manufacturing and supply chain logistics, but in the creative design process as well. It’s a tool that’s catching on among legacy brands, technology providers, student designers and retail startups alike.

“How can data make us smarter?”
For Tommy Hilfiger, AI serves as the launchpad that gets the creative process off the ground.

Recently, the brand announced a partnership with IBM and the Fashion Institute of Technology that uses IBM Research AI tools to decipher real-time fashion industry trends, ongoing customer sentiment around every Tommy Hilfiger product and runway image, and resurfacing themes in patterns, silhouettes, colors and styles. Using AI, this massive library of visual and textual content is drilled down into decipherable data and served back to the human designer on the other end, who can then use it to make informed decisions around the next collection as it’s designed.

Questions like, “How did this shirt style perform five seasons ago?” “What color schemes are trending now?” “Is this trend close to being over?” and “What was our most popular piece in the last three runway collections?” can be answered in a matter of minutes. AI is essentially drawing informed inspiration from past and current fashion trends, inside and outside of the brand, immediately — a task that would take a human on a design teams days or weeks to achieve, and on a much less scientific level. Certain information scraped by the algorithms would be impossible for a human to acquire at all. For instance, the machine gathered Amazon and Zolando reviews for Tommy Hilfiger items to understand not just positive or negative reactions, but customers’ views on items’ fit, color options, price and quality.

“The goal was to equip the next generation of retail leaders with new skills and bring informed inspiration to their designs with the help of AI,” said Avery Baker, the chief brand officer at Tommy Hilfiger. “AI can identify upcoming trends faster than industry insiders to enhance the design process.”

The purpose isn’t to replace the creative process — that gut feeling, human eye or impulse — with a series of objective 0s and 1s. The purpose is to reduce the “brain clutter,” as Baker called it: the laborious tasks that delay the creative process, like trend and archive research.

“We wanted to know: How do we eliminate the repetitive tasks? Once you do, you can focus yourself elsewhere, instead of manually scanning Instagram and Pinterest. We’re pulling insights that brands can use again and again, from massive data pools,” said Chris Palmer, the global cognitive offerings lead at IBM. “This is not the same as the creative process, and it’s not replacing it. It’s answering: How can data make us smarter?”

Robot, meet designer
Tommy Hilfiger’s new partnership with IBM and FIT is a small step of progress toward a fashion world that fuses artificial intelligence into the design process. While it’s a leading move in the traditional contemporary and luxury designer spheres, which can be slow to adopt new technology, it’s happening in much fuller force elsewhere.

Online styling service Stitch Fix, which went public in the fall and is projected to bring in $1 billion in revenue in its financial 2017, used troves of personal customer data and feedback (Stitch Fix members are asked to review every piece of clothing they receive in a style box, whether they buy it or not), plus artificial intelligence to design its first in-house line of clothing last year. Called Hybrid Design, the line is made from a series of algorithms that combs the visual and textual data to determine what styles don’t already exist in Stitch Fix’s inventory and are positioned to perform well.

A Stitch Fix Hybrid Design top

The items made with Hybrid Design are entirely cultivated by a machine. The humans on the design team at Stitch Fix only approve them, to make sure nothing “wonky” happens, as Stitch Fix chief algorithms officer Eric Colson phrased it.

“Most of our styles have had volumes written about them, thanks to customer reviews,” said Colson. “It’s next to impossible to parse all of that by a human, but algorithms distill it down: Here’s how to make sense of these reviews, who will love what and who won’t. In the same way, we match what other people have said about something to a client’s preferences, and new styles are curated based on that learning. You can reduce variants by aggregation and end up with a blouse that’s made up of the most popular style, color and silhouette.”

Stitch Fix, which was built on the pervasive idea that data science could improve retail, has made strides in AI that most brands haven’t yet touched. It’s also not designing algorithm-based fashion with the goal to set trends or become a fashion tastemaker — quite the opposite. These Hybrid Designs are meant to blend in with the inventory from the other 500 brands Stitch Fix works with. But the underlying value of AI remains: Set the machine in motion so humans are freed up to do more creative tasks.

As Italian lingerie brand Cosabella wanted to move more into other categories like loungewear, sleepwear and swimsuits, artificial intelligence played a role in deciphering a customer’s life cycle with the brand. Becoming a “lifestyle” brand is a risky move, so Cosabella CEO Guido Campello wanted to navigate the transition in the smartest (read: data-backed) way possible.

“Each time a new customer starts and stops shopping with us, we learn a little more. Does she want boyshorts? Lace? No lace? We can design better and faster with all these customer preferences and demographics in mind,” said Campello.

Cosabella’s design process used to work 24 months ahead of its sale schedule. Using AI, that’s been reduced to six weeks for some items.

“All designers and brands would benefit from adopting this technology into their design processes, and eventually, it’s going to change the way all brands go to market,” said Ed Gribbin, president of apparel consulting company Alvanon. “If you had the chance to get better product that your customer is more likely to buy to the market faster than competitors, I don’t know why you wouldn’t do it.”

Vetting the next generation
FIT student designer Grace McCarty won the design contest hosted by IBM and Tommy Hilfiger with her Tommy Hilfiger-branded raincoat. The contest asked students to design a product they thought could fit into Tommy Hilfiger’s arsenal using AI and wearable tech.

Image: Grace McCarty

McCarty’s raincoat included a removable bottom layer that was threaded with color-changing fabrics that responded to an analysis of voice and social media feeds, using AI. But it wasn’t the futuristic, wearable technology aspect of the design process that opened McCarty’s eyes to where fashion is headed.

“I believe that AI and technology will eventually change people’s lives through fashion,” said McCarty. “But it also taught me that technology in fashion isn’t only wearables. It can play a role in the design process that doesn’t actually change the design process at all; it just makes it easier. It made me approach things differently.”

Michael Ferraro, the executive director of the Technology Lab at FIT, said collaborative efforts like the IBM and Tommy Hilfiger partnership, which bring together students and staff across marketing, manufacturing and design departments, will serve as the blueprint for where FIT’s program is headed.

“AI is a tool that augments your existing toolset and mindset. It’s designed to inform your decisions,” said Ferraro. “That’s going to be incredibly powerful.”

The post How artificial intelligence is informing how fashion designers create appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon Go, the online retailer’s cashierless convenience store, is slated to finally open to the public on Monday, after a yearlong delay during which the company trained the store’s algorithms to account properly for customers and their habits.

Anthony Noto, a top Twitter executive, is in discussions to become the next chief executive of Social Finance, as the online lender grapples with accusations of improper workplace culture.

Rocket Lab, a space-transportation startup promising frequent, economical launches on rockets featuring 3-D printed engine parts, successfully blasted its first payload into orbit from a remote New Zealand pad.

Hyundai will tease its Super Bowl ad during both the NFC and AFC Championship games on Sunday. The teaser will also be available for viewing online and on the brand’s social channels. It suggests a kind of follow-up to last year’s “A Better Super Bowl” from Hyundai agency of record Innocean, with the brand promising…

We hear a lot about “storytelling” in one form or another these days. It’s become one of the most overused and hotly debated buzzwords in the business. Now, acclaimed commercial director Rodrigo Saavedra puts storytelling in sharp focus for Francis Coppola’s winery in “The Red Stain,” a 10-minute brand film that debuted Friday at the…