Data-Labor-Technology

That’s because the way that marketers and brands are using influencer marketing has become ineffective and disingenuous, Curtis said. Professional influencers can really only provide mass scale — not creating connections to the communities that brands want to reach.

“Overtime, influence has become media that’s only defined by social metrics and followings, said Curtis. “But for us, some of the most influential people aren’t on social.” These people do not care about a follower count, he added, they care about the type of people who are following them and where and how their message is being amplified.

Prioritizing culture and community are the key to ensuring a successful brand campaign, but what’s equally important is looking at the culture and community of your own company, said Curtis. If a project’s success is dependent on being able to resonate with a community that you yourself are not in, then having team members who can understand and facilitate that relationship will only make your campaign stronger, he added.

In the latest episode of Digiday’s weekly show The New Normal, Curtis talks about his company’s unique influencer marketing strategy as well as the importance of having a diverse team to rely on.

The age-old secret to influencer success

The secret to success with influential marketing, according to Curtis, is not activating the individual, but activating the community. Most people cannot do it, however, because brands and marketers are trying to activate a community that they don’t belong to, he said.

“It’s age-old word of mouth, which is created by trust. The thing about it is, most brands and agencies only use it as a way to amplify,” said Curtis.

The beauty of influencer marketing, however, is that if you work with that influencer across your entire process, they can help hone your strategy for communities that you might not be familiar with or a part of. 

Curtis said brands should not rely on influencers to simply project the brand from their platforms and allow it to go wherever it happens to go. Instead, brands should use influencers’ insights at the strategy stage of the partnership to learn about potential vendors to use or even what trends might be popular in their communities.

The problem of the professional influencer

As Curtis said, some of the most influential people don’t have the social following that you would expect from an influencer. “We would never hire a professional influencer because what are you influencing? What are you a master of,” Curtis said.

Culture starts hyper locally and within those small communities comes the artists who carry the influencer abilities that marketers should be looking for, he said. They are the trend starters who then get picked up by people with wider audiences and can distribute the trends more broadly.

Curtis said that all celebrities and public figures have a team of these artists who helped shape them into the image that they have.

“Think about the whole network of people. It’s a team that helped to build a celebrity,” said Curtis. “To me, those are the real cultural specialists, brilliant icons and the people that we look to for cultural direction.”

Taking on a hybrid experiential model

Over the past three years, about 30% to 40% of Team Epiphany’s income has come from creating experiences, according to Curtis. However, like many companies during the coronavirus crisis, much of that business has been adapted to virtual platforms, including a series of block parties that the company put on for the season premiere of HBO show “Insecure.” 

Now, Curtis said he is starting to think about all of the positive touch points that his team achieved while doing virtual events that wouldn’t have happened in-person. Looking to 2021, Curtis said that he is excited about combining the digital and the in-person experiences to unlock more cool ways to connect with consumers.

Diversity makes the work good

Team Epiphany’s staff is 65% female and 35% male. It’s staff is also 70% minority and 30% white, according to the company, and a balance very unusual when it comes to agencies.

“If you want to be great, you need a lot of unique POVs weighing in on a particular topic. If you have too much overlap in terms of interests and passions and skill sets, the work becomes ineffective. We weren’t trying to be diverse. We’re trying to look like the world that we come from and live in,” said Curtis.

Agencies and brands that are not diverse therefore do not have a winning strategy, he said.

Diversity does not have a ‘pipeline problem’

Brands and agencies will say that diversity is difficult to achieve in their company because the pool of applicants is by nature less diverse.

Curtis said that the best way to combat the notion that there is a “pipeline problem” is to work hard to find candidates who haven’t decided what their career path will be. This means creating a pathway through internships or fellowships that gives students and new talent ways into exploring a business and its culture.

Additionally, once they are with your company, Curtis said, have a system to incubate talent by providing additional opportunities to learn and offer insights, he said. Also, don’t be afraid to shift your business practices in oder to better incorporate their strengths and passions.

“Diversity is rendered useless unless the diversity is inclusive, unless the diversity is active,” he said. “It’s not just about identifying and bringing in talent, it’s about changing their ecosystem to welcome and effectively integrate the expertise and the professionalism of these diverse people. That is the biggest challenge.” 

“There won’t be any product placements in the episodes nor will there be any bold marketing messages from the brand,” said a spokeswoman for BMW. Instead, references to BMW will come as “secret hints” that the spokeswoman said only the most die-hard fans will notice. 

“We wanted to use this series to show our vision of the future when it comes to the development of cities and mobility within them,” said the spokeswoman. 

Branded podcasts are nothing new. Slack, McDonald’s, McAfee and Basecamp have also produced their own podcasts to varying degrees of success. But save a few examples, there have been very few branded podcasts that focus on a fictional, original idea.

Often, advertisers have preferred to produce factual-based shows that revolve around interviews with guests. While those shows can make an impact, especially with a high profile presenter attached, BMW felt it needed to focus on long-form narratives to stand out in a market teeming with studio chat formats. So much so that it hired award-winning author Robert Valentine to develop its original concept for the podcast into a screenplay. 

“Podcasts are a fast-growing market and we knew that if we went with the typical approach to branded shows that we might not be able to attract many listeners,” said Jörg Poggenpohl, global head of digital marketing at BMW Group. “We decided we wanted to treat the medium as if it were like Netflix for ears in the sense that the priority was to create an entertaining fictional series.”

Should the series prove successful then a second batch will follow, said Poggenpohl. Doing so would establish the Hypnopolis original production alongside BMW’s earlier branded podcasts “Changing Lanes,” “Creators of a Different Beat” and “KulturMobile”. Of those four shows, Changing Lanes is the most popular, said Poggenpohl, who pointed to its more than 100,000 followers as proof.  

Poggenpohl declined to say how much those podcasts could cost, though production costs are a fraction of the amount of capital needed to produce a TV ad. Indeed, a branded podcast could range from about £2,000 ($2,526) to over £12,000 ($15,157) per episode in terms of production, said Max O’Brien, founder of podcast agency Novel. 

While BMW has advertised in podcasts via sponsorships as recently as last year, Poggenpohl said the effect of those buys can be limited.

“Do you really listen to those ads when they come on? I just try to skip them,” he said. 

His rationale being that branded podcasts are more likely to get BMW’s messaging across to listeners than a typical ad would. It’s why the advertiser is pouring money into esports in the hope that it could reach those younger audiences who consume a significant portion of their content online.

“Podcasting, therefore, offers brands the chance to communicate in long-form to an audience who’d never dream of dedicating 20-30 mins of their busy lives to a piece of video branded content,” said O’Brien.

That said, there’s still value in being able to reach those people who are engrossed in listening to a show with an ad as evidenced by Omnicom’s decision to invest $20 million upfront into podcasts on Spotify over the second half of 2020.

“Ultimately what’s driving the shift towards podcasting for brands is their appreciation of the power of audio storytelling, as well as the realization that podcasts are consumed in “found time” — listening to audio whilst engaged in another task,” said O’Brien.

Funding those podcasts will be at the expense of BMW’s other media channels. As Poggenpohl explained: “This isn’t going to be funded by incremental investments. We shifted money around within the global marketing budget to fund the new series.”

Other advertisers like Kraft Heinz and Vodafone are also producing branded podcasts over the summer. 

At first, the asks concerned him. “We’ve been meeting so much on how we reopen the offices, and my worry there is it’ll manifest with them wanting to meet with their groups, or do group sales,” Brandau said.

But after ensuring that his directors would take appropriate precautions and could decline the meetings if they didn’t feel comfortable, that anxiety gave way to a feeling of excitement. “Other people want to meet with us,” Brandau said.

The Los Angeles Times is not the only publication that’s had to consider such requests. Sales leaders at publications including Meredith and Fortune have had their sellers ask about the prospect, as growing numbers of agency and brand executives begin to feel more comfortable, even with daily infections continuing to rise in some of the country’s most populous states. States in the Sun Belt are breaking their own records for new infections on practically a daily basis.

The form and style of these visits differ from normal meetings of the past. Many have taken place outside of New York City and other major urban markets after many executives retreated to the suburbs or farther flung locales in the early days of the pandemic. Marla Newman, evp of digital sales at Meredith, met up with a senior agency executive she’s known for years last week for a socially distant walk on the beach on Long Island.

Even in the city, the settings have been more relaxed. A top revenue executive at a large legacy media company, who asked not to be identified, spent a day this past week taking client meetings at an outdoor café in Manhattan, located within walking distance of several clients’ offices. “Several people were willing to do it, as long as it’s outside and the tables are spaced,” that source said.

Newman said she and her colleagues have only begun taking these kinds of meetings in the past ten days or so, as parts of New York and the rest of the country begin to open up.

“There’s nothing like a face-to-face,” Newman said. “It speaks to the value of our relationships. And, at the end of the day, this is a relationship business.”

But even as these vestiges of the old way of doing business return, it is hard to say whether they might bring more revenue with them.

Three sources contacted for this story said the meetings tend to be informal, mostly focused on brainstorming and thinking through large, complex programs that often take a while to come together. While prospects are nowhere near as grim as they were in late March and early April, most publishers’ businesses remain gripped by uncertainty.

But most sellers will take returns to normal wherever they can find them. In the weeks after coronavirus clamped the country in a vise of social distancing regulations, many ad sellers tried new tacks to keep their clients engaged. TV networks bought meditation app subscriptions; ad tech sellers sent food via Uber Eats.

Not everybody in media feels comfortable with the changing attitudes. Though several of his sellers have asked for permission to meet with clients this month, Fortune’s chief revenue officer Michael Schneider said that he has barred in-person meetings “until conditions become more favorable.” Fortune will not hold any in-person events until at least the second quarter of 2021, Schneider said.

A senior executive at another large legacy media company said he had trouble imagining that people would be comfortable with in-person meetings.

“I barely sleep in the same room as my wife,” that executive said, describing the precautions they were taking to avoid the disease.   

Inside ad agencies, about 45% said their employers hadn’t said anything concrete, while for 29%, they expected to be back in the office by the end of the third quarter as well. About 7% were told they can work from home permanently. 

Of course, the return to physical offices is anything but normal. A whopping 73% of agency workers and 88% of media workers said working from home will now be encouraged and accepted. About 39% of agencies and 36% of publishing workers said they expect a reduction in shared amenities and around 40% said they expected fewer snacks. And 32% of agencies, and 37% of publishing workers said they expect fewer meetings to take place. 

As we previously reported, at agencies and publishers, 58% of respondents said they missed working in an office. But what they miss varies — and this is what employers are trying to figure out when they seek to replicate the in-office collaboration and serendipity so missing from remote workplaces.