HOW DEEP IS YOUR INFLUENCE?

ARE INFLUENCERS SENDING ADVERTISING BACKWARDS?

Influencer marketing is hot right now. $8B and counting. It recently clicked over 1% of the world’s total adspend. And as more brands pay more people to ‘authentically’ promote their products, I got to thinking about why. Is it because of the trust and simplicity of personal connections? Or is the industry hot because the influencers are hot? And if that’s the case, what does it say about us as marketers?

Here’s my take on why I think influencer marketing is often little more than skin deep.

PEOPLE LOVE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.

This is a fact. Biology built us that way. That warm fuzzy feeling you get when someone you like remembers your name? That’s the dopamine, that is. It’s a neurotransmitter that bounces around your brain and makes you feel good. Everyone gets a little hit of dopamine when they find someone attractive – it’s both literally and figuratively seductive.

That’s why attractive people do well in life. More people instantly like them. More people instinctively trust them. There’s plenty of research to quantify the impact of attractiveness on success – including one study that says a good looking CEO can add value to the share price. It’s also why the world’s top twenty influencers are all next-level attractive.

There’s nothing new in any of this and nothing much wrong with it either. But that’s just the biology. The ethics of how we use that power to sell stuff is something marketing has been grappling with forever.

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE MAKE BEAUTIFUL ADS.

Remember the old days? When we’d put beautiful people into beautiful settings and light it and shoot it and show how our products made their beautiful lives a little more beautiful? Then we grew up. The industry (in general) now understands the social harm of wrapping fake in unattainable to sell an ice-block.

The obvious example is Dove’s campaign for real beauty. People loved it, they respected it and they bought shedloads of soap. My favourite example was this one from Heineken. Get people who think differently to bond over beer. It’s totally fake and enormously authentic. Again, people loved it. Then we got all excited about the network-effect reach of Instagram and it feels like we’ve leapt back in time.

THERE’S NOTHING VERY REAL ABOUT REALITY.

The ultimate power of great Influencer Marketing is authenticity. It’s the digital amplification of Word of Mouth. If I see someone I like enjoying a product, I want to get one too. It’s the oldest trick in the marketing playbook. Influencer Marketing is pitched as real life and delivered on a feed — and it seems like we’re eating it up. Mostly because we also want to believe it’s real.

Except it’s not. No real person looks that good when they ‘just woke up and reached for Coffee Brand.’ Nobody does. No one normal lives in a house like that, wears clothes like that to wash the dog or wanders around proclaiming the virtues of always following dreams. It’s bollocks.

And even while we happily still make ads to construct fake realities – everyone knows we’re doing it. Everyone gets that it’s just a story. It’s just an ad. But the danger of fakery pitched as reality is the social harm it can cause. We have rules to manage that in marketing. There aren’t any rules on the web.

WHAT IS THIS AD TRYING TO SAY?

That’s the question everyone asks of every ad. Primarily it’s a question about the specific message we’re trying to communicate. But great marketers think deeper and ask what the big picture is selling and whether it’s right for the brand. That’s why the heroin-chic models of the eighties are mostly yesterday’s news. It’s not the right thing to do these days and it’s obviously way too fake.

Look at it this way. If anyone on your team recommended finding a bunch of super hot people, lining them up in fake worlds and pretending it’s real life while they clumsily pitch your product, you’d ask what the hell they were thinking.

We’re so much better than that today… or are we?

BRANDS HAVE THE POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

With half a trillion dollars to spend, the marketing industry has the ability and responsibility to change perceptions of normal, reasonable and ethical. By and large, we’re pretty good at it. We naval gaze like nobody else and recognise our flaws. And we started this century on a pretty good path. But then we get distracted by this hot new thing.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of influencers are genuinely influential. They let you into their lives and share their world by showing that they’re normal – just like us.

But then there’s the others. The overproduced and seductively shot beautiful people who spruik the sponsor’s product with an occasional side of “me without makeup” that only goes to show how ridiculously constructed the whole thing is. It’s not real. It’s not cool. And there’s mounting evidence to suggest that it’s dangerous.

Do you really want to wrap your brand in that?

That’s my big question. Like all of us, I’m proud to work in an industry that understands and carefully manages its impact on society. So next time you’re buying influencer reach ask yourself – am I delivering on that promise? Or am I just using hot people to sell ice cream – like we did in the eighties?

That’s what I reckon, what do you think?