The next presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jeremy Shtern, who begins by noting that the quantification of the influence of online and social media actors is a tricky problem – but it may not be as hard to qualify such influence. It is important in this context to understand online environments as working largely on the basis of a monetisation philosophy, too.
Online influencers are individual content creators in online and social media spaces who monetise their large followings to advertise particular products and services. Such influence can also go badly wrong, however, as influencers choose the ‘wrong’ products to support or are found to have acted unethically. Nonetheless, many influencers become micro- or Not-so-micro-celebrities.
But what conditions have enabled the rise of such influencer economies? The present study examines this through interviews with digital advertising executives, social media creators, and platform representatives since 2011, and charts the emergence of this economy and its strategies of affective targetting and its monetisation.
Influence marketing has been around since at least 2010, but Google searches in influence marketing took off around 2016. The money spent on such marketing continues to rise steadily over time, and this has aided the rise of influencers as personal brands. Indeed, there are now laws in the U.K. and elsewhere that are attempting to define influencers as a category of brand.
Interviews with influencers and others show that sponsored content marketing has a long and effective history since the early days of radio and television (this is where we get the term ‘soap opera’ from – Procter & Gamble once operated its own television production studio), but such models also became problematic when brands were found to interfere with editorial content. Online, such interference is likely to continue even now: this is enabling companies to create free earned media – promotional content that does not give the appearance of being promotional content and appeals to audiences’ emotions. From an ethical perspective, this is deeply problematic.
