The influencer marketing business, having swelled to an estimated $37 billion in size, now finds itself grappling with a problem familiar to anyone who has ever watched a naturally charming person become self-conscious once they realize they are being observed.
Digiday, the trade publication that covers digital media and marketing, is convening a virtual gathering on Nov. 4 to examine what it calls "creator strategies" — the increasingly elaborate choreography required when brands wish to borrow the credibility of people who became famous, in part, by not seeming like the sort of people who would do deals with brands.
The event, scheduled for 11 a.m. Eastern time, promises to bring together creators, the executives who manage creator businesses and the brand marketers who write the checks, all of whom will reportedly "open up their influencer marketing playbooks." (Whether a playbook remains useful once it has been opened up to one's competitors is a question the organizers do not address.)
Among the topics on the agenda: the mechanics of producing sponsored video content, the dynamics of deal-making between creators and advertisers, and the operational realities of running what the industry has taken to calling "creator-led media companies" — a phrase that would have required some unpacking for a Madison Avenue executive of, say, 1995, but which now rolls off the tongue at conferences with the ease of "integrated marketing" or "brand safety."
The underlying tension, as ever, is authenticity — that quality which makes audiences trust a creator's recommendations, and which tends to become more difficult to maintain in direct proportion to the number of zeroes on the sponsorship contract.
It is a familiar dance, even if the music has changed.
Original story published in Digiday: "Digiday Creator Strategies"