Unilever Demands Influencer Marketing Business Clean Up Its Act
June 17 2018 - 6:30PM
Dow Jones News
By Suzanne Vranica
Using personalities popular on social media for promotion may be
a hot marketing technique, but it also has a downside, warns one of
the world's biggest advertisers.
Unilever, the maker of Dove shampoo and Hellman's mayonnaise, is
expected to call for greater transparency in the often murky world
of influencer marketing during the Cannes ad festival that is
taking place this week on the French Riviera.
Influencer marketing, the practice that involves paying people
with large social-media followings to promote a product or service,
has been growing in importance over the past few years as brands
flocked to the practice to help them harness the popularity of
social-media platforms.
However, the sector has lost some of its sheen after numerous
reports surfaced about fraud that exist in the business from
influencers that buy followers to influencers using bots to make it
look as if there are more people engaging with their posts.
Points North Group said it has found that midlevel influencers
-- those with between 50,000 and 100,000 followers -- often have
about 20% fake followers. The company, which analyzes influencer
marketing, estimated that in North America, brands pay influencers
millions of dollars each month to reach follower that are fake.
The rise of fraud in the sector has been a wake-up call for
marketers who pay influencers based on the number of followers they
have.
"At best it's misleading, at worst it's corrupt," Unilever
marketing chief Keith Weed said in an interview. "For the sake of a
few bad apples in the barrel, I believe there is risk in the area
of influencers."
The consumer-products giant, which spent more than $9 billion on
marketing its brands last year, said it wouldn't work with
influencers who buy followers. Unilever said it found some of the
influencers it was using were buying followers in some
instances.
Mr. Weed also is calling for social-media platforms to do more
to fix the issue and wants more measurement and oversight to ensure
the problems are eradicated.
"Some platforms already do things in this area, but they have to
do it at a larger scale and with more transparency, so the industry
can be reassured that the influencers on their platforms are not
using these practices," he said.
Despite the problems, advertisers are still enamored with the
marketing technique. A survey of 158 marketers conducted late last
year for the Association of National Advertisers found that 75% of
those polled use influencer marketing and almost half of them
planned to increase their spending on the practice over the next
year.
Write to Suzanne Vranica at suzanne.vranica@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 17, 2018 18:15 ET (22:15 GMT)
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