Influencers in the media mix: Lessons from the 2018 WARC Media Awards

Intro to this report

This report is a sequel to WARC’s Media Strategy Report that was published in March. It analyses four winning case studies from the 2018 WARC Media Awards, detailing their different approaches to influencers in the media mix.

Contents of the full report

Influencers in the media mix: optimising for effectiveness 3What this means for... 5

Chapter one: Data – four models for integrating influencers into the media mix 6Four ways to integrate influencers 7Gillette: offline influencers engage elusive Orthodox community 8Maybelline New York: tapping into fan pride 9ŠKODA: foreign YouTubers resonate with Taiwanese youth 10Nippon Pylox: three separate approaches boost engagement 11

Chapter two: Lessons from the winning case studies 12How to reach the unreachables 13Gillette: I Don’t Roll on Shabbos 15Defining the role of influencers in the mix 16Maybelline New York: Power to the Queens 19Innovation + influencers = effectiveness 20ŠKODA x Handsome Dancer: CoinciDance 22Nippon goes niche 23Nippon Pylox: If you can dream it, you can Pylox it 25

3 Influencers in the media mix © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.

Influencers in the media mix: optimising for effectiveness

Selecting the right channels for an influencer campaign is just as important as choosing the best influencers, writes WARC’s Lucy Aitken.

In WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2019, clients and agencies revealed mixed feelings about the future of influencer marketing. Yet clients appeared to be more positive about the future (Chart 1). This suggests that advertisers will continue to rely on them, particularly to reach younger audiences and combat ad avoidance.

One such example is fmcg giant Unilever. Despite concerns over fraud – former CMO Keith Weed announced at Cannes 2018 that Unilever wouldn’t work with influencers who buy followers – integrating influencers into the media mix can help

advertisers to reach audiences which would otherwise remain elusive.

The rise of micro-influencers – people with smaller circles of influence (usually between 10,000 and 20,000) – is increasingly regarded as a more effective means of engagement. This is especially the case when compared to enlisting celebrity influencers, which can be costly and may not work as well. The authenticity that micro-influencers appear to offer is highly appealing to advertisers seeking a more relevant engagement tool.

The use of influencers, particularly micro-influencers, is set to continue

Lucy Aitken is Managing Editor, Case Studies at WARC

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12%Client-side Agencies

Strongly agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly disagree

Chart 1: No sign of the ‘death of influencers’ in 2019

Source: WARC Marketer’s Toolkit 2019

“Influencer marketing has reached its peak and is now in decline”

4 Influencers in the media mix © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.

Influencers in the media mix: optimising for effectiveness

The ŠKODA x Handsome Dancer: CoinciDance (page 22) campaign partnered a YouTube music duo from New York and localised relevant content across Taiwan’s most popular online channels.

Malaysian spray paint brand Nippon Pylox (page 25) targeted three communities via the most appropriate influencers and channels for each one.

There were, of course, other examples of highly effective influencer marketing from the 2019 WARC Media Awards. The Grand Prix-winning An Ignis Adventure for car brand Suzuki in the UK used an influencer community to launch the small model and engage women. The brand, through its agency the7stars, gave 32 influencers their own cars and asked them to have ‘everyday adventures’. These influencers then posted their experiences on social channels prior to the car’s big TV push via All Stars Driving School, a Suzuki-funded TV series. This inverted common practice for a car launch where a TV push would traditionally come first. As

Rachel Lorenzon said at a WARC event in April 2019: “We prioritised engagement and endorsement over reach and the content started to spread momentum. We were trying to warm people up to Suzuki prior to launching the brand, so we kicked against convention in the category.” The influencer activity helped the brand to increase its overall market share and sell 6,308 new cars despite decline in the UK’s small car market.

We also saw other winning work that used influencers on Instagram, from Harley-Davidson in Canada to state-owned telco STC in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, YouTube continues to be a powerful influencer platform, particularly for personal care brands – as demonstrated by P&G-owned shampoo Head & Shoulders in Poland and Axe’s Find Your Magic campaign in Indonesia.

The role of this report is to assist advertisers and agencies with selecting the most appropriate channels for their influencer campaigns so they maximise engagement with the right target audience.

over the coming years, with Instagram being a key platform in the media mix. Klear’s 2019 report, The State of Influencer Marketing, indicates a 39% increase in sponsored Instagram influencer posts and shows how women, micro-influencers and millennials dominate this space (see Chart 2).

This was backed up by the winners of the 2018 WARC Media Awards. This report scrutinises the channel plans used in four of the winning case studies and includes commentary from the brains behind them, sharing their insights into how to build influencers into media strategies.

Gillette’s I Don’t Roll on Shabbos (page 15) initiative enlisted

local rabbis in Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel and a range of offline channels.

Maybelline New York’s Power to the Queens (page 10) campaign from China focused its attention on an influencer fanbase, deploying activation and social channels for them to participate with campaign content. William Perez from Mindshare China, the agency behind the Maybelline New York campaign, offered a view on how including influencers in the media mix might evolve. On page 7, he writes that: “Influencers in China have not just been platforms for information and persuasion: they have turned into actual sales channels.”

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Female Male 12-17 18-24 25-34 35-49 50-64

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Chart 2: Global, Instagram sponsored feed posts

Source: Klear, The State of Influencer Marketing 2019

% share of #ad posts by gender and age

5 Influencers in the media mix © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.

What this means for...

Brands

Despite justified concerns from advertisers and agencies, influencer marketing can be a highly effective way to interact with specific target audiences, particularly when they skew towards young people. It helps brands communicate authentically with elusive customers and, when executed well and on the most relevant platforms, it can win their attention and drive conversion, particularly in the short term.

An influencer component needs to be integrated effectively into the media mix to avoid it looking like a last-minute bolt on.

Influencer marketing has now matured to such a degree that advertisers can feasibly consider how an influencer can evolve into a cultural touchpoint, such as ŠKODA’s ‘shoulder-shaking dance’ in Taiwan (page 22).

Agencies

Assist advertisers to think more laterally about which influencers they could consider a collaboration with. Influencers that are too popular with brands risk coming across as inauthentic because they have spread themselves too thin. The Gillette case study (page 15) shows how to identify a more non-traditional type of influencer and leverage their position within a specific community to grow a brand.

Gillette also demonstrates how to think more creatively about channel selection. Social platforms might not be quite right for your target market, so consider whether offline influence could be a more productive route.

Influencer marketing executed on social platforms needs to encourage interaction with audiences as a way of building trust. Think how audiences can comment on particular content or make special requests and build this into the campaign from the start so neither the brand nor the influencer you’re working with is caught unawares. With the influencers, plan for consumer reaction to the content.

Media owners

Media owners need to innovate to keep up with advertisers’ demands regarding influencers. Tried and trusted platforms for influencers are already starting to innovate and more will emerge as media owners increasingly work directly with advertisers on their influencer activity.

Media owners need to ensure that they are supplying advertisers and their agencies with the right data they need to inform their decision-making around influencer campaigns, at both the start and the end of the process. Media owners should consider how the quality of the data they offer advertisers regarding influencers could help their brand with differentiation in a cluttered media environment.

6 Influencers in the media mix © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.6 © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.

Commentary

To launch a new lipstick in China, make up brand Maybelline New York mobilised the ‘Queens’, aka fans of actor and singer William Chan, the brand’s celebrity endorser. Given this, it’s no surprise to see social play such a lead role in this media plan. In this case, the lead social channel was Weibo.

The next step was to include the fans with a participatory element. This took the form of an interactive billboard in Times Square: fans could enter a raffle where one Queen could appear on the big screen with Chan.

This short-term campaign, and the highly relevant platforms it used, was extremely successful. It generated buzz, participation and drove sales for the brand: 20,000 Queen lipsticks were sold out in 20 seconds, and another 20,000 lipsticks were sold in less than two hours, breaking Maybelline’s e-commerce sales record.

Maybelline New York: tapping into fan pride

Product launch targets celebrity’s fan base

Fans at the forefront of media mixCampaign objectives

Brand launch: Extension/variant

Brand building: Build brand equity

Sales growth: Gain new customers

Sales growth: Increase value/volume Budget: 500k - 1 millionDuration: Up to 3 months Social media: Weibo

social media

onlinevideo

games &competitions

out of home

1 William Chan’s fan base lives on social

2 Interactive billboard prompts fan participation

3 Fans incentivised to post selfies sporting new lipstick on social

£sales

buzzconsumerparticipation

7 Influencers in the media mix © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.

Defining the role of influencers in the mix

Jerry Perez is Strategy Director at Mindshare China

Mindshare China’s Jerry Perez explains how the role of influencers in China is evolving.

Influence is inherently social. Social media has not only given amplified voice to tribes of online consumers, but it also gave rise to a new breed of tribe leaders: influencers – personalities that have persuaded and shaped people’s mindsets about brands and products.

Indeed, they have become a key part of marketing efforts worldwide.

As in the rest of the world, this has been a reality in China. It’s one of the biggest social media markets worldwide (over 1.1 billion monthly active users on WeChat, China’s biggest social app; source: iResearch, March 2019), and it has also developed its own unique media ecosystem that allowed different kinds of influencers to rise.

Social media in China does not just centre on communication and sharing – it rapidly evolved to include more entertainment and commerce functions. Mintel reports from 2018 and 2019 on Chinese social media indicated that 72% of respondents have seen merchandise and 61% have purchased products on messaging

apps. Of those surveyed, 87% have bought, sold or shared information on social commerce platforms.

These developments have fuelled rapid changes in the Chinese influencer landscape. Just in the past five years, there have been shifts in:

the roles of influencers for consumers and marketing campaigns,

the kinds of influencers that have been thriving, and

the ways in which these influencers have partnered with brands.

Evolving rolesYears ago, dealing with influencers was typically handled as a public relations initiative. Brands provided them with samples and invited them to a launch event, so they could speak positively about brands on their platform. Gradually, influencers got paid directly to feature these brands and bring awareness to them, for example posting photos and reviews on WeChat for product launches.

These dynamics still happen, and influencers still play a big role in the upper funnel of the consumer journey. However, their impact

8 Influencers in the media mix © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.

Defining the role of influencers in the mix

Evolving kindsChina’s biggest social media platforms, WeChat and Weibo, kicked off the social power of influencers. Previously, the landscape consisted mainly of big celebrities such as popular actresses who had built their online presence and internet sensations who became big due to some of their content going viral. These can be internet-born personalities like

has quickly expanded to include conversion and sales in a more direct way.

In China, the ‘shoppertainment’ phenomenon has been solidified on how people buy online – content discovery and engagement have been very much tied to e-commerce experiences, and social livestreaming via influencers has allowed people to ‘see and buy’. Influencers in China have not just been platforms for information and persuasion: they have turned into actual sales channels.

For example, celebrity Angelababy’s livestreaming event for Maybelline New York was viewed by more than 6 million women in China and sold more than 10,000 products in just two hours. Another famous case covered by the press was that of digital influencer Li Beika, who sold 100 limited-edition Mini Cooper cars in just a few minutes.

Some influencers have become so famous and authoritative that they’ve leveraged their popularity to build their own brands and businesses. With services that allow building and

managing online stores easily (e.g. creating mini stores within WeChat or online stores in e-commerce site Tmall), some influencers have built their own shops like Benny (more than 4 million followers on micro-blogging platform Weibo), who built his Croxx cosmetics brand, and Zhang Mofan MOMO (more than 12 million Weibo followers), who established her beauty and lifestyle business, Mo-amour.

comedy vlogger Papi Jiang (more than 30 million Weibo followers), who became famous for posting funny, sarcastic rants about her daily life.

But as more niche social verticals proliferated, new kinds of influencers emerged. Smaller influencers who are experts in particular domains like beauty or travel, have risen in their smaller but fast-growing platforms like Little Red Book and Douyin – with 50 million (a 239% year-on-year increase) and 362 million (a 110% year-on-year increase) monthly active users respectively (source: iResearch, March 2019) – which can lead to seamless purchase functions. These influencers may be smaller in terms of followers, but can command effective engagement and conversion within their smaller community circles. Even the bigger influencers have started to establish their presence in these growth platforms.

This transformation in the landscape has become so diverse that even within certain niche domains like anime and comics, influencers have thrived. China’s

Maybelline: “celebrity influencer was featured across touchpoints”

9 Influencers in the media mix © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.

Defining the role of influencers in the mix

engagement to create an illusion of how effective their platforms were. Given this problem, social tracking services have started to build functions in their tools to gauge fraud levels, and brands have been paying more attention to due diligence in their partnerships.

Keeping up with evolutionWith these shifts, brands have been more discerning on how they do

popular virtual singer Luo Tianyi, an anime/cartoon character that has her own social media following, and even her own live concerts where she gets projected on screens, has collaborated with brands like Nescafé coffee and soft drink Mirinda.

Evolving meansAs the power of influencers grew, the ways in which they have been leveraged by brands also expanded. They’ve become much more than a mechanism to drive buzz or review products. Some brands have really treated influencers as part of their media mix and have maximised their partnership across platforms.

One such case was Maybelline New York’s partnership with big celebrity influencer William Chan. A shade of Maybelline New York lipstick was named ‘Queens’ – the name that Chan’s fans gave themselves. The influencer was used not just for his social media presence, he was also featured across touchpoints: online video, out of home, programmatic, sales promotions and e-commerce. All this hype resulted in 20,000

lipsticks being purchased in the first 20 seconds of launch, and 20,000 more in less than two hours after restocking.

Besides maximising influencers across content-distribution touchpoints, brands have also facilitated better content creation – from something as simple as providing better product kits for influencers to actually creating a production studio where influencers can make better content for their brands. These were more hands-on approaches from brands that strengthened influencer relationships while boosting content quality.

Given that influencer marketing in China has ballooned at an estimated $17 billion in 2018, a figure double that of 2016 (source: CBNData via eMarketer, August 2018), there has also been a growing incentive for more influencers to ramp up their social media presence to attract more brand sponsorships.

A negative effect though has been fraudulent activities – where some influencers can resort to buying fake followers or generating bot-made

influencer marketing, and will likely continue to adapt in the following ways:

As influencers play a much stronger role across the consumer decision funnel, brands have been trying to define the roles of influencers and align these with their broader campaign and company objectives.

As the kinds of influencers available have grown, influencer selection has become more complex and brands have therefore been experimenting on how to create a mix of partnerships across brands and product portfolios.

Brands have been trying to find ways to better engage influencers, getting more out of the partnerships while also being more disciplined to make sure the brand is protected against risk and fraud.

Given the increasing dynamism of the Chinese media landscape, where new platforms can be catapulted to the top every other month, it has become ever more important to monitor and grasp evolving complexities and opportunities moving forward.

Maybelline: ”20,000 lipsticks purchased in 20 seconds”

10 Influencers in the media mix © Copyright WARC 2019. All rights reserved.

Driving sales through fan-centric influencer endorsement

ObjectivesCosmetics brand Maybelline New York needed to maximise the use of its new endorser, William Chan, to drive sales of its new Color Sensational lipstick range.

InsightThe rate of celebrity endorsement among ads in China is the highest in the world, and with the rise of social media, the interaction between celebrities and fans has changed forever as their relationship is much more intimate and interdependent. Maybelline New York found that Chan’s fan base was notoriously protective and labelled themselves ‘Queens’ – with Chan being their king – so it knew it had to demonstrate that it cared about Chan’s career.

StrategyMaybelline New York named one of the range’s lipstick shades ‘Queen’ to bring Chan’s fans to the forefront of the campaign. Despite his popularity in China, Chan is yet to be recognised worldwide. To show the Queens that it also

wanted to elevate Chan’s stardom, Maybelline New York featured Chan on a massive e-billboard in Times Square, New York. By posting on social a picture of themselves wearing the lipstick, fans entered a raffle to appear on the billboard alongside Chan.

Results

20,000lipsticks sold

30,000 fans entered the raffle

VIEW FULL CASE STUDY

SILVER

Agency: Mindshare ChinaAdvertiser: Maybelline New York (L’Oréal)Market: China

Cosmetics brand Maybelline New York maximised the use of its new endorser, William Chan, to drive sales of its new Color Sensational lipstick range in China

Maybelline New York: Power to the Queens

Takeaways

When working with influencers, don’t forget about their fan base – creating something for them can be more effective than just talking to them.

Demonstrate that you share consumers’ interests and make them feel empowered.

It looks at a new way to deal with influencers – a new kind of product development, a new twist.Dean Challis – Head of Communications Strategy, Droga5 New York

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