FTC Announces Settlement Over Influencer Campaign for Xbox One

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Nick Hayes

Thanks to Gonzalo Mon of Kelley Drye & Warren LLC for flagging this story. It’s a really important one for those thinking they can get away with paying for endorsements without telling their public. I hope the pay-for-play blogger companies take note.

“In January 2014, AdAge interviewed me about news reports that Machinima had hired influencers to create videos promoting Microsoft’s Xbox One gaming console and games. In a native advertising campaign, the influencers posted positive reviews, but didn’t disclose that they had been paid to do so. During the interview, we speculated about whether the FTC might take action against the campaign and what the result might be. Now, almost 20 months later, we have the answer. This week, the FTC announced a settlement with Machinima.

According the to the FTC, Machinima, the operator of a popular YouTube network, paid two influential gaming bloggers to create videos promoting the new Xbox One console and three new games, but didn’t require the bloggers to disclose that they were paid for the reviews. The bloggers posted four videos that had more than 1.6 million views. To capitalize on this success, Machinima later recruited and paid more people to upload positive reviews, again without requiring a disclosure. This generated another 300 videos and 30 million views in a five-week period.

If you follow our blog, you can already guess the problem. As Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said: “When people see a product touted online, they have a right to know whether they’re looking at an authentic opinion or a paid marketing pitch. That’s true whether the endorsement appears in a video or any other media.” Under the proposed settlement, Machinima is required to ensure its influencers clearly disclose when they have been compensated in exchange for their endorsements.”

For Gonzalo’s original story go to:

http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ftc-announces-settlement-over-16317/

And here’s the original AdAge story:

http://adage.com/article/digital/microsoft-machinima-native-youtube-blunder-risks-ftc-ire/291273/

Our new InfluencerCommunities subscription service

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Nick Hayes

We’ve recently launched our new InfluencerCommunities subscription service. Here’s why. There’s a massive disconnect between the importance of an industry sector’s most important influencer communities, both online & offline, and the attention paid to them by vendors’ marketing depts.

According to InformationWeek, special interest communities featured in the top five most likely sources of vendor information for prospective purchasers (both at initial problem scoping and at vendor choice stages).

And while over three-quarters of B2B industry marketing heads rate their industry sector’s main forums & communities (both online and offline) as very important in influencing their prospects, less than one-third are confident their company has ongoing, proactive relationships with those top communities.

So companies really need to know which online & offline communities are the most influential in their sector. Which they should monitor, which to ignore and which maybe to join. Where are their industry’s most important conversations going on and who’s instigating them?

And it’s not just about which communities have the most members. Are their members those people moving & shaking the sector or are they just … followers? Which of their sector’s top influencers are members? And what should they do to engage with those people once they’ve identified the most important ones?

Our new Influencer Communities subscription service answers all of the above and more. We expect it to become one of our most popular services.

Why aren’t in-house vendors & brands talking about their Influencer Programs?

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Nick Hayes

How come we rarely hear from the brands themselves about the success of their Influencer Programs? Rarely a day goes past I don’t hear or read of marketing agencies touting their skills at working with ‘influencers’, of successes achieved or local awards secured. Many of these stories come with the flimsiest of evidence – mid-range bloggers saying how thrilled they were to work with the brand, a regional magazine writing a fluff-piece about a local agency, or the agency itself spinning numbers of ‘passionate brand advocates’ they’ve engaged with. But rarely do the brands themselves do the talking.

Are they just too busy? – maybe, do they not want to tout figures for reasons of commercial advantage? – maybe also, or perhaps the agencies are just more motivated to shout their perceived successes. All I’m sure are a factor but I think it’s primarily something else.

I think the metrics agencies are working towards just aren’t the same ones that the brands are. The agencies may well be satisfied with seeing a rise in fans, retweets, impacts and OtS (opportunities to see). But this isn’t enough for the brands. The C-level execs running them know these measures aren’t strong enough to bring in new customers, or even move new prospects far along the pipeline.

Until they can tie those important measures into their influencer programs I think they’ll be staying quiet.

Are brands getting what they intend when they pay their ‘social influencers’?

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Nick Hayes

I don’t have big numbers to share. I have five anecdotal conversations – each with a CMO, or equivalent, of organizations ranging from $35m to just shy of $1bn revenue. Here’s the first. There’ll be more to follow.

This East Coast marketing chief paid $9,000 in total to get five bloggers to write two blog posts and a minimum of four tweets over a four-week period about their supposed adoption of a new tablet accessory. These tweets were then re-published as part of the vendor’s launch invite activities. Each blogger then attended the San Francisco launch earlier this year. That’s approx. $1800 each person.

Was it worth it? The marketing head, who’d identified the bloggers through a ‘social influencer’ database provider, was initially “ok with it, though we’d already known two of the five so we could have approached them direct. We’d have preferred to work with independent bloggers who didn’t need payment, but we were told most did, so we went along with it.”

“It felt a commercial arrangement throughout, with them having all creative control. That was a surprise. It felt like it was all give from us. The upside was that all four turned up at our launch, it wasn’t obvious to anyone else we were paying for them, and we could use their endorsements in our web ads. Financially it wasn’t a bad return for us, but I’ll definitely read their future posts with a lot more skepticism than before. I’ll always wonder if they’ve taken a payment to write about what they have.”

How do these ‘social influencer’ peddlers still exist?

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Nick Hayes

In the B2B sector every in-house Marketing VP, Audience Manager or C-level immediately understands that their organisation’s customers & prospects are primarily influenced offline and through online search. Those that meet their customers know that these people aren’t glued to Hootsuite all day long, picking up whatever’s being posted on Twitter, Facebook et al. They laugh at even the thought of it.

So it still bemuses me there are other self-appointed ‘influencer platforms’ that effortlessly transpose the word ‘influencers’ for ‘social influencers’ so as to promote their own Twitter- or blog-trawler software. I used to wonder how these companies exist – because if they met any of the corporate buyers I meet they’d be laughed out of the office. In perhaps every B2B sector that I know of, ‘social influencers’ are in the very extreme minority – less than five per cent.

Then I came to understand how these platform providers exist. They sell to marketing agencies. And marketing agencies just don’t care about real market influencers – they care about numbers of people who they can outreach to. The game is to continuously ‘top up’ those outreach numbers. Even if those people have only the most tenuous connection to their client’s sales prospects.

So why don’t the in-house managers spot this and call out their marketing agencies? Because too many in-house managers themselves never meet real sales prospects. And so also have no understanding of who they’re really influenced by. This cycle has to stop.

The Buyer-side Journey

Where Influencer Marketing should be going…but seems to have gone off-track

Tag Archives: Bloggers

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