Vamp & Hypetap on influencer selection

Vamp and Hypetap talk about influencer selection and vetting, the role of tech and tips on what to watch for in contracts

At the very first webinar of the year AiMCO members shared some great insights into how influencer marketplaces can assist marketers with influencer vetting, brand safety and managing campaigns at scale. 

 Patrick Whitnall, AiMCO’s Deputy Chair and advertising guru, social media marketer and podcaster chatted to Lauren Thomas and Detch Singh.

Lauren Thomas is Head of Content at Vamp, which is one of the fastest growing influencer platforms globally as recognized by the Deloitte Tech Fast 50.

Detch Singh is CEO and founder of HypeTap as well as the Chair of AIMCO. HypeTap is one of Australia's leading influencer marketing agencies, focusing on planning, executing and reporting on influencer campaigns for their clients.

These industry leaders provided insights into influencer vetting, contracts and how technology is helping to eliminate the onerous aspects of influencer campaigns.

Patrick: Selecting influencers can be quite daunting with so many influencers to choose from, how can brands narrow this down?

Influencer Selection and Vetting

Lauren from Vamp highlighted that when using an influencer platform for creator or influencer selection it can involve hundreds of applicants for a brief. The key is that it always starts with the objectives of the campaign. Data is important in terms of reach, engagement and ensuring the audience is local. In terms of determining a content aesthetic, Vamp also have creative sampling tools.

 Vamp, is an invite only community of creators and Lauren explained that there is a process that happens before talent can even join and that this monitoring process is ongoing:

‘Everyone has been vetted and checked before they're on our platform, but we know that's not enough. We need to continuously vet those creators, so we've got computer vision algorithms that continuously monitor our creators and their performance and their content. It looks out for anything like paid for engagements, fake followers and will flag an anomaly. Then a member of our team can look into that and take action as needed. If something like that happened, that would be when a creator would get excluded from our platform’.

 Competitor Conflict

The other thing that Vamp monitors is competitor conflict. Their briefing tool has been built in such a way that if a creator has been working with one of your competitors, they can be excluded from that brief list. And then exclusivity can be built into the agreement which is contractually binding. Plus, Vamp are currently working on technology that looks back at the last 60 days of the creative paid partnerships to give our brand some more safety in terms of competitor clashes and things like that.

Brand Safety

Detch Singh founder of Hypetap likewise confirmed that it’s a really time consuming process to get influencer vetting right. That was why Hypetap developed tech tools that vet content for hate speech, profanity and other issues of brand safety using tech algorithms. It’s not only quicker than a manual review of content but also more accurate than scrolling the content. Using language processing to read or convert voice to text for review is also used from a brand safety perspective.

 Patrick: Are the days gone of selecting the influencer based on follower levels. Detch what metrics matter?

Detch confirmed that the industry had moved on from purely using follower size for influencer selection.

‘We start top of the funnel like average reach and impression data, then we'll look at engagements relative to that rate. So, all the way from likes down to saves, to how are people interacting with the content. We'll look at previous click through data if that’s a client objective. Lastly, and this is one that we look at quite a lot is the audience data. The demos, who's actually going to see the content, is it the right target?’

 Patrick: So Detch, an influencer receives a brief or booking via your platform and given the majority of influences do not have a talent manager and are effectively small business owners, what should they be considering before entering into a contract?

Client Contracts

Detch indicated that they’ve seen some pretty onerous brand contracts in the past. ‘I think influencers don't always realize what they're signing up to’.

 Detch’s advice to clients is: ‘always keep it as simple as you can. Internally when we're contracting with influencers on behalf of clients, we like to standardise our contracts. We keep them pretty simple. All the influencers get very similar contracts every time so they know what to look at.’

 In terms of contracts, Detch highlighted key areas that influencers should look out:

1.     It’s pretty obvious, but deliverables and timing, just make sure you can hit them. Because you are working on a campaign for a client so just make sure you can actually deliver on what you're signing up to.

2.     The second one, and this is probably the one where the most issues arise, is usage rights. Just definitely be aware of the usage rights and how a brand wants to use your content. By all means charge accordingly but know how it's going to be used. And don't be surprised later. I've seen lots of situations where influencers may kick up a fuss about how that contents being used, but it's been contracted.

3.     The AiMCO Code of Practice is a really good place as a starting point, there's some good key points around briefs, and contracts that are definitely worth a look, if you're an influencer or even a marketer.

 Patrick: Brands working with multiple influencers with lots of content being created and posting at different times, it can be a logistical nightmare. How does your technology make life simple for brands?

 Detch:

‘We use most of our tech internally to just streamline all the onerous stuff across a lot of the selection elements discussed - metrics, data, brand safety. At times we are negotiating on mass, contracting on mass, scheduling content, then it's going to go live, and we need to be monitoring all that data and making sure that we can report in real time.

The one caveat I would add is that at the end of the day, when you're running an influencer campaign, it is very much still a people business. You know, we're dealing with human beings who are creators. So, I think we've just tried to be very careful to draw lines around the elements where automation might actually stifle relationships or creativity.’

 Lauren:

‘Using a platform really helps you to operate at scale. I mean, it can be a really daunting task. We had a campaign last year that was simultaneously running in nine countries, 180 creators, well over 1000 pieces of content. How do you manage that without a platform? We've put the tools that we use to use within our company in the hands of marketers now. So, with budgets are rising, people want to put more and more money in influencer marketing. So, this basically allows them to scale their impact all in one place. We've got a timeline feature, so you can look at all the different schedules for your creators, you get  notifications that go out to keep you on track, and then all of your content, all of your metrics, all of your campaign is just in one centralised place so that you can keep on top of it all, you've just got a one-stop-shop. And then, if that's still too much, then we've got a team of experts. So, you can add on a campaign management aspect as well.’