Truth in influencers: Marketoon of the Week

Is it fake or is it "authentic"?

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Influencer Marketoon

This week’s Marketoon takes a hard look at the veracity of claims made by our modern day pitch-people, the influencers.

Fishburne’s take: “Influencer marketing is a large and growing part of this widespread pursuit by brands to appear more authentic. This makes the fakery that is endemic to so much of influencer marketing even more striking.  A study by HypeAuditor found that 55% of Instagram influencers were involved in some sort of social media fraud and fakery in 2020 and that 45% of Instagram accounts are not even real people. Yet they predict the Instagram influencer market will grow by 15% this year.”

Why we care: Performance-based relationships with influencers, and a fraud solution to insure that measurement is accurate, help marketers determine the value of an influencer campaign. Broader questions of authenticity should be directed to the influencer’s audience, which ideally is also your brand’s audience. Understanding why an influencer is successful in engaging this audience will help marketers communicate more effectively to customers.


About the author

Chris Wood
Staff
Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country's first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on "innovation theater" at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.

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