At the rapid speed that influencer partnerships are formed, agencies are faced with vetting up to hundreds of thousands of creators for their clients to deliver on brand safety.
What was once done manually by teams of people — reviewing online history and social media content or identifying sentiment and misinformation — now can move faster and more thoroughly with artificial intelligence. Influencer agencies have to adapt to these products as their clients work with creators at a larger scale.
“The issue, honestly, is that influencer marketing is scaling,” said Kevin King, chief revenue officer of creator agency Viral Nation. “A lot of the clients that we were working with two years ago were maybe working with a handful of influencers — those now they’re working with hundreds. We actually have some clients that are working with thousands of influencers.”
There’s more at stake
The scope of creator programs also needs to be wider than ever, which inherently increases the risks of poorly aligning content with messaging — as factors include a U.S. presidential election, AI-generated content and more creators creating their own brands. Global influencer marketing ad spend is projected to reach some $35 billion this year — with the market seeing an annual growth rate of just under 10%, per Statista.
“With creators being active in these conversations, we’ve been receiving more requests from brands for political vetting to be added to the due diligence process for creator campaigns over the last few months,” said Ed East, group CEO and co-founder of influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy.
Billion Dollar Boy’s recent research found that one in four (28%) of U.S. creators have been approached by political organizations to create political content for this election year. The agency uses its influencer tool Companion in the vetting process.
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