|
|
|
|
- TikTok Fund Glitch Prevents Rising Stars From Getting Paid
- Instagram expands its product tagging feature to all US users
- Pepsi enlists silent TikTok star Khaby Lame
- China says to more closely regulate influencer management firms
|
|
Great Reads
China says to more closely regulate influencer management firms
China will "rectify" companies that manage social media influencers as part of a 10-point "clean cyberspace" plan announced on Thursday by the sector regulator.
The focus of the campaign will include rectifying multi-channel network (MCN) agencies, short video and livestreaming, as well as cracking down on internet rumours, according to Sheng Ronghua, deputy director of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).
The addition of MCN agencies to the clean-up campaign highlights the CAC's growing concern with the firms behind much of the viral content seen on Chinese social media. read more
In 2020, research consultancy iiMedia Research said in China there were over 28,000 MCN agencies, which tend to manage multiple online influencers.
These influencers and their companies have come under great scrutiny in recent months over issues such as tax evasion.
MCN firms are behind 40% of all accounts with over 10 million followers on China's main social media platforms, according to Zhang Yongjun, a CAC official, who said future regulatory measures would target MCN firms whose influencers produce content deemed harmful to society.
"Online chaos is certainly related to the management of the website platform, but there is also a great degree of correlation with MCN agencies."
TikTok is rolling out its Snapchat-style stories to more users
TikTok’s experiment with Snapchat-style stories is continuing, with the company further rolling out the feature to a larger group of users today. If you’ve gotten the feature, you’ll be greeted with a new banner when you launch the app encouraging you to create a story.
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, TikTok noted that “Currently, we’re expanding a pilot test, which provides creators with additional formats to bring their creative ideas to life for the TikTok community,” although that doesn’t say how many users are currently included in the test or what the future rollout of the feature will look like.
Adding a video or photo to a story works extremely similarly to taking a photo or video for TikTok’s standard feature, with the same editing tools, effects, filters, and sounds. Unlike a regular TikTok video, though, stories won’t show up directly on your profile or feed and disappear after 24 hours.
|
|
- Partnering with creators cuts content cost in half by streamlining the creative supply chain.
Consumer trust
- When brands partner with creators, they get access to their audience. Consumers trust their favorite influencers.
Screen time
- Consumers average three hours/day on mobile- it’s imperative to meet them where they already are: on social media.
Ad blockers
- Over 50% of internet users have ad blockers installed- Influencers help dodge these and get your content to consumers on social media.
|
|
Campaign Insights
Pepsi enlists silent TikTok star Khaby Lame to pour new nitro cola
Pepsi has partnered with TikTok star Khaby Lame for an ad campaign supporting the nationwide rollout of Nitro Pepsi, a nitrogen-infused cola unveiled last month, according to details emailed to Marketing Dive.
Lame, who has accrued more than 135 million followers on TikTok thanks to his wordless reaction videos, will appear on billboards in Los Angeles, New York and Las Vegas and print spreads in publications like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times and the New Yorker. Ads for "A Smoother Way to Soda" were shot by photographer David LaChapelle.
Nitro Pepsi, available in Draft Cola and Vanilla Draft Cola variants, hits retailers nationwide March 28. Pepsi will run the first national TV ad promoting the offering during the Oscars Pre-Show as it looks to create a splash for a beverage it's positioning as the soda category's biggest innovation in years.
Honda Hits the Gas on Honda DreamLab Twitch Channel
Honda became the first automaker with a Twitch channel dedicated to lifestyle content following Friday’s introduction of Honda DreamLab.
The channel’s content is based on three main themes—collaboration, competition and conversation—and new livestreamed episodes every Friday will reflect those themes. Shows include:
Dashboard DJs, a live competition series featuring DJs battling it out in the driver’s seat and engaging the audience, with SOSJPERSAM hosting and contestants including Blklght and JVNA.
Dream It Yourself (DIY), a 100-minute crafting challenge inspired by collaboration within custom car culture, with featured creators including host Eutel and Utopia by Cho.
Power Of, conversations surrounding pop culture, hosted by Action Jaxon and featuring creators such as Richie Le.
Instagram Campaign Backs Black British Creative Talent
Instagram is positioning itself as a hotbed of Black creative talent with the launch of a cross-channel campaign featuring four British creators.
Black Perspectives sees youth worker Tanya Compas, GUAP co-founder Ibrahim Kamara, Kiss presenter Henrie Kwushue and lifestyle expert Esther Areola (Estare) come together to inspire new talent wishing to challenge the status quo.
To further the cause, the social network will support the four creators to run their personal initiatives to inspire other Black creatives and amplify the community’s voice on Instagram and beyond.
Compas will host a two-day boot camp to challenge LGBTQ+ stereotypes, while Kamara is to take five creators under his wing to fulfill a personal brief for editorial, images and video.
Kwushue, meanwhile, will challenge some of the industry’s biggest names on how Black creatives can secure that all-important first commission and, just as importantly, actually get paid. Last but not least, Estare will challenge five emerging fashion and beauty creators to respond to a real brand brief.
|
|
Interesting People
Mark Prinzinger: Putting Philly’s Food Scene On The Map
Mark works with major restaurant groups, independent restaurants and alcohol companies. He points out that his most successful shoots are those where he is granted creative freedom.
“Sometimes, restaurants have a very specific idea of what they want shot and it might not necessarily translate well into a visual. And at other times, I go into places and they give me the menu and they’re like, ‘Pick whatever you want’. Those are typically much more successful shoots because restaurant general managers, owners or whoever you’re working with, might not understand what is going to work well on an influencer account, and what the food trends are outside of their own restaurant.”
His favorite Happy Hour Philly campaign was an Instagram live broadcast at the beginning of the pandemic. The event was sponsored by Jack Daniels and took place at Moonshine Philly in south Philadelphia.
“We did this cooking competition and asked anybody from the audience if they wanted to be in our cooking competition. And we had this one guy who had actually been a contestant on Hell’s Kitchen. And after he came up, nobody else wanted to compete against him. Finally, this one guy sitting there who had had a few drinks, offered to participate. He’s like, ‘My name is Three-finger Bill’.
How former Labor Secretary Robert Reich got TikTok-famous
Closing in on half a million followers, the 75-year-old Clinton-era Labor secretary and current Berkeley professor is an unlikely figure on the short-attention-span video platform, which is designed for younger users and thrives on trends, memes, inside jokes, and dance moves du jour. And that’s part of the reason it works for Reich. He embraces the platform and all its quirks. He dances. He clowns. He duets with other TikTok-ers. The effect is often funny, and the funny seems to smooth the way for the more serious political and policy messages being delivered through the mouth of a truly authoritative figure.
I follow Reich on TikTok myself, and after seeing a number of his videos I began to wonder how a 75-year-old ex-Labor secretary could seem like such a natural on this very 21st-century platform. So I asked him.
How did you get interested in doing TikTok videos?
The context here is that my son Sam runs a company called CollegeHumor, so he got me into social media years ago. He said, “Dad I don’t want you to take this critically or personally, but nobody reads your books.” After I recovered from the trauma of that realization that people are not reading books–predictably young people . . . I think his point was that if he wanted to reach young people with serious ideas, books are a very inefficient way of doing it. So I began doing videos.
March Madness 2022: NCAA players will get to profit off their names this year
Brands are expected to spend close to $600 million on name, image and likeness (NIL) deals by the time the first anniversary of the NCAA's policy change arrives in July, according to a recent white paper by the site Front Office Sports and Opendorse, a consulting firm that tracks the potential brand value of athletes across the NIL universe. Eventually, that spending is expected to swell into the billions, ushering in a new era of financial opportunity for the nearly half-million student-athletes competing in NCAA sports — the majority of whom are not on athletic scholarship.
"It has completely changed college sport," says Thilo Kunkel, director of the Sport Industry Research Center at Temple University. ""It has provided opportunities for student-athletes to really make some money along the way, and it's also sparked a lot of awareness around student-athletes [about] what it means to build your personal brand and what it means to monetize that personal brand."
|
|
Industry News
Instagram expands its product tagging feature to all US users
Instagram is expanding product tagging to everyone in the United States over the next few months, the company announced on Tuesday. Prior to the expansion, only creators on Instagram could tag products from businesses in their posts. Now, all U.S. users will be able to tag products from businesses that are set up for Instagram Shopping. The company says the expansion will make it easier for people to discover products from people they follow and for businesses to grow their audience on the platform.
Business owners will receive a notification when someone on Instagram tags a product of theirs. They can also view all tagged content on their profile in one place. Brands are also able to control who tags their products by managing their product tag preferences in their settings.
To tag a product in your post, you’ll need to select a photo or video, add a caption and then select the “Next” button. You need to tag a brand first in your post to see the option to tag products. From there, you can tap “Tag Products” to search for a business and then find the products you want to tag and then add them to your post. Users have the option to tag more than one product in a post.
Australia Warns Social Media Influencers They Need A License To Dish Out Financial Advice
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) has announced that social media influencers will need a license to give financial advice or face jail time.
Calling them “finfluencers”, Asic said it has noticed the rise of influencers who promise big returns or back unverified investments. They warned that influencers who benefit from providing links to online brokers require a license.
This comes after a study commissioned by Asic found that a third of Australians between 18 and 21 followed financial influencers on social media, and a further 64% reported changing their behavior due to ‘finfluencer’ posts.
“It is crucial that influencers who discuss financial products and services online comply with the financial services laws. If they don’t, they risk substantial penalties and put investors at risk,” said Cathie Armour, the commissioner of Asic.
Asic is currently engaged in a legal battle with Tyson Scholz (@asxwolf_ts), an influencer who has luxury sports cars and yachts on his feed. He is being accused of delivering training courses and seminars about trading in securities on the Australian Securities Exchange without a license.
Shopify targets influencers with new link-in-bio tool Linkpop
E-commerce giant Shopify wants to take a growing share of social media stars’ online sales with a new link-in-bio tool called Linkpop.
Like other link-in-bio services, Linkpop allows users to promote multiple links on a single page — a musician can promote links to their merch site, their YouTube channel, and their Spotify page, for example. However, what makes Linkpop different from other link-in-bio tools is that it’s designed from the start to promote shopping with as few clicks as possible. Linkpop users can promote a curated selection of Shopify products that visitors can buy directly without leaving the link-in-bio page, instead of say, clicking on a separate link that takes them to Amazon or another e-commerce site.
Unveiled today, the tool is free for anyone to use whether or not they are a Shopify merchant. But the shoppable links are only available to Shopify merchants. By doing this, the hope is that ultimately Linkpop users will be incentivized to create a Shopify storefront, in order to get access to checkout experiences.
Bored Ape Yacht Club creator raises $450 million to build NFT metaverse
Yuga Labs, the owner of three of the biggest NFT brands on the market, has raised $450 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation, the company announced today. The team behind Bored Ape Yacht Club plans to use the money to build a media empire around NFTs, starting with games and its own metaverse project.
The team describes its metaverse project, called Otherside, as an MMORPG meant to connect the broader NFT universe. They hope to create “an interoperable world” that is “gamified” and “completely decentralized,” says Wylie Aronow, a co-founder of Bored Ape Yacht Club who goes by the pseudonym Gordon Goner. “We think the real Ready Player One experience will be player run.”
The announcement comes just weeks after Yuga Labs made a major move to consolidate the NFT space, acquiring CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. The acquisition put three of the most lucrative NFT collections under one roof — and gave Yuga Labs a bigger roster of IP to pull from when crafting its game and metaverse plans. The company also launched a cryptocurrency, ApeCoin, last week; the token will be governed independently and used as the primary currency in Yuga Labs’ properties.
|
|
Registration Required
Great Paywalled Content
TikTok Fund Glitch Prevents Rising Stars From Getting Paid - Bloomberg
Matt Mooney said he’s been posting three times a day in attempt to grow his account and join the creator fund. Since qualifying last week, he estimates that he’s checked whether the glitch has been fixed 20 times a day.
“Once I finally hit 10,000 followers, I felt pretty achieved. And then seeing that glitch, it’s a very defeating feeling,” Mooney said. “Every time I post, all I can think about now is how much I would have gotten in the creator fund.”
Dozens of users on TikTok, Twitter and Reddit’s TikTokHelp forum tell a similar story of a bug preventing users from joining the fund, with posts dating back to Feburary 25.
“We are aware of an issue that is impacting the sign up flow for the Creator Fund and are actively working on a fix that should be available in the next few days,” TikTok said in a statement. “We continue to listen to and seek feedback from our creator community and evolve our features to improve the experience for those in the program.”
How a 26-Year-Old Made $2M in Revenue From Influencer Video Production - Business Insider
When Jade Watson landed a deal with The Shade Room to help produce three Facebook Watch series last year, she knew her company had "made it."
In 2021, Watson, the 26-year-old producer and founder of the company SickBird Productions, brought in $2 million in revenue creating digital content for influencers and brands. This year, she projects ""$5 to 7 million because we have great momentum,"" she told Insider.
Watson has built a speciality in an emerging section of the social-media business. Based in Los Angeles, SickBird Productions is a full-service production company that focuses on creating video and podcasts for big-name clients in the social-media world. Some of her clients have included TikToker Talia Lichtstein, major social-media channel The Shade Room, and the brand TBH from actor-turned-online persona Noah Schnapp. Essentially, anyone who needs help with video editing, or copywriting, or to take an entire concept from start to finish.
|
|
💬 Become an Influence Insider
This is your link to share Influence Weekly with colleagues: https://sparklp.co/8323887e
If you refer 3 people to start reading this newsletter you'll get an invite to a Telegram group for Influence Insiders.
If you have the swipe up feature on IG stories, share this link
https://sparklp.co/8323887e
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
