The inaugural Influencer Marketing Awards (IMAs) is just around the corner (March 26 to be exact), and Tony Laskar, the CEO of Audience2Media, sat down with us to discuss the key developments in the influencer marketing industry, what he thinks makes a successful influencer campaign and how Audience2Media is helping push the influencer marketing  industry forward.

Audience2Media will be attending the awards ceremony as a sponsor of the Best Large Influencer Marketing Agency.

First of all, could you give us a quick overview of your company and what you do?

We are the only online audience targeting platform, with offices in the UK and Asia, that applies an innovative bespoke approach to your online advertising campaigns, specialising in behavioural advertising across Display, Video, Mobile and Social.Combining our advanced technology, 1st party data analytics and extensive platform of media (websites and apps) allows us to help advertisers reach the most relevant audiences with the right message at the right time.From September 2018, we launched the only behavioural influencer marketing platform, IMPACT,  leveraging our proprietary online data from our other platform KRYPTON, utilising the display advertising data to build deeper audience interests in real time. We further use granular social data to provide enhanced follower data on influencer accounts. We offer brands and agencies two options, either for us to fully manage their influencer marketing campaign needs or a fully white labelled self-serve option.  With over a decade of experience in connecting brands with relevant people using pioneering technologies in the digital media world, you can be confident that we will far exceed the advertiser’s campaign goals and deliver positive results to your brand. We are also known as Tribe Global, which consists of more than 40 independent agencies combined offering full-service marketing communications in every continent with one point of contact for our clients. We are truly a global organisation.

What key developments in the industry have you seen within the last 12 months, and how has your company maneuvered with them?

In the last 12 months, the influencer marketing industry has grown faster than the rest of the digital markets. Nowadays, the brands are moving their digital budget more and more into the influencer budget. It’s estimated that the influencer market will spend $10 billion by 2020. Last year was one of the most important years for influencer marketing. A lot of companies started to pay attention to the campaigns, most specifically to the engagement and ROI that the influencer campaigns generated. At the same time, a lot of search, activation or analytics platforms launched into the market, without knowing what the brand really needs.Here, at

Audience2Media

, we have met with different agencies and brands and we asked them what is lacking in the industry to suit their needs. Post our market research and data analysis, we developed

IMPACT

, the world’s largest influencer platform with over 47 million content creators which continues to grow, plus automated technology to manage the E2E campaigns process management alongside deep analytics of each campaign. With

KRYPTON

, our behavioural display tool, we can understand and target the exact audience for the campaigns, find the right content creators and reach the best engagements and reach possible. This is our unique positioning that no other platform can benefit from.
As the influencer marketing space is still young, so from my point of view, everything is trendy now. Almost all the brands in all categories are implementing influencer marketing. Creative content styles are pushing boundaries on how consumers are buying and our position in the market is to push behavioural influencer marketing.

And the biggest challenge faced?

The biggest challenge is to prove to the brands and customers that the campaigns are authentic. Nowadays, anyone can buy fake followers, likes, and comments and because of this problem, many brands are holding back their investments into influencer marketing until they feel secure with guaranteed elimination of fraudulent accounts.Our mission here is shown to brands that influencer marketing is the best way to engage with customers. To be successful, the influencer tech companies have to build anti-fraud software detection systems to have credibility regarding the influencers they choose to work with.

In your opinion, what kind of attributes stand out in a successful influencer marketing campaign?

In my opinion, finding the right influencers with the right audience is one of the most important (and difficult) parts of a campaign. It’s important to humanise and think that the content for the followers and not for the for influencers. The best way to have a successful influencer campaign is to work closely with the influencers regarding content and creativity. They know and understand their audience better than anyone else. Once you have the right influencer with the right creativity and align it with the best in class technologies, there is nothing that can stop you having a successful influencer marketing campaign.

How does it feel to be sponsoring the category for Best Large Influencer Marketing Agency at the first-ever IMAs?

We believe the IMAs is a great place to start introducing Audience2Media to the influencer marketing industry. We have already connected with great people and businesses, which makes us feel welcome and has identified the huge demand for our unique services.

We feel excited to be part of the IMAs and sponsoring the category will help all agencies recognise the fantastic work being done on a huge scale for all types of brands.

Lastly, how will Audience2Media help drive the influencer marketing industry forward on a global scale in 2019?

Our mission is to deliver best in class automated processes to manage influencer marketing campaigns, applying the best style and original content being chosen on influencer marketing campaigns. We made, Impact, to lead the way.First, solving the labour-intensive and time-consuming activities to launch a campaign. We see the automation of processes of starting an influencer campaign to be fundamental, just as we did 10 years ago with display advertising filling the gap for audience targeting applying data-driven techniques to allow measurable ROI for digital-first brands as well as into automated media buying, programmatic. Brands demand speed and originality with the highest quality, to stay ahead of their competitors. Secondly, solving the problem of fraud. Our clients will only work with authentic and credible influencers, eliminating marketing budget wastage to ultimately deliver massive brand impact to new audiences on a huge scale. Thirdly, solving a need to measure immediate ROI. We have built in an affiliate option into our platform that allows an ever-increasing surge of influencer marketing budget to be allocated to this area by brands that are more performance driven and do not have big budgets. Further to this will be a deeper look into creating an attribution model tool to realise the true benefits across all media channels for a specific campaign.Lastly, we will continue to drive the channel forward by listening to our clients, engaging with content creators in a seamless fully automated manner, and aligning instant demand and supply with modern brand experiences.

Find out more about the Influencer Marketing Awards here.
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