Episode 7 of the Influencer Marketing Lab - a weekly podcast tracking the growth spurts and growing pains of influencer marketing.
This podcast is sponsored by Tagger the data-driven influencer marketing platform and social listening tool.
This week Scott Guthrie is in conversation with Jennifer Quigley-Jones, CEO & Founder of Digital Voices, a YouTube-specialist, Influencer Marketing agency in London.
The episode covers:
👍Check out the Influencer Marketing Lab for full show notes, related useful links and a transcript.
🆕 Don't forget to sign up for the companion newsletter The Creator Briefing ( https://www.creatorbriefing.com/ ) - the weekly newsletter from Scott Guthrie which provides a breakdown of all the major news from the creator marketing industry alongside his insight and analysis.
Episode 7 of the Influencer Marketing Lab - a weekly podcast tracking the growth spurts and growing pains of influencer marketing.
This podcast is sponsored by Tagger the data-driven influencer marketing platform and social listening tool.
This week Scott Guthrie is in conversation with Jennifer Quigley-Jones, CEO & Founder of Digital Voices, a YouTube-specialist, Influencer Marketing agency in London.
The episode covers:
👍Check out the Influencer Marketing Lab for full show notes, related useful links and a transcript.
🆕 Don't forget to sign up for the companion newsletter The Creator Briefing ( https://www.creatorbriefing.com/ ) - the weekly newsletter from Scott Guthrie which provides a breakdown of all the major news from the creator marketing industry alongside his insight and analysis.
Hello, I'm Scott Guthrie and welcome to episode seven of the influencer marketing lab. This week I'm in conversation with Jennifer quickly Jodi's founder and CEO of digital voices, a YouTube specialist influencer marketing agency based in London. In our conversation, we discuss how long term brand collaborations build consumer trust and drive sales. Why saying yes to every job isn't always the best decision, the Rolls Royce initiative, which provided a step change within Jennifer's agency. While the ultimate aim of all CEOs should be to become completely irrelevant, why some Tick Tock agency tactics for like a retrograde step how working with YouTube creators saves on average 50% compared with video production companies, and comes with the added advantage of generating content which is 40% more memorable. Why not all Gen Z are woke and the positives from the recovery paradox the influencer marketing lab has been made possible through exclusive sponsorship by Tiger Tiger is the number one data driven influencer marketing platform and social listening tool. It's an all in one SAS platform that helps users succeed in every step of the influencer marketing workflow. With it you can discover the perfect influences, research your target market, activate campaigns and measure influence of success all in one intuitive platform. If you want to see how Tiger can work with you go to Tiger media.com slash request hyphen demo. This week I'm delighted to be in conversation with Jennifer quickly Jones. Jennifer is CEO and founder at Digital voices. A YouTube specialist influencer marketing agency based in London. Digital voices runs campaigns for clients including Rolls Royce, the Royal Air Force, Universal Music Group, the NHS and booking.com. Prior to founding digital voices, Jennifer worked at YouTube, teaching creators to grow on the platform. Before that, she completed her master's at Harvard University in the Middle Eastern Studies on a full scholarship from the Kennedy Memorial Trust. Jennifer, welcome to the influencer marketing lab.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Scott. You're the smooth operator of insurance marketing.
Scott Guthrie:Although we were just talking before we press record that you're the other show day of influencer marketing the smooth operator
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:level of class to this industry. Thank you mean cooling constant with industry apart from three Scott with Roman numerals, the date, it is like a level of class that I've noticed
Scott Guthrie:when we get Well, I'm glad we're doing it. We're not doing a video because because I'm blushing as you're the CEO and founder of digital voices, a YouTube influencer marketing agency, as I've just said, what does that role really mean? And what's your day to day
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:environment? Yeah, it's quite, it's quite interesting. I think anyone who's founded a company probably feels feel similar. I think I've probably done every role in the company. So I founded it about three and a half years ago with just like a 500 pound personal investment. And it's very exciting now that it's grown to the level it has. So we've got about 12 employees now. And we're hiring another four or five at the moment. And so it's grown very.
Scott Guthrie:Hang on a minute, you founded the company with 500 pounds. But digital voices wasn't founded on a whim. It wasn't blind luck. You already had a strong pedigree in this space. Can you tell me where you work before setting up a shop with digital voices?
Unknown:Yes. So um, I worked in tech for YouTube before then. So I worked at YouTube for two years. And my job was to teach UK creators how to grow their channels. So I found that really interesting. I learned a lot. And I learned a lot about the YouTube landscape in the UK. So I think over that two years, I worked with about 500 channels. I kept seeing that there was something lacking in I could give them all the advice about how to optimise their content that I wanted. But you can't give them brand deals as YouTube, you're not supposed to be introducing them to brands you're not supposed to be. You're supposed to be an impartial platform advisor. And what I really got excited by was seeing how they're growing their businesses and diversify my strategy. So I left YouTube and decided to try and I didn't To be honest, I didn't really know which angle I wanted to take my career and I was doing training for a lot of big brands forum on kind of social media and YouTube strategy and influencer strategy. And then kind of saying yes to every job linked to social media. So I made our little Squarespace website Initially, I Did graphic design I work from home I ran. I ran Instagrams, which, to be honest, was a huge I mean, I learned a lot but it was a huge mistake Why was it a mistake? Did you feel as though you should be specialising?
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:Yeah, I think often people, especially when you start freelance, there's this temptation to say yes to everything. And I realised what I done. So I was selling my time and not even necessarily the things I was best at. So it wasn't scalable. So for the first nine months, I was not earning particularly great money. I was working really hard and actually not being treated particularly well by my clients. They were lovely, but I let them undervalue me. And then about nine months in randomly were introduced to someone from Rolls Royce who wanted to give the RAF kind of centenary present of a youth campaign. So he was like, what could you do to get young people excited by science, technology, engineering and maths for the RF? And I was like, Well, actually, there are lots of ideas floating around here. But you should run a YouTube channel. And you should have YouTube creators who do science and education and engineering and tech, or push to this RF and Rolls Royce YouTube channel, you've got access to the red arrows, you have access to a centrifuge, that's what we should be doing. And they were like, Well, okay, are you the person to run it? I said, Yes. And then I got an office and started hiring people. That was kind of our first big campaign, rather than just influences we started specialising in YouTube, about a year after that. And since then, the company has completely transformed. So we've hired I think we hired five people just before going into what under lockdown, and we're hiring another five now.
Scott Guthrie:So you found your niche, and you had a willing client that was, I suppose, a they had sort of deep pockets, but be they were malleable enough to be or intelligent enough to know that they didn't know what they wanted and to be led by you.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:It's rare. Very, very lucky. Like it was, um, I think the person who was running the project was kind of like a bit of a maverick. His name's Dave Gordon Rolls Royce, he was definitely like, he's not a cookie cutter person you meet and it was like being trusted to do this was really exciting. But that meant at the beginning, I did the sales, I did campaign productions. So I'd reach out to creators, I'd go to shoots, I'd help organise shoots, I'd do all social media posts, I kind of did everything. Now luckily, I get to specialise a little bit more in what I want to do. So now that I've got a team who can help thing for me, we have like a content team, we have campaign producers who do all the creative part. And we have creative stretches to do the sales and account management, I get to check in with the sales team hand things to them. But also look at long term strategy pieces, like reports, we want to do data tools we want to develop, I get to finally do the stuff that I love. But it's taken me a long time to get here. And as of hopefully, the next month, I'm hiring someone I found the person I will hire to take over all of my accounts, so I won't have to do any account management of my own. And that's so exciting. So don't know what I'll do at the time. Currently, I'm running mate, calm Magnum ice creams we just finished and another travel brand. And the NHS, all clients that I run and kind of account managed to make sure the campaigns great, but I'm very excited to actually structure the company while not doing yours as a
Scott Guthrie:well travelled, entrepreneurial journey. Of course, one which starts with fulfilling most or all of the various functions required to one or specialising in steering the ship, the danger, of course, it is not wanting to let go. And you've all those fabulous accounts that you've just mentioned, that you've grown from nothing. And you won't want to relinquish control to fully focus your attention elsewhere.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:I think a lot of CEOs and a lot of people who had to kind of their business baby really struggled with this, like the idea of hiring and giving your relationships to other people. But I think if you hire people and trust them, make sure you're there to answer any questions. But if you trust them, and you genuinely believe that I think the person I'm hiring better at the job than I am for account management. I'm really excited to hand it over to them. I can't say who they are. I feel like one of these influences. He's got a big project and working on
Scott Guthrie:the T's great, the great teams when I look forward to the to the reveal YouTube video. But also, there's a nice synergy there between the new account management position you've created and finding the most appropriate influencer to work with on a brand partnership. If you've gone through the process of searching, screening, and selecting the most appropriate influencer to partner with, you need them to trust in your decision and let them get on with it or be it within brand guardrails. And this seems to be the way you're positioning the new account management person. We've talked a lot about how you've grown the business. And increasingly that means moving from a generalist role to a specialist role. What challenges are there specifically to your role? And what challenges are there about growing that category of influencer marketing?
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:Yeah, and what big questions, my role, to be honest, are getting out of the way. I think like, so we did raise investment back in January, just to be honest, just to get advisors and one of the investors said to me the other the other night, he was like, my aim as a CEO is to become completely irrelevant to get out of everyone else's way. So my challenge at the moment is making myself obsolete. There are lots of things I want to work on that a long term strategy and I just want to make sure that the rest of the team feel empowered to do their job and feel like they know what they're doing and feel supported. But my challenge is getting out of my own way. Really, I don't want to be the bottleneck of my own company. I think it's the micromanagement is the death of creativity and inspiration.
Scott Guthrie:Now hundred percent scrolling back to your example, the Rolls Royce guy, he was great because he took a punt. And he obviously paid dividends is one of the challenges. I don't want to put words in your mouth. But there's one of the challenges, trying to get legacy brands to test out influencer marketing as a new channel.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:When we meet legacy brands, we tend to get them on side quickly. I think there's a lot of there's a lot of influencer marketing fatigue still. And there's also a lot of there's an assumption that influence marketing isn't for a lot of industries. So especially b2b or tech that isn't like tech consumer products, but tech, like, we work with fast hosts who are an IT service provider. So they are looking for IT professionals who that's their customer. They never thought let's do an Instagram campaign. What we've managed to convince them of is like 2 billion people watch YouTube around the world, they watch for an average of four minutes per video with the sound on on our campaigns an average of six minutes with the sound on there are so many different niches you can go into. If you can't find your customer on YouTube, you don't know who your customers. So for a lot of brands, we're lucky because YouTube gives us kind of a slight differentiator. I think they see Instagram and lavonne does influence marketing and then anything beyond that they often haven't considered before. So it's really nice to go in with that specialism. The thing I'm finding really interesting at the moment is no one's signing off new budgets. So even though we want Unilever under lockdown, and we want may document lockdown, and the NHS but like a lot of brands aren't signing off new budget until at least 2021. They say 2021 they're going to start trialling things again, but so many marketing teams are furloughed. And then so many budgets are squeezed that although YouTube is the thing people are watching while they're stuck at home, it's still very difficult to get people to experiment and the other challenges. So we're looking at this piece where YouTube creators actually kind of dominate and have higher engagement rates on other platforms. So we do offer tik tok as an option. We do have Instagram but mainly still with YouTube creators because their audience trust them and see some like more of a friend. But now the experimental budgets that were going to us at YouTube when we could kind of wrestle away from just Instagram are now looking going going into tik tok as well. agencies who specialise in Tick Tock I do feel like we're going back kind of five years in the influencer marketing industry, the idea of like Tick Tock houses and the idea of just chucking loads of money a problem where often there's no link, you can swipe up to you there's no trackability there's no Tick Tock very difficult to actually advertise on and assess any performance.
Scott Guthrie:Well, even the the dwell time is completely different, isn't it? If you're talking about the average dwell time on YouTube, being four minutes with the sound on and your content provides six minutes with a sound dog versus a matter of seconds on Tick Tock is a different product, isn't it really, and there's a there's a different sort of immediacy, and it's a different sort of demographic and a different style of production? I would imagine.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:Yeah, we just did a campaign with a client on Tick tock, and the average view time was 11 seconds, and then out of nearly like 7000 comments. There are a few that mentioned the brand positively, but very, very few and most were rejecting product placement. So which is really interesting. I think there's a real distaste for advertising on Tick tock, and brand partnerships. I wasn't particularly impressed by the outcomes of the campaign and normally we advocate that YouTube should be used in YouTube creators or influencers should be used as part of always on performance. And then as part of big brand awareness activations, so you can work with different sides, different departments, with marketing different teams with the marketing departments. With Tick tock, it's so much about brand awareness. Sometimes you feel like there's no way of measuring an outcome. Often brands don't, aren't allowed to have their own Tick Tock channels and they don't know what they put So even click through to the brand technical channel doesn't really make sense discount code to the only way you could do it. But apart from that, it's really hard to track actual impact of tech talk. So and then a lot of the companies, agencies, and then managers involved, that's where it feels like going back five years, you know, when everyone was suddenly trying to sign up influencers to make a quick buck. And they were waving shiny things in front of brands, in front of brands eyes, hoping to distract them. The thing I love about this industry now is it's professionalised. To a degree where we work with view guarantees and we work with guaranteed sale results like we were so excited by the professionalism and professionalisation of the industry, to go back and fight against kind of the same battles, we had to have discussions about five years ago with influences. For Tick tock, it's exhausting.
Scott Guthrie:There are lots of threads here that I will touch on towards the end of the conversation about professionalism. So I want to pop those, I don't want to lose those. But I want to talk a little bit now about COVID-19. As an accelerant of change, you've seen that there there are downsides, obviously with this, this global pandemic, many, you know, not not just you don't to be flippant about it. It is a global pandemic. You've won accounts, but the accounts aren't going to be activated until New Year, for example, and the experimental elements of accounts have seemed to have drifted off. Are there any positives, though, in terms of the way content is created?
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:For us, I mean, we're very lucky because YouTube subscriptions at the beginning of locked up 20% YouTube views, we're up on average over 15%. For certain verticals, the growth has been huge. And then on top of that, when brands couldn't do their traditional video production, we could encourage them actually, they could turn to YouTube creators to not just do campaigns will also get usage rates and also cut produce output cut downs. So working with influencers rather than video production companies saves on average 50% and makes your content on average 40% more memorable. So I doubt that a lot of brands are going to go back to the same way they did TV production and TV ads before. I think hopefully they're learning from this and L'Oreal's The Great example, was Eva Longoria doing her hair at home. It was very personal, the advert actually was really compelling. And it's like, okay, find a trusted voice, who knows how to speak directly to a camera and be relatable and use that in your advert. So I'm hoping that that will move happen moving forward. And I also think if we've managed which to become kind of a line item in budgets. So the Unilever campaign, I think they've already said they want to work with us for next year. So we did it in we just finished that campaign in August, September. And they want to do next summer and maybe some things in between, if you manage to convert the people who are experimenting now to working with you consistently in to being retained clients
Scott Guthrie:to be evangelists as well for for the channel. So they can tell there there are other product managers within Unilever or Procter and Gamble or wherever they can start
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:back. I think that's the fear post COVID I think there'll be a lot of pressure to just go back to doing kind of ridiculous, huge productions we did before that feel, I think people have hit a limit. Like if you think about viewers now, what they want from YouTube creators is by the productive entertainment, or just comfort, they want something that feels normal and safe. And I don't know if people are when we come out of COVID if people are going to be duped by the like, huge, crazy productions anymore. I think there's like a vulnerability in society and discussions about mental health that we've opened that mean the way we communicate with each other, and connect with each other, and what we need from other people is much more personal. And that's where influences do, especially on YouTube fit in because they show kind of a more or even Tick Tock makeup videos get ready with me on Tick Tock. It's all about showing a more vulnerable side, and then building trust that way. So I'm hoping that that won't disappear.
Scott Guthrie:This podcast has been made possible through exclusive sponsorship by tiger. I particularly like Tigers discovery tool, because it lets you apply hundreds of different filters to their huge database so you can find exactly the influences you want that perfectly match your campaign. I've seen agencies and brands discover high value influences less than CT for an hour take his affinity tool takes discovery a step further by showing you an influencers brand affinity. What does this mean? It means you're able to partner with influencers who are most likely to enjoy your brand or product. Tiger focuses on their customer success. When you sign up to the platform. You'll give it a dedicated customer success manager. They guide you through everything from onboarding, to training, to just checking in and making sure you're finding success with the platform when you're running an influencer campaign. Sometimes it can be difficult to measure your success, but it's easy to report your campaign data with tiger. Their modular Report Builder lets you pull accurate real time data directly from social media platforms. You can also choose which metrics matter most to you and your clients. When you can customise the data that you show in your report. Something that can be overlooked when you're choosing an influencer marketing platform is the quality of the data. Tiger has direct API access to all major social media platforms. This gives Tiger users 100% accurate real time data that's gathered responsibly, he can't find a good strategy if you're not looking at good quality data. If you're looking to scale your influencer marketing efforts, Tiger is a truly global solution. It's availability in over 10 languages. And the ability to make multi currency payments directly on platform gives brands a huge advantage when running multinational, multi lingual influencer campaigns. If you want to see how to get to work for you go to Tiger media.com slash request iphon demo globally television advertising account for something like 33 cents of every dollar spent on advertising, do you think there is a future where influencer marketing can take on television as a channel and when as a medium.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:So I think influence marketing should always be part of brand campaigns, I don't know if it will always be if it if it's worth eradicating a crazy creative TV ad but idea entirely. I like the idea that there's something of substance in a message that then we as a media channel amplify. So I think it's still worth having something spent on a TV or digital ad that is kind of at the heart of the campaign, and then getting influencers to create their own ads around it. So instead of being 33 cents of the dollar, it should be more like three cents of the dollar. But the kind of key message you want to get across maybe lands in the right way, then help influence us influences instead of TV advertising use influence. And then use that influence content again, in paid ads. So TV contents, the initial Spark, creators talk about why that philosophy is important, and then amplify it themselves and then use their voices amplify in a relatable way.
Scott Guthrie:influencer marketing often gets a bad rap for being opaque. What is what's your take on transparency within the industry.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:We are very transparent with an agency we will share prices for creators with clients, we will share how our agents will pay structure works. We basically say if you have a campaign budget, 100% 70% of that will go to influencers. 30% will go on agency fees, we guarantee views at the beginning of the campaign. And if we do not hit those guaranteed views within 30 days, we will either give you back our agency fee as a brand. Or we will spend that fee creating more content until we hit that guarantee. So that no one has to go back to their boss and say, Oh shit, we really screwed up, the agency just didn't hit their targets. That would be us making someone in a marketing role making their job making them look worse at their jobs or something they didn't do wrong at all. I am very passionate about being transparent, because I think it does better for the whole industry. It means people know what results they're getting, and how they're going to get there. I think a lot of agencies often are very protective about this. And they say they don't want to share fees. They say they don't want to share contact information I understand but they say they don't want to share. Every time we have been more open and transparent with a client or potential client. Every time we've gone in been like, here's the data tools we use. Here is exactly how the process works. Here's how long it takes. We can sit in your office and do it with you if you like. Here's how much we how long it takes to contact people to get a yes, here's the contracts or the stuff. The more transparent about that, the more they want to work with us because they realise it is a complicated process that takes specialists. By doing that you're demystifying the process and demonstrating that there is a process there is a workflow and there there is specialism within each element of the workflow. Yes. And I think often there's this assumption that, for instance, marketing, again, that kind of bad rap of the industry, you mentioned, where it's like, oh, you reach out someone Instagram and give them a ludicrous amount of money. And that's it. And that's not actually how any specialist agency work. So we find the more open we are about education, we do better the industry as a whole. But we also show the value of our work. And those clients often look at it and go, Oh God, I don't have the resources to pay for those data tools internally. I don't think I'd know how to use them. I don't know how to specialise in creating the right content. And I don't have the time. So actually, I would much rather trust this agency to do education transparency is also part of the sales process. There's a saying and someone taught me And I tell to everyone we work with. It's the confused brain says no. If someone's confused, they will find a way to shut it down. If someone is like, I don't know why this is this price, I don't know how it works, they will shut it down and walk away, that normally if there's a no, it's because we haven't done our job well enough and explaining why what we do has value.
Scott Guthrie:So transparency leads us into a conversation in the area of ethics, the ethics of paying influences the ethics of how you vet influences, what's your standpoint, and you know, how important is that to digital vices
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:we do in the system creators being paid. So a lot of brands will come and ask for gifting, a lot of brands will come and ask for them. And kind of ask us to get the creators as low as we can, or try and do experiences, the only exception we've ever made to that was flying with the red arrows. I felt like that was a fair opportunity. But we really insist on paying creators and appreciating the work they do. If you're looking to use content, we do push back on brands a lot and say no, you have to pay separately for usage rights. You have to you can't just try and sneak it into a contract. That's not how this works. And then also diversity of creators you work with. During BLM. It's been really, really interesting. So we've always been very focused on diverse creators, partly because YouTube is about finding different niches and building trust. But yeah, diversity in terms of content, diversity in terms of kind of race and gender. But then often during BLM, I think the pay gap has come out. So under COVID, it's really interesting. People weren't talking about influence pay gaps before we were working on a campaign. And the creator kind of said to us, what should we charge? She was that person of colour. So what should I charge? And we were like, Oh, we pushed her to charge slightly higher than her normal fee. And then we spoke to the brand. And we're like, we still think she's under charging. Luckily, the brand was so understanding completely agreed. It was like, yeah, we're gonna double her fee.
Scott Guthrie:Wow. Again, that pays testimony to the quality of brands and the quality of the values lived out by those organisations. And so you managed to partner with
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:Yeah. And we say to the customers, like, Look, this. This is our guidance, we think this person should be paid and paid fairly. This is the budget we have, we have slightly more to allocate you. You're happy to do it. I'm, I'm actually I'm really glad we can have these conversations. Now. I think like, under COVID. And with BLM, it's been this perfect. A perfect storm of starting to be more transparent and more ethical. So there are lots of like Instagrams have come up with influencers sharing their rates and what they've been offered and the discussion of like, Is this fair?
Scott Guthrie:We've talked for years about brand safety, but increasingly influencers see themselves as brands. As part of the influencer workflow. We know it's our job to make sure there's the most appropriate fit between brand and influencer. Now influencers are vetting brands, making sure the brand is the right fit for them for their community and for their long term careers. Do you agree?
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:But this perfect storm of transparency now and upholding brands to account with holding agencies to account where influencers are learning their worth. And I think it's very exciting that we're having this conversation. And it's so nice as an agency to be able to discuss it with brands, because then they understand Actually, it's not just these decisions aren't made in a vacuum, potentially a whole creator community ecosystem that if you get this wrong under pay someone to take advantage, it could damage your reputation potentially. So it's really interesting to have kind of brands held to account and agencies and creators.
Scott Guthrie:This goes part and parcel with your organisational values, building an agency you want to be proud of, and only working with brands and verticals which hold integrity to you. In simpler times, and I said this in an earlier episode, when I was in conversation with Steven ready have inspired in simpler times, the simpler wild product makers would stick to promoting just their own products, they would be Switzerland, neutral to politics, but we don't inhabit that simpler world. Our world is fractured, is comprised of polarised communities and a fragmented media. Today brands need to believe in something beyond shareholder value. They need to stand up for that thing. Their stakeholders expect them to do so and will reward those who do so honestly. But those same consumers will cancel those brands who fail to live up to their expectations. Yes, we see that with Gen Zed, but increasingly with these we see this across all consumer age groups.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:There's this romanticization of Gen Z. So we're having a big debate with some clients. And it's like this is like not where I thought we'd go. Brandon. Lots of clients are very specific on the type of people they want to work with making sure they're a good brand fit. I understand that but often, creators aren't perfect creators can't be perfect creators, the humans and the thing that audience love is that They're humans and that they sometimes make mistakes. Whereas performance campaigns where a brand says to us look, we need this ROI, we need to hit this number, we need to hit number of sales that will this earned back this percentage of spend. We often say to them great, you're gonna have to be really flexible with the creators you work with. So we recently worked with them. I mean, for a conversion campaign with nella rose who had a very interesting lockdown, because she was she's only she's quite young. But when she was 1213, she she is black, and she tweeted some racist things about other black people. And she apologised for it. She was like, I was a child, I'm an idiot, I hated myself being black. I didn't understand race politics. Most brands, immediately on that brand awareness side would never work that they're like, she's not safe. who worked with her after that? for conversion campaign and her audience were really grateful with how kind of honestly and how vulnerable is she, she, she apologised and was like, I'm not going to cry and say, like, I feel like I've been cancelled, she was like, I did something wrong. And I've changed as a person. And her audience really bought into that and really believed her. And she drove kind of a hell of a lot of sales for this brand. And it was really interesting, because that, I think, again, when this report we did with Gen Z, we assume that they're like this woke generation that really politically correct, we looked at what they actually watch on YouTube. And it is, it's the first time I felt all so much inappropriate content, swearing, really inappropriate jokes, but it just beyond like, some of the creators were very irreverent, I think Gen Z are quite sick of being told that their work and told they're politically correct and told they should have values that are better than all of us. And so there's kind of this rejection, if you look at what they're actually watching, we say to brands, especially government brands, and things like if you want to reach Gen Z audience, you're gonna have to be a little bit flexible with your vetting, or a little bit flexible with the ideal creator you're looking for. Because these kids are irreverent, we've gone past the like, brand safe youtuber situation to like the people actually get growing and gaining traction with Gen Z audiences in the UK are often not the most appropriate or brand safe creators. ethically, it's still like, they're putting a lot of pressure on influencers to be perfect, but actually, you don't want to watch perfect people,
Scott Guthrie:or they don't. And it's how you react to a misstep that's most important. In your example, you describe a young creator who showed her vulnerability, who was accountable for her actions, but also who demonstrated how she had grown from that experience and how she corrected it. Your example shows that often, when we put our hands in the air and own a mistake, then sometimes that act can have the effect of strengthening rather than weakening our relationship with an audience. It's similar to what they call the recovery paradox. This is where the satisfied consumers are so impressed by the service recovery, they experience, that they become even more loyal and satisfied than they were originally. I want to turn now and talk about return on investment. What the results look like to you and your clients. How do you define our OSI?
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:Yeah, if it's a brand awareness campaign, it's guaranteed organic views and guaranteed organic impressions on Instagram organic views on tik tok. So we set up some clients have asked us to do on average watch time. So they'll be like if the platform average is four minutes, can you do a guarantee of say, a million organic views with an average four minute what time so that suits brand awareness? For conversions? we've we've actually got a few different metrics. We can do it based on a CPA for like, download, so like, what is your best performing marketing channel? What's the best CPA you've got on it? Okay, let's set that as a benchmark that we're trying to reach. So I'm sets like, oh, I've we've run Facebook ads, and it was five pounds per download, like, Great. Okay, let's, let's, um, let's try and hit that with YouTube creators by tracking instals. And then the final one that we've done, it's performance based entirely. So it's like what percentage of their spend did we earn back? And that is really reward difficult optimization, conversion data like that. We have a lot of very smart people on the team who work on it. And make sure every single microscopic element of each video is optimised because if you miss say a links wrong, or if you, I don't know, don't put a link on screen. That's custom memorable link, you lose 10 sales Actually, that's quite significant for that creator. So we wouldn't respond to them if they'd lost the sales. So we really, we work really, really closely with that and transparently with that client, to make sure we're really optimising every aspect of their spend.
Scott Guthrie:So return them Investment measurement depends on the client depends on the objective depends on the communications objective and attend depends on the organisation objective. Last few questions now, what's the biggest industry trend you're most excited about, or most concerned about?
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:I'm really excited to see where influences community building goes. I think, oddly, I'm going to say something very strange only fans has been there, growth has been incredible during lockdown. And there are lots of YouTube creators who are making YouTube content to bolster their only fans. So new YouTube creators who their YouTube content might be like, doing Q and A's or talking about their lives or reacting to other YouTubers, and they have only fans which is their main way of making money on the side, their YouTube ad revenue and only fans, I find that really interesting not because I mean, the pornography part doesn't really matter here or there. To me. What I find fascinating about it is the idea of YouTube creators growing, monetizing, and being in control of their own communities. I think if brands can partner and harness that it will be a much deeper relationship. So it's like Patreon, but more. So I'm kind of excited to see where in the next three years, YouTube creators take this idea of like normalising monetizing their community, and how much access you give them and how much vulnerability I think that that's a really interesting trend. I'm a little bit concerned about AI influences. I think they're exactly the type of shiny objects that brands would get excited about and spend money on. Because they feel controllable. But that's the opposite to what they should be doing. They should be letting go of control a little bit more, and trying to pay entrepreneurs not necessarily like design studios that design these influences. They should be working with influences as entrepreneurs. So I do get a little bit worried that shiny object syndrome of like the perfect fake AI creator that won't even have a YouTube presence, they don't have a personality, they try and fake their personalities. And I'm sure you have a lot of opinions on this.
Scott Guthrie:There are two fascinating elements here. I hadn't considered only fans. But of course, I have considered how creators are looking to become both platform agnostic and self reliant, no longer purely reliant upon brand collaboration deals, or the vagaries of social media platform algorithms. And their commercial aspirations are reaching beyond selling much as virtual influences or AI influences as he referred to them. The last episode I was in conversation with Dudley nevel, Spencer and authority of virtual influences, and I believe they do have a place and I explore virtual influences in greater depth in a chapter, more human than human coming out in a book to be published later in the year by Routledge titled, influencer marketing, building brand communities and engagement. But the power of the virtual influencer lies in the power of their backstory, and their story arc and their ability for us, the viewer to suspend disbelief. And as you say, it's not just about the design, or the way they look, or how they interact, how they engage with their community.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:to YouTube, because I think one of the reasons we can have an opinion on Instagram, and I know that I'm, what's the name of the studio that makes them in LA, the one the Bruce, we have, yeah, la Michaela. And they work hard on having every different creator that every different character or influence they make has different opinions. Yeah, but they haven't managed to translate it to YouTube. Because I don't know if one the animation channel is challenges very, very difficult. But two, I think you can get them you can list opinions they should have, and you can list kind of archetypes that they can adhere to, but they can't actually be real people who go through breakups, or no, this is
Scott Guthrie:great. This is very true. And I and I think that little Michaela, and you know, and her sort of alter ego, Bermuda, they are sort of early iterations of where we're going to be in 510 years time. So they are I, my understanding of them is that they are humans, but with a synthetic sort of overlay. And there's the humans behind the scenes, who are answering the questions that are engaging with with the community, the next iteration or the iteration after the next iteration will be will be continually learning and to be machine learning. And they'll be they'll be absorbing their backstory and learning from people, the community, how they engage with them, and they will be able to engage in real time and that will be machine learned that won't be human sitting in a PC,
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:or some anime run YouTube channel in Japan. So I think 7000 of them there's I mean, there's possibly It's just gonna be interesting to see how they take that, I think, yeah, taking that challenge to the next level, it's still brands trying to exert more control over influences and more control over who they pay and paying more professional design agencies rather than paying entrepreneurs, which I still think as long as they're one small part of the big influence marketing ecosystem, it's fine. But I just don't want brands to get excited about only paying, like virtual influences because it's the control they can have.
Scott Guthrie:No, absolutely. We talked a little bit about professionalism at the top of the conversation and I said that we would pop that we wouldn't delete that will come back to it. There's a there's a conflation between, I think, especially in the mainstream media between influencer advertising, and influencer marketing and influencer. advertising is often I think, portrayed with those love Island contestants that have maybe 18 months in the sun. So they will sell any anything to anybody because they know that they've got a finite celebrity window, versus you know, influencer marketing, which is a long term, honing of a craft. We've talked a little bit about ROI in terms of return, the guaranteed sales results at about guaranteed views in the first 30 days. But how else can the industry professionalise?
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:It's really interesting. You touched on this ROI over kind of short and influence marketing being long term. So if you conflate that, for some brands, it's really interesting, especially if it's a product that costs money, we find that the if you work with creators on a longer term basis, actually conversions stay the same often. So they'll keep converting even though they have the same audience. That's been really fascinating for us, because we assumed that people were just talking about partnerships, but there wasn't really a benefit to it. But actually, I think long term partnerships do build consumer trust and drive sales. So I'm excited to see that professionalise
Scott Guthrie:and, of course, you know, a lot of working with an influencer is, is front, the cost is front loaded, you know, it's finding the right most appropriate influencer to work with your brand, to do the proper vetting, to to understand their demographics, and to check you know, there's no influence of fraud, but also that the softer side of the appropriateness of it, you know, whether even whether they're decent gamers to get along with you. And then you have to get through legals, and your contracts are drawn up. So it's quite, there's a lot of cost fraud. And so from, from a financial point of view, it makes perfect sense to keep on building that relationship. But from a content point of view, I think it makes perfect sense as well. Because the more the influencer or the creator works with the brand, the more the brand works with the Creator, the more they get to know each other. And so that cuts down the timeline for creating new content and understanding the creative brief. But also, I think the the brand opens up their kimono a little bit, and they trust the Creator with more details about what their brand does, and they sort of that they lift the velvet rope to into the VIP area of what the brand is. And then you can so that it's a win win win, it's a win for the Creator, they get to create more interesting content, it's a win for the audience, because the community gets to see more interesting content and obviously is an a win for the brand because they get more engagement, and more more ROI.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:Yeah, especially if a brand present is presented as the enabler for something. So um, if there's a purpose message or this brand is allowed us to do this, me as an influencer and the audience. I think that's where brands should be trying to go, which which does require more trust, but long term partnership make it makes it much easier for brands to be seen as this enabler, or this kind of pivotal, purpose driven force behind content.
Scott Guthrie:Lastly, Jenny, how do you continue to learn in order to stay on top of things within your role and within the industry?
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:I'm learning too much at once. I think I'd never thought I'd run a company. And then there are lots of challenges that come with that. But I'm learning. I like to read a lot. So I like to read a lot of like startup books I am that that dickheads? A little bit. I struggle with podcasts. Pretty hard to listen to them. But auks sorry, yeah. Yeah, I like, yeah, I'm a reading person. And then talking to people to be completely honest, the more you can find people who are really smart, who have done something who are facing similar challenges and encouraging them to be open is huge. And then even like internally, like find people on your team and ask what they're struggling with. And then you'll learn from them as well talk to creators ask what they're struggling with your length and look at data patterns, like I get obsessed with data patterns. And you'll learn a lot from that. So I think it's kind of keeping your mindset at the stage where you're forcing yourself to learn or
Scott Guthrie:Finally, Jenny workin people find out more about digital voices and about you online,
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:thanks to the plugging opportunity panel where we interview creators. We've got We're on LinkedIn quite a lot or you can just reach out to hello at Digital voices.co. uk.
Scott Guthrie:Jennifer quickly Jones, podcast hater, founder and CEO of digital voices. Thank you very much for your time and for all your insights.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones:Thank you Scott. Thanks for having me.
Scott Guthrie:Thank you for listening to the influencer marketing lab with me Scott Guthrie. The podcast is sponsored by tiger. Please subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts. For more information, visit influencer marketing lab.com. And if you want to see how tagger can work for you, go to tag a media.com slash request hyphen demo