Regulators welcome influencer marketers to top table

Sponsored by Fourth Floor

Issue #097 | Your reading time this week is 4 mins. 30 secs.

Influencers have the single biggest impact on people’s green choices, finds survey

A new report from Unilever shows that consumers turn to creator content for information about making green choices (78%) ahead of turning to TV documentaries (48%), news articles (37%), and government campaigns (20%).

• 8-in-10 (77%) of survey respondents support creators encouraging their audience to behave in an environmentally friendly way.

• 7-in-10 (72%) support creators selling products or services focused on sustainability.

Unilever worked with ten creators from the UK, the US, and Canada. The CPG firm commissioned 30 pieces of content aimed at nudging people to waste less food and less plastic.

Influence is King

Influencers leading the way in changing gender stereotypes

Campaign asked this week whether influencers have done a better job eroding gender stereotypes than mainstream advertising. It’s an interesting read with several contrasting viewpoints, including those of practitioners from different parts of the world, alongside academics. The consensus: a cautious ‘yes’. But the contrasting views are worth exploring.

Gen Alphas are influencing household purchase decisions

Gen Alpha (kids aged nine and under) are already influencing household purchase decisions, according to Morning Consult.

• 56% of Gen Alpha’s parents report that their kids watch shopping content like haul and unboxing videos (48%, for parents of kids aged 0-4), where they get ideas about new products and brands.

• 52% of Gen Alpha’s parents said YouTube is their kids’ favourite social media platform. The next most popular platform is TikTok, at 9%.

TikTok starts blocking links to app stores in creators’ bios

According to TechCrunch, TikTok has started blocking links to app stores in creators’ bios. In the future, only TikTok business accounts will be able to link to app store pages. No pay, no display. Otherwise, businesses trying to drum up app store downloads will have to buy ads.

The top 30 YouTube stars

Insider used SocialBlade to identify YouTube’s most popular platform-native creators. Musicians, entertainment brands, and production firms were excluded from the analysis. MrBeast tops the chart, followed by PewDiePie (no surprises so far). Third place went to Anastasia Radzinskaya, the nine-year-old Russian-American YouTuber fronting channel Like Nastya, the top grossing child-audience channel.

• Just five of the top 30 channels are fronted by women

• Only eight of the top 30 channels are US-based

TikTok wants in on $112 billion search ad market

TikTok has been beta-testing search ads for a year, but has been upping the ante in recent weeks. According to Insider, the short-form video app uses scenery, images, voice-to-text, captions, and keywords that appear on its green screen effect to choose which ads to show. Google and Bing just look at the title, descriptions, and tags on a video.

Meta to lay off another 10,000 workers

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this week that the firm plans to lay off another 10,000 employees as part of its “Year of Efficiency”. This almost doubles the 11,000 layoffs from last November. In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg explained: “I've said that part of our work will involve removing jobs -- and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision. I understand that this update may still feel surprising, so I'd like to lay out some broader context on our vision, our culture, and our operating philosophy.”

TikTok takes out ads to address data security concerns

TikTok has taken out advertisements in outlets including Axios to address concerns around data security. The ads explain that the social media platform is building tailor-made systems, overseen by US-based teams specifically tasked with managing all access to US user-data and securing the TikTok platform.

Meta sunsets NFT projects

This week Meta announced it’s winding down “digital collectibles” (NFTs to you and me). The news came out as a Twitter thread from Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s head of Commerce and Fintech.

Forget GPT-3. GPT-4 just rolled out

OpenAI has created GPT-4, its latest effort in scaling deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, and emitting text outputs). It purportedly shows human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.

→ Texan toddler TikToker wows celebs with brutally honest reviews [CNN].

→ “It felt like our consumption of information - both factual, balanced, entertaining, etc. - had an existential crisis,” Kevin Systrom explaining to TechCrunch why he and fellow Instagram founder Mike Krieger decided to launch Artifact, their news-based platform.

→ I spoke at length with Marketing Beat about de-influencing, the Influencer Marketing Trade Body, and a sustainable future for our sector.

→ Performance Marketing World had me on their excellent podcast, Attention Seekers, S2E12, to ask me what I consider to be over-rated and under-rated.

UK regulators welcome influencer marketers to top table

This week, The Influencer Marketing Trade Body (“IMTB”) announced it has been appointed as a member of the Committee of Advertising Practice (“CAP”), to represent the influencer marketing sector.

This marks a monumental milestone for both the IMTB and the wider influencer marketing sector. IMTB becomes the CAP’s newest member in over a decade. Until the IMTB’s joining, the Committee had no direct influencer marketing representation by a dedicated body.

CAP is responsible for writing and updating the rules on advertising in the UK via the CAP (non-broadcast advertising) Code. CAP is the sister organisation of the Advertising Standards Authority ("ASA"), the UK’s independent advertising regulator that administers the CAP Code to keep ads legal, decent, honest and truthful. Additionally, the CAP Executive provides the advertising industry with guidance on complying with the Code.

QUOTABLE: "Influencers increasingly represent a significant part of the advertising ecosystem and ensuring they understand how and when the ad rules apply to them is a focus of the ASA’s work. We are therefore delighted to appoint IMTB as a member of CAP. We have been impressed by IMTB's depth of subject matter expertise.” - Shahriar Coupal, Director of CAP

DIVE DEEPER: There’s more on the story from Hello Partner, Marketing Beat, Performance Marketing World, The Media Leader, the Wadds Inc. newsletter, and the IMTB website.

DECLARATION: I lead the IMTB, and Fourth Floor is a valued early member of the body.