Let's Call Influencer Marketing By Its Real Name

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash.

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash.

The late, great Townes Van Zandt was certainly prescient – and by that I don’t mean the fact that he titled one of his albums The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt. 

I’m referring to a line from his late, great song “Fraternity Blues,” where the singer-songwriter says, “If you want good friends, they’re gonna cost you.”

Golly, if that isn’t influencer marketing in a nutshell my name is Eggly Butters. And it’s not, so there.

Influencer marketing is hot right now, mainly because marketers are so flummoxed by all the channels and strategies that have been shown to be a Corvette body with a Model T engine.

Facebook has a credibility problem with its analytics, cable can’t measure its audience, Google struggles with attribution, YouTube can’t get rid of the sketchy stuff, Twitter is full of bots, and Snapchat … please. 

And no one wants to see stuff from your brand just because it’s your brand.

Once you filter out the macro channels with micro-audiences about the only thing left is influencer marketing, which seems like a reasonable way to reach a social-media audience without all of social media’s problems.

I mean, you either co-opt an influencer or cut a deal with them so they’ll promote you to their followers, the followers follow, and boom! Targeted target marketing at its finest.

We’ll get into the problems with that in a second. But first, let’s call influencer marketing by its real name: spokesperson marketing.

I know it’s not sexy, but it’s true.

To prove it, let’s compare influencer marketing to an example of spokesperson marketing from the glory days of TV advertising: Bing Crosby for Minute Maid orange juice.

Right now, I can’t tell you whether this comparison will work out in favor of the influencers or Der Bingle, so let’s just see where it goes.

Bing Crosby made a series of commercials with his family where they all enjoyed Minute Maid orange juice. By all indications these commercials sold a lot of juice, because:

  1. People trusted Bing Crosby;
  2. He had a reputation as a family man – and the family to prove it;
  3. The setup was real and believable; and
  4. The product seemed to be a good fit. It made sense that the Crosbys would drink Minute Maid.

Now, let’s take a contemporary example of influencer marketing that I know pretty well: Travel guru Rick Steves’ endorsement of Allianz Travel Insurance.

This works because:

  1. People trust Rick Steves;
  2. He has a reputation as an honest person in the travel space; and
  3. It makes sense that he would buy travel insurance because he travels so much, and Allianz would be a reasonable product for him to buy.

Crosby was a spokesperson; Steves is an influencer. But is there really any discernible difference between the spokesperson and the influencer?

Yes, specifically:

  1. The influencer works with a smaller, more targeted audience;
  2. The influencer uses different channels; and
  3. The influencer is generally not as well vetted (generally; there are a long line of advertising fails in this department, with the most recent being Jameis Winston).

However, the broad strokes are virtually identical. The brand wants a good friend, and is paying for their friendship.

The vaunted contest between the influencer and the spokesperson is a draw because the influencer is the spokesperson, and vice versa.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t a problem, as long as it’s acknowledged that influencer marketing is not somehow different or better than spokesperson marketing. It’s just a modern name for an old approach, just as a lot of social media is simply public relations made into tapas.

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash.

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash.

I can hear the disciples of influencer marketing now, saying that they have so many more ways to measure their impact than a mere spokesperson in a simple TV ad.

To that I say that the spokesperson-in-a-TV-ad approach had only one measurement of impact, but the best one: Run the ads and see what happens to orange-juice sales.

We can’t go back to the days of Bing Crosby and Minute Maid, and we shouldn’t want to. But sometimes we get so caught up in new channels and new buzzwords that we forget the cornerstones of marketing:

  1. Sales is just about the only thing that matters.
  2. The best advertisement is an authoritative repeat customer who recommends your product, brand, or service unsolicited. Every other marketing tactic is an attempt to emulate that.
  3. Given 1) and 2), one of an organization’s very top goals should be to provide such an outstanding customer experience that people become repeat customers and recommend you to others without any action on your part.

I realize that dispenses with a lot of what we do as marketers. And maybe that’s as it should be. I’m not sure that all good friends are worth the price you have to pay.

Kit Kiefer1 Comment