YOU’VE BEEN KNOWN AS VINELAB ACROSS THE YEARS AND YOU’VE BEEN EXCLUSIVELY OFFERING INFLUENCER MARKETING FOR 10 YEARS. WHAT CHANGED THROUGHOUT THIS DECADE?
We rebranded to Sociata for starters, we feel the brand better connects with marketers, creators and the raison d’être of our industry. We launched our technology as a self-serve model, the same technology that has been powering our client campaigns across the years and we are proud to see it adopted by advertisers like Talabat, Magrabi and Mastercard, along with agencies like TBWA and Magnitude, to name just a few. Our technology’s robust capabilities have prompted TikTok to select us as the first platform in EEMEA to integrate their creator APIs with.
DO YOU NOTICE A CHANGE IN THE ADVERTISERS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS INFLUENCER MARKETING?
It was harder in the early days to justify to marketers a big spend in influencer marketing, given none of the social platforms nor the big agencies were advocating for the practice. Today, influencer marketing is finally a line item in a marketing budget. Marketers nowadays are also much more comfortable giving creators the creative helm. Many brands were used to having full control over their messaging, however, they saw when creators are given creative freedom, they can produce more authentic and engaging content that yields great results.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE REASONS WHY INFLUENCER MARKETING IS NOW SO ESSENTIAL?
TikTok certainly helped fuel this phenomena as they are the first platform to offer creator-led ad products. Despite them being a later entrant, they have awoken all of the other platforms on the need to offer creator solutions. It’s only until recently that we started hearing Meta and Snapchat leadership talk about the need to prioritize creators. It took for Elon Musk to acquire Twitter to put creators first on the platform. It’s really not that hard to see that the practice will keep growing once you realize that the party on social platforms is among people. The job of the marketer is to enter this conversation among people.
MANY MARKETERS COMPLAIN ABOUT CREATOR FRAUD, HOW DO YOU TACKLE THIS PROBLEM?
It’s an issue that we take very seriously. We vet every creator profile through our technology and then manually through our team, but the majority of the process is done through tech. The fact that our platform is connected to the social platforms’ official data APIs, makes the data a source of truth. This ensures matching the right creators with advertisers very quickly and guarantees that the creators they work with are authentic and have real engagement with their audience.
WHAT SETS YOUR COMPANY APART FROM OTHERS IN THE INDUSTRY?
One of our strengths and what makes us unique is that we offer full-funnel measurement for campaigns, which includes media and sales metrics. Our AI has been learning for the past five years, an and through it, we are able to predict the impact of a creator on the customer journey, from attraction to transaction. We are also able to measure those stages in real time over a dashboard. Our clients appreciate that they can see exactly how their investment in influencer marketing is paying off.
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT A SUCCESSFUL INFLUENCER MARKETING CAMPAIGN THAT YOU HAVE EXECUTED RECENTLY?
We worked with Dubai Future Foundation on promoting the One Million Arab Coders educational programme. Our mandate was to generate one million enrolments in the programme and graduate hundreds of thousands of developers to the marketplace. From a performance lens, paid social alone was going to drastically increase the cost. From a storytelling perspective, it was essential to position that learning to code is essential to unlock job opportunities, similarly to how knowing the English language was essential decades ago. We were brave to spend 70 per cent of the budget on collaborating with over 150 creators and we were able to generate a cost per enrolment of $1, a cost that is unheard of in the edtech industry.
HOW DO YOU SEE THE INFLUENCER MARKETING PRACTICE EVOLVING?
Moving on from influence to confluence: an influencer waving the next must-have product in the face of their audience can become just another form of ad that people are little-by-little shying away from. There certainly needs to be a longer relationship and a better exchange of value among brands and creators, which will bring about more authentic outcomes from these collaborations. The practice certainly will evolve into being more rational as brands get access to technology like ours that vets creators better and accurately measures ROI. Lastly, more equitability among platforms, creators and brands is needed to ensure fairness in the economics. I believe these are the essential pillars for the industry to flourish further.
