Forget supermodels, glossy magazine editors and Hollywood celebs – today’s fashion and beauty stars are the YouTube vlogging, Instagram-addicted girls (and boys) next door. Selena Schleh explores the rise of the new influencers and the agencies guiding brands through this brave new world
Vlogs, like cigarettes, should come with a health warning: they’re dangerously addictive. Click idly on one, and you’ll find yourself tumbling, Alice In Wonderland-style, down a YouTube rabbit hole of hair and make-up tutorials, ASOS outfit ‘hauls’ and bathroom tours, peopled by a parade of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed girls chatting cheerily about life, lippie and everything in between. You’ll encounter vlogging royalty, like Zoe Sugg, aka Zoella (7.2m YouTube subscribers and a place in Debrett’s 500 most influential people in Britain) and make-up guru Tanya Burr, as well as pretenders to the throne Fleur de Force, Patricia Bright and IntheFrow. Surfacing three hours later, you’ll feel like you’ve binged on a dozen cupcakes – the kind smothered in baby-pink buttercream icing.
Nonetheless, this saccharine fodder is eagerly gobbled up by millions of young consumers: 50 per cent of 16-24-year-old internet users have watched a vlog within the last month according to a GlobalWebIndex (GWI) report released earlier this year. And it’s not only YouTube stars who are attracting enormous fan bases: younger social media channels like Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope and Vine have all spawned influencers of their own. “With these platforms built around a camera and a camcorder in people’s pockets, all of a sudden, the barrier to [producing] great content has become lower,” says Eric Dahan, CEO of InstaBrand, an influencer marketing platform based in LA. “We’ve now opened the floodgates for anyone to be an influencer, with lots of people generating content in a very Darwinian fashion.”
No wonder brands are desperate for a slice of the action: how better to tap into a youth market that traditional channels can’t reach? Amidst the white noise of today’s ‘faceless’ advertising, it’s the authentic voices of influencers which cut through to millennials, says Dahan. ‘It’s a way for a trusted source to share [a brand’s] message with their audience, to put a personal stamp of approval on it so it’s both stickier and positions the brand.” Or, as Amy Cole, Instagram EMEA’s head of brand development puts it: “The ability to combine the power of targeted, mass reach through advertising with the advocacy of an influencer can be an incredibly effective way of telling your story and moving consumers.”
Influencer marketing presents particularly enticing opportunities for fashion and beauty brands, as Nick Stickland, founder and executive creative director at ODD, pointed out recently in The Guardian: “Whereas glossy magazines can provide great aspirational triggers, vlogs are a brilliant tool for making brands accessible through real peer-to-peer conversations.” Similarly, as a visual storytelling platform, Instagram allows people to engage with fashion in a way they never could before. “People come to Instagram to be inspired and discover new things. That’s a powerful opportunity for brands to engage with them while they’re in this mode of discovery,” says Cole.
How to win friends and influence people
As with all fledgling marketing channels, though, brands are struggling to leverage the full potential of influencers. Enter a host of specialist agencies and networks, such as InstaBrand. This started life as a distribution platform – identifying influencers, building a roster of talent and connecting brands with influencers, but swiftly took on creative and strategic responsibilities for campaigns. “We realised brands had no idea what the messaging should look like; their creative teams couldn’t apply it. So now, when they come to us, we build out the creative aspects of the campaign, or take their existing creative and translate it in a way that works,” explains Dahan.
Amsterdam-headquartered IMA is another dedicated influencer marketing agency, which connects the likes of Diesel, DKNY and Tommy Hilfiger to its not-so-little black book of 4,000 Europe- and US-based social media influencers. Although clients benefit from IMA’s “short lines of communication” to content creators, co-founder Emilie Tabor says the agency’s real value lies in creating tailor-made long-term strategies. “To be honest, if a brand wants to work directly with an influencer, it’s not hard – their email addresses are on their blogs,” she admits. “But brands are realising that you really need a strategy to work with influencers. You need to have long-term vision and to establish a concept and a consistent campaign around them.”
The granddaddy of them all, though, is RTL Group-owned network StyleHaul, which boasts a 6,000-plus-strong community of fashion and lifestyle content creators across 63 countries and has produced content for L’Oreal, Maybelline, Macy’s and Nasty Gal. James Stafford, vice president for Europe, has seen the market mature from very basic brand ambassadorship, which didn’t go much beyond bagging the influencer du jour (“They’d ring up and say: ‘We want a pretty girl’ or ‘We want Zoella’”) and blatant product placement (“‘Can you get so-and-so to hold up my product and say they like it?’”). Convincing brands to ditch the scripts and think more laterally has been a process of education – one that’s ongoing.
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The situation hasn’t been helped by tricky legalities, which differ significantly between territories. While a simple hashtag (#spon or #ad) satisfies the requirements for a branded post on Instagram or Twitter, the UK’s position on vlogging was, until recently, pretty murky. Following several high-profile bans by the ASA – in 2014, biscuit brand owner Mondelez got its hand caught in the cookie jar by failing to make clear that its Oreo Lick Race videos featuring YouTube stars were marketing communications, while P&G was less than made-up with a finding that the words “sponsored by” and “brought to you by” in a Max Factor-backed beauty tutorial by model vlogger Ruth Crilly didn’t go far enough – the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) finally issued a comprehensive set of guidelines in August this year.
Although influencer agencies have purportedly welcomed more clarity, won’t it make collaborations less appealing to brands? Stafford isn’t worried. “Our audience is very advertising aware – they know exactly how it works and they know the talent needs to work with brands. They very much appreciate it being done properly, with full disclosure.” StyleHaul vlogger Patricia Bright, whose YouTube subscribers top 600,000, agrees. “[My audience] don’t mind sponsored content. In fact, they almost like it – because they’re happy to see that I’m doing well.”
While there’s no magic formula for successful influencer marketing, a few golden rules apply. On Instagram, it pays to think big, as retailer Lord & Taylor recently proved when promoting its new Design Lab, enlisting 50 fashion influencers to flood Instagram with images of themselves wearing an identical dress. With posts attracting up to 13,000 likes each, the dress quickly sold out.
But on YouTube it’s more about quality than quantity, says the brilliantly-named blonde bombshell Fleur de Force, one of the UK’s most successful lifestyle vloggers (vital stats: 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and over 600,000 Instagram followers). Since launching her channel in 2009, she’s worked with numerous fashion and beauty giants on everything from sponsored videos to product development (a line of fake lashes for Eylure), and says a natural synergy between brand and influencer is key to a successful collaboration. After all, when your fans have been watching your whole life online for six years, they’re highly attuned to your likes and dislikes. “They want good recommendations, and to be entertained at the same time, but they also come for authenticity. They know what you like, so if you’re talking about something that doesn’t fit, they’ll pick up on that within five seconds and will comment [negatively] or stop watching,” she says.
De Force cites her recent collaboration with Estée Lauder, RED Lookbook, as an example of a natural ‘fit’, since she frequently features the brand’s make-up on her YouTube channel. Inspired by new fragrance Le Rouge, the film is an arty fashion montage of red – from clothing to lipstick to handbags. “[Estée Lauder] were very open with their pitch and said they didn’t want the perfume featured heavily, but they wanted my video to be inspired by it,” explains de Force. Hence, we get a few glimpses of the product, but no ostentatious spritzing. Although RED Lookbook was professionally shot, de Force claims that for the vast majority of brand collaborations, she will star in, film, edit and produce the content herself, giving her complete editorial control. But wresting the reins from iron-fisted brands has taken time and patience: “For the last few years it’s been a process for brands to understand how [the medium] works, as opposed to: ‘This is what we want you to say, here’s a script,’” she says.
Instagram’s Cole believes that the best collaborations come from brands treating influencers the same as a traditional photographer or content creator, “rather than just trying to use them to tap into their audience”. But how easy is it to achieve consistent brand messages while retaining the influencer’s distinctive voice? For InstaBrand’s Dahan, it’s simply a case of “setting up the guardrails carefully”; for IMA’s Tabor, it’s about giving influencers creative freedom (in terms of content and choice of channel) to interpret a broader concept. Take Italian fashion brand Diesel, which often uses influencers to promote its new collections. Every season IMA works out a clear, consistent concept with the brand, and shares this with influencers, who then create and post their own looks based around a key Diesel item. “They all receive, say, the same leather jacket, but create very different pieces of content because they have their own style of interpretation,” explains Tabor.
Customising influencer experiences
While sponsorship can offer influencers tools, expertise and bigger budgets to create more professional content, brands shouldn’t lose sight of the girl- (or boy)-next-door appeal, which is at the root of an influencer’s popularity. Higher production values should be tempered with gritty authenticity, cautions de Force: “You have to retain a slight rawness in your content; a polished edge doesn’t sit quite as well on YouTube.” Bright agrees. “Some of the videos I shoot off the cuff, in my bathroom, can get 100,000-200,000 views, and then something highly produced will only get 60,000.” The problem is often clients approaching projects with a traditional advertising mindset. “They’ll say: ‘We’re going to bring four cameras and a lighting rig, and we need a script,’ because they’re treating it as a commercial. They want to control it and over-produce it, whereas actually it’s more like video social networking,” explains Stafford. His advice? “Go and watch 10 vlogs, read the comments underneath and visualise yourself as a fan.”
Levi’s got it right with Custom Festival Experience, a series of documentary-style shorts to promote its denim customisation service, working with three influencers to create personalised experiences – from choosing their Levi’s outfits to being whisked off to festivals around Europe. Interspersing the vloggers’ self-shot footage of bleary-eyed early morning starts and back-of-the-cab make-up application with slick, professionally-produced sun-drenched festival shots, all overlaid with commercial music, gave the resulting videos a cool pop-promo feel. For Bright, one of the influencers involved, the collaboration succeeded thanks to a small crew and off-the-cuff approach which chimed with her own creative style: “It was about capturing spontaneous things throughout the day, versus staged moments. And the edit was almost exactly the way I would have edited it myself.” More importantly, judging by the 150,000-plus hits and breathless comments the video has garnered on YouTube, it resonated with her audience too.
But do all these views, comments, likes and follows actually translate into cold, hard cash for brands? Lord & Taylor’s Instagram stunt certainly sold dresses, but the GWI survey suggested that vlogging “is still heavily associated with entertainment, comedy and advice – rather than a space for overtly commercial activities”, based on a finding that only 12 per cent of viewers discovered new brands and products via vloggers: search engine results, website stories and recommendations from friends were all more popular methods. However, as Stafford points out, “it’s not a huge surprise [the report] pointed towards a trend of newer and less established marketing channels struggling with effectiveness. It’s definitely not true that getting a vlogger to hold up your product and say they like it is effective marketing; this is the reason companies like StyleHaul exist.” Once brands start thinking strategically about audience insights and creative best practice, more creative – and effective – collaborations should emerge.
And with brands wising up to the fact that influencers’ consumer insights outstrip their own, the next logical step is a shift in conceptual responsibility. “Brands have a ton of data but it’s very macro,” says Stafford. “They can take a brand persona approach – ‘our [typical] consumer is Heidi, she’s 15 and she lives in the Midlands’ – but the difference is that Fleur de Force actually knows the consumer, because she chats to her on Twitter and she just commented on a video. I think we’re going to see more creative control ceded to the influencers based on their closeness to the fans, and better work as a result.”
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