A new suite of tools that automates the vetting process for influencers could turn a marketing channel – sometimes derided as the “Wild West” – on its head. Fabulate’s SparQ suite of AI tools promises to change the way influencer marketing activity is planned and delivered, adding greater rigour and confidence to the process. B&T caught up with the Fabulate team to find out more.
The Federal Government’s decision to recruit online influencers to star in an anti-vaping campaign earlier this year appeared to be a masterstroke.
Comedy duo the Farbairn brothers, who have a combined following of nearly 5 million on YouTube and TikTok are popular and influential with 18 to 24 year old young men.
Junior surfer Shyla Short as another personality paid to take up the fight against the vaping industry.
The pair were among six influencers who fronted the campaign and signed documents saying that they hadn’t been vaping.
An Australian article only weeks later discovered that Jaxon Fairbairn and Shyla Short had posted social media content where they are holding vapes.
Finding influencers that align with a brand’s purpose, has the right-sized target audience and are brand safe has proven to be a minefield for marketers looking to tap into Australia’s $800 million influencer marketing sector.
Seventy-six per cent of marketers cite brand safety as their number one concern about influencers. In fact, more than half (55 per cent) of marketers would like to use an AI tool to make more informed decisions about influencer marketing but only 19 per cent plan to do so.
Finding influencers’ SparQ
Fabulate, an Australian tech startup that helps brands and agencies find, manage and evaluate more than 200 million influencers, has launched a new AI-powered – in beta phase – that could turn the identification and vetting process on its head.
“The number one issue for marketers when it comes to identifying influencers is brand safety,” Fabulate chief product and strategy officer Nathan Powell said.
“When we start to look at the average number of influencers for a campaign over an average number of videos, over an average time length of each – that’s 46 hours just watch them.
“We’ve developed a video, image, audio and text brain safety tool called SparQ that basically allows you to scan any content on an influencer’s profile to find out if there are any undesirable posts.”
B&T was taken on a demonstration of the SparQ tool to find out how effective and efficient it was. By customising a search within the tool, it identified influencers who had posted about vapes or cigarettes across their social media feeds.
The demonstration reduced a brand safety procedure that would usually take the average working person a week into a matter of minutes, effectively allowing users to check whether creators had posts relating to smoking, nudity, drinking and a range of high risk or explicit material.
Fabulate insists it’s not a tool to beat down creators because they can also use the tool to scan their own profiles for a “sense check” before responding to briefs.
“It professionalises the industry more and that’s not a bad thing; I think it’s what’s been missing,” Fabulate chief revenue officer Ben Gunn said. “It’s unfortunate that there is sometimes that typecast of the influencer industry and it only takes one bad apple. The other 99 out of the 100 are actually incredible creators, very talented, who can work with brands and have engaged audiences with authority and trust.”
Beyond brand safety
SparQ is not just a brand safety tool and has three product offerings:
- SparQ Brand Safe – A brand safety feature able to scan content for high risk or explicit content that may put the brand at risk.
- SparQ Brand Advocate – A brand advocacy feature that empowers marketers to find the right authentic voices in both paid and organic social media.
- SparQ Audience Overlap – A follower overlap analysis allowing marketers to analyse the unique audience reach of 100 creators in a single search.
The tool can also be used to find out whether an influencer is working for a competitor of a brand, and whether an influencer’s audience has much overlap between its different social media feeds and also compare that to other influencers in the same space.
For example, Samsung has a policy that whenever it briefs for an influencer, they must not have ever worked or posted about rival Apple in the past. SparQ allows marketers to eliminate duplication and make influencer marketing more efficient.
“Let’s say a brand like L’Oreal is comparing its owned audiences to an influencer’s audiences, it could make a determination whether there is an overlap and a greater chance of reaching new followers versus reinforcing a message in the same audience,” Fabulate chief technology officer Sachin Singh said.
It is often the case that the larger an audience an influencer has, particularly reality TV stars, the more likely it will be subject to bots and large numbers of accounts in places like India and Brazil.
When Fabulate ran Instagram’s @Arvind account, which numbers around the 21k follower mark, it found a sizeable fanbase from India in spite of @Arvind never appearing on Love Island.
“I think that the overlapping tool is particularly interesting for media buyers who want to start thinking about reaching frequency, which previously there was just no way of even knowing,” Gunn said.
“It allows you to start thinking of it as a channel strategy. So why wouldn’t influencer marketing be a line item on a media schedule like digital out of home and free to air TV?
“We also think it just opens up the market to a much broader set of brands who have previously been concerned about brand safety as the number one reason for not wanting to go too hard into influencer.
He continued: “The ultimate goal is to professionalise influencer marketing and get it to a level where it becomes a serious channel for any marketer to be able to use and have great impact.
“We believe this will be a game changer for brands wanting to work in the influencer space.”
