Re management - I haven’t ever worked for one but very nearly did, I was at salary negotiation stage and had signed an NDA but then got unwell lolz. It was one of the big ones, and even then I was underwhelmed with their proposition and what they actually did for influencers? I really don’t think they’re getting strategic career advice at all, the impression I got is that it’s a glorified sales, legal & accountancy setup rather than an all encompassing digital branding service with PRs on standby or any sort of trend mining work going on to keep their guys at the top of the insta game?
Like I think where a lot of influencers are just normal people, not in a nasty way but rarely accomplished in a professional career so wouldn’t know how to handle a lot of the things expected of them? So their agency managers are holding their hands through negotiations, admin stuff like setting up Ltd companies and managing their work schedules, putting them in touch with accountants or using the in house teams etc etc?
Also having worked in advertising previously it is a wanky mediocre old boys network so I imagine Quentin who’s CMO at Unilever knows Jared who set up X startup so they just pass work to him which is how Jared signs XYZ influencers cos they know he’s connected, and then you sign second gen influencers off the basis of those before them and before you know it you’ve got a huge agency despite not really having much of a proposition / adding much value...
Like they don’t really use data in their pitches yet, the work I did as part of my interview process was take their existing pitch deck and say what I’d add in from a data POV. I was really underwhelmed at the deck I saw - it was still really fluffy and like, selling you the lifestyle / dream stuff with nice pictures and life stories and the basics like follower or view counts rather than anything useful like engagement rates, best times of day to post, audience demographics, ROI, historical campaign results, naaada. And a lot of this stuff is so easily accessible like every youtuber will have access to their own data, even us peasants can go into twitter analytics??
However it is a double edged sword. These agencies aren’t going to want to show weak results to CMOs who know they can get x reach or y conversion rate with £p spend through other channels so just switch off influencer campaigns? Or even worse they tell a glorious story of how well this microinfluebcer sells to their 25k followers, set ambitious campaign KPIs and then have to report that you’ve actually under performed on avg oops soz hun x I think they still want it to stay sort of soft and snake oil-y, more like branding/comms than an effective conversion channel.
I would love to hear more from people working in PR/marketing departments cos they’ve got the real knowledge but most importantly the goss! Sadly data is usually just a bolt on at the end of it all - and when it doesn’t say what they want they’ll just delete those slides anyway
