By Nat Ives
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (June 12, 2019).
One year after Unilever PLC warned that fraud was undermining
influencer marketing, the company's venture-capital and
private-equity unit is buying a stake in a software company that
helps marketers manage influencers.
The investment is largely an effort to better understand
influencer marketing, which Unilever continues to use on a large
scale, according to the company.
Unilever criticizes, in other words, because it cares.
"We very much love working with influencers because, as you
know, they're very influential in driving consumer opinion," said
Vasiliki Petrou, executive vice president at Unilever and group
chief executive at Unilever Prestige, which comprises brands
including Dermalogica, Living Proof and Kate Somerville.
Brands have increasingly been turning to so-called influencers
-- people with some level of social-media following -- to help them
reach consumers in social media.
But many influencers have been caught buying followers or using
bots and accomplices to make their posts look more engaging.
Unilever, the maker of Dove soap and Axe body spray, last summer
complained about poor transparency, a lack of accountability and
fraud in influencer marketing.
"At best it's misleading, at worst it's corrupt," Unilever
marketing chief Keith Weed said last June, as he prepared to call
out the problems at the Cannes ad festival, the marketing
industry's most prominent gathering.
Mr. Weed also called for social-media platforms to do more to
help fight problems with influencers. "Some platforms already do
things in this area, but they have to do it at a larger scale and
with more transparency, so the industry can be reassured that the
influencers on their platforms are not using these practices," he
said. (Mr. Weed retired last month.)
The company promised not to work with influencers caught
inflating their impact. But it never backed away from using
influencers as a strategy.
Now Unilever Ventures and TVC Capital have led a $12 million
Series B investment in SocialEdge Inc., doing business as
CreatorIQ. The startup's Enterprise Creator Cloud platform is
designed to help advertisers find influencers, manage their work
and measure the results.
It is the first move into the sector for Unilever Ventures,
whose portfolio includes skin-care brand True Botanicals,
daily-delivery service Milkbasket and ad-targeting firm Blis.
Unilever wanted to better grasp the tools and techniques at play
in influencer marketing, said Luis Di Como, executive vice
president for global media at Unilever. CreatorIQ also provides
services in the detection of fraud, he added. "And if there is a
financial return, there will be an added value," he said.
Nano-influencers and Advocates
Unilever already uses CreatorIQ, among other tools, to help
handle proliferating influencer relationships. Its executives
believe consumers listen to influencers in a way they no longer do
to marketers speaking for themselves.
Ms. Petrou's Prestige group is complementing traditional
influencers with people who have smaller followings -- dubbed
micro- and nano-influencers -- and expanding its roster of
influencers in the process. "The micro-influencers sometimes have a
very engaged audience," Ms. Petrou said.
Other marketers are also adding to their ranks of
influencers.
Calvin Klein works with hundreds of influencers at any given
time, according to Marie Gulin-Merle, chief marketing officer at
Calvin Klein Inc. and chief digital officer at Calvin Klein parent
PVH Corp., who said the brand employed more than 350 to promote its
Instagram-friendly pop-up house at Coachella this year.
This year Calvin Klein is also monitoring social media to find
fans who might help amplify its messages without being paid, Ms.
Gulin-Merle said in an email. It plans to enlist some 3,000
advocates this year and have 7,500 up and running by next year, she
said.
"We generally think that the usual 0.2% top-tier influencers are
a limited and sometimes saturated pool, and that we really need to
talk to the 2% of our consumer base that are brand advocates and
sometimes micro- or nano-influencers," Ms. Gulin-Merle said.
Calvin Klein uses a mix of tech platforms and agencies to manage
its influencer campaigns, and works directly with the advocates it
is recruiting. It isn't a CreatorIQ client.
The new funding round values CreatorIQ at $40 million to $50
million, roughly four times its previous valuation, people familiar
with the deal said. The company plans to use the money to pull in
additional measurement and data, pursue further growth and double
staff this year to about 160 people.
Unilever says the influencer ecosystem has improved since its
call for action last year.
Platforms such as Twitter and Instagram say they have
deactivated millions of fake followers over the past year in an
attempt to restore trust in the counts.
Write to Nat Ives at nat.ives@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 12, 2019 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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