By Takesh Singh. Actor, Writer, Director and Public Speaking & Camera Facing Coach.
Let’s be honest, everyone is talking about Influencers these days. Data suggests that over 70 percent of brands in India prefer working with Influencers as opposed to celebrities. This is mainly because influencers are considered to provide a larger amount of credibility in the eyes of the public. They are seen as Authentic, reliable and cost effective.
Production houses these days are also casting influencers in their OTT series and Ad agencies are always on the look out for the next big influencer to feature in their ad campaigns.
While these influencers have a large follower count on their social media pages, it is worth thinking about how effective it really is to feature an influencer in an advertising campaign.
As someone who runs a production house I have seen occassions where brands have been insistent on casting an influencer purely based on the sheer number of followers they had on their social media. Whether they were the right fit for the brand or not is something that is debatable.
Let’s for example consider a brand that manufacturers lollipops? The brand tells the production house to find an influencer to cast in the advertisement. The production house lines up a series of influencers from different domains / walks of life.
The brand decides to go with someone who has a large number of followers, fits the age profile they are looking at and of course fits their budget.
However the factors that the brand needs to consider is:
1) What sort of content is the influencer known for on their page and will associating with a lollipop brand resonate with the influencers audience or not? For example- casting a beauty influencer in the lollipop ad may not connect at all with the audience on their page.
2) In the large follower count that the influencer has how many are genuinely engaging with the influencer’s content and is there a percentage of followers that may not be genuine?
3) Most importantly how many of the influencer’s followers, will actually go out and purchase a lollipop brand. I believe a deep dive needs to be done on the actual demographics of the followers which is a complete grey area at the moment.
As per a report by EY, India’s influencer marketing industry is estimated to reach INR3,375 crore by 2026. Its clear the creator economy is only here to grow.
Given that, I believe its time we start looking deeper and asking the right questions to make this a win win for both the brands and the influencers.
By no means am I an expert in this domain. I am just sharing some thoughts that I felt were important to address. I would love to hear your views on the same.
