The Engagement Rate

An industry bulletin for marketing pros.

TikTok launches new ‘Creative Cards’ to provide content inspiration. The cards provide data-backed notes of inspiration for your TikTok clips.

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Stop the scroll!

These days, you’re no longer competing against brands or other content creators. You’re vying for the attention of your audience’s attention span. The first 1.7 seconds is especially crucial to stop the scroll.

But audiences are smart and they don’t miss a trick. Nothing makes them more prone to the dopamine releasing scroll of their feed when coming across inauthentic influencers. Whilst certain influencers or content creators find it easy to connect with us with their charisma, subject matter or style. For other influencers, it’s a science rather than an art. Audiences can smell a cash grab a mile away, making genuine connections between brand and influencer critical. A foodie blogger, for instance, may not be a de facto right fit for a food brand these days. In fact, it could be your favorite gaming influencer that exemplifies that brand’s personality that gets the deal.

The most successful influencer partnerships happen when you have high quality content (and no, that does not mean breaking the bank with production levels) superseded with value. Smart and engaging content that makes your audience feel comfort just by seeing you helps it easier to build that compelling message. Yes, there is value of the product you are trying to sell. But there’s even better incentive when it’s married with entertainment value to stop the scroll.

Billion Dollar Boy CMO on how to leverage AI-powered content marketing

Becky Owen, Global Chief Marketing and Innovation Manager at Billion Dollar Boy’s is leading the influencer marketing agency’s new AI investment arm and there’s some pretty useful insights to takeaway…

Unlike the boom and bust of enthusiasm for NFTs and the metaverse, AI is expected to have a different turnout, according to Owen, given its immediate impacts to businesses across industries. And it’s a call for innovation budgets that Owen heads to businesses she is partnering with, including luxury fashion brands that have launched their first ever generative AI led creator content on Instagram.

And the stats speak for themselves, content using AI receives double the engagement… (Read full article)

The 1,500 artists comprising Cirque du Soleil influencer network

From it’s 40 year history as a live entertainment company to declaring bankruptcy back in 2020, it’s been a wild ride for Cirque du Soleil. But fortunes look promising with Christopher Bower’s, Head of Global Brand and Social, latest plans to shift from being perceived as live entertainment only to a branded content company.

The group, which amasses over 1,500 artists that total 35 million followers on socials, is now looking to harness all of the isolated engagement from its artists into a central plan of action - get artists to create content, get paid and in return, attract lucrative brand sponsorships to Cirque itself.

With influencer marketing continuing to mature, advertisers are expected to spend over $30bn this year. Under Bower, pitches to Air Canada and beverage brand, Liquid Death, now don’t seem to be a crazy idea at all.

The execs of color leveling the social media playing field…

The pay gap within influencer marketing spheres is REAL. Data on pay inequity between and white and BIPOC creators is at a 29% gap. And many talk about how discrimination is baked into the algorithms of TikTok to center on whiteness.

Alexzi Girma, Community Development Manager leading #BlackTikTok, speaks about setting up their initiative as a means to launch several initiatives for Black creators, including a three-month incubator and a dedicated fund to help pay creators. It’s starting to provide movement for leveling the playing field. Kayla Zapata Fory, TikTok’s Latin creator community lead, said being in ‘near constant’ communication with hundreds of creators helped her build #CasaTikTok, a cohort with over 500 creators. Gabrielle Cerberville, who has 1.1m followers on TikTok speaks highly of the initiative, mentioning they “wouldn’t have been able to grow [their] brand to what it is now without the program’.

A round of applause for our unsung heroes!

Overheard 👀

• Paris Hilton’s entertainment company 11:11 Media suspended ads on X a month after disclosing an exclusive partnership with the site formerly known as X, according to CNN.

• Instagram rolled out new features for content creators, including new camera filters, video editing tools and text-to-speech voice options.

• A new study by the review website Trustpilot showed that nearly half of young people had fallen for social media shopping scams.

• X is bringing post headlines back to link previews in-stream.