The dysfunctional influencer bubble: No transparency and no authenticity
From sponsored weddings to cookie-cutter social media ads – there is really nothing authentic left in influencer marketing, and the brands still clinging to the medium are sadly deluding themselves, writes Mumbrella Asia’s Eleanor Dickinson
When do you ever see a negatively-reviewed product on social media? Or a piece of scathing food criticism? The answer is never, of course, when it comes the influencer scene anywhere in the world. But this is true especially so in Singapore.
What originated as PR people sending bloggers a few free items in exchange for a (hopefully) positive review on WordPress has now become a billion-dollar industry with marketers forking out thousands to individuals in return for just a picture posted on Instagram.
And what with recent reports of Singaporean Instagram ‘dreamer’ Melissa Koh’s ability to persuade brands such as Swarovski and Dior to sponsor her wedding, it seems no event is off-limits if it means access to a 240,000-person following.
Melissa Koh’s wedding
And with brands seemingly prepared to throw money at just about any so-called influencer – although it helps to be under 25 and photogenic – it’s understandable why so many feeds in Singapore now are just full of branded messaging.
It’s not surprising either. Having seen some of the most prominent Singaporean influencer rate cards, it’s easy to see why people opt for it as a career choice in their droves. One influencer with a 300,000-plus following on Instagram charges S$1,800 per post, S$500 for an ‘Instagram Moment’ and S$3,200 for a blog post.
Another, with a following 60,000 or so can make S$1,600 for an Instagram picture, S$2,200 for a video and S$400 for a ‘Moment’. At the lower end, a beauty/fashion influencer with just under 20,000 followers commands S$500 for an Instagram picture, S$200 for a ‘Moment’ and S$2,000 for a YouTube feature. Nice work if you can get it, right?
There’s definitely good money to be made here, and ultimately that isn’t what irks me. Everyone has to make a living after all, even if it is in my view a dubious one at that.
It’s the fact that marketers continue to hold dear the idea that by using a social media star, you are still speaking intimately and on first-name terms to your consumer. Many point to it as the equivalent of word-of-mouth, implying audiences should be able to believe and trust everything that comes out of that influencer’s mouth. That is of course rubbish.
A transaction has taken place between a marketer and an individual in order to sell a product or an experience. But when that is not disclosed – as it rarely is in Singapore – both the brand and influencer lose any claim to authenticity. And with that, bang goes the trust of the audience, which is the polar opposite outcome to the one that brands are aiming for.
In all honesty though, it doesn’t take a ‘#Spon’ or ‘#Ad’ to see which posts are genuine and which are not. A quick trawl through some of Singapore’s biggest influencer Instagram feeds and it soon becomes clear that far from honest, personally-held views, these posts are cookie-cutter copies of each other and could have been written by anyone.
Here’s two for Lancome with Jemima Wei and Melissa Koh. Get the picture?
Jemima Wei
Melissa Koh
Then again: at least these posts have made some effort to tell a ‘story’, even if they are so painstakingly cliched and bordering on a cure for insomnia.
Others, such as these from Bellywellyjelly – also known as Christabel C – and Rachel Wong don’t even bother to post anything other than a product description.
Bellywellyjelly
Rachel Wong
When I spoke to Visa’s content division director, Kris LeBoutillier, he told me the reason so many brands are drawn to influencers is because it allows “someone else do your talking for you“. He said: “All corporations are looking for a way to stand out. If you just stand on a soapbox and say what you want to say, nobody will listen. If you get someone else, who is seen as legitimate, it works quite well.”
Soapbox-style shouting is exactly what I would call the tone of the posts above. And there are many more like these to be found. So much for letting someone else do the talking for you.
And it’s not like the consumers are stupid enough to believe this piffle, though sometimes it seems marketers and the influencers think otherwise. Many called out UOB earlier this year for its #KrisFlyerUOB whereby a number of ‘brand ambassadors’, including Melissa Koh, Bellywellyjelly and Lady Iron Chef were caught posting exactly the same copy on their Instagram posts.
Apart from being downright embarrassing for UOB, incidents like this hardly create consumer trust – which you would think is pretty important for a bank.
However, it is worth saying there are influencers out there whose accounts reflect both transparency and a genuine love of the products they are plugging. It’s ironic that one best practice example comes from an Australian 11-year-old girl named Grace Mulgrew, who has 578,000 YouTube subscribers watching her play with barbies. At the same time in Singapore, the colourful character Xiaxue is one of a handful to use the hashtag #sp at the bottom of her posts.
And it’s clear efforts to clean up the market are underway. Instagram recently announced a new tool to tag advertising partners in posts
Meanwhile, the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore issued a fresh set of social media guidelines (see below) last year following a scandal involving influencers allegedly being paid to write negative posts about Singtel’s rivals:
- Disclosures of commercial relationships and disclaimers should be made prominent, easy to understand and appropriate for the form that the communication takes;
- Paid reviews, testimonials and endorsements have to be clearly indicated;
- Reviews that are disguised as being from impartial sources are not permitted; and
The use of services and methods that fraudulently boost user engagement is prohibited
Judging from the posts out there, these are not being enforced nor adhered to. Nevertheless, for as long as the ASAS remains little more than an advisory board, you can hardly blame brands for taking their guidelines with a pinch of salt.
Meanwhile there are those within the industry that say the arena is maturing. Jade Seah, an influencer with 67,000 followers on Instagram, claims the “explosion” that took place three years ago has started to simmer down. As a result, it might not be as lucrative as it once was. She explains: “You can still make money, but I hope people will not spend their lives trying to make this a career. Being pretty and taking nice photos is not going to work anymore.
Jade Seah
“You need to have an angle or a niche. There is money to be made but it must be a supplement to your day job, unless you are making content that is truly valuable and educational.”
Aly Ang, an account director at W Asia, who routinely deals with influencer marketing, echoes a similar sentiment. “Overall, the market is wising up to the pros and cons of influencer marketing, there’s definitely been a sense of savviness with working with influencers,” she says.
“Instead of a blanket approach, brands are now taking a step back to evaluate efficacy in the influencers they’re working with. There’s a sense of ‘quality’ over ‘quantity’ so to speak and a deeper thought process with regards to the type of campaigns that will actually engage audiences.”
Maybe there is some hope to be gained from these sentiments. But “engaging an audience” in the long-term requires trust and transparency. Marketers working with influencers need to step up to the mark and encourage this honesty with full disclosure. Given so many of the posts read like blanket advertising copy, there is neither transparency or authenticity. Only a dysfunctional bubble that might soon burst.
Eleanor Dickinson is the editor of Mumbrella Asia. Eleanor joined the Asia platform from Dubai, where she acted as senior reporter for Campaign Middle East.
100% correct. It’s a farce.
ReplyVery nice piece….congrats to the writer.
Having said that, I think influencer is too kind a word….how about
brand pimps? A bunch of morons who trade off their looks and lifestyles to post some junk that, most of the time, they don’t even create themselves. How else can you account for similar copy across three individual feeds?
The saddest part is, there are some people who think this is digital, non traditional, cutting edge advertising. It’s just a fucking testimonial print ad….without an idea or aesthetic design.
ReplyTotally agree. Up till now I still cannot comprehend how clients and some marketers and even the influencers themselves believe that they have something amazing to offer in terms of marketing value. It’s all in the data, the numbers clearly show how effective (or not) these collabs are, I cannot wrap my head around how people cannot fucking see that.
Clients are stupid enough to be duped by follower count, don’t understand the direction they are taking and conversion they want, marketers spouting bullshit about “reach” and targeting the influencer’s fans which are 0% accurate and 100% pointless if they bought any at all, not following up with the data (probably because it’s embarrassing) and the influencers thinking bought followers will give them ANY influence at all (er, who is going to engage in your content?? Conversions??? Clickthroughs???) and how pumping out shitty sponsored content especially at an early stage in their content creation is going to make them rich and famous overnight when they have no personality, no creativity, no passion for creating content. They just want to be an instagram star without caring how they get there, and the public are complete idiots for buying into that, making it a full cycle of stupidity.
For all clients/marketers, do yourself and your budget a favour and analyze influencer following before engaging them and track the conversions you get from influencer campaigns meticulously.
ReplyAgree. I once put a tracking link on a bunch of influencer’s post for a big brand campaign that is valued at a high 5 figure for the influencer buy – let’s just say atleast we learnt not to take them seriously anymore.
These jokers have the cheek to call themselves “content creators”, i mean what content are you creating with a selfie and the product?
ReplyDo you call out Straits Times out as G’s Newsletter
Do you lose sleep over Zoe’s many Star Award (by her company aka monopoly) and her many expensive endorsements. Do you snub Zoe because she swallows?
Transparen and authentic?
Why treat influencers or social media differently?
Apply the same Caveat Emptor we apply for traditional media and their paid influencers.
ReplyGreat….a SG marketer who thinks an ad and a social post are one and the same…why am I not surprised (roll eyes)?
ReplyOne is an ad masquerading as spontaneous personal endorsement and one is a bad ad. Which means they are different. I’ll give you ten minutes to work out which is which. Go! [and we wonder why marketing in this town is so bad]
Replybecause those are explicit ads. influencers on social media infiltrate into ur lives and pretend 2 be ur friend while selling u adverts. is irritating
Replyactually, thats a bit of a blanket statement. most influencers are rubbish but you do get some really good content from a few – but doesn’t that 80-20 rule apply to every industry? mumbrella articles themselves are a bit of a hit and miss..
ReplyI respectfully disagree. Open your eyes, not every influencer in Singapore behaves like that.
Take a look at Dawn of SGBudgetBabe who does both sponsored posts and negative reviews (UOB Krisflyer, London Weight Management, Beautiful Teeth Whitening Kit…all of which were widely raved by other social media influencers, mind u!) Or Aaron of Milelion who dissed UOB Krisflyer, OCBC Voyage and Grab Rewards.
Or do they not count because they don’t have a 5-digit Instagram following? Because they’re not “pretty” or “take nice photos”?
How superficial.
Marketers have only themselves to blame for the influencer fatigue we face today. Go on, continue choosing folks who promote every single brand out there and keep calling each new item their new “HG”. What a joke.
ReplyMy big beef with influencers is that they are such crap communicators, with a sketchy grasp of english. They have no wit, style or appreciation of a brand’s tone of voice, let alone the ability to create one.
ReplyI agree 100% with this post and would like to thank the author for bringing up this issue.
It is true that a lot of statements made here are applicable to Influencers in general but I feel that in Singapore the situation is even more extreme.
I mean, Influencers are all over the world and some of them are ridiculously fake, but in Singapore their posts are characterized by a painful lack of creativity and personality (I am generalizing here, a couple of them are still quite good). I know only one Influencer (Rosalyn Lee) that is authentic and whose opinion I would really trust (and still she fell too into the “staged ad” trap a couple of times, but everybody gotta pay the rent). I used to live in Europe before, so I started to follow the Singapore scene just about a year ago, and I really see a huge difference. An example: there was a campaign for a beauty product recently (I don’t remember which one, but high end like YSL or Estee Lauder) when 5 Singaporean Influencers’ posts appeared on my feed at the same time, on the same topic, for the same product, with the same content. I don’t follow all Singaporean Influencers so I am sure there were more posts like these.
This means that all of them were told to post the same thing about the same product, with a similar photo and at the same time. Now, I would like to ask the marketing people of the brand, as a consumer, how do you think I will take this? As a genuine review? Really? When I see the same advertisement pop up on 5 Instagram profiles at the same time, with a description of the product that sounded incredibly staged? Singapore is a small Country, it is highly likely that the audience who follows Melissa Koh also follows, say, Jemma Wei or Aarika Lee, so why are you, as a brand, asking them to post about the same product at the same time?
In Europe (you can see this in USA too), different Influencers engaged for a campaign rarely post about a product on the same day and they are (almost) always given complete freedom on how to interpret the product and how they want to post about it. It adds a personal perspective to the ad, which contributes in creating trust in the customer. Which, in the end, is the perk of social media marketing compared to traditional advertisement.
So actually, I think the real issue lies in how social media marketing is done in Singapore, the strategy is completely wrong. I sometimes work with brands too, as a fashion illustrator, and I am always asked to do the same thing, in the same style (mostly, live sketching at events). Why not exploit the creativity of the illustrators instead, and create a campaign that is different from all other brands? It would just take a trip to USA and EU magazines and brands Instagram accounts to see how they do it and take inspiration from that.
The lack of creativity and personality is what is killing the game here. There is no point is social media marketing, if it looks like a normal advertisement in the end. My Instagram feed is so boring that I started unfollowing Singaporean accounts, even if I still live here. It is that bad.
My best advice is to look at the big Influencers, like Chriselle Lim and Aimee Song, and see how they play their game. The strategy of Chriselle Lim is brilliant: she doesn’t only post about a product once but she constantly features it in her stories and posts, integrating it in her daily life to show her followers her day-to-day use of the product. The feeling it gives can be described with only one word: REAL. She is able to sell La Prairie serums retailing for 300 $ to anyone and Nordstrom receives the biggest chunk of traffic every month from her website.
As always, the best strategy is to look around and think outside of the box. Give freedom to these Influencers to represent the product as they wish, which will also help to differentiate between the “good” and the “bad” influencers, develop niches and add a little bit more of diversity.
Marketing in Singapore has still a lot to learn.
My two cents.
Al
ReplyThank you for this article. I think you tackled an opinion that touches a lot of raw nerves here among Singaporeans. I believe the key to being a successful ‘content creator’ rather than an influencer is being multi-faceted. Take for example Margaret Zhang, who has branched out from blogging to becoming a writer, photographer, stylist and consultant. Posting photos with bland, glaringly obvious captions with a pretty face is no longer enough for marketers to be shelling out serious money for. Influencers who want to stay in the game need to step up their game or step down, because consumers needs will continue to change and right now its definitely evolving beyond what the current influencer market can give.
ReplyGreat article, and I completely agree that the influencer scene in SG feels extremely manufactured. I personally tried following a couple of these influencers for about a month, before I gave up because there was nothing genuine about them or their posts. I most definitely wouldn’t go out and buy something just because an influencer promoted it, unless it was a genuine review. At the end of the day, isn’t that what all consumers want from brands? Authenticity.
ReplyI was just discussing this very topic yesterday with a friend. A decade ago then this would have been called ‘Cash for Comment’ where brand associations were undeclared as paid for – people would have been outraged and brands or media personalities would have been investigated. Is this a generational change though where influencers and brands have completely ignored the need for transparency and got away with it? It doesn’t seem to bother many people who are younger than me that these posts from influencers are paid for.
Reply“It doesn’t seem to bother many people who are younger than me that these posts from influencers are paid for.”
These instagram/blog posts are just a mindless version of a print ad….but way more shit…because no thought goes into them…the idea is always the photo of the personality. It’s a formula and dumb clients love formulas….that’s why they have guideline manuals.
Consumers can spot ads a mile away and I believe they spot them from influencers too ….whether they are swayed to but the product as a direct result, who knows.
ReplyAnd really, most of them are unemployed millennials – hardly personalities that i want representing any brand. When i asked for proposed influencers to represent a luxury brand, whose target audience are mid 30s PMET types. the top influencer agencies came up with nothing, because zero influencers fit this category.
ReplyI am sure most have read this, but it very informative on just how much we are dealing with the Emperor’s New Clothes here. And how brands are so frightened to point out he is stark naked!
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/social-media-experiment-fake-instagram-accounts-make-money-influencer-star-blogger-mediakix-a7887836.html
ReplyI think that testifies more to the stupidity of the buyer than the dishonesty of the seller.
Only a moron would appoint an influencer they havent heard of, seen, met and spoken too.
Replythis is funny because it is PR fluff for the marketing agency that does exactly what it is trying to shine a spotlight on – influencer marketing. Like comments on the article pointed out, it gives limited information on actual figures made. If they want to do an expose, please learn from Xiaxue. But if you’re mediakix advertising here then I guess you wouldn’t know much about her.
ReplyPaid by Xiaxue to diss Melissa Koh?
ReplyInfluencers are only people, and people act in accordance with the culture that has been ingrained in them.
Asian culture, at the risk of sounding reductive, is direct and some would say, lacking subtlety. (Unless sinister things are being plotted.)
So all these influencer posts are like that…its the clients who are idiots as they think having a print ad say something and having an influencer talk the same way is ok. These fucking idiots don’t know the difference between sounding commercial and being social. So I don’t really blame influencers. Its a very asian thing…keep your mouth shut, do as you’re told and take your pay check.
ReplyHave your say