Product placement by influencers needs to be rethought

Just a few years ago, product placement with social media stars was relatively straightforward with a look through the keyhole. Products were subtly placed in pictures and influencers told how they came across a product by chance and gave a personal recommendation. In this way, brands were able to enjoy an "authentic" recommendation.

The beginnings of influencer marketing

However, this type of subtle product placement no longer works these days. What's more, the internet is full of absurd examples of products being held up to the camera without any context or entertainment factor. This blunt type of influencer marketing no longer goes down well with followers. But even a professional campaign, in which many posts with a similar motif are placed and thus appear in the timeline of all major influencers, runs the risk of boring or even alienating the target group. In addition, posts must now be labeled as advertising. As a result, it is now unmistakably clear to every user that money is flowing in the course of supposedly organically created posts, that content is editorially thought through and that many posts are commercially related.

Product placement by influencers on social media channels therefore needs to be rethought. Brands should not even try to place the product subtly and supposedly surprisingly out of the situation, because every Instagram story, every snap and every YouTube video must be clearly labeled as advertising. Experience shows that social media stars are now also punished by followers if they feel that it is surreptitious advertising.

Entertainment is king

Today's digital natives hardly watch TV anymore, but rather YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram Stories, preferably on their smartphones. It is therefore important to adapt the content for these formats and make it vertical, easy to understand and entertaining. Good creation is therefore essential for brands planning campaigns with a large number of influencers on multiple platforms and for the long term. Of course, the popular fashion and lifestyle influencers know how to "authentically" showcase a pair of jeans in a cool Instagram post, for example. However, if all the big influencers supposedly do this in the course of a single campaign, the content quickly loses its entertaining and informative character for the target group. For this reason, the brand should tell an interesting and exciting story together with the influencer.

Let's stay with the example of jeans - you can inform users about different fits with the help of a fit guide, for example. This can be followed by a How-2-Style module that shows different styles to match the respective fit and then takes the follower to different occasions where the jeans are worn. In this way, even in the course of a supposedly classic placement, different posting modules and narrative strands are created and the followers are picked up on different entertaining and informative levels. Here, too, the focus is not on authenticity and the original idea of a subtle recommendation, but on relevance and entertainment.

Co-creation campaigns

In a co-creation, an influencer creates a new product or design together with a brand. In this way, influencers can also be won over for a long-term collaboration. The story can be told together with the brand from the idea to the finished product, and often begins long before the final product is held up to the camera for the first time. Followers are therefore indirectly taken along on the journey from the very beginning and the start of sales of the new product is staged as a momentum. At the same time, the ROI of a co-creation case is relatively easy to measure: a successful campaign is reflected in high sales figures.

Pay attention to the special features of influencers and platforms

When it comes to product placement and influencer marketing in general, you should familiarize yourself with the various platforms and the special talents of social media stars beforehand. Many companies still prefer Instagram posts, as they remain permanently in the influencer's feed and are easy to understand. However, there are also clear advantages to Instagram Stories. While the field of influencers who could contribute video content as part of a campaign was long focused primarily on YouTubers, Instagram Stories, and more recently IGTV, opens up an almost inexhaustible field of creators with whom branded content can be created. Thanks to the swipe-up function, followers can be directed straight to your own website or online store. Videos can be used to generate even more emotion, impart even more knowledge and generally create even more entertainment together with the influencers.

When selecting influencers, you should always ask yourself first: What do we want to tell? If you have a clear story in mind, many influencers automatically fall out while others fit particularly well. In this context, "authentic" product placement is given a completely new interpretation: authenticity no longer means subtle placement, but entertainment and infotainment at eye level with the target group. The focus of every campaign should therefore be on how brand messages should be designed to suit the respective influencer, the respective platform and the language of the target group and be authentic (=relevant and entertaining) despite clear labeling.

Philip Papendieck is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Intermate Media and Co-Founder of Truemates. As a pioneer in the field of influencer marketing, he has built up Intermate, which started out as an agency for Instagram campaigns, into one of the leading German agencies for influencer marketing within a very short space of time. The production of elaborate formats takes place in-house with the specially founded production company Truemates. Philip Papendieck founded the agency in 2015 together with Allessandro De Pasquale and Jörn Mecher.