Influencer Marketing 2.0 🤳

Meta and Google are becoming more expensive and less measurable for brands, leading brands to start exploring new customer acquisition channels. Influencer marketing is one option, and the industry has swelled from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $16.4 billion in 2022 (a 46% CAGR). Influencer underpins discovery-driven commerce.

In the Influencer 2.0 era, anyone will be able to launch a brand.

3. Influencers enable disintermediation of the social media superpowers: As Facebook matures, CPMs rise, driving up acquisition costs, often rendering the platform unsustainable or unscalable. We’ve witnessed the rise and fall of many D2C companies that competed for attention on Instagram and Facebook, and fell victim to increasingly expensive ad c... See more

But influencer marketing is also broken. As I wrote in May’s Influencer Marketing 2.0, most influencer campaigns rely on hefty upfront lump-sum payments and use hacks like discount codes to track attribution. ROI is often poor, and measurement is even worse. The channel is difficult to scale efficiently.

We recently invested in a company that enables creators to be the next-generation sales channels for brands, in a transparent and privacy-forward way. Brands care about a few things: 1) They only want to pay when they’ve acquired a new customer and done so profitably; 2) They want to control who can sell / promote their brand and where; and 3) They... See more

Sponsorships and ads are no longer sufficient – it’s time for social networks both new and old to focus on building tools to allow influencers to make money on-platform.