would you say so called "influencer" / "creator" marketing is more valuable nowadays as a result? Getting people behind you who have a trusted audience seems like the only way to combat this problem, I just don't know that its a serviceable business per se?
I think that depends a lot on how that marketing is actually done. Just having an influencer read an ad text or insert a prerecorded segment feels just as annoying as regular ads, sometimes even more as there is no Skip-button or adBlock that can make it go away quickly.
Actual products reviews, even when they are not all positiv, on the other side I find extremely effective. Same for behind-the-scenes video that show you how a product is made and tested. As what an ad should ideally do is really just show me that the product exist and what it can do. That's all I care about and that's what most regular ads completely fail at.
Even if I go hunting for the actual websites of a product, they never contain the information I am looking for. I find it completely ridiculous how bad most ads are in that regard. I don't even expect much, size, photos from all angles, photos of stuff that's in the box. Really basic stuff. Most Youtuber's will include that in their unboxing and product reviews, companies very rarely do.
Trust is important, but you don't just gain that by having popular influencer read your lies, you gain that by not lying in the first place. Few companies seem to realize that.
That said, I am a sample size of one and other people will make purchase decisions differently.
>Even if I go hunting for the actual websites of a product, they never contain the information I am looking for. I find it completely ridiculous how bad most ads are in that regard. I don't even expect much, size, photos from all angles, photos of stuff that's in the box. Really basic stuff. Most Youtuber's will include that in their unboxing and product reviews, companies very rarely do.
Trust is the biggest thing missing from most forms of advertisement. I know I will gladly check out a product that a YouTuber I enjoy recommends, but banner ads/prerolls/TV ads/etc feel like a scam reel.
This is huge. There's a YouTuber I've been following for a stupidly long time, and if he recommends something, or even is sponsored by someone, I'll check them out. Same thing with acoup.blog - if there's a book recommendation there, I'll check it out in a heartbeat. Why? Because they've spent a long time developing trust with their audience. The YouTuber has been absolutely brutal about products, and has been extremely open about how people have tried to influence him one way or another when he's doing reviews. The author of acoup.blog has similarly put a lot of work in establishing his bonafides, so when he says a work is good or important, I know what he means by that.
I trust YouTubers (or whatever celebrity) even less than banner ads.
I know a pharmacist on Instagram that quit being a pharmacist and started hawking health supplements in between semi useful posts, mixing bullshit with truth and trashing the credibility of their qualifications.
I'll trust a product that a youtuber I like organically recommends. But I'd still not trust anything they "recommend" in a sponsored ad slot.
The only way you can (legally) pay for the former as a business is indirectly, via investing money into making a decent product rather than advertising.
There's a fun model I built once upon the level of monetization versus trust building activities a given YouTuber/influencer should do maximize monetization over any given time period. You can model the decay in audience trust per monetization.
I have clicked on more banner ads (though few) about products I didn't know about, than I would ever be swayed by an "influencer", which is the new term for celebrity shill.
Pop ups, however, have made me NOT buy products I would have otherwise be interested in, lol. But I'm a spiteful person.
EDIT: I take some of that back, maybe. I do look at car experts on YouTube, and listen to their opinion. I guess they might be considered "Influencers". I was wrong.
It depends. I play MTG Arena. There's a slew of overlay apps that give you access to extraneous information. Best advertising dollars I've seen spent are Jim Davis's plugs of Untapped.gg. Not only is he using the app himself, he raves about it all the time. He's worth every penny they pay him. Tossing money blindly at influencers just because they have a following is not a good strategy, you still have to validate that it's a proper way of getting the right eyeballs on your product.
I still can't wrap my head around the fact that people are actually "influenced" by influencers. I have never trusted anyone and anything. When it comes to spend MY MONEY I do my own research, period.
I genuinely can't tell if this is satire or not. Assuming it's not, unless your "own research" consists of actually buying a wide swath of competing products and testing them against each other, then at some point you are indeed relying on "influencers", whether those influencers are Consumer Reports, Amazon reviews, your parents/neighbors/friends, etc.
When you watch people for cumulative hours, you get an idea of who they are. You get a feel for who is a normal Joe that gained an audience because of their passion for a topic and who is just someone following trends trying to gain follower just to gain followers. You also get an idea of whether or not they really know what a vpn is.
If I see a product I've never heard of before advertised to me by someone I trust to some degree, I'll check it out. I almost never buy because I have years of shields built up to stop myself from buying crap at the drop if a hat, but there are occasions where I will buy if I like the product enough after researching it. Those times are rare, though.
I don't watch videos from most people who could be described as "influencers", though. Mostly small creators who have an interesting take on something and are passionate about it.
When you watch people for cumulative hours, you get an idea of who they are.
And you get an idea of their tastes & whether or not you share the same tastes. Back in the day, if Siskel & Ebert gave a film two thumbs up, I would probably go see it. Not because they were on the TV, not because of some credentials they may or may not have had, but because over time, I've found out that I generally liked the films they gave two thumbs up, and life is too short to "do my own research" on all the movies playing this weekend.
Of course, this doesn't mean I would go out and buy a car if they were in the commercial for it, but I might have thought about getting a movie related product they hawked (microwavable popcorn? Special edition VHS/DVD? I dunno...).
What does your research consist of? When Steve from GamersNexus posts a video of him benchmarking a bunch of different cases with temperature gauges and the exact same internal hardware and workloads to tell me which one cools the best, I can try to independently reproduce those results myself, but that requires purchasing all of the cases, so there is no gain there. If he turns out to have been lying, I lost the money anyway.
I trust my judgement based on all the information I have gathered. Then I check with friends and people that I trust, certainly not the random dude on youtube that ads the best blender 2022.
Thats a wonderful thing but I think you know its quite rare.
Influencing is nothing new though the medium change has allowed for a preponderance of people to become influencers to smaller and smaller networks, we've always relied on proxy information if only on where to start research.
It applied to the clothes we choose, the movies of which we might consume the trailers and then reject, the research we do. The universe of awesomeness and crap which we create as a species is multitudes larger than any person could just navigate via pure first order research.
We all need signposts. While I abhor marketing and think hard about how to avoid or reduce its impact on me, its just not fully avoidable.
Regarding doing own research I think this approach works for many products that are cheap to purchase. But, this approach fails badly when you have to purchase items that are expensive and one time purchase. How do I pick good washing machine? I can only purchase washing machine, or chimney, or smart TV only 1 time, so I can't do research unless I am determined to burn money.
I do agree with influences. These guys can sway people and make people to purchase ersatz product and has ability to do shenanigans.I think people should be cognizant while watching "influencers".
Yeah but if you like Shaq and he tweets “hey this basketball is the best one I tried” then some fraction of his followers will just trust Shaq on the theory he wouldn’t hurt his reputation. Why not buy the Shaq ball?
Because he hasn't played in years and whatever ball he used was the official nba ball at the time. Most people would buy the official ball not a random ball.
If you are talking shoes then people will buy to be associated with that player.
That's because you have the antibodies. The people who closely follow influencers and who do not realize what the influencers are doing to them, lack those antibodies. This is a sad time to be a person who browses the internet without any jadedness or paranoia.
