Michael Bürgi | January 12, 2024
Wrapping its blitz of moves with major social and commerce platforms to align the discovery, planning and measurement of marketing-driven influencer and creator content with other media channels, Omnicom is rolling out creator benchmarking insights for all Meta platforms, Digiday has learned.
The news follows research that aims to better understand the value influencers bring to the marketing equation, as well as partnerships and deals with TikTok, YouTube and Amazon — all aimed at putting influencer marketing alongside other channels as well as to boost its performative abilities.
The co-development deal with Meta revolves around the ability to benchmark creators mainly within Omni, Omnicom’s central operating system, which was intentionally designed to be open to data inputs from any source (ie Meta) to harmonize it with its own data. The benchmarking ability lets planners across Omnicom’s global markets analyze the performance of creator content across Facebook and Instagram against more than 28,000 creators curated by Omnicom Media Group. Insights within these data lakes can be broken out by industry and influencer to drill down to granular decisioning levels.
Megan Pagliuca, OMG’s North American chief activation officer, said the benchmarking extends work Omnicom has been doing with Meta for more than a year. “It started as kind of a paid social intelligence suite where we had paid social benchmarking, and it’s now extended to have to creator benchmarking capabilities that help inform planning,” said Pagliuca. “So we’re looking at an array of attributes rather than just looking at something like the number of followers.”
That resonates with other agents of the industry that have a stake in making influencers a bigger part of marketing.
“A good influencer campaign should look beyond follower counts, emphasizing audience loyalty and engagement,” said Matilda Donovan, digital talent agent at UTA. “Aligning the creator’s brand with the promoted product ensures resonance with the audience’s established preferences, driving the strongest results.”
Ben Hovaness, global chief media officer for OMD, added that this is another step toward assessing creator marketing side by side with other established media channels. “This gives our clients insights far beyond what you can get out of using the platform’s built-in planning tools, because we have the advantage of a huge volume of client performance data to use,” said Hovaness, just recently elevated to his current role. “So we can drill in by different objectives, formats and so forth.”
“As we are moving towards influencer [marketing] being a full fledged media channel, we had to think about what are the ways you would optimize,” said Clarissa Season, chief experience officer at Annalect, which manages Omni. “So that caused us to look at data a little differently for the influencer audience and how we visualize that and bring that to life for our users, so that they can quickly and easily optimize and make those adjustments.”
Bianca Bradford, Meta’s head of agency for North America, said it’s the context that’s key to the co-developed benchmarking: “It can help provide additional context around the impact an individual creator is making, and we believe that providing these types of insights to advertisers can help push forward the broader creator ecosystem.”
Hovaness pointed out the importance of understanding regional nuances of creator partnerships — and the benchmarking effort will occur in a variety of global markets starting in Q1 of this year. “Influencer Marketing varies a great deal from one region to the next from one market to the next,” he said. “What a micro influencer is in the United States is very different from what it might be in China or another major market. Being able to cluster our data into tranches or tiers of influencers is enormously powerful, especially when we’re looking at things through a market-specific lens which we do for most of our media activations.”
