85 million shekels — that’s the amount advertising agencies in Israel spent last year on influencers and online creators, while the global market turns over about 17 billion dollars a year, and the budgets only grow from year to year.
True, large companies can’t afford to invest their entire budget in digital, where the younger audience is more present, but there’s no serious television campaign that doesn’t combine the platforms.
While the internet was flooded with software and bots that essentially faked likes and engineered awareness, a real need arose to reach masses of audience within a specific field of interest, and to do so with credibility and reliability. Into this vacuum stepped influencers who managed to amass a community of users, alongside view counts and statistics — unlike traditional television campaigns, which have no ability to bring analytics, except for sales cycles.
Who are online influencers?
With the development of digital media, a new profession arose that we didn’t know in the previous decade — “online influencers,” who replaced the bloggers.
Online influencers are content creators on social networks around a particular topic.
Content creators developed a platform aimed at people with a shared hobby or interest, what’s known in professional terms as a community. Content creators are considered opinion leaders with the ability to influence and drive action — or so it’s customary to think in most cases.
Once they learned to persist with quality, consistent and uncompromising content, influencers want to maximize their work into an economic model through commercial collaborations with various brands that benefit from a niche and precise audience.
The influencers’ approach varies — some see their content as business opportunities for the highest bidder among rotating clients — short-term, one-off sponsored activity — and some aim to be “presenters,” creating dedicated and consistent content for a particular client, as opposed to the more patient ones who insist on amassing more and more exposure, creating organic content without commercial collaboration until the right moment.
Either way, the common denominator for all of them requires persistence, building affection and interaction, the ability to keep a loyal and consistent audience, and in due course — becoming an authority.
Online influencers are the rising force of recent years — mainly on the consumer level. These aren’t celebrities who enjoy especially high exposure, but rather anonymous people who grew on the web and started from scratch, thanks to quality content, talent, one ability or another, and a winning appearance — and they are opinion shapers in every respect, in almost every field: lifestyle, food, gaming, tourism, fashion.
It’s commonly thought that influencers receive various products or enjoy barters, but online influencers who are strong in the field earn a very respectable living. The compensation varies in relation to the number of followers and views.
No wonder talent agents identified the trend and engage in brokering between online influencers and advertisers. Just as a brief comes in for casting a commercial or series, a talent agent receives a precise brief asking to propose options, alongside marketing and initiative for clients suited to the influencer.
The web allows room for creation, and we’ve seen quite a few cases where the most talented manage to do the unbelievable — like the illustrators Yehuda Adi Devir and Maya Zaltzer — and some become television stars like Orel Tzabari, Or Spitz or Uri Vered, whom the talent agency was the first to identify.
