Jack Neff covers household and personal-care marketers, Walmart and market research for Ad Age and recently wrote an article: Google Links Brands With YouTube Creators: Are Agencies and Influencer Networks Threatened? The story looks at the Google Labs initiative to bring together marketers and YouTube Creators for media and features gen.video president, Jessica Thorpe’s thoughts on what it means for the industry and if other platforms and vendors that provide influencer video services should be threatened.
Our perspective
We are in the midst of the burgeoning video generation. Peer to Peer Influence, video content and social networks are the new currency. As a sign of the times, this is a logical and inevitable evolution of Google’s facilitation role in the YouTube marketplace.
Influencers as Creatives?
The Google Labs initiative will undoubtedly put more pressure on companies (platforms and agencies) to provide more services than simple matching to support and amplify the impact of influencer video. We’re already doing this. One of our favorite recent examples was for LG, PCgram – where LG tapped into the gen.video platform to find an amazing creator (Ray) to product a commercial to promote the light weight PC Gram. He isn’t the world’s largest influencer but that didn’t matter. His storytelling and cinematography skills and the reach was built into a comprehensive distribution plan.
But what if it could also be linked to driving sales?
Another example, which highlights a key point of difference of ours, our ability to enhance any brand/influencer relationship by offering retail distribution of content, comes from this holiday season, Giving Tuesday campaign for Huggies. The YouTube video featured links to a custom landing page on Amazon for consumers to “buy now”
So what does this all mean?
The players that only provide exchange based matching will quickly die out and those that can differentiate will thrive as leveraging influencers becomes more universal. We are excited about Google’s new focus, which will be another catalyst for growth for the video generation. We look forward to partnering with more brands, retailers and agencies to best take advantage of this step change in our industry.
Read the full article here AdAge/gen.video