Page 30 - IIMV Vibes 2020_4th March 2021_Final

For a long time, businesses across the Influencers these days are looking at the
globe used icons and public figures as
endorsers for their brand. Often, this was
a very tedious process in several ways.
From getting in touch with them to
convincing them was hardly a cakewalk,
particularly for newer or smaller brands.
Moreover, this came at a high price and
celebrities had the least engagement with
their followers.
Influencer marketing has made this an
integral part of the online marketing mix.
Why is this the case? According to 84% of
marketers, influencer marketing is the
most effective way of connecting with
people, particularly millennials, and
businesses have transformed, especially in
the ecommerce space.
However given the increase in the
number of influencers and with
companies spending more on influencer
marketing, the industry is also facing
sturdy pressure to show their
effectiveness to the brands and their
worthiness to the consumers. Every
influencer carries the responsibility of
making sure what they are sharing online
is not harmful, fake or offensive. There
are many instances where influencers
have exploited their power. That’s
because there is no proper legal and
accountability framework which monitors
and regulates the industry.
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fat pay cheque rather than whether the
brand is authentic, or shares the same
morality and personal values as they do.
As a result, consumers are slowly losing
trust in those they were initially able to
relate to. Recently, the Ad Standard
Council, a non-government body that
ensures protection of consumer interest,
came up with decisions on how people
are to consume branded content. For
instance, when an influencer endorses a
product in their video, it is mandated that
they disclose that the ad is sponsored in
the first 30 seconds of the video.
They must also include the hashtag ad,
the hashtag sponsored in the description.
Whether these rules are monitored
loosely is again a question left
unanswered. According to the Social
Media Trend 2020 released by social
media analysis firm Talwalkars, there is a
huge increase in the number of fake
influencers and almost a third of the
marketers have already decreased their
marketing spend on influencer
marketing.
There are multiple such cases. One such
case is a scenario where the influencers,
out of greed, sign up for multiple
products and their followers find it
difficult to associate them with a
particular brand. Moreover, since the
motivation for the influencers is money,
the fan can easily identify that the
influencers are not using the product
themselves, even though they are asking
their followers to use the product. Cases
like this are on the rise.