We've already discussed the concept of Influencer Marketing in depth, so here's a quick reminder: Influencer Marketing is a new approach to the promotion of products and brands, which uses as a driving force opinion of people, having certain popularity and weight on social networks, Influencers. The key difference with advertising is that Influencers base their opinions on the true interest in brands they promote. Usually, they and their creative work are related to a certain niche where mentioning of certain brands is relevant. For example, when popular blogger, writing about healthy lifestyle, mentions what brand of sportswear she personally prefers, it sounds natural and authentic. It means, as opposed to advertisements, when Influencers talk about some products their followers perceive it as an honest recommendation. In some way, they might be considered a core of a fan-base forming around a certain product. Presently the market of freelancers and content creators engaged in Influencer Marketing is in a chaotic and disorganized state, which leads to following problems:
First, in the absence of organized ecosystem, it's hard for marketers and brands to find Influencers. Especially, if they look for people who fit specific criteria. For example, Influencers who work in some particular niche, catering to the certain type of audience. And at the same time, they must have a required level of visibility, content quality, engagement, etc. Another associated problem is how to organize communication with those freelancers. Working with freelancers directly, well, it requires figuring out schedules, payment methods and schemes, feedback, etc. Also, there's a question of how trustworthy is the freelancer, and whether there is a guarantee that he or she won't bail on the task at the most critical moment. This organizational aspect can be delegated to special agencies and intermediaries who work with freelance content producers. But the downside of this approach is that agencies take hefty commissions, which can significantly increase marketing expenses.
Another big problem of Influencer marketing is the difficulty of evaluating content quality. First of all, it's a subjective metric, and without any system where content creators' level is quantified in the form of ratings, the only way to determine their qualification is by reviewing and assessing their portfolios. That's a lot of work for the potential customer, who'll need to browse through and examine multiple portfolios. Plus, he might not even have a sufficient level of expertise to determine the quality of content in terms of marketing impact. In any case, this examination will be intuitive and subjective, and not confirmed by any practical marketing metrics.
Also, another ubiquitous problem is the absence of the reliable, fast, and cheap mechanisms of money settlements. Payment systems take high commissions; it takes a long time for money transfers to be completed, plus, there are additional problems and higher fees for cross-border, international payments. Additionally, there's a problem of trust. There is nothing that can prevent freelancer from taking the money and bailing on the task. As well as nothing can prevent customers from screwing freelancers after the work is done.
Plus, it's not easy to assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns themselves. Especially, if it's necessary to track campaign metrics in real-time. Also, even if the company, conducting the marketing campaign, can effectively trace campaign metrics like views, clicks, conversions, etc., it's a somewhat raw data, and not all the companies are able to effectively analyze this information to answer more general questions. Namely, does this marketing campaign work? Or, which elements of the marketing campaign work and which don't?
Creator AI is a platform created by the Captiv8 project with the aim to provide an organized marketplace where Influencers and brands would be able to effectively communicate. The platform architecture includes five major parts:
- Payment protocol: The payment protocol how all money settlements are conducted between marketers, influencers, and reviewers. The system is based on blockchain and uses platform-specific CR8 tokens as a means of exchange. This is the most natural application of blockchain, which is an ideal tool for creating a micro-economy within an online platform. Also, the system of smart contracts eliminates the need for trust between platform participants.
- Content review protocol: Includes mechanisms and procedures that ensure the quality of content: reviewers, ratings, etc. Creator AI has the whole category of paid users, specifically tasked with content reviewing and motivated to do their work well. Otherwise, they lose tokens staked on their decisions. The system works in a way that the quality of content is assessed by reviewers, and the quality of reviews is determined by the majority vote among reviewers.
- Discovery protocol: A number of mechanisms, allowing marketers to find influencers based on a set of criteria. Like for example, a marketer is interested in finding a blogger, who targets a very specific audience and has a high level of engagement with the audience. Also, the criteria can be age, gender, geographical location, sphere of interests, etc. It also works the other way; content creators can find clients, using the same set of criteria.
- Insights protocol: In a nutshell, this component analyses data generated during marketing campaigns, for example, metrics related to user interest: views, clicks, conversions. Also, taking into consideration specific visitors' attributes like age, gender, geographical location, etc. The platform employs smart algorithms and AI to process and analyze this information and generate "insights," or some deep and sophisticated conclusions that can be helpful, for example, for planning the next marketing campaign.
- Reporting protocol: This is a subsystem that is supposed to analyze the effectiveness of marketing campaigns conducted on the platform. It tracks all the campaign's metrics and analyzes them, eventually providing campaign organizers with comprehensive reports on the campaign status and results.
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