Dive Brief:
- Gnack, a tech startup, announced at South by Southwest (SXSW) it is programmatically selling influencer content on Snapchat and Instagram, Digiday reported.
- Its influencer roster consists of what is known as “micro influencers” with 10,000 followers on a platform.
- Gnack allows influencers to sign up to be paired with marketers. It helps advertisers looking to programmatically buy influencer content, and find matches based on campaign objectives, negotiated price and target demographics, as well as preferred hashtags and the number of influencers.
Dive Insight:
“We used to be a social marketing agency manually matching brands and influencers, which took an average of 200 hours just to start one campaign,” Chico Tirado, co-founder and chief revenue officer for Gnack, told Digiday. “So we wanted to create a programmatic platform for brands and agencies to scale their social campaigns.”
According to Tirado, Gnack is an “activation platform” focused on user-generated content “because more than 30% of millennial are consuming social content created by their peers.”
Recent research from eMarketer pointed out the growing importance of influencer marketing with 67% of respondents reporting using influencers for content promotion and 59% reporting using influencer marketing tactics for product launches and content creation. The research also found that the rise of influencer talent agencies, a definition that fits Gnack in a way, has made it easier for marketers and agencies to tap influencer talent.
Social influencers have emerged as powerful media channels, and in 2015, "you saw leading edge companies adopting influencer marketing ... and it's certainly not going to slow down any time soon," Chuck Moran, vp of marketing at RhythmOne, told Marketing Dive last month.
What's interesting about Gnack's services is the programmatic component -- a marketing topic that has also garnered a lot of buzz in the past years for both its benefits and inefficiencies.
