Dive Brief:
- Hearst Corp. and video ad tech firm Reelio are working together to create social media influencer networks that will be relevant to the publisher’s advertisers.
- According to Donna Kalajian Lagani, senior vice president and chief revenue officer for Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, advertisers are highly interested in content produced by social media influencers.
- The two magazines have already started using Reelio to locate "creators" on YouTube, namely those with anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 subscribers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Dive Insight:
"Every CMO I talk to is concerned about this. They say, ‘How do I find them? Once I find them, how do I manage them? How do I track return on investment?’" Kalajian Lagani told the Journal.
Reelio offers Hearst’s advertisers a dashboard that allows them to sort through influencers based on the size of their followers, what brands they’ve worked with previously and how much they charge for sponsored content.
"We want to make it incredibly easy for anybody in this part of the industry to work together effectively," Reelio CEO Pete Borum told the Journal.
But Hearst isn't the only publishing house aiming to leverage the ever-popular inlfuencer market.
At Conde Nast, GQ magazine launched a new native video product called GQ Stories that will feature influencers. The men's magazine has been working with a pool of 6,500 influencers and GQ Stories is an extension of that effort.
“One of the challenges brands have is that there are so many influencers at this point. They can’t create a campaign for each one. We can do the legwork and the brand can be part of it," Ed Romaine, associate publisher at GQ, told Digiday.
