As consumers become acutely aware of sponsored Instagram posts, will a new form of authentic brand promotion come to the forefront?
Despite their ubiquity on our social feeds, the importance of influencers is being called into question. According to a report by Linqia, 76% of marketers are still struggling to determine the ROI of influencer marketing and cite it as their number one challenge in 2018.
Audiences are also becoming wise to paid product placements, with almost half of British consumers stating they would actively avoid clicking on an affiliate link to prevent an influencer from receiving a commission. With 7 out of 10 hashtags used on Instagram connected to brands, it begs the question as to whether this marketing trend has reached saturation point.
This is compelling companies to construct a more seamless and immersive ad experience, driving a shift from overt visual merchandising to an invisible, subconscious integration of the goods or service into influencers’ wider creative narrative. The recent rise of virtual influencers such as Lil Miquela has opened a new avenue for product promotion, but also an almost satirical acknowledgement of the artificial influencer lifestyle. As i-D’s deputy editor Felix Petty notes, the digital avatar celebrity is ‘an exercise in reflecting the emotional emptiness of influencer-society, and the shallowness of a method of communication that reduces all language to images and platitudinous one liners’.
