What you need to know:

• OMG launching local arm of specialist influencer marketing unit Creo.
• 250,000 creators locally on its books.
• Early trials suggest they are moving the needle - driving footfall gains for the likes of petro-convenience network Reddy Express.
• OMG is confident enough to guarantee outcomes and results.
• Research by Amplified Intelligence and TikTok suggests influencers drive massive engagement gains versus standard ads and brand content.
• Challenge for large brands is agility – where layers of approval crimp ability to react to trends.
• But creators say that can change over time as trust is built – with Nine's Stan and L'Oreal cited as examples of brands that trust their creators, giving them the autonomy to tap the zeitgeist while it's fresh.

OMG Australia is piling into Australia’s $800m-plus influencer market and promising guaranteed outcomes via a new specialist agency dubbed Creo – and has partnered with Amplified Intelligence and TikTok on research that underlines creators’ engagement creds.

Per that study, influencer content comfortably surpassed the 2.5 seconds of attention it takes to impact a memory – which 85 per cent of ads fail to achieve. It came in at 6.5 seconds of total attention, ahead of regular brand content by 3.5 seconds, and drove 116 per cent more active attention.

Client trials suggest the influencers on Creo’s ticket – circa 250,000 locally – are able to drive commercial gains. The firm cited one with petro-convenience chain Reddy Express reporting 7.29 per cent footfall visit uplift via a campaign tapping 12 creators. The content reached an audience of 5.9 million, with view-through rates exceeding platform benchmarks by 265 per cent.

The tech, which operates as a managed service, launched in the US two years ago, with Australia the second market to take it live.

End-to-end influencer tech

Pitching the Creo platform at a breakfast event on Wednesday morning, OMG Content MD Thomas Hutley said the Creo would enable OMG to “measure more tangible KPIs at every stage of the funnel”.

“Our founding principle for Creo is that is a vehicle for media effectiveness. And what we mean by that is that we should be treating influencer marketing as a key media channel, planned, executed, and measured with the same rigour as you would any other media channel.”

The firm uses “influencer listening” tech that tracks content trends across categories and competitors to inform strategy by “identifying the white space” for clients, per Hutley. It’s also got creator discovery and evaluation tools – not unlike Australian tech start-up Fabulate.

So far, Creo lags the incumbent by a long way in terms of creator data – it only has around 250,000 creators embedded locally (though claims 15m globally) versus Fabulates claimed 300 million – which if accurate would equate to 6 per cent of the 5 billion people globally estimated to be social media users. But Hutley said OMG is adding more “every single day”.

Creator outreach and contracting can be handled in-platform too, with three-, six-, nine- and 12-month contract extensions built in as a default, per Hutley, giving clients the ability to “extend and amplify” influencer content without “going back to the negotiation table”. Then real-time reporting closes the loop, with macro and micro metrics tracked in a live dashboard.

But the big marketer hook, according to Hutley, is that OMG is promising “guaranteed outcomes”.

“Whether that's awareness, consideration or conversion, what we're effectively saying to you is that if you invest in X, we will guarantee Y,” said Hutley. It’s an incentive he argued will “de-risk” influencer for clients and their senior stakeholders.

Attention study

The Amplified Intelligence study measured the responses of 300 participants to influencer content on both Instagram and TikTok. Influencer content for 10 OMG clients – including Edgell, Mazda, Nivea, SBS, AAMI and the NSW Government – was tested against each brand’s standard social video ads.

It found influencers drove higher long- and short-term brand recall than standard social ads, driving 21 per cent uplift in Short-Term Advertising Strength (STAS) and 9 per cent gain in Mental Availability (MA).

Content with higher active attention achieved stronger STAS (+66 per cent) even without obvious branding, and even content with lower attention but obvious branding drove a 19 per cent increase in STAS and 6 per cent lift in MA. Content that had both high attention and obvious branding landed better – 102 per cent STAS gains and 10 per cent more MA, per Amplified Intelligence.   

Influencer content that was culturally relevant or event-driven captured more attention (+246 per cent) and delivered 55 per cent greater STAS. 

Solving approval lag

With the research underscoring the impact of cultural moments in driving influencer gains, OMG assembled a panel to unpack how brands a tapping in. And while most have nailed the long term, calendar milestone stuff, landing the mid-and short-term social media trends has proven more of a challenge. Running at the fast-moving social media zeitgeist tends to come less naturally for large and enterprise level brands in particular, where stakeholder governance and legal have traditionally blown out approval processes and stifled agility.

Speaking on a panel the OMG’s launch event, former Bachelor star turned creator Matt Johnson, known online as Matty J, said that in his experience, being reactive was “very tricky” for most brands.

“As a real ballpark figure, when I get a brief from a brand to when that content is published, it's between four to eight weeks… where I work with brands is more on the calendar milestone events that we can pre-plan for.”

But the lag doesn’t stop some from hopping on the bandwagon, days, weeks, sometimes months late. The challenge, per TikTok agency lead Sam Powell, is in figuring out the “tipping point” – i.e. what is the best time to engage with – or pass – certain trends.

“Does everyone remember that ‘Very demure, very mindful’ [trend]? Every single beauty brand thought ‘I'm going to jump on that’, and then it just became part of the noise. I think everyone's inbox was filled up with the exact same [stuff].”

Taking a bigger picture view, and “planning long term” is way to go for brands aiming to more authentically capture cultural moments, per Powell.

And to that end, a growing number of brands are following media agency cues in reframing influencer content from tactic to a full-blown media channel.

“The numbers speak for themselves, per the media and digital lead of a major FMCG drinks company, who spoke on the panel. The company has moved influencers from “the bench” and onto “the playing field”, now seeing them as “a key platform and channel”.

The opportunity is for “amplified reach”, cultural relevance, and diversified storytelling and content, per the exec. But she admits wrangling stakeholders and partners on the journey has been “a bit of a spider's web” internally.

“It's about making sure that you're working with your partners and that you've got the right process,” they said. “I think equally for us it's about taking legal on that journey and making sure that you're working through it with creators and thinking of them as partners as well.”

“But then again, making sure that you're not jumping on every trend. It's really important that you don't rip up your brand playbook, and you actually make sure that you know what you want to stand for, and equally, what you don't want to stand for.”

Better briefs, faster response

Nailing internal alignment makes for a more streamlined briefing process and eases the logistical headache of content approvals.

“Historically it was a bit like war and peace when you got a brief from us,” said the FMCG media and digital lead. But now, it’s about “keeping it simple” – asking “what are the key messages that we want to land” and “making sure that we've got alignment internally as well to avoid that back and forth”.

By getting clear on the guardrails for content across its brand portfolio, the company has managed to get the legal and stakeholder approval process down to 24 hours.

That, in turn, allows them to give influencers the “creative freedom” to deliver engaging – and timely – content for their audience.

“Sometimes internally we like to take control, but I think it's making sure that you give creators that freedom, because that's what you're paying for.”

Trust = turnaround

Trust between brand and creator builds over time – which tends to streamline approval processes, likewise smoothing the path for longer-term contracts while building in greater scope for creators to tap into trends and moments as they arise.

Matty J said that’s how his work with streaming platform Stan has developed over time.

“What I love about their briefing is that we know that we can look at the next three months of when titles are coming out. There's no strict timing, per say, on when that content has to go live for certain titles that are being released. So they're very open to saying, ‘hey, from now and over the next three months, if there's an opportunity where there's a trend that aligns with the title that's being released, you tell us and we'll listen’. Sounds like best practice to me.”

TikTok and Instagram star Maddy McCrae said that was a similar approach between her and long-term client L’Oreal.

“Last year they engaged with me to do a partnership for six months, where I would create three pieces of content for them.

“That was a really great way for me to jump onto cultural moments, because there were less [isues with] approval times – they actually didn't give me a brief at all. They didn't tell me which products I was going to be doing until [the month of delivery activity].”

Then it was all systems go. “I think I gave them a concept that day, it had been approved that night, and I filmed the next day – it was really a great way for me to be reactive.”