APPLE TREE’s influencer marketing agency, Keeper Experience, organized the event ‘Protecting Brands: Strategies for Brand Safety and Reputation in Influencer Marketing’ to discuss the new challenges brands face when developing strategies with influencers and content creators. During the session, participants identified key challenges in the industry: continuing to enhance brand reputation and crisis prevention, improving the search for profiles aligned with the brand, and providing measurable results that add value to the business.
Sergio Barreda, CEO and founder of Keeper Experience, opened the event, saying, “We have an industry that has made significant initial progress, but clients are starting to worry about other aspects, such as ensuring influencers align with brand values, achieve advocacy within their communities, and, of course, comply with the current legal framework.” Sergio noted that Keeper Experience has listened to these concerns and developed a ‘reputational management method’ for working with influencers to help select the most aligned and safe profiles for each brand.
Héctor Abanades, Research Manager at the consultancy SCOPEN, analyzed the current state of this industry using data from the first edition of the ‘INFLUENCE MARKETING SCOPE’ study, based on interviews with 132 advertisers and 69 agency professionals. Héctor emphasized the importance of establishing controls and processes to ensure influencers’ suitability for these strategies and presented the main conclusions of the report: “The main objective for advertisers in influencer marketing is to achieve greater brand visibility and awareness, followed by branding. However, sales are not yet the primary goal for advertisers, although I believe this will change as the sector becomes more professionalized. As for KPIs, reach is the primary metric for all professionals, which makes sense if the main goal is to achieve awareness.”
From the advertiser’s perspective, Isabel Rodriguez-Arias, Marketing Specialist at Ecovidrio, agreed with Héctor on setting brand awareness as the main objective of influencer marketing at present. However, she pointed out that achieving awareness requires a careful selection of profiles that can build a secure relationship for both the brand and the creator. “Influencers must have values very much aligned with us; alignment with the brand is fundamental. But also in this selection, the quality of the content and the way it is communicated are highly valued. The person must know very well what they are talking about and convey it in the most engaging way possible,” said Isabel, for whom influencer marketing is “the most personalized way of advertising possible.”
In this regard, Sergio Barreda shared with attendees the influencer selection dashboard used by Keeper to select profiles for brands based on various parameters that help build brand reputation and prevent potential crises, which the agency calls the Keeper Essence Certificate. “Brands are increasingly concerned about their reputation when working with influencers, and we already have cases in Spain that have caused major communication crises. Therefore, brands ask us to ensure these creators have a degree of affinity with the brand to avoid such situations. Hence, at Keeper, we have responded to this need by developing our analysis methodology, where we analyze parameters such as the degree of activism, discrimination, and types of behavior of the creators, thus being able to offer the type of profile that best fits the client.”
Keeper Experience emphasizes that all their scoutings start with a detailed study of each creator’s background, considering their positioning, potential topics they may be involved in, and their track record on social media. “We always keep brand safety in mind and analyze how it can affect the relationship between the creator and the brand,” added the agency’s representative during the event.
