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2017 Influencer Marketing Budgets Are On The Rise, New Study Shows
Sixty-three percent of marketers increased influencer marketing budgets this year, according to research from Bloglovin. Influencer campaigns helped 67 percent of surveyed marketing professionals reach targeted audiences, while 32 percent see influencer campaigns as essential to their strategies. In fact, 41 percent said they have seen more success in influencer campaigns than in more traditional advertising efforts.… Read more »
YouTube Stars Hit The ‘Fastlane’ In New Mobile Game
Influencers hold a particularly fond place in the hearts of video game developers, and can sometimes make or break a title’s success. For its upcoming release, Fastlane: Road to Revenge, Space Ape Games knew that YouTube creators would play a major role . . . literally. They’re in the game. Space Ape teamed up with more… Read more »
Instagram Influencer Marketing Could Reach $2 Billion By 2019
With around 300 million active daily users, Instagram is a marketing haven for connecting with influencers both big and small. Estimates place the current Instagram influencer market at around $1 billion and at its current growth rate, could reach $2 billion by 2019. July 2016 research found that 24 percent of US influencers cite Instagram as… Read more »
Gunnar Optiks President Takes Us Behind ‘The Movement’
Known for their amber-colored lenses, Gunnar Optiks manufactures computer and gaming glasses that protect against digital eye strain. They’re helpful to anyone who stares at screens all day, but Gunnar has made a particularly strong impression on the video game community. To spread their message of eye protection to other demographics, Gunnar has just launched… Read more »
Haste Finds Big Success With Microinfluencers
We gamers have a saying—video games don’t make people violent, lag does. To improve performance and reduce table flipping everywhere, the small but scrappy team at Haste has created a way to reduce lag and improve network stability. Since necessity is the mother of all invention, it’s no surprise to learn that Haste was co-founded by an engineer… Read more »
Oprah And The Future Of Influence Marketing On Amazon Echo
In a world where consumers—especially young consumers—trust the opinions of peers and online celebrities over brands, hearing information in that person’s own voice may naturally extend to AI. Pioneering this effort is Hearst, publisher of O, The Oprah Magazine (and over 300 others). The company’s Native & Emerging Technologies team has teamed with Amazon for an… Read more »
F8: Potential For Influence Marketing With Facebook Camera Effects
During this year’s F8—Facebook’s annual developer’s conference—Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement about Facebook Camera Effects that could get the creative juices flowing for influence marketers everywhere. Facebook’s new Camera Effects Platform turns smartphone cameras into an open augmented reality (AR) platform, allowing artists and developers to create effects for the Facebook camera. Currently in beta, the platform allows anyone… Read more »
Fyre Festival: 3 Major Lessons For Influencers And Brands
So far 2017 has been the year of marketing train wrecks, but few have managed to horrify and entertain like the Fyre Festival. On April 28, after being lured to the Bahamas by modern-day sirens of Instagram, hundreds of festivalgoers were horrified to find squalor instead of the luxury they were promised. Let’s face it—things go wrong.… Read more »
Could ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ TV Be The New Norm?
Twitch wants to combine two things it does best—influencers and audience participation. Twitch COO Kevin Lin said that the company is interested in streaming original, “Choose Your Own Adventure” content, as in a TV show viewers control. The idea is that audiences would directly impact a show’s writing and production along the way, although any other… Read more »
What Google’s AI Offerings Mean For Influence Marketers
Google has adopted an “AI first” mission statement, according to the company’s I/O 2017 keynote. The tech giant introduced the second version of its Tensorflow Processing Unit (TPU) called the Cloud TPU. This upgrades the hardware it uses for Tensorflow, an open-source machine learning software for developing AI-powered tools and apps. So why should influence marketers care? Three… Read more »