Ammo Marketing :: Why Influencers

WHY INFLUENCER MARKETING? Facts, Figures and Focus

Insanity: Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein

Deutsche Bank estimates that only 18% of TV advertising campaigns generate positive ROI.

Clancy and Stone calculate that for every $1 spent on advertising in the US, the average return is 54 cents, and that it is necessary to increase advertising spend by 100% to increase sales a mere 1-2%.

AdAge reported that the real cost of TV advertising has risen 256% in the last decade - just as audiences have fragmented and turned to alternative sources of entertainment.

And how about reach? In 1965 you needed just 3 prime time TV commercials to reach 80% of the US population. Now, according to a 2003 study by Stengel, you need 117.

And yet, when you do reach the elusive consumer, Gallup reports that only 14% of people trust advertising information.

Walter Carl of Northeastern University reports that the average US consumer is bombarded with 30,000 commercial messages every week - yet they act on just 4.

What is today's marketer to do? What do consumers respond to?

The answer is deceptively simple. Consumers trust each other for advice, information, ideas, recommendations and perspectives on brands. Walter Carl reports that people in most categories act on 1 in 3 recommendations from friends they trust.

In study after study, word of mouth recommendations from friends top the 'trust' and 'action' charts, way ahead of any other form of communication. Which is why Influencers are so important to marketers the world over, regardless of age, category or geography.

However, as we all know intuitively, not all friends are equal when it comes to trusting their recommendations; and there's never one single person who we trust on all topics. So, whereas

the one-in-ten rule holds up well for Influencers in any one category, or for any one brand, your 'fashion Influencer' is unlikely to also be your 'financial Influencer', who in turn probably isn’t your 'green Influencer'.

Ammo believes that many people tend be an Influencer on at least one topic - but very few are Influencers on more than half a dozen. Consequently much of our focus is on the identification of specific Peer and Über Influencers, what social networks they move in, and what matters to them as it relates to your brand.

Ammo have been doing this for nearly ten years now, across virtually every category from the sexy to the mundane, for teen and senior brands, in the mid-west and on the coasts. It's what we do; in fact, it's all we do.