By

Assembly on July 12, 2022

Our 2022 report takes a magnifying glass to global luxury brand engagement in China, delivering four key consumer and market trends at the intersection of technology, culture, and brand experience.

Hot off the press – Assembly is back with its much-anticipated global luxury brand reports. In 2022, we release a first-of-its kind-installment, focused on the market quickly becoming the most critical for luxury brands worldwide: China.

Download your copy of: LUXE IN CHINA – New Horizons for Luxury Brands

In 2020, it was reported that by the year 2025, China will contribute to half of all luxury goods purchases worldwide. Two years later and that trajectory is very much on track, as experts expect China to take its place as the world’s largest luxury personal goods market within the next three years.

Not only are the trends we see in this market relevant to the brands seeking to win the hearts and minds of Chinese consumers – but they also point towards luxury’s future place in the lifestyles of up-and-coming generations around the world.  Where China leads in technological advances and innovation and bold, new experiences, others often follow.

In the 2022 report, we look at four key defining trends, with insight and examples of successful implementation and transformation done by global brands in the Chinese market:

Emerging Media Formats

Our Future in the Metaverse 

The Evolution of Offline Immersive Experiences 

New Consumer Engagement Beyond Brand 

Get your copy today.

We also look at media investment trends across key luxury categories, as a signal of the continued digitalization of luxe brand experiences.

While challenging economic conditions and the continued effects of COVID are felt by all, luxury brands are creating vibrant, truly culture-defining moments to create closer connections with luxe consumers.

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By

Geoff Edwards,
Executive Creative Director, GALE 

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By

Brendan Shields-Shimizu,
President, Observatory

Originally Appeared in MusebyClio 

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I started out as an executive assistant at William Morris Agency and then Creative Artists Agency, where people described it as getting your “MBA in entertainment.” I didn’t take a traditional path in entertainment, but I do make entertainment—with brands. I still draw on that “MBA,” and the lessons I learned from it are useful to any brand trying to create content that people want to consume.

If you aren’t trying to make brand content that engages audiences rather than annoys them, you should. When ads worked in the past, it was because sitting through a commercial break was easier than getting up for a snack. There are fewer chances to interrupt with today’s programming, which threatens the foundation of our industry and makes us wait longer between snacks. Brands have been slowly waking up to that shift over the last decade, but they’re still struggling to bring entertainment into their brand entertainment.

That’s because, as an industry, we’re still approaching content the same way we’ve always done. What’s the expression? If your only tool is an ad, then everything is a :30. We fall back into the same patterns, and the work falls short. Making effective entertainment means not just aiming for something different, but actually changing the way we create and the partners we create with.

That’s where this MBA in entertainment comes in. Because they were right—the things we learned from working with the top creators in the world, the contacts we made, and the understanding we gained of the industry’s machinery were all things you need to know to make great content. These principles have helped me navigate my career, whether in the boardroom or in the writers’ room.

Idea flow before deal flow.

Think about the last movie you watched. It didn’t start out with Tom Hanks attached. More likely than not, it was a writer in some corner of Hollywood who had an idea that just had to be made. That idea evolved, as more people touched it, until it was in a form where it could be brought to Tom—and he was impressed enough that he had to be the one to make it.

Brands tend to start out thinking they can buy their way into talent, and that will be enough to make their content great. Sure, most stars have their price, but if they’re not committed to the project beyond the paycheck, it will show in the work. And some people can’t be bought.

For instance, Coldplay, despite being one of the most successful bands in the world, has never licensed its music for advertising. Except twice. Those were for a couple of projects for Chipotle you’ve probably seen. The pitch for Coldplay wasn’t about the money they could make. It was to be included in gorgeous animated films about sustainable farming, a cause important to lead singer Chris Martin—and to have your songs covered by Kacey Musgraves and Willie Nelson.

Story comes before media.

Try to dive into a campaign before the brand buys its media. Why? Because once that media has been purchased, you’ve placed yourself in a box. Don’t start with a 60-second ad or a billboard image. Don’t even start with scripts and storyboards. Start with the story you want to tell, and it will lead you to the media.

You get to a brand’s story the same way you do a film’s: with the message you’re trying to get across to viewers. Is it a love story, a comedy, a drama? Can it be relevant to the brand without seeming like a sales pitch? Once you lock it in, then you can talk about media. It could be a series of short films, a long film, or a VR experience; it could be told on one channel or several, or even in new mediums like the metaverse, as long as all channels point the consumer back to the core piece of content.

Don’t use celebrities just because you can.

The prevailing wisdom among advertisers seems to be not only that celebrities are necessary for brand entertainment, but that if one celebrity is good, then lots and lots of them are better. Just look at the Super Bowl ads doing the Dance of a Thousand Celebrities.

Look at the last 10 Oscar Best Picture winners. All of them had great actors, but almost none of them had megastars. If you get the story right, you don’t necessarily need an A-List celebrity to make it amazing. One of my favorite Super Bowl commercials is “The Force” from Deutsch LA. Yes, there was a (tiny) Darth Vader, but the best parts were the yearning of the kid to be special and the dad’s connection to his son.

Collaborate with the best.

It takes hundreds, even thousands of people to make a blockbuster film. Not only are there a lot of them, but they’re at the top of their game. So if you’re going to make entertainment content, you have to work with the best. Don’t default to commercial directors, even though there are some great ones out there. If you want a film, start with a filmmaker!

The way you work together is different, too. The traditional agency creative process tends to be a battle royale, where teams compete against each other for the winning idea and protect it from meddling. Contrast that with the creative process of a place like Pixar, where everyone weighs in to shape an idea. To create great entertainment, you have to share ownership and credit. You have to welcome voices into the debate—you never know which water cooler conversation will spark an idea or which team member will be the one to “crack” the idea.

Study entertainment trends.

It’s easier to predict pop culture than you would think, partly because films and TV shows have a long development time. If you were working on a project six months ago, for instance, you’d know with a little research that multiverses would be hot right now, between multiple superhero titles and Everything Everywhere All at Once. So your brand’s mind-melting dive into the multiverse would seem prescient when you were really just doing your homework.

Study what’s coming down the pipeline in the entertainment world. There are multiple benefits. Going back to the multiverse, you might have guessed that Everything Everywhere star Ke Huy Quan, who reappeared decades after iconic child roles in Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, would become a hot commodity. If you had locked him in on a project then, it would be cheaper than if you came to him when he was hot hot hot.

Advertising is changing, and to get ahead of that change, you’ll need to forget a lot about what you know about advertising. You’ll need to learn what makes entertainment work—and get your own MBA in entertainment.

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Originally released on

By

Jay Powell
SVP, Communications,
MMI Agency

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At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, stay-at-home orders and social distancing drove hordes of Americans to their devices to connect with family and friends. It also helped fuel more online purchases that might typically have been made in-store. Cue the rise of shoppertainment – a phenomenon at the intersection of online shopping and influencer livestreaming that brands are eager to leverage, emboldened by the success live-streamers have found across Asia-Pacific.

As an integrated communications and media firm that has remained at the forefront of marketing innovation since inception, MMI is uniquely qualified to support brands through this latest evolution of commerce. After digging into performance data, examining industry reports, and speaking with brands and influencers, we have compiled a quick start guide to help your brand execute a winning influencer livestream campaign.

Shoppertainment in the digital age is the latest way brands utilize influencers to make the social shopping experience more entertaining and authentic. Shoppertainment rests on influencer livestreaming, which is often less polished than the slickly-produced shorts created by brands and influencers for official campaigns.  For leaders worried about brand safety and consistency across platforms, this imperfect content might be troubling. But Caroline Vazzana (@cvazzana), style influencer, says the imperfection of livestreaming is its charm.  “The beauty of going live is that not everything needs to be (or can be) perfect!”

Livestreams Sell Out the Digital Shelf in China

In 2020, the shoppertainment took off in China; two-thirds of Chinese consumers purchased products via livestreams that year. During Taobao’s 2021 Single’s Day, China’s unofficial shopping holiday that is four times larger than Black Friday in the U.S., China’s two most famous livestreaming stars sold a total of $3 billion worth of products via separate livestreaming sessions. The verticals driving this success in China are cosmetics, beauty products, fashion, and food.

Influencer livestreaming is gaining traction, as evidenced by increasing viewership and conversion rates. Per Bloomberg, social commerce is expected to accelerate over the next few years, with U.S. sales reaching $1.2 trillion by 2025.

Instagram and TikTok Take Center Stage

Initially a photography-focused app, Instagram now prioritizes video content to keep up with its competitors, most recently with the introduction of Instagram Live Shopping. MMI facilitated a collaboration between a large skin care brand and beauty and lifestyle influencers Paola Matute (@paox33) and Melody Acevedo (@melodyslife) to promote holiday season self-care products via Instagram Live. 44% of Instagram users shop Lives weekly, making them an effective way to place your product directly in front of consumers.

Brands are also finding success on “the QVC for Gen Z,” TikTok Live, whose “Top LIVEs” category makes it easy for live content to be discovered by users on the platform. MMI executed a TikTok Live on behalf of a major hair care brand, hosted by Vazzana, to promote an innovative new hair styling product line. Viewers chatted with Caroline during the session and posed questions that she answered live, creating an interactive environment for viewers. Click-through rate to the brand’s product page exceeded campaign expectations.

Influencers can seamlessly livestream beyond social channels via a brand’s website by incorporating livestream shopping platforms like buywith and talkshoplive. This allows the audience to shop directly on the e-commerce site, along with the influencer, in real time, removing path-to-purchase friction, increasing engagement and boosting conversions. Large brands and publishers who are already livestreaming shoppable content across these platforms include Walmart, Buzzfeed and Hearst.

Best Practices for Lively Livestreaming

The world of influencer livestreaming can be daunting to brands that are accustomed to controlling every aspect of influencer content development. MMI’s philosophy for content creation is to give influencers “freedom within a framework” to do what they do best and create content they know their followers will engage. MMI compiled this list of tips to consider as you craft your influencer livestreaming strategy.

Go with the platform where your audience spends the most time..

Meet your audience where it’s already engaged to maximize the reach and life cycle of your content.

Go with someone your audience trusts.

87% of Instagram users say influencers have inspired them to make a purchase. Collaborate with an influencer your audience already looks to for advice to drive conversions.

Go with someone you trust.

Identify creators you’ve worked with in the past who will understand the nuances of your brand as well as the required FTC and platform-specific disclosure policies.

Go with the content format your audience engages with most.

Examine past organic social and influencer campaign performance to determine the content type(s) with which your audience is more likely to interact.

Go with the platform where your audience spends the most time..

Meet your audience where it’s already engaged to maximize the reach and life cycle of your content.

Livestreaming, shoppertainment, and social commerce are new domains for today’s brands. To drive results, they will need to get comfortable with leaning on influencers and ceding creative control where necessary. We’ve found, though, that the best collaborations occur when influencers are given the freedom to create what works for their audiences. Acevedo affirms that the resulting livestream “feels authentic, yet informative for the audience.” When you’re ready to see influencer livestreaming work magic for your brand, MMI’s influencer marketing team is here to support you every step of the way.

See how MMI helps brands break through the noise and stand out here.

MMI Agency is a modern brand lab where performance meets possibility. Our mission is to inspire action by combining our end-to-end approach to reaching consumers with our tenacity for data.

By

Kaitlyn Schembri
Contributor, Koalifyed

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With the advent of social commerce, influencers have never been more important. Global sales driven by social commerce will triple to $1.2 trillion by 2025. At the same time, user-generated content is on the rise, accounting for 39% of weekly media hours consumed by Americans. We’re living in the age of nano-influence, driven by the professionalization of the Creator Economy and brand investments in social commerce.

In the old days of influencer marketing, celebrity partnerships were strong drivers of top-of-funnel marketing. A-listers like Betty White gave brands wide-ranging exposure. No wonder brands lead with celebrities at the Super Bowl; on a stage with a hefty price tag, leveraging talent with a built-in fan base makes sense. Salesforce’s recent Big Game ad with Matthew McConaughey was a memorable callback to his 2014 hit “Interstellar.” It likely did little to drive conversion when it aired but drove conversation for days afterward.

With the rise of social commerce and performance measurement, creators boast an enviable position in today’s brand marketing playbook. In-app social marketplaces that let consumers shop the entire funnel on Instagram and TikTok mean the power of a single influencer post holds more weight than ever before. Consumers no longer need to see your website to make a sale – and it’s likely they don’t want to!

Nano-influencers are today’s driver of commerce. TikTok, more than any other platform, is driving this trend. Over the past two years, TikTok has democratized the digital world, allowing creators to reach a large audience on the app without a substantial following (and, in some cases, hardly any following at all). The algorithm prizes discovery over drudgery, priming niche content and creators with fewer than 10K followers to capture eyeballs (and results).

In this landscape, nano influencers are an authentic way for brands to connect with consumers. Frequently the tastemakers and thought leaders of their niche communities, they command the respect of small but mighty followings. Consumers are more likely to view them as friends than other-worldly celebrities, adding trust and engagement. Studies have shown that while 3% of consumers would consider buying a product in-store if promoted by a celebrity, that number jumps to 60% for a nano-influencer.

Dunkin’ recently tapped into various influencers with fewer than 50,000 followers to power its latest “coffee-first” campaign. Analysis showed nano-influencers generated higher engagement rates, with an average engagement rate of 5.2%. Dunkin’ succeeded in organically growing a support base for its coffee ambitions.

Nano influencers also can help brands drive a positive impact on diversity & inclusion. Being purposeful in curating your influencer marketing partnerships can ensure your brand does its part in platforming diverse perspectives. Consider how nano-influencers from yet-unengaged segments might supplement your core marketing activities for major product launches. Launching a new foldable exercise bike for the WFH generation? Consider partnering with TikTok influencers who produce content on career acceleration for P.O.C. talent. You never know what content may come of the effort!

As nano influencers proliferate marketing campaigns, it’s critical brands have agile, scalable solutions for influencer marketing management. Creators should be natural extensions of the marketing team. Investing in the right tech to reach, negotiate, and communicate with them is essential for success in this era of super-charged social commerce.

When leveraging the power of nano influencers, do not overlook the vetting process. Brand safety controls are key in the wild west of today’s platform-fragmented internet, as is closely managing influencer spending. Many marketers fall prey to the hidden costs of fake follower bots on their influencer efforts, which threaten to diminish a campaign’s chances of success and harm trusted influencer relationships. Bot detection is vital to ensuring brands are getting the complete picture. At Koalifyed, we leverage our platform’s built-in S.N.I.F.F. technology to help brands reach a higher R.O.I. for their influencer marketing investments.

We hear success stories every day from brands utilizing nano-influencers to hit their marketing KPIs. We predict the gap between the brands who invest in this strategy versus those who don’t will only widen in the coming years as platforms double-down on social commerce development and authentic brand marketing remains a priority for consumers.

BY

Christine McDermott
VP, Veritas/Meat & Produce

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This piece is part of series on Social Commerce, Influencer Marketing, and the Creator Economy. 

A decade ago, brands looked to influencer agencies to connect with the ‘who’s who’; today, they come to us to wield the transformative power of social influence through their entire marketing stack. As part of the agency that felt so strongly about the term “influencing the influencers” that we trademarked it, I am keenly aware that influencer marketing long predates the current hype that social media has generated around the industry. When we look at the prioritization of influencer marketing in today’s marketing mix, it’s no longer considered a nice to have but rather a core component of brand planning.

It wasn’t always this way, though. This has provided a fascinating opportunity to watch the shift in the marketplace from a client service perspective. In today’s creator-centric economy, brands require influencer marketing agency partners to keep apace the transformation in this space.

From Impressions to Engagement

In the days of blogs and burgeoning social media channels, the most significant opportunity influencers afforded was the chance to reach new audiences. The focus was almost exclusively on maximizing the number of impressions from influencer content. Guaranteed organic reach and high blog readership provided cost-effective ways for brands to reach audiences that otherwise may never have interacted with them. The deep relationships that influencer marketing agencies held with influencers were critical to obtaining the best earned and paid opportunities for our brand partners and allowed for agility in influencer placements.

As social channels moved into the spotlight, accounting for more media hours consumed across generations, the focus shifted to engagement. The goal was to measure the attention content could generate through authentic connection with audiences in an increasingly competitive digital world. With this, we saw the rise of micro and nano influencers who built strong relationships through two-way communication with their audiences, maintaining consistently high engagement. Trusted recommendations from the right influencers could bring your brand into the consideration set for your target audience. Dedicated audiences of nano influencers also provided an opportunity to access niche consumer segments that otherwise would be challenging for brands to find. Our key to success was pairing the right influencers with our brands, ensuring alignment on values and demographics. 

The Creator Economy

Today, getting the right message to the right person at the right time has never been more critical – or more difficult as the consumer ecosystem becomes increasingly sophisticated. New channels and content formats provide evermore opportunities to attract and engage new and existing audiences with relevant content. Moving influencer marketing from a single tactic to a full-funnel approach creates a new world of opportunity for brands, while at the same time raising countless new considerations. With all these factors to contend with, the role influencer marketing agencies take on has never been more critical. Today’s influencer marketing agency partners must help clients navigate this ever-changing world by:

• Going beyond the numbers: As data-driven marketers, it can be attractive to make decisions based solely on the immense data we now have at our fingertips. While these are fundamental parts of our discovery and vetting processes, we believe it’s equally important to review the qualitative elements of an influencer agreement: alignment with brand values, the types of social conversations creators drive among their followings, and, importantly, any content or connections that may increase brand risk.
• Capitalizing on available technology: Today’s digital tools provide capabilities that aid every step of the process: diving deep into audience demographics, reviewing years of content to ensure brand safety, authenticating audiences to remove bot traffic, and analyzing results. The available options can also be overwhelming. Here, the right mix of talent (agency experts with a deep understanding of the landscape) with technology (digital SaaS and DaaS tools) can supercharge campaign results. 
• Keeping human connection at the center: True influence is built on strong connections between agencies and influencers and influencers and their audiences. Authentic connection is essential, from the relationships we build to the content we create. 
• Letting creators be creative: Our influencers are partners in the creative process, not simply another outlet or a channel to distribute brand messages. Influencers know their audiences better than anyone. Leaning into their insights and creativity will lead to more authentic content and experiences that resonate. True partnerships with influencers allow for co-creation and collaborations that can excite and convert. 
• Researching and reviewing: Due to the steady growth of influencer marketing, we now have a wealth of research to help inform and guide everything from partnership models to accurate approaches for optimizing reach. Every campaign is an opportunity to test, learn, and then review performance to better optimize results in the future.

There has been a tremendous acceleration in influencer marketing growth and investment. When done well, it works. When we examine the transformation of influencer marketing and the creator economy in just a few short years, it becomes clear that more evolution is to come. Leaning on agency partners with deep knowledge of the discipline, facility with the technology tools driving efficiency through the space, and authentic relationships with influencers will help brands get the most out of this fast-moving space.