Jennifer Quigley-Jones is presenting on what programmatic marketers need to know about creators at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference in New York City on September 28-29. If you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, you can secure your seat here.
A decade ago, most influencer marketing agencies were only buying ads in one place: Instagram. Which meant that as a YouTube employee, Jennifer Quigley-Jones had to do a lot to help creators on the platform get noticed.
“TikTok didn’t exist,” Quigley-Jones says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “YouTube was driving so many sales for the brands that tested it and were courageous enough to test it.”
The problem was, “most agencies weren’t even thinking about that opportunity” she says. “They weren’t thinking about YouTube creators.”
That gap in the influencer marketing landscape is what inspired Quigley-Jones to leave YouTube in 2017 and start her own agency, Digital Voices, which was acquired by PMG in earlier this year.
These days, it’s a lot easier to convince brands to invest in creator talent across multiple platforms. But as Quigley-Jones points out, there’s still a lot about the typical creator-marketer relationship that can be improved with the use of new technologies, including AI models and performance data analysis tools. (It also doesn’t hurt when creators learn how to think like marketers, too!)
By increasing the scale of creator relationships, “You can really raise that floor from 25 creators to 1000,” she said. “Which is great. I really love democratizing media spend.”
Also in this episode: Why influencer marketing should be seen as a strategy rather than a tactic, and what kinds of conversations advertisers should be having with their creator partners to make sure everyone’s aligned on the same goals.
