MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Southeast Asia-based PR and digital marketing agency Vero announced its latest influencer marketing stack InFluent — a combination of products and services designed to help brands in Southeast Asia achieve their business and reputational goals.
Vero created InFluent as an integrated and regionalized approach to influencer marketing featuring standardized guidelines and tools designed to resonate with brands and creators in the ASEAN region. InFluent was created to replicate the unified processes and workflows powering some of the most successful cultural industries such as A&R, publishing, and distribution in the music industry.
Citing challenges within the influencer marketing industry such as fraud, measurement, and an increase in misinformation, Vero executives built InFluent to bring more vigorous processes and methodologies to influencer campaigns, as well as assure the authenticity and credibility of each campaign’s content and conduct cohesive and comprehensive reporting to measure the campaigns’ effectiveness.
“InFluent was designed to benefit both creators and brands to ensure that collaboration is healthy and successful for all of the campaign stakeholders,” said Umaporn Whittaker-Thompson, Group Vice President of Consumer Communications at Vero. “Vero created InFluent because we believe more innovation is needed in how brands and creators collaborate. Our goal is to create a win-win scenario for both parties that leads to more authentic online experiences.”
“As authenticity and transparency have now become more important than ever, InFluent is going to be essential for brands, as well as emerging and established content creators. We believe that through this initiative, we’ll be able to address existing and future challenges around influencer marketing and continue to create successful campaigns amid shifting consumer behaviors,” said Bianca Balderas, PR Account Manager at Vero Philippines.
InFluent contains four integrated components.
The first element is KOL LAB, a regional database of influencers, contract templates, and scoring metrics for a qualified pool of influencers in Southeast Asia. With increasing numbers of creators invested in various fields and entertaining diverse scales of audiences, it’s now necessary to conveniently access curated profiles across the ASEAN region. This can be done via third-party tools with support from the vast influencer database Vero has built over its years of working with influencers. The goal of KOL LAB is to share knowledge and insights about influencers regionally to identify the most suitable influencer profiles for clients.
The second element is TrueVibe, an influencer identification tool that scores an influencer’s brand fit across six categories. To help audiences connect with more authentic brand and influencer collaborations, TrueVibe provides a data-led process and leverages the influencer list from KOL LAB to help brands identify and engage with influencers who can deliver optimal impact and results for their campaigns. Since it launched last year, TrueVibe has received positive responses from clients seeking a data-driven method for finding the right influencers to work with.
At the core of successful collaborations lie moments of cultural bonding and celebration. With those moments in mind, Vero created the third element, Happy Hours — a program designed to nurture relationships with influencers through creator bootcamps, networking events, and an ongoing influencer gifting program to recognize important milestones and events.
The fourth element of InFluent is called ECHO+.
ECHO+ is designed to measure campaign success, help brands achieve their campaign goals, and ensure media buy plans support campaigns so that the contents reach the right audience on a broader scale. ECHO+ includes both quantitative and qualitative measures which are based on online conversations, sentiment, and brand mentions, different from the common social media metrics that focus mostly on reach, engagement and impressions. ECHO+ is supported by Vero’s Media IQ team, which integrates media planning, buying, data and analytics, and platform partnership.
InFluent is a product of Vero’s years of experience at creating and implementing influencer marketing campaigns across Southeast Asia for industries such as entertainment and streaming, automotive, e-commerce, beauty and lifestyle, finance and banking, technology, travel, and education.
“More than ever, brands view cultivating relationships with influencers as the most credible and trusted way to reach their audiences and convey messages in an independent and authentic way,” said Whittaker-Thompson.
Whittaker-Thompson’s team comprises influencer specialists across Southeast Asia specializing in services such as strategy, influencer identification, content creation, and integration of influencers across marketing functions, including live events.
Vero will conduct training for all Vero consultants and launch the InFluent stack across the ASEAN region before the end of the first quarter of 2023.
