Con­sumers expect and demand gen­uine prod­uct feed­back pri­or to pur­chase. That’s why it’s more impor­tant than ever for brands to work with influ­encers, who have the abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate said feed­back to con­sumers in palat­able ways. This also means influ­encers have more pow­er and are no longer wait­ing around to be dis­cov­ered, but rather join­ing mar­ket­places that brands are using to con­nect with them. Going for­ward, it won’t be enough for brands to sim­ply find influ­encers, but they’ll have to actu­al­ly align said influ­encers with the ROI of their brands. Here’s a clos­er look at how influ­encer mar­ket­ing has changed over the years and what specif­i­cal­ly is to come in 2015.

As the final sea­son of “Mad Men” approach­es in April to pay homage to an extinct adver­tis­ing world, real-life brands and mar­keters are con­fronting a much dif­fer­ent real­i­ty in 2015.

In the “Mad Men” adver­tis­ing era, the Don Drap­ers of the indus­try were them­selves influ­encers who held sway over ads that told con­sumers what to buy. But today’s con­sumers have much more pow­er.

“For years, mar­keters knew and had insight about how to engage and influ­ence behav­ior,” said Hol­ly Hamann, CMO of influ­encer mar­ket­ing plat­form Tap­in­flu­ence. “Look at TV, radio and print adver­tis­ing. Mar­keters knew more about those chan­nels than con­sumers did, which gave them lever­age. With­in the last few years, how­ev­er, with [the rise of] social…consumers know more about these chan­nels than mar­keters do.”

What’s more, these chan­nels are where con­sumers are hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions, doing research, and mak­ing pur­chas­ing deci­sions. That’s because they are get­ting opin­ions from peers and oth­er experts on prod­ucts before they buy any­thing. And these peer/expert opin­ions have become increas­ing­ly impor­tant.

That also means mar­keters – who may very well be part of an old­er gen­er­a­tion, albeit per­haps not quite as old as Draper’s – have to now try to keep pace on plat­forms they didn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly grow up with and for whom “social media is a con­scious effort, not a born organ­ic effort,” Hamann said.

From Big Audiences To Authentic Audiences

With the rise of con­tent mar­ket­ing, which has more or less cre­at­ed an insa­tiable appetite for sto­ries and images, as well as for the pace and vol­ume at which they appear, more tra­di­tion­al forms of dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing like ban­ner ads are see­ing declin­ing influ­ence on pur­chase deci­sions, Hamann said. And that real­ly cre­ates an oppor­tu­ni­ty for influ­encers.

But not just any influ­encers – influ­encer mar­ket­ing has seen a def­i­nite shift from sim­ply the social media pow­er­hous­es with the most fans/followers to the ones with the best fans/followers for a giv­en brand. Or, as Eric Brown, vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions at social net­work engage­ment com­pa­ny Lithi­um Tech­nolo­gies, which acquired online exper­tise man­age­ment firm Klout last year, puts it, there has been a shift from big audi­ences to authen­tic audi­ences.

“The ear­ly era of influ­encer mar­ket­ing was all about ‘How can we acti­vate the most peo­ple?’” Brown said. He not­ed that’s a holdover from dis­play adver­tis­ing days in which online prop­er­ties asked brands how many peo­ple they want­ed to reach and how much mon­ey they had to spend.

“But in influ­encer mar­ket­ing, it’s not about buy­ing audi­ences in bulk. It’s about find­ing authen­tic ways to talk to peo­ple who are already engaged in your prod­ucts and ser­vices and tap­ping them,” Brown said.

These cam­paigns reach small­er audi­ences, but the con­sumers they do reach are active, inter­est­ed and can help get the word out fur­ther and do bet­ter things for a brand, Brown said. He uses the exam­ple of the gam­ing com­mu­ni­ty in which tra­di­tion­al adver­tis­ing can help com­mu­ni­cate a new game, but influ­en­tial gamers are the ones that tell con­sumers whether the game is actu­al­ly engag­ing and fun to play.

“Call of Duty”, for exam­ple, cre­at­ed a cam­paign with Lithi­um in which about 2,000 peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ed, but it gen­er­at­ed 140 mil­lion impres­sions and had a total audi­ence reach of 33.3 mil­lion, which Brown said is “the beau­ty of influ­encer mar­ket­ing.”

This is a shift that could also ben­e­fit small­er agen­cies.

A lot of adver­tis­ing is sold through big agen­cies, Brown said, but it is hard­er for them to cre­ate mean­ing­ful rev­enue mod­els around influ­encer mar­ket­ing.

“It would be real­ly hard for one of the big advertising/marketing con­glom­er­ates to cre­ate a rev­enue stream that would be real­ly mean­ing­ful for them to tar­get 2,000 peo­ple,” Brown said. “But for in-house mar­keters or a small­er cre­ative agency that wants to bring inno­v­a­tive think­ing and fresh approach­es, they will say that for the good of the client, they will inte­grate influ­encer mar­ket­ing into a cam­paign.”

The Rise Of Influencer-Brand Partnerships

Influ­encer mar­ket­ing has also seen a shift in con­tent and an increased desire from brands to forge part­ner­ships.

A few years ago, influ­encer mar­ket­ing was all about blogs. Con­sumer brands tar­get­ed women – even if they weren’t a giv­en product’s end user – because they do most of a giv­en household’s shop­ping and make up a big chunk of the blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty.

Then came YouTube and there was an even big­ger explo­sion of video con­tent with mil­lions of chan­nels from so-called Haulers, who post videos detail­ing recent shop­ping sprees, and Sneak­er­heads, which, as the name implies, post videos about sneak­ers. And with the prod­ucts reviewed in these videos came oppor­tu­ni­ties for brands and a sub­se­quent “explo­sion in terms of brands want­i­ng to part­ner with video influ­encers,” Hamann said. That’s par­tic­u­lar­ly true in indus­tries that are more visu­al, like fash­ion, food, and fit­ness.

This has also led to the rise of net­works like Style­Haul, a fash­ion and beau­ty net­work on YouTube that rep­re­sents Haulers because brands are try­ing to reach them and work with them, Hamann said. Accord­ing to Style­Haul, it has 17 bil­lion net­work video views, near­ly 200 mil­lion net­work sub­scribers and 4,900 net­work chan­nels. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, in Novem­ber, enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny RTL Group acquired a con­trol­ling stake in Style­Haul for $107 mil­lion, valu­ing the com­pa­ny at $151.4 mil­lion.

Increased video con­tent has also seen a rise of a sub­genre of Vine influ­encers, which, in turn, has led to some cross-plat­form trends, she notes.

As brands like McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Silk have embraced Vine, this sub­genre of Vine influ­encers called “Vine magi­cians” that can do “neat edit­ing tricks” have emerged, Hamann said. The best exam­ple of a brand har­ness­ing this sub­genre is HP, which did a TV com­mer­cial with noth­ing but Vines from influ­en­tial Vin­ers. The result­ing #BendtheRules spot has more than 3.6 mil­lion views to date.

The HP spot also marks crossover between a social plat­form and a tra­di­tion­al means of adver­tis­ing. Anoth­er exam­ple is brands like McDonald’s and Taco Bell using Snapchat. The scarci­ty of such images inspires young con­sumers to cap­ture them and post them to oth­er chan­nels like Insta­gram and Pin­ter­est, Hamann said.

Keeping It Authentic: Citizens, Not Celebrities

This shift in con­tent and the rise in pop­u­lar­i­ty of reg­u­lar Joes and Janes under­scores one impor­tant shift in cus­tomer expec­ta­tions: Con­sumers want more author­i­ty from influ­encers. Brown calls this the shift from celebri­ty to cit­i­zen.

Celebri­ties still clear­ly work in tra­di­tion­al adver­tis­ing, “but we’ve found celebri­ties are not very cred­i­ble in influ­encer mar­ket­ing and engag­ing peo­ple online. That’s where cit­i­zens come in,” Brown said.

In oth­er words, a moth­er of a tod­dler is a more cred­i­ble source of infor­ma­tion about dia­pers and day­care ser­vices than, say, actress Nicole Kid­man. He also points to ads he has seen on San Fran­cis­co pub­lic tran­sit for a renter’s insur­ance com­pa­ny that is using actor/host Mario Lopez, who, again, is per­haps not the most reli­able author­i­ty on renter’s insur­ance. Instead, con­sumers want cred­i­ble feed­back from sources that they can use to make informed deci­sions.

“I think the reac­tion is more ampli­fied in a dig­i­tal world where peo­ple are all about keep­ing it real and mak­ing it authen­tic and mak­ing it deeply per­son­al for me,” Brown said.

Even if the celebri­ty cul­ture is alive and well in many respects – look no fur­ther than the Kar­dashi­ans – con­sumers have come to expect more per­son­al and deeply rel­e­vant expe­ri­ences thanks in part to con­tent shar­ing on net­works like Face­book, Twit­ter, Pin­ter­est, etc., where images and posts are often per­son­al and deeply rel­e­vant.

Plus, Mil­len­ni­als sim­ply have more dis­trust for tra­di­tion­al mod­els like TV adver­tis­ing.

“I’m smart enough to know that they’re going to tell me what I want to hear,” said Katie Pater­son, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing direc­tor for influ­encer mar­ket­ing plat­form Traackr. And even with the rise of con­tent mar­ket­ing and con­tent in Google ads or in dis­play ads on Spo­ti­fy and Pan­do­ra, con­tent is still being pushed toward buy­ers in ways that do not res­onate, she said.

“Where 2015 and beyond goes is the rise of the influ­encer in which brands take their con­tent mar­ket­ing strate­gies and put con­tent in the hands of peo­ple who are actu­al­ly trust­ed by the buy­er,” Pater­son said.

That means more brand-influ­encer part­ner­ships to come. And more paid media to sup­port that influ­encer con­tent.

No longer does influ­encer mar­ket­ing mean find­ing pop­u­lar blog­gers, send­ing them free prod­ucts and hop­ing they will men­tion them, said Mar­cy Mas­sura, senior vice pres­i­dent and dig­i­tal prac­tice lead at PR firm MSLGroup. Instead, she expects to see “much more play” in the paid con­tent cre­ator cat­e­go­ry in 2015 in which brands part­ner with influ­encers and “have them cre­ate the kind of con­tent that will res­onate with their audi­ence first, but also ben­e­fit the brand sec­ond. That real­ly is the mag­ic sweet spot,” she added.

For years, brands have been pay­ing for their con­tent to be seen, she said.

“They do YouTube pre-roll in which they are pay­ing to say, ‘Look at what we made,’” Mas­sura said. “But encour­ag­ing and devel­op­ing pro­grams for brands to use paid dol­lars to sup­port influ­encers’ con­tent and gen­er­at­ing great results and great scale reach­es a broad­er range of peo­ple.”

More Big Data, Tools & Technology

New tech­nol­o­gy and tools in the works will allow brands to not just iden­ti­fy the right influ­encers, but to cre­ate met­rics to align with their busi­ness objec­tives.

“What 2015 to 2016 will be about is not just find­ing influ­encers, but about align­ing them to the ROI of your busi­ness,” said Katie Pater­son, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing direc­tor for influ­encer mar­ket­ing plat­form Traackr.

Big data has giv­en brands new tools to find peo­ple with spe­cif­ic inter­ests, influ­ence and res­o­nance with­in tiny audi­ence seg­ments. For its part, Klout scores online pro­files and tracks engage­ment, res­o­nance and rel­e­vance over 10,000+ top­ics. This allows brands to very specif­i­cal­ly tar­get influ­encers with a range of char­ac­ter­is­tics like, say, a 35-year-old moth­er of two who lives in Los Ange­les and is pas­sion­ate about healthy fast food, Brown said.

“Big data is play­ing a very big role in how influ­encer mar­ket­ing is chang­ing,” Brown said.

Hamann agreed that in the next few years, the mar­ket will see more tools and tech­nol­o­gy, bring­ing effi­cien­cies on the plat­form side and allow­ing influ­encers to man­age con­tent and pay­ments.

“It’s just like email mar­ket­ing – once they fig­ured out how to do it, you start to see tools that pop up that allow them to do it right and scale it and influ­encer mar­ket­ing is scaled to do well and be more rapid­ly adopt­ed,” Hamann said.

This also includes the rise of influ­encer por­tals, which Mas­sura said are real­ly going to take off in 2015.

“We do some of that, but influ­encer mar­ket­ing at scale has been the biggest chal­lenge for agen­cies and it is solved by web-based por­tals, which help man­age large num­bers of influ­encers,” she said.

What changes do you expect to see in the influ­encer mar­ket­ing space in 2015?