Harnessing AI, community, and authenticity to unlock influence

Thanks, Chris. So I'm a marketing strategy consultant. I work with agencies, uh, and brands directly to help them decide the right strategy, uh, with a specific expertise in social, and I've been doing that for the last 20 years, uh, in various different markets around the world, currently based in Singapore. And I'm also an investor and advisor to a couple of companies, including. Um, roster, which is actually a recruitment platform, uh, for

the social first, um, world. So you can hire strategists and creatives, and podcast editors, etc. etc. uh, for specific jobs, uh, on social media. So that's joint roster, if you want to check it out online.

So essentially that's what we do, um, finding the right person to say the right thing at the right time for brands, uh, modern term, we call it influencer marketing. I really, really glad to be here, uh, this discussion with with Alex and Chris.

quick poll. The big question here is, which business challenges are most critical to your brand in 2025? And you know, I was just reading an article yesterday on Business Insider, CMOs are now really, well, they are trying to keep themselves eye focused on long-term planning, but with all the things about tariffs and geopolitical issues, budgets are tied, there are so many concerns that everybody's thinking about, um,

and we gave you some four options here. If you have others, you could always type in a chat. But Alex and Evangeline, I mean, love to hear from you. What, what, what you've been hearing from the market and people you've been working with? These are all challenges, right? But I think, uh, the biggest one is not whether to use AI, it's how to use AI. I think everyone's using it, and, um, it's just that question of, if everyone's using the same tools, are you really getting, uh, an advantage? And.

Where do you use it in in in the marketing process? Do you, uh, just use it for research, do you actually use it for the end product of marketing and advertising, um, do consumers. Realize that you're using it, do they care? I think it's all those sort of questions that are top of mind right now and if I knew all the answers to those questions, then I would be uh very well off, but yeah, still figuring it out like everyone else, uh, Evangeline.

how do I make best use of that dollar? Every single dollar must return the best impact, whether it is organic content you create, social media content you create with influencers, content partners, and it's particularly challenging and, and this comes from the Um, uh, background of us really finding it critical for us to understand audience, who we're trying to target in this climate where consumers are skeptical? Is it a fake, is it an AI generated ad that I'm just looking at?

Is it for real? Um, authenticity, uh, whether, you know, everybody's expecting things to be authentic, to be relatable, to be real, personalized, because technology is supposed to allow for that. But as marketers, it's like we only have finite budget, finite resources. How do we really do, uh, make the best use of the money we have with the strategies

that we can have? And here's the conversation today. Uh, we just finished a very, very detailed um survey among Singaporeans about how, what impact do influencers have on them. And I'm gonna share with you some insights and with that we can kick off the different discussions with Alex and Benin today. Yep, so let's go. Um, first insight. No surprise, but also surprise. Attention is fragmented. I mean, in Singapore today, the average Singaporean is following 5 types

of influence. I'm not talking 5 influences, but 5 types. So you have say foodies, you have uh health enthusiasts or, you know, different types of influences across 6 different social media platforms. You, you have your usual suspects, your YouTube, your, your TikTok and Instagram, but there's a lot more up and coming, right? Xiaohongshu, the Red Note, um, all these new platforms are constantly starting and getting the attention and fragmentizing how we

can engage them. And your brand, the brands that we work with, the brand that you're owning or creating content from is like this, just one of the many accounts that is popping up on the feed. And, and the thing is that all the different platforms are, are having different engagements. Um, one fun fact which we realized from the, the survey is that TikTok, um, sorry, among the young people today, Instagram is actually the one where they're following the most influencers.

We always thought TikTok is the one, but actually TikTok, on the other hand, is the one where people are really passively engaging and watching the content. So it's like this whole different type of platform, different ways of engagement. It's, it's, I don't know, it's, it's really complicated. I mean, Alex, what do you think? Yeah, I think people still of course do do pay attention to longer forms of content.

You can see that on all the streaming platforms and, and YouTube, of course, has lots of long form content, as do other platforms, but there has been a fundamental shift, uh, and I think it's even more true every day that people are paying attention in these. They're paying kind of half attention in in these handful of seconds, and not always actually absorbing what they're looking at.

I think that's the key as well, is that just because someone, um, scrolled through and may have briefly paused on the content that you created as a marketer, doesn't necessarily mean that the message has been absorbed. Um, so it's really, really important to make sure that you've got other measures in place, uh, that means that people have done more than just flick their thumb past the content, uh, because we've all been in that.

Kind of zombie mode at times where we're second screening or we're just checking out and we're we're not really um paying proper attention. Uh, Evangeline, what do you think?

Um, and hence the relationship with influencers and whoever we like and we click on the follow button just to stay updated is a more natural um consumer behavior. Whereas on TikTok, you realize the moment you switch it on. You get discovery, you get entertainment and faces that you see are likely people you do not know, and it's something trendy, right? Labubu or whatnot.

And you, you may actually use TikTok, say for example, to follow travel content, you save it, you go to the trip, follow the itinerary, you come back and you still don't know who the influencer is. Right. Also, the consumer behavior is really different, but I definitely echo that that one is that is one of the fundamental reasons why Instagram is still very strong for building that relationship with people and hence influencer marketing is really prevalent over there.

And it, I think everyone will agree there are moments now where You think, right, I, I saw this video on TikTok or on Instagram, or I watched this show on Netflix or Amazon Prime, or wherever it may be, and you think, all my friends and family must have also seen the same content. So we'll talk about it. And they look at you like, You're talking in a different language, and they've completely missed

what's happened. And I think that, that, that's a regular occurrence now, that there are hardly, there, there are hardly any singular moments of culture that we all experience in the same way, like they used to be, because of that attention being so fragmented. And this is really true across, um, the different age groups, as well as different mindsets. You can see that visual on the right hand side. There's. Increasingly there's even more of a difference between what different

demographics are are consuming uh through their media channels. And now, the way that we have to respond as marketers is to take those broad audience groups, uh, that we all have and make sure that we are, as much as possible, creating content for niche communities within those groups, right, so to give an example. I worked with Burger King in Malaysia. They've of course got a broad target audience, like every, almost every brand,

or two target audiences in this instance. But then underneath those audience groups, the great thing about social is you can target for specific mindsets and demographics. Um, for example, bang for buckers. It doesn't mean you necessarily use that language in the actual content, but these are behind the scenes, um.

Subgroups within those broader audiences. There might be another group called Food hackers, and you might sometimes find the same people occupy different groups and different mindsets under, uh, within those. So you can create the content to target those subgroups, rather than just always going really broad with kind of a spray and prey approach. Uh, Evangeline.

talking about. You have that, you know, stay at home and really cook for the kids, respecting all the nutrition, that kind of cook, and the list goes on.

It's the same thing, right? Um, there, there are almost limitless groups underneath, say, foodies, or mums, or 16 to 34 year old singles, as shown here. And my, my, one of my top tips would be only create as many subgroups as you can for within the scope of your team, because. Sometimes, like I said, it can go on forever in terms of the subgroups you can create, and for a small marketing team, it might not be possible to create content for all of those groups, but do as many as you can.

And the other thing I'd say is, yes, you can use targeting levers on the different social platforms, but really the content itself is the targeting. So the, the metaro platforms have slightly better levers in terms of paid media targeting. TikTok, not so much. But really, the content, if it's targeted to a specific subgroup, it will and it's good content, it will find those groups. And if you think to yourself, oh hang on a minute, I don't want.

My whole audience to see bang for buck content. Don't worry because they won't see it. The algorithm will ensure that 99% of the time, uh, the people it's not relevant for will not see the content. That's how it works. In fact, one of the things that we've done recently, I'm, I'm not sure anybody has seen this, if you're part of the Silver generation, which none of us here are, I'm not sure anybody from the audience, uh, we, we launched this, this, uh, this social channel called OG Gangs.

Um, with the intention of engaging with the silver generation in Singapore. Uh, it will, you know, traditionally you would think, oh, let's just In very broadcaster mindset. Let's just think of people aged 45 and above, but to us, we started to break it down. 45 to 5055 years old, who are they? What are their concerns? How can we break them into

smaller subgroups? We didn't go into like a massive list of them, but we actually went into certain concerns and certain subgroups like people looking for healthy living and healthy eating, people who are into uh traditional food, um.

And even those who are just trying to bridge the intergenerationally and this strategy really helped us to garner really good reach and and like what Evangeline was talking about just now, right, um, what you see on TikTok is often not who you follow and 80% of the content that we watched was actually hitting the for you page, meaning it's not based on people who follows us. Average video views is 2 times that of the number of followers we have.

And, and that's the whole different dynamics that, that, that um TikTok brings and, and all this is how also kind of like how we start to understand audience. So there's a part about demographically, how we understand them, but psychographically right here in this case. Original generation, Ricky. So travel audience, what are the content

that travelers are looking for? If I'm today going on TikTok to look at travel, like, for example, eventually just came back from Bhutan, what kind of content will engage her as someone who's traveling, right? And, and, and, and actually data signals can help us to deep dive further into the specific type of content angles and niche angles that we can use to

Appreciate and engage with travelers today. So, really, really uh think that the, the, the way of using AI, using data to understand our audience is really tying together really nicely nowadays for strategies. And talking about how things are shifting, I mean, eventually I saw you on podcast recently, clearly this is not the one, but were you dating this rich boy? Excuse

a very fragmented way, right? I wanted to share this very Um, lighthearted one because we're talking about social media, right? It's sometimes on social media, it's about entertainment, it's about fun and I think this really echoes how actually having fun can also give us very good success. So maybe we can take a look at what this Bobby says. And we don't reach a million people every week, I'm firing every single person on that team. This yacht company hired me to do one video, just one.

We got 7 buyers for the yacht, $2 million purchase. You create a character that is a billionaire's son and there are real rich people who bought the yacht that is following you. You make fun of people and yet people want to take a photo of you. What kind of phenomenon do you call this? What is it that brands should learn from what you have been able to do? I went to acting school and what you have to do is you have to.

What do you think would be certain key elements that if they were to collaborate with you, could potentially help them create content that can go viral? I think the consumer market is going to be led by influencers in the future and it already has, but I think brands are not smart about the influencers they choose. The best form of marketing is not what you say about yourself, but it's what others say about you.

Yeah, and I think a lot of us would have seen um his content about really being sarcastic, his kind of humor, and yet the word gets out there. Um, so about content targeting, right, even though he's a a fictitious character that he. That he created to be able to resonate with the rich. The people that are following actually are the real rich people. They want to maybe just check out like, hm, what is this guy doing? Do I resonate with him? Oh yeah,

I do. Or maybe no, I don't, right? So it's fun and that's why he was able to deliver that kind of results. So. I mean, I'm sending out a signal out there that, you know, in in 2024 we've seen a lot of chaos, geopolitical, that's extending to this year. It's creating a lot of stress amongst a lot of people. And sometimes people just retreat to social media for for some relax and um content like that can can deliver quite good success. And I also want to talk about the tailored targeting

that uh Chris and Alex has been talking about. Um, we can use content, we can use age groups, we can use that very niche categories. And in fact, when we are doing campaigns for even the government bodies, it may be quite straightforward. OK, I want to target all Singapore.

Because all Singaporeans need to get healthy. But different Singaporeans get healthier in receiving different messages, right, from the intergenerational ones where we can bring people and bring their grandparents to create a very lifestyle content to how you actually want to talk a little bit more about the mental health.

To parents wanting to take care of their kids better, to even very niche community in this case, right, the individual, be it the Muslim community, the Indian community, and in this case, we actually were getting the Muslims who had once quit smoking and don't mind sharing it online because it can be a taboo. Right? And being able to find such relevant creators, influencers to talk about it online, it raises the authenticity a lot, the relevance as well, that people can feel that, oh, OK,

you're talking about something that is related to yourself. But the story format or the content format also needs to be different, right? If you're getting People to share about their thoughts about how they feel about quitting smoking. And putting out a post out there asking everybody to comment publicly. Trust me, nobody's going to do that, because maybe it's a taboo to tell people that, you know, I was once smoking. So if you put it out as a public comment, it may not work

as well. We switch it around, put it as an anonymous, um, question where people can answer it on an IG story. The response was, you know, was, was overwhelming. And with that response, it was very intimate, very authentic, and the creator could create content very relevant to each and every comment that was received and the engagement rates blew the roof. So targeting individual communities can work very well. It just needs a little bit more of a technique, some thoughts

around it, and it can be fun as well. And of course, there are other ways. I'm going to share with you more fun ways that you can do tailored targeting with not just the um age group or the content format. In this case, it's business owners influencing other business owners. OK, this was a campaign by ByteDance, TikTok shop, wanting to encourage business owners to take their, uh, products from the

offline to the online using TikTok Shop. So imagine this, if you're in Chuck to chuck as a a brand seller, withstanding the heat and going through, you can actually go on TikTok shop. And reach the world with the products that you sell. So this was a similar, uh, kind of, uh, campaign that we ran for, for, for ByteDance, uh, encouraging the adoption of TikTokho. And we, we, we, we delivered 9000 of our conversions, double than what people actually were thinking about.

So that in itself can be a B2B influencer kind of influence kind of campaign. And um when you talk about individual tailored targeting right, you can even do fun things like using content that ranks well on TikTok, especially now that people actually search a lot on TikTok, um. Not versus other platforms, but maybe on top of other platforms. People search on TikTok, people search on Chat GPT, you search on Google Maps, you know, it's not just a

single search engine for everything now. So you can actually also try to optimize the content, the influencer content, your own content, and it can have that peripheral kind of benefits. Um, and you can, uh, people haven't really thought about this, but you can actually do influencer marketing on, on Spotify. I'm sure Mediacorp has thought about it and has actually done it very well because I attended your last webinar

about audio marketing. I thought that was very brilliant. And, and, and this way of doing, actually, even though people are saying. Yes, the attention span can be less than 30 seconds. Nowadays we don't have that time for that long form content. But look, this content is a 39 minute podcast, but it worked really well. See, this campaign was MSF trying to encourage people to, you know, uh, take marriage seriously,

not think about divorce so easily. The easy way to run such a campaign would be to put up an Instagram post, a beautiful wedding vow. A couple photo, right, and just say that, you know, I love you, you love me, let's, you know, treasure each other. Yes, impression check, engagement, I'm not sure. But when we go on Spotify, the topic changed to conversations with a young divorcee. The whole conversation changed altogether and people actually tune in, listen, impressions, check, engagement,

double check. So sometimes we want to go very in depth to influence, not just on, you know, checking off the impressions. And the last one over here is that the common, uh, ask that I have is that, oh, social media is for Gen Z, you know, spending power is not very high. Maybe that is going away slowly.

I hope faster. But we've also done longevity campaigns, not just for the Silver hair generation, OK, because nowadays, even if you have black hair, you might also want to look for health, fitness, longevity, and sometimes people think that, oh, social media is for the low ticket items, but over here we're actually targeting the luxury affluent individuals and staying at landed homes that people can resonate. I mean, apart from Bobby, there is

a lot more of such characters. So I just like to inspire everyone with these real life cases on how the very customized targeting can be done. Back to you, Chris, or Alex.

who may not be a parent, right? Hence all this targeting and all of us engage with different ways of the media, whether it's audio or whether it's TikTok or what have you, but just keeping in mind who we're trying to reach out to and what's in it for them at the end of the day, whether it's to give them a bit more entertainment, a good laugh, like the Billionaire, I think this really will drive us really far.

Just switching gear a bit. I mean, um, as we think about all this micro very niche or subgroups or sub-communities, um, does this mean, I mean, I like love to hear from you, whether uh social media that is just very micro, you, you, there's no scale behind it. Yeah, I think this connects to the point around paid media, uh, for, for starters, so.

For me, social media is a mass media channel, and I, and I kind of wish it wasn't called social anymore because it's not uh it's a bit misleading in some ways, and. I, I think a lot of marketers, especially in this region, are still treating social media as an afterthought to the other channels that they're working with. And that's a problem because actually globally, uh, just recently, social media advertising spend, so promoting the posts that we create, uh, has finally

overtaken search and video. And by video we mean linear TV and connected TV. So for a long time, the eyeballs have all been. On social, uh, more than they have been, um, on search and certainly more than they have been on video, in particular, some forms of TV, but only recently has the advertising spend caught up with that shift in culture. And look, um. For me, connected to this point is that, yes, absolutely, you can use social um.

To try and To try and sell products through the whole marketing funnel, but really these days social media platforms are very similar to what traditional TV or out of home was like and are much more suited to for most brands in most categories as awareness and consideration uh drivers. Uh, the products that tend to sell on social tend to be at the lower value, um, in the lower value range. So don't think of social as an afterthought, don't think of social as just there to perhaps convert,

which some people think of it as. Uh, it needs to be backed with proper media spend and it needs to be considered more at the start of the marketing funnel. And in terms of that, so what's also happened over the years is that occasionally we see a post go viral. That post might be by an influencer, it might be by a normal person, it might be by a brand. It happens and we see that, and we think, well, that, that must happen that quite easily, it happens all the time.

And it really doesn't, right? So generally what happens is the most successful brands create quite a lot of content themselves and via influencers. And they monitor that content very closely, and then, so that those blue dots on the right hand side are the different audience groups, the subgroups we talked about earlier. The green dots below them are the is the content performing under under the average, and the content above the

blue dots is the is performing above average, right? So you post the content. And if you see within the first hour that organically it's performing above average or with a small amount of paid media spend, you then need to just put as much paid media spend behind it as you can until it stops performing well. And that first hour is critical. Because after that, the algorithm starts to think that the content is not as important and starts to deprioritize it

in general, right? So it's not a set and forget, unfortunately. It's really time intensive, uh, unlike other channels, but that's just the way it is. you know, I could imagine if not on the questions already, everybody's asking like how on earth are you able to respond so quickly within an hour, because that, that's, that's really intensive. I mean, just imagine how many pieces of content we generally will push out. Yeah, well then, depending on the the size of your team, right, I think,

I think there's a few things to consider. One is, if your team is not that big. Then it doesn't mean you have to create an insane amount of con, the same amount of content as a multinational corporation. I would, I, I, if I had the choice, I would rather pay close attention to a small amount of content and boost it really quickly than create loads of content and not be able to pay attention to how it's performing. If I had to make a choice, obviously, ideally you do, you do both.

Um, another thing I'd, I'd consider is, do you have to be on all, on all the channels? Probably not. Too many brands are, are on all the channels because initially it's free, but, apart from the people you're paying to do it, but it's free to set, set yourselves up on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. But just because you can be in all the channels doesn't mean you necessarily should be. And I would advise probably choose less platforms and be better at them.

Um, and then the other thing is, set aside money for paid media spend for that quarter or for that year, have that approved, have it good to go, and put someone in charge of it who knows what they're doing. So make sure that's not, there's not too many people that need to approve a post getting boosted with some paid media spend for a few $1000 and then you miss your window of opportunity.

Actually that's true, um, and more and more we've seen whether you do it in-house or partner with the likes of Kobe or ourselves at Mediacorp, like you just handle everything quite turnkey, right, both working influencer, creating content and just maximizing and scaling it up. In fact, that's that's kind of like how we've been doing for some of the clients we've been working with. Um, you have a very nice content in this case, uh, Asian mom or Minnie Muchi on the left hand side.

She did a piece of content talking about financial wellness, how you manage your money, some financial tools, and it did really well. And we amplified it, we, we saw it, we amplified it across different platforms, with outdoor TV, digital, and we even got her to write an article that runs on our digital platforms. It's kind of like just maximizing whether to pay media on social or whether paid media through other forms to maximizing the piece of content and driving that ROI.

But for the first hour, can't do it on all these other platforms, but the first hour first on social media and then how you transcend to all the other platforms. And, and it does require investment of time, it doesn't require investment of resources, whether internally or with the right partners, uh, which I think talking about investment, I mean, Evangeline, you do have clients who invest quite a lot to have that kind of mass media platform effects through influencers, right?

Um, an alternative treatment would be using multiple people to reach multiple, uh, uh, multiple communities, and in this case, we did around 6000 of the contents, uh, within 4 to 6 months for a brand called Arao. Um, I think now people are not so strange to eSIM. You know, you don't have to take out your needle thingy to, you know, put your SIM card to take out the old SIM card and then replace with the new SIM card, which was an old technology, but um

now eSIM is a lot more convenient. But when this whole eSIM came about like uh 1 or 2 years ago, um and when it was becoming very trendy, right, people actually didn't know there was such thing. So there was a lot of education, awareness, uh uh at the at at the volume right from the start, and we use multiple creators um in 6 different countries, uh. To achieve this effect, right? So they were able to speak to their very um individual communities using different contents.

In this case, there were people that like to talk about the eSIM using itinerary blogs, uh, they talk about how. You can do all sorts of things at Chiang Mai when you travel and one of the tips you must remember is using the AC right? Uh, some people talk about travel must-haves. It's kind of like a like a functional um value given to their, their consumers, right? Some of them, they like to use animation, um, trend jacking,

very popular. Uh, if the campaign is now, maybe we'll see some morning routines happening. Um, or that coffee with a younger self, I don't know, right? Um, so, so that one requires a lot of, uh, uh, you know, a lot of social media time to know what's trending and then using. And then uh role play is quite evergreen. Today we're talking a lot about micro dramas on TikTok, uh, and, and how these little role plays actually get people quite, uh,

attentive into watching a longer form video. When I say longer, it means like one minute, lah. OK. OK, and then you have your very typical aesthetic travel one touch, right? Uh, that, you know, throwback and stuff. And then you've got your green screen demos where people can, you know, share how do you do it. Um, the list goes on as the social media world continues to unravel, but he is giving you a flavor about uh amplification in the different format beyond just taking

a single um creator everywhere, but any creators everywhere. Yeah. Back to you, Chris.

right is so important. Um, that of course there's a part about it running on your own social media channels, uh, organic content, but I think regardless of whether it's your, your own self or with others, um, it's important to just really see how important content is, making sure it works right and scaling it up. I think there are a lot of questions actually um. You know, love to just pause here for a while,

a lot of questions about AI generated content. There's this question about AI generated content that can be done fast versus real influences coming from the example you just gave, Vanin. But it does take longer to to find the right influences compared to just creating something from AI. So which is better if you want to reach multiple communities at once if time is of essence. What do you guys think? Do you think AI influences, I mean, their platforms just

driven by AI influences today, right? So what what are your thoughts?

Mhm. So, uh, we use, uh, our, our, our in-house tool to do it a lot more efficiently and at scale and definitely our tool will require a lot of, uh, AI. So your, your question might be, OK, then how do you use AI? Do you use AI to talk to

the influencers or what? OK, so AI will help us to actually study and profile the influencers a lot faster and more accurate and better because every influencer, they are humans, you know, at the end of the day they are not like they are not a media placement that you can just. Put the ad on you. They're humans that you need to build a relationship with, and hence, they're going to tell you that, oh, actually I can do this, I can do that. But AI actually helps us to profile

their social media personality a lot faster. So number one is cost discovery, profiling, um, that, that AI portion. And then every influencer costs differently if you have done influencer marketing before. But with AI, you can do a, uh, you know, your LLM and then you can study. got this pricing and it can give you a rough guess about how much potentially or, or, you know, predictably this this content piece should cost. So, it actually helps

a lot in all these efforts. But making a relationship with a human influencer, it still has to take, you know, a human connection, I feel. After doing this for 9 years and talking to 300 to 50,000 influencers, that's my conclusion. You still need a lot of human relationships. Then the next question is, A, if I don't use human influencers, I use all the AI influences instead. Is

it better? I don't have to deal with, you know, people being late or like not submitting the draft on time, on, on, on brief or like, you know, stuff like that. So actually, 4 years ago, we were involved in this, uh, virtual influencer development project. Uh, she's one of the, I think #1, if not one of the #1 in Singapore. You may have heard of her before. Her Instagram handle is Here is free.

Right, RAE, right? OK. So we have a project team and it's very fun giving birth to, uh, giving birth to a virtual influencer because like, OK, works, this hairstyle works, that eyebrow le works, imperfection works. And we did a lot of experiments, right? But one of the key conclusions, you see, if I were to talk about a skin cream and I put it on my skin and see, see how it goes into my very imperfect big pores over here, right? But it, you know, close up my course, you're gonna

believe it. But if the virtual influencer were to do the same thing, I think the outcome be very different, correct? Virtual influencers are followed for a very different reason. And the brands that they can talk about are also for very different reasons. People follow them for entertainment, for novelty and for checking out the latest technology and how actually this works or the latest trends, that's going to

be dropped, the latest sneakers and stuff like that. But if talking about an authentic connection, human to human, about how the life unfolds unpredictably, a virtual influencer will be slightly different in that sense. Of course, you can read the influencer to a low McKellar standard. That the most popular number one in the world, where you can start to have that connection, but that connection is going to be a little bit different versus a human connection.

We've seen a lot of TikTok accounts. I think they will be coming and more on Instagram as well. Those AI accounts which it's entirely powered by a virtual avatar telling a story of the past or just delivering content. All these accounts, they actually sprout to fame and is doing multiple tests. I can create 100 a day, show it out there, see who grows, 2 of them grows, load content on them, and then after it gets sponsors. That can work.

However, if you're a brand looking to market your brand and engaging with influencers, then the consideration goes back to the basic. Who is my target audience? What are the platforms, what are the content that resonates? Will AI influencers actually resonate with your final consumers will be the questions that need to be asked. So it can deliver some efficiency if it works for your objective, and that's my take for um AI. Happy to chime in more, but um over to

Um, uh, that AI influences, AI artificial identities tend to engage a certain niche group of communities and they tend to be people who are into gaming, into cosplay, into tech, and, and things like that, and, and I think because this is how the interaction with games. So that's one part of it, but the other part which I just want to add on to that is that.

Um, yeah, and there's a novelty factor. Then the other part of it is, however, if let's say it's blatantly an advertisement, AI for advertisement, right, that you know it is not about me relating to this person, I'm not here to interact with this person. I think there's a bit more receptivity towards that. And there are, there's a growing number of luxury brands even going into the space of creating digital doubles and things like that to really just drive out efficiencies and scale.

So there's two parts to it. It's the influencing part, the engagement, the relationship, and the other part which is really pure advertisement that could run at social media ads, right, because social media can also be an ad platform. And all this actually brings me to the third insight, um, and, and which is that ultimately, what moves the needle is the,

the authenticity and trust factor that people can have. So even if you do use AI, my people expect you to declare, if it's sponsored, expect you to declare and not just hide the fact that actually I, I never use this product and just talk a lot about it, right? People do want the authenticity and the trust with influencers and anything that they see today and on that note, I think eventually you some examples about authenticity.

and I guess a lot of us use filters, right? So, so how authentic can authentic be? versus an AI that's in your face, I am inauthentic. People actually like it, right? That you declare to me. So like what Chris says, I think a lot of times it's about whether or not people feel like they cheated or not, you know. Because human that you will, is it true or not, right? So anyway, back to this, uh, examples of authenticity and

how you can be radical about it, right? The first one is uh by UOB, um, you know, finance Font, it's always quite a headache on, on social media because everybody would just skip it, right? Um, but this one has 11,000 savings and 3000 of shares. How did we do it, right? Number one. Get an authentic creator. She, there she is a real super fan of UOB. Don't ask me why they are super fans, but she used to work at UOB and

she really, really loves the brand, right? And getting her to talk about the content, #2, get a content concept that actually, uh, sink in, sinks in very well with the campaign. In this case, we use the trend get ready with me. Yes, it's a bit outdated right now. But finance content generally gives people that, you know, I, uh, what is behind the estuaries, there's so many other terms and conditions

that I will never know, right? But this get ready with me actually makes someone go like that into the screen and looks a bit ugly and then it's vulnerable and it's authentic. And that tied in with the finance content. In with being a super fan advocate actually delivers this kind of results. So radical authenticity can work very well. Second example, this guy actually travels back and fro from Johor Bahru to Singapore every day and use DBS as

a bank. And him talking about his story about how he actually does it can resonate with a lot of people in that specific community and people feel that authentic relevance, rather than getting just someone popular to talk about a shout out about the latest promotion, this works very well. The third one is a very daring try that we did with Tata, because we went on the streets to

ask people, grab or tata, right? And people, there will be people, I mean, obviously, we know who is the, the, the, the, you know, the more common brand over here. But Tata wasn't asking much. They were asking for a good comparison, that's all. And we went on the streets, we got that authentic sentiment, and we put it out, even when people say, uh, Tata, what is that? Right? That was authentic and it actually got people talking, right?

And the last example, also a very daring one, rather than just selling supplements and because my, my, my promotion is such, my objective is to push this particular promotion, we actually went out there to ask people, what are your health problems? Is it weight loss? Is it sleep? Is it exercise? And from that, we created content and promote the right

products to what people were asking for, right? And this authentic and very courageous owned by the marketing team, um, that we enjoyed working with, was actually able to cut through a clutter and get to people's hearts. So authenticity can can work in this sense. back to you, Chris.

about this quite a bit already, right? Um, it's just another, it, it's just a mass media, um, feed that happens to sit in your hand, um. So, let's move to the next slide, just conscious of time here. Like, yes, some brands have really strong engagement, uh, but most of them, for most of them, strong engagement in terms of lots of comments, you know, kind of wore off a long time ago. Why? Novel novelty factor that I mentioned already, um.

And there's other, other points as well, like there are some, there are some people who are always just more chatty and talkative, right, even in quote unquote real life. Uh, those tend to be the ones who, who maybe jump into the comments more often. The comments are spread across more posts now because there just are more posts from brands, um, and influencers as well, of course, and some real people. And I've got a quote here from the Financial Times,

Social media networks are not very sociable these days. Feeds are algorithmic, which means you see whatever the apps want to show you. Threads is, which of course is the um sort of rival to um X or Twitter, is more stage than public town square, and I think that's absolutely bang on for what we've been talking about. And in terms of measurement, which was asked in, in, in,

in the, in the questions, measure what matters, right? So. I personally would prioritize metrics like video completion rate, 1 to 1 messaging, if relevant, and also uh shares. I think it's really interesting if people are sharing it, uh, with others. And also dark social community growth. So dark social is things like WhatsApp or Telegram. Um, growing communities on those platforms can be, can be really, a really great idea. Check out brands like Tasty, which is the food platform

owned by BuzzFeed. They've got over a million people on their WhatsApp for Business channel. And there's also Absolute Vodka doing a good job there as well. And then finally, regularly review your benchmark because the platforms are constantly changing how they define their metrics. Like for example, YouTube, the last few weeks changed how it defines a view on its platform. Yeah, and Instagram just scraped away impressions, right? They're all

views right now. And, and, and to the question, I think some of them were asking was that can AI then help us to understand results and all this and I believe, I mean, eventuallyline on your end, copay, you were sharing how proprietary tools you're building, you're building to help analyze and find the right influences and benchmark results. Same thing here at Social hub, we do a lot of constantly benchmarking using AI machine learning.

And, and I think the other, the key takeaway I have from whatever Alex was sharing was also that things are constantly evolving, understanding where your content is going to run, eventually maybe you want to give one or two examples here. About how we need to really understand how platforms are

changing and what platforms is used for all. You can't be in everywhere, but you just need to know what is critical for you to, what, what the different platforms and nuances are so you can create the right content, right?

can play around with. Um, and people were asking, will you get fatigue, right? I think one of the questions that just popped up, um, I think this is the exact way how you can do it, because if you keep doing Instagram product seeding, you're just going to get IG stories. But if you see it on a laminader, you're gonna get a long form infographic that. Actually gives you a lot of content. So there are

a lot of fun ways to do it. And I think this is precisely the reason why I think tying up with the, you know, the, the, the famous, um, influencer or the overpopularized influencer, that has a lot of, um, sponsorships could sometimes deliver a little bit of fatigue. And you are uncovering the, the, the different niche communities, be someone that's traveling from JB to Singapore or whatsoever a business person in in Singapore or something like that,

it's going to be a lot more um interesting over there, right? Um, someone was just asking about blacklist and measurement metrics just to chime in a little bit on that, um. Our platform, yes, all the metrics that Alex was suggesting video completion rates, save rates, and everything, they should all be tracked and measured across each influencer across each campaign. Something a little bit fun that we do is that we have a kind of like a grab 5 star rating for each of the content that each of our

influencers creates. So you can imagine we have done 10s of thousands of hundreds of thousands of content over 9 years. So each one has a 5 star rating. So with that kind of volume, we would roughly know what kind of influencers can deliver, what kind of campaigns, content formats on time, on brief, right? So this is a little bit more qualitative, but quantitative in a sense, because it's what the advertisers gives us. This is something very um.

You know, think about is the influencer putting enough effort, is the content good quality, but it's so subjective, but I find that using this rating actually gives us really good indication of who actually consistently delivers. So that's something uh food for thought.

influences or your own content across the different platforms? Is it to, I mean, there's a simple way we we we summarize it, is it to entertain them, is it empower them, is it to educate them, or is it to create a uh a whole. For more effect, right, through all this when we educate and empower them. If we sum it all up, all the different things we covered today, and I know we didn't cover everything, um. There are, there are the few things that we hope

everybody can take away from today. Number one, we talk about how fragmented social media has become, or media consumption has become. Um, one of the things is that let's look into niche communities, one community at a time. You may not have the time and capacity and resources, work with partners, work with different agencies, but look at one community at a time as much as it's better that you do each community well than you do too many and you fail at them.

The other part is invest in social media and content as you would as a mass media channel. I think social media has not presented a way that we can be used, but it's peak media, where amplification, where the content and scaling it up. It have become a really massive platform for us to influence and engage with our audiences. And as the scale grows, it's critical for us to

learn how to evolve. There were really a lot of much better, really, really good examples that Evangeline shared today and some of which we didn't have a chance and time for. We will send the deck across, but importantly as social media evolves, um, stay true to yourself, the authenticity. The relationship that you have as a brand or as a personality with your audience is so important. What is your content formats, what is the way you talk, what is your get ready with me with the eyes close

to the screen. I think all this is so important as we continue to move and evolve with social media. Thanks everybody. Uh, I know there are a lot of questions. Don't worry, we will answer, address them and like what you eventually said and Alex would love to say is reach out to us and be in touch and we'd love to have coffee together. All right, so take care, everybody. Have a good morning. Bye-bye.