Can Artificial Intelligence Be The Ultimate Influencer? Posted on : Feb 15 - 2018

We live in a crazy world where a robot was recently given citizenship to a sovereign country for the first time. Granted, the country is Saudi Arabia and the robot’s creator is creepier than the robot itself, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving quickly and becoming ingrained in various aspects of our lives.

Programmatic advertising online is a space that was driven by empowering computers to make decisions by taking into account enormous amounts of data that the human mind could never process. Is influencer marketing, a space that has been plagued by a lack of automation, in line for a revolution?

If you ask me, automation will streamline the influencer campaign process. Based on our company's research, the average influencer campaign requires more than 30 days of research and 84 emails to activate a single influencer. Then, you have to sit there and refresh their page to see if and when their post went up. Over the next year, we’re going to see discovery, outreach and measurement become automated, leveraging artificial intelligence as a driver.

When I discussed influencer marketing automation with Estelle Yafi, project director of Fabernovel, in an email, she posed some good questions. “The notion of influence will always stay, but the question is: Who will be the next crop of influencers? Still celebrities and mainstream people? Or will we start to see bots and robots taking their place?”

I agree with Yafi, and it goes beyond just having an AI interface select which influencers you should work with and reach out to.

An acquaintance of mine and co-founder and CEO of the audience intelligence platform Spree, Danielle Yanai, told me in an email that AI and machine learning are already powerful in influencer marketing. “We’ve been able to leverage these capabilities to algorithmically predict what messaging is most likely to resonate and influence certain people,” Yanai said. “In addition, predictive analytics can be used to advise influencers on the topics people care about the most.”

Emotional marketing may be the future of influencer marketing, where certain emotions are triggered in consumers through sensorial experiences. This may sound far-fetched at first, but tell me that Tinder doesn’t want to know when you’re listening to break-up music and that Haagen Dazs wouldn’t kill to know every time you’re crying.

Invoking Emotion

Duracell’s 2015 commercial with NFL superstar Derrick Coleman is a great example of a brand partnering with an influencer to invoke emotion. Coleman, who is deaf, uses Duracell batteries to power his hearing aids. Coleman’s voice saying, “They didn't call my name. Told me it was over. But I've been deaf since I was three, so I didn’t listen,” is enough to give anyone goosebumps. Every time I see Duracell batteries, I remember that line. View More