Why influencer marketing performs best when viewed as an in-house job

Vogue Business has declared that the Instagram era for influencer brands is over. The result of this decline is said to be a new era of influencer engagement that caters to the expectations of consumers who seem tired of over-the-top brand-influencer partnerships. This new era clearly favors a more organic pairing between brands and influencers that looks more authentic and less artificially created.

The success of Crocs and Stanley influencer campaigns has piqued the curiosity of marketers and encouraged them to venture into these new areas. The possibilities of what happens when an ordinary person with an extraordinary number of followers recommends that others buy your product are too tempting to resist, even if it requires new thinking and skills. is.

Be that as it may, influencers can go beyond that veneer and provide a level of context and authenticity that most brands rarely achieve on their own. In an era when consumers demand authenticity and relevance from brands, this level of understanding between brands, influencers, and consumers is invaluable. Now, imagine if this kind of proximity existed within the walls of an organization rather than within the confines of an outsourcing agreement. Few companies embody this unique alchemy more than 2K Games and its digital marketing director Ronnie Singh (better known as Ronnie2K, the face of 2K).

During my interview with Ronnie, I learned that neither his formal title nor his colloquial nickname fully capture his contributions to 2K. His role is to go beyond traditional marketing conventions and embed his 2K in the heterogeneous cultural space of a community of gamers who are at the center of sports, gaming, music, and fashion, and who flock to gaming.

“2K sits at the intersection of these evolving spaces, which is why my role has evolved over the years,” Ronnie explained. What started as a niche basketball video game has expanded into a world of cultural production consumed by over 30 million players worldwide. This meteoric rise is a direct result of 2K's cultural fluency, thanks to Ronnie's instinctive anthropological approach to understanding cultural exchange between these converging spaces. An avid gamer and sports fan himself, Ronnie has a deep knowledge of the basketball fandom and a deep understanding of the many expectations that make up what it means to be a part of this community. I have cultivated it.

“I have to truly live and breathe these things every day, like my love for fashion and music. They were there at the same time I started working at 2K,” he says. Masu. This immersion allowed him to organically identify the cultural characteristics of the community along with its dynamism and codify them into his experience of gameplay and marketing his communication activities.

From collaborating with clothing brands for in-game apparel integration to promoting music releases, NBA 2K is more than just a video game, it's a platform for discovery. It is a cultural artifact that acts as a marketplace of ideas where cultural features are affirmed, introduced, negotiated, and constructed through media texts mediated within games and across social networking platforms. And in this exchange that 2K has created, Ronnie is in many ways the chief cultural officer (to borrow a name from my friend, the anthropologist Grant McCracken), and he is responsible for the ideas expressed in the game. guarantees that it is representative of the world. Community folkways and moray eels.

This deep contextual knowledge and subsequent credibility is the holy grail for influencer relationships. Gone are the days of hiring influencers solely for media reach. Real value comes from the cultural currency embedded in the output of content creators and community facilitators who engage with brands with common interests, not just brands with deep pockets. Good things happen there, and this is where a new era of influencer marketing is headed.

Fortunately for 2K, it's precisely because of the cultural intimacy Ronnie brings to the brand that it appears to have had a 16-year head start.

Achieving this level of understanding and intimacy is not easy. It takes hard work and dedication. Ronnie attends product launches, builds relationships with cultural producers (athletes, musicians, etc.), actively engages players of all skill levels, and provides information on various aspects surrounding the game. . This is an anthropological enterprise, albeit a visceral one, comprised of all the many diverse social actors that make up the 2K flywheel and drive its commercial success.

This type of role in an organization may seem unconventional for a company, but it can pay dividends. By centering the voices of cultures that companies want to engage directly within the walls of their organizations rather than outsourced resources, 2K is able to eliminate inauthentic marketing efforts that tend to exclude smart consumers. Avoid potential failures that plague you. “I think that's why this approach worked for us… Our influencers talk about our game without any push from us. It feels authentic because it reflects who we are,” Ronnie asserts. Without it, influencer campaigns feel increasingly empty.

For brands looking to make the most of their influencer efforts in an ever-evolving cultural landscape, 2K offers a masterclass. By empowering Ronnie within your brand and integrating his understanding into your workstream, leveraging cultural insights becomes more than just a marketing tactic. It becomes an operational method that permeates the entire organization. The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated.

There's a saying that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” which means that no matter how well-planned a strategy is, it's the outside culture of the people we're trying to influence and our opposition to it. The internal culture of the team you are trying to achieve. Both external cultural knowledge and internal cultural know-how are required. One cannot function without the other.

The future of influencer marketing leans toward external cultural knowledge, but the success of this future state is only possible through internal capabilities. By viewing influencers and creators as partners rather than hired guns, we too can leverage the 2K value Ronnie provides and benefit from the cultural tailwinds that come with it.