The Fourth Industrial Revolution has transformed all production sectors, including marketing. The annual online advertising market in Europe was worth €55.1 billion and the figure is growing year on year. But the explosion of digital ads has resulted in users becoming increasingly saturated and beginning to place their trust in personal recommendations. For this reason, more and more brands are deciding to reach audiences through influencers. In this way, there is a growing market for influencer marketing.
But this world also has its challenges. Influencers can inflate their number of followers by buying bots, which has a negative impact on the brands that decide to partner with them. To help them choose from so many candidates for their campaigns, young Mexican Gerardo Sordo has created BrandMe, a platform to correctly build advertising campaigns based on influencer marketing and sponsorships. Thanks to this development, Sordo has become one of the winners of MIT Technology Review in Spanish's Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2020.
Major brands such as Coca-Cola and Unilever use a proprietary algorithm to search through millions of content creators across all social networks. BrandMe provides them with statistics on these accounts with large followings, including the percentage of fake followers they have and their actual level of influence on social networks. "We help brands make better decisions about which influencer is worth hiring in an ethical and transparent way. We democratize the growing industry of digital content creators," explains Sordo.
The platform uses big data to help companies make their advertising messages go viral by linking brands with influencers. BrandMe saves brands time and helps them optimize their budgets. It also unmasks the fraud of fake influencers who charge advertisers large sums but have numerous fake followers.
But BrandMe doesn't just cater to businesses. It also helps Internet stars to team up with brands and earn advertising revenue. "I believe the world should work without intermediaries. In the marketing industry they drive up costs. BrandMe was born to democratize this," its co-creator adds.
Despite having no external funding, BrandMe is scaling up. This influencer marketing platform is already expanding in Latin America and Sordo is looking to make the software cheaper and translate it into more languages in its quest to democratize the advertising industry.
The CEO of the Quito Stock Exchange (Ecuador) and member of the Innovators under 35 Latin America 2020 jury, Jeffry Illingworth, considers BrandMe to be "a great project." In his opinion, "there are many people working on creating their personal brand. Having a guide to the impact they are having and all the support they could have is key." He also points out that its "portfolio of brands is top-notch." And he concludes: "If these brands have trusted BrandMe with their positioning, BrandMe's value proposition is undoubtedly first class.
