Studio71 Leverages AI and Machine Learning to Navigate Influencer Marketing

Guest post by Mike Flynn, CTO at Studio71

It’s an understatement to say that the influencer marketing space is highly complex. New influencers, new types of content, and new ways to post and promote said content seem to pop up daily. Studio71, the LA-based digital network I joined seven years ago, has always been a great partner for brands to help them navigate the influencer marketing space and find the best way to get their message to the right audience, and today we’re launching new tools to using artificial intelligence and machine learning powered by our new Arrow Intelligence Platform and Amazon Web Services.

Today’s brands need new ways of reaching audiences who have drifted from traditional media platforms, but new platforms—teeming with user generated content—can be tricky to navigate. Last year, we solved this key issue for our partners by launching Context, a content scanning application that tracks uploaded influencer content and uses all of the available metadata and machine learning to understand if a given piece of content is vulgar, sexual, or violent to align brands with the right type of content for their message. The new Arrow platform expands on that by tracking more data around the influencer such as demographic data, historical and predictive analytics, and audience data, which are benchmarked across the influencer landscape. Those benchmarks provide Studio71 insights around an influencer, the content they create, their audience, and the audience’s commercial intent at a new level of scale by using AI and machine learning built on top of Amazon Web Services tools such as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Rekognition.

Amazon’s ML services allow us to discover additional metadata on content and quickly import multiple datasets, such as historical campaign data, audience viewership and commercial intent, to rapidly iterate over and discover new insights. Brands can come to us with little more than a budget and a set of goals, such as young men with an intent to purchase in a specific category, and the Arrow platform can find the right mix of influencers who share that audience to maximize their budget and ensure the audience is ready to act on the message.

A great example of how the Arrow technology has been able to help a brand’s message is our work with Chevrolet. Chevy came to us to create a social movement against distracted driving, and to drive downloads of their “Call Me Out” app. Using Arrow, we were able to locate influencers with an 18-34 audience demographic, create compelling content that could speak to their audience and make a real impact with the campaign, but avoid any creators or creative that could be considered “brand unsafe” and distract from the campaign message. The end result was that our content did create a social movement: the video completion rate was double the industry standard and our brand study showed unparalleled positive sentiment with huge increases in familiarity and favorability.

Influencer space doesn’t seem to be getting any easier, but I’m excited about the ability of Studio71 to navigate the space for our brand partners with the new Arrow platform.