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One of the most frequent questions I encounter from clients, press partners, and people who stop me at the airport to rave about this newsletter (this happens all the time), is about brand/creator exclusivity: is it better to work with a creator who only (or primarily) posts about your brand, or is it alright to team up with creators who are also talking about everyone else?
Well, thanks to a little data science wizardry, I finally have an answer for all those nice people at the airport. If you’re at all curious about building a winning influencer marketing strategy—and I’m guessing that a few of you are—you’re going to want to check this out.
If you spent your Leap Day watching our webinar, Exploring Exclusivity: Should Your Creators See Other Brands?, some of this might be a little familiar to you. But for those who didn’t, or those who could use a refresher (there will be a test), read on. And for the full Exclusivity Experience, be sure to take a gander at our webinar recording, which you can find here, and the full report, which you can find here.
Those overachievers among you who watched the webinar got to experience the magical mind of Alexandre ‘Sacha’ Emelianov: former Head of Data Innovation and L’Oréal, current CEO of Occam Consulting Services Paris, and all-around international man of mystery. We gave Sacha data on thousands of creators and brands across CreatorIQ’s ten main verticals, and he spun some magic to determine how exclusivity informs Earned Media Value. As displayed throughout the webinar, Sacha really knows his stuff, and we’ve benefited greatly from his expertise.
Oh, and Conor Begley was there too.
So what was this presentation all about? I’m about to throw a lot of numbers at you, but rest assured: everything will be explained.
Creator Overlap for the Top 10 Cosmetics Brands in 2023 by EMV
I was told there would be no math. That’s okay though—let’s break it down.
What we’re looking at here are the Top 10 Cosmetics brands by EMV for the U.S. market in 2023. As evidenced by the charts on the left-hand side, these ten brands accounted for $4B EMV, garnered posts from 48k distinct creators (the vast majority of whom were micro-influencers), and mostly saw activity from retained creators.
Retention, Distinct Creators, Creator Demographic, and EMV for Top 10 Cosmetics Brands in 2023
So that’s who we’re working with. But how do they stack up against each other?
Share of EMV for Top 10 Cosmetics Brands in 2023
What we have here are our Top 10 Cosmetics brands plotted by:
- Their share of that $4B EMV (Rare Beauty comes out on top, accounting for just over 14% of that total)
- Their share of those 48k creators (Charlotte Tilbury ranks No. 1, with a little over 12% of these creators posting about the brand)
As with most quadrant graphs, you want to be as close to the upper right corner as possible.
So that in itself is a helpful visualization of brand performance. But what about exclusivity? That’s where these bar charts come in (you know this newsletter loves a bar chart).
Many Creators Talk About One Brand
On the top, you’ll see the amount of creators talking about each of these 10 brands. As is the case for every vertical that this data covers, a majority (or at least a plurality) of creators talk about just one brand, with a steadily diminishing proportion talking about increasing numbers of brands.
For Cosmetics, we see an inverse relationship in terms of EMV allocation. Generally, the more brands a creator mentions, the more EMV they drive. Just 800 creators powered $900M EMV for the Top 10 Cosmetics brands in 2023—nearly 25% of these brands’ total. And yes, we do know exactly who these 800 creators are, and would be happy to tell you. But more on that later.
As for the third component, this table provides a direct comparison of creator overlap between Top 10 brands:
Top 10 Brands Distinct Creators Overlap
Think of it as one of those charts you’d see in old road guides or atlases showing the distance between two cities. In this case, you can gauge which brands are drawing from the same pool of creators, and which brands don’t have much in common with others. For example, it’s less of a surprise to see that ColourPop and Dior Cosmetics share just 15% of their creators, given these brands’ different audiences. In comparison, NYX Professional Makeup and E.L.F. go together like peanut butter and jelly, sharing 36% of their creators.
The dynamic of exclusivity being decoupled from EMV generation is on clear display in Cosmetics, and in a few other verticals as well. Sacha spent part of the webinar going over the strongest outliers in this regard, including the NFL.
NFL Top 10 Brands Distinct Creators and Overlap
*Cris Collinsworth voice* Now here’s a vertical with extremely stratified EMV generation.
This makes perfect sense, though: the NFL’s top EMV-drivers are journalists or publications that are naturally going to mention multiple teams—even the Jets! As a result, the 300 creators who talked about all of the NFL’s Top 10 teams by EMV produced over half of all EMV in this vertical.
But this isn’t how exclusivity operates in every vertical, and that’s where things get even more interesting.
Take Skincare, for example. As another branch of Beauty, you might expect it to operate similarly to Cosmetics. But you’d be wrong…dead wrong.
Skincare Top 10 Brands Distinct Creators and Overlap
In this case, there isn’t as clear of a signal. It looks like having five or six favored brands is the sweet-spot for Skincare influencers, but there’s pretty consistent EMV generation across the board.
But when we get to Fragrance, the results are even starker, this time in the other direction:
Fragrance Top 10 Brands Distinct Creators and Overlap
I’ve always said that Fragrance influencers are like swans, prairie voles, or French angelfish: they mate for life. Exclusivity is a must in this splashy vertical, further demonstrating how different creator dynamics ought to inform different creator strategies across various industries.
As in so many things, not even Luxury Fashion and Apparel operate under the same rules:
Creator Overlap for the Top 10 Luxury Fashion Brands in 2023 by EMV
In Luxury Fashion, we have an ~ aesthetic ~ progression of leading brands along our axis, and a clear trendline in which multiple brand mentions are by no means a bad thing.
Creator Overlap for the Top 10 Apparel Brands in 2023 by EMV
But in Apparel, we have a mirror-image graph. The vertical is dominated by Fashion Nova in terms of EMV Share and Nike in terms of Creator Share, we see that exclusivity is what guides successful brand-creator partnerships.
This is a lot of information, and there’s even more in the webinar, which also covers Haircare, Media & Entertainment, QSRs, and Non-Alcoholic Beverages. You can slice and dice this data in so many ways, but what are the key points? What are the most important factors that brands need to understand in order to build successful influencer marketing strategies across these various verticals?
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Different Categories Behave Differently
Strange but true. There’s no golden rule about how desirable exclusivity is; instead, it varies from market to market.
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So Plan Accordingly for Your Market
If you’re a Beauty brand, you should be seeking partnerships with the creators who talk about everyone. It doesn’t mean that they’ll love your brand less—it just means that they have a wider audience that will ultimately drive more coverage for you.
But if you’re an Apparel brand, you should be looking for exclusive partnerships, as those relationships are more resonant within that vertical.
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Leverage This Tool for Deeper Insights
While we’re still working out exactly how to integrate the tool that Sacha’s built into our product, in the short-term, our team will be equipped to provide you with personalized walkthroughs of the data, complete with granular details about your brand, vertical, and competitors.
For the time being, we just have information on 2023’s top 10 brands across these 10 categories in the U.S., but even as I write these words, we’re working tirelessly to expand our rolodex. So who knows where we’ll be by the time you read them?
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