The Amplify

Brandtech Group acquires US influencer company, Collectively, to join forces with theAmplify NEW YORK (August 6, 2020): You & Mr Jones, the global brandtech category pioneer and market leader, announces it has acquired Collectively, the leading US influencer marketing company. The deal will bring together theAmplify’s global community building expertise and proprietary brand-safety and health-tracking technology for managing large scale influencer marketing programs with the full-service social and influencer strategy, campaign management, and industry-leading benchmarking and analytics for which Collectively is renowned. Collectively cofounder and CEO Ryan Stern will lead the new company as chief executive, she is joined by theAmplify CEO Amy Luca, who has spent a large part of her career working in APAC and who will take the role of president and head of international, and Collectively cofounder and EVP Alexa Tonner will serve as chief operating officer. Joining forces with theAmplify will accelerate that trajectory and being part of the You & Mr Jones Group will give us major global reach and access to its platform of the most advanced brand and marketing technology companies.

Growing ‘brandtech’ company will combine its newly purchased influencer agency with theAmplify to create a global player. Together, they are “the world’s leading global influencer business,” per chief exec David Jones. The former Havas global chief exec has seen his group’s organic revenue grow 27% for the first half of 2020. ” He says the combined offering of Collectively and theAmplify solve three big issues marketers face with influencer programs: the ability scale globally, show ROI and provide fraud-free, transparent metrics.

Read the full story by Patrick Coffee at Business Insider

Instagram’s assault on ‘likes’ might actually force brands to find meaningful social engagement metrics. It’s good for Instagram, it’s good for brands and, ultimately, it’s good for the people using the platform. Brands that work with influencers on Instagram, as well as those creating brand pages, will need to re-evaluate the validity of adopting the “like” as a measure of success. We can expect that the loss of the social encouragement of seeing what others like and, in turn, wanting to like the same things too, will result inevitably in a decline in “likes” across the board—and therefore the erosion of what has been, up until now, considered by some a key engagement rate.