A revolutionary Influencer Marketing solution that creates a new sales channel for SMEs and self-employment opportunities for Social Media influencers

Project Information

OCTOLY REVIEWS Plugin

Grant agreement ID: 756850

DOI

10.3030/756850

Project closed

EC signature date 9 December 2016

Start date 1 January 2017

End date 30 June 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 2 500 312,50

EU contribution

€ 1 750 218,00

Coordinated by

VIDEOAGENCY SAS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - OCTOLY REVIEWS Plugin (A revolutionary Influencer Marketing solution that creates a new sales channel for SMEs and self-employment opportunities for Social Media influencers)

Reporting period: 2019-01-01 to 2019-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The OCTOLY REVIEWS Plugin project is focused on creating an innovative new approach to “Influencer Marketing”.

Today, on social media, brands’ “official” message makes-up less than 10% of overall visibility – more than 90% of mentions of their brand are made up of influencers talking about their products. Brands have realised that they must work with influencers, but struggle to mobilise them at scale: how can they collaborate with millions of influencers?
To tackle this, in 2015, Octoly launched the “Free-Store”: a platform where brands can distribute free products to influencers and see them featured in millions of social media posts (YouTube and Instagram reviews). Since then over 20 000 influencers in 5 countries have applied for products from our Free Store, generating over 500 000 product reviews for our partner brands. Octoly has rapidly gained a leading market position with its unique Free-Store approach.

The aim of the OCTOLY REVIEWS Plugin project is to go beyond the Free Store, by providing brands with a unique Plugin enabling them to display best influencers’ reviews directly on their product pages.
This unique approach enables influencers to generate commission fees and make a living from their passion, while brands, particularly SMEs, reinforce their current sales channel(s). Finally, this revolutionary new influencer marketing solution will reinforce our position as a market leader in Europe and the US.

The project therefore involves 5 major objectives:
1. Implementing product detection (WP1), so that we can automatically detect the products mentioned by influencers and provide links to purchase them. This is the key technical foundation of the Influencer store.
2. Enhancing the Octoly product catalogue (WP2), to intensify our activity, encouraging brands to launch more campaign and enabling our creators to review more products.
3. Creating the influencer’s licensing platform (WP3), so that Influencers can create their own licensing platform in a few clicks
4. Create our unique plugin for brands (WP4), including tools for managing reviews and reporting features.
5. Marketing strategy and project management (WP5), with a focus on continuous user testing.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Significant progress was made across Work Packages 1 and 2 during the first reporting period. We have developed both the improved influencer detection engine and the product detection engine (WP1) and we successfully built the foundations of the product catalogue (WP2).

During RP2, we completed both of these two Work Packages as we developed an innovative system to reduce failures and loading time of redirection links (WP2), and enhanced our product and brand detection engine focusing on text analysis (WP1). We developed the tracking component of our disruptive Octoly Reviews Plugin (WP3), and we created new features for brands (WP4). At the same time, we spent weeks enhancing our security system and the Octoly platform compliance to become a reference in our sector (WP5). Lastly, we kept implementing many activities related to the development of the commercialisation strategy (WP5). We organised exchange sessions with our partner brands and creators in orders to reshape our project, we presented them the Octoly Reviews Plugin, and we launched alpha tests with two strategic partners.

During RP3, we developed the Octoly Onsite Reviews solution and carried beat tests with 4 brands (WP4 & WP5). We developed the monitoring and reporting features for brands and finalized our pricing model (WP4). We also developed the reporting and monitoring features for influencers and created their new account (WP3). We integrated both brands and influencers feedbacks to enhance our solution.

The product will be officially launched in mid-September.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project gave us the opportunity to carry our research and to test many options on e-commerce. It resulted in the creation of a relevant offer for both brands and influencers.

Developing the technical foundations of our innovative solution has implied pushing our innovative technology for the automatic detection of content in social media posts. In particular, we developed a relevant solution to detect brands mentioned in our influencers’ posts.

We also developed an innovative solution to track and register visitors behaviour on our clients’ website, as well as unique smart plugin.

Despite difficulties faced in 2018, Octoly has continued to experience significant growth through the last reporting periods of the project.

We ended 2018 with an annual turnover of 3.5M€. Despite our reorganisation and change of strategy, our base activity – the Free Store – has continued to attract thousands of new influencers and hundreds of brands in Europe and overseas. The US reached $2.5M.

A new CEO is now managing the company and implementing our new strategy. Elie Curetti joined us on September 24, 2018. He is the former CEO of Shopmium and therefore has a great business development experience in both France and the United States.

Screenshot of the Octoly platform