Services Offered: Influencer Discovery / Third Party Analytics
Channels: Instagram, YouTube
WEBSITE

In a way, the name “Popular Chips” perfectly encapsulates why influencer marketing has transformed digital marketing. In preparing for these reviews, I always start with a Google search to find out company details, press releases, and any other information the internet has to provide. But then I entered “popular chips” in the google search bar, and the results weren’t entirely helpful:

Of the eight websites Google linked to after that, four were related to snack food. The relevance of my results increased to 100% after I added in the phrase “influencer marketing,” but this still just demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on SEO to build brand awareness.

First, I was directly searching for the name of a company I already knew. Several more generalised searches—influencer marketing solutions and influencer marketing analytics, for example—didn’t get me anywhere near the Popular Chips website. Add to this scenario Google’s ever-shifting rules on what their algorithm finds relevant and useful, and the constant push-and-pull to optimise your web presence with keywords and backlinks. It all becomes a kind of unpredictable and exhausting game, one which brands have very little control over.

Influencer marketing, of course, is far more suited to the task of building awareness and getting people excited about a brand or its product. As the first step in marketing to new audiences, we’ve seen how effective it can be in placing brand-messaging into the social feeds of millions of potential new customers. But exactly how effective can it be? While Google provides its own analytics suite so companies can measure the impact of their website in very precise detail, influencer marketing platforms have yet to perfect this part of the equation. At its most basic, platforms can track impressions (a fancy marketing word that means “useless interactions”) and engagement (another fancy word that means “possibly useful interactions”). Some platforms go deeper than that—audience demo- and psychographics, sentiment analysis, and sales tracking, to name a few. But none of these platforms go as deep as Popular Chips.

Founded in 2015 by Andrea Olivato and Sabrina Stefani, the company itself is a testament to the pair’s commitment to the intelligent use of data. Instead of setting up shop in Italy, where they’re from, or even in Europe, where the the culture is at least familiar. Instead, they took their idea to Singapore and started up there, because that’s what the data suggested makes sense. Southeast Asia is not only the fastest growing region for social media adoption, but it also has the most room to grow. The overall lower cost of living/doing business there probably doesn’t hurt, either. Finally, as Olivato noted in a recent interview, “there’s no better place to have the best business lunches of your life.”

Mee goreng and roti aside, what matters most about Popular Chips is its unmatched ability to parse and visualise truckloads of data that’s useful to marketers. You can see Olivato’s background coding for web analytics companies all over the place, and Stefani’s design and marketing experience is what helps all the data come alive in ways that are clever and practical.

 Cheers,