Thomas Moen on the future trends impacting influencer marketing

My name is Thomas. I work in United Influencers. We help influencers in Scandinavia grow their business, basically. And yeah, this is my third time to South By. And very happy. First of all, I prefer actually talking to people in queues everywhere and having conversations more than just the sessions. And I met a lot of cool people. And it's fascinating how South By, you know, attracts so many different people from all over the world. So I have a lot of interesting conversations about artificial intelligence, about bots, about Facebook marketing and something I have a great passion about, influencer marketing as well. And it's also really interesting to see that companies like Facebook and Instagram all are talking about how they can help influencers grow their business. And also about how to amplify and redistribute the content that these influencers are creating. So yeah, it's a mashup of a lot of different things, naturally, because there's so many sessions. But I would say that everything from going deep into psychology and how to really affect people and influence people and engage people, to how to use artificial intelligence in a smart way to do marketing is one of the things that I've learned a lot about the last few days. The things I'm going to take home are mainly from my conversations with media houses here in Austin. The Verge people, Vox Media, all those kind of people, understanding how they are using branded content in a very natural way. So for example, I had an amazing session where I met Joshua Topolsky from The Outline, and they actually create the advertisement for the advertiser. The advertisers are not allowed to put on their own creative work on their site. The Outline's team need to create the advertisement for them, so it actually mixes good and blends into the site and has the same visual vibe. And that's something that I got really inspired by and are going to try to incorporate in our native advertising strategy going forward. So that's one of the cool things that I picked up. So based on your angle, influence and marketing, when being here at South By, and I know that there's a lot of people who are interested in this topic, is there something, you've already touched upon it, but is there something that will affect, like really dramatically affect your line of work in the futuristic, kind of the trends that people are talking about here? Well, yes, because one, I think that what Instagram are doing with their shopping products and their storage products are really impacting and really are turning around how we saw and used Instagram just three, four months ago until now. And seeing what Instagram has planned for the future, it's very obvious to me that we need to spend even more time building audience engagement over there. So that's one of the things. And also just going even deeper in terms of helping our influencers identify their audience, because a lot of key points from a lot of different media houses is that you need to be, go even deeper and find out who your core audience really is instead of going very wide. So Joseph Holtzke again said, it's not for everyone, it's for you. I think it's a beautiful way of seeing it that you need to find who is your core audience and stay with them. And it's fascinating to see big media sites and blogs and websites that have millions of users every day trying to kind of just pinpoint and laser target their audience instead of trying to reach everyone. So I think that's really fascinating. So what's next? Tacos? No, I don't know. I'm going to see a cool session with Google now and I'm just going to go around again talking to people and enjoying Texas. The sun is finally out, which is amazing. And I have three more days here in Austin, so I'm just going to enjoy and be social. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Anytime. Thank you.