Before hiring an influencer, brands let loose digital sleuths

“The companies need these influencers to have a certain image that will tie well with their brand recall,” Tarun Bhatia, regional managing director of investigations at Kroll, one of Asia Pacific’s top forensic consulting firms, told Mint.

“They come to us to check the kind of image these influencers have across social media platforms to ensure that they redirect the value of the brand they represent,” Bhatia said. “If there is damaging content, which includes an older video, post, images and likes, then the client is alerted.”

Such background checks do help companies avoid potential controversies while working with influencers. That becomes even more critical when creators have come under increasing scrutiny from courts, prompting the government to draft new regulations.

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Fast food chain Wow! Momo Foods called off a potential partnership after one such exercise. “This has turned out to be very helpful as it prevented us from entering a potentially risky collaboration by associating with a particular mega influencer by alerting us about negative comments on his feed in time before the controversy,” said L Muralikrishnan, chief marketing officer at the company.

Wow! Momo has a “very rigorous process that involves internal tools and a professional aid from third-party agencies to identify influencers who align with the narrative of the brand”, said Muralikrishnan.

How brands verify authentic engagement

Detailed sentiment analysis of comments and engagement and a study of the kind of brands they have associated with in the past becomes a critical point, he said. “From scanning their comments to analysing the last four weeks’ performance of the influencer content has become a mandatory routine.”

One of the most important aspects of this exercise is verifying if the creator drives authentic engagement. Brands also use influencer intelligence platforms to verify this.

“To be fair to the process, we do analyze the social media backgrounds of influencers we onboard for marketing campaigns to verify the authenticity of their followers through influencer intelligence platforms,” said Shankar Prasad, founder of beauty brand Plum Goodness. “These crawlers check if the number of followers and engagement of these influencers are in tandem and also skim through the followers to determine if they are spurious or irrelevant accounts.”

According to Prasad, often, this diligence is “not about authenticity but also about audience relevance for the specific campaign we’re running”. “As the influencer space evolves, self-regulation will begin to play a far bigger role than any external diligence that brands conduct.”

Consulting firms that run the forensic tests make sure that the influencers have a clean reputation across all social media platforms and have an authentic audience that responds well to marketing campaigns done in the past.

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They especially run a check on any political association, hate speech or controversial statements that a creator might have made in the past, and that could make the person a poor candidate for the brand’s social media campaigns. They also look at their past collaborations, employment, income tax returns, and criminal verification, the forensic lead at one of the top consulting firms told Mint.

“The cost of such open-source investigations to companies can start from ₹1 lakh and can go up to ₹10 lakh per influencer, depending on the depth of the analysis,” he said. “However, most companies, including large firms and major startups, especially in the consumer and quick commerce segments, get this done to ensure that the character and the image of the influencer they are betting their brand’s reputation on is as clean as a whistle.”

Companies do not mind spending on forensic investigations given the risk involved.

“In recent times, with things becoming murkier and regulators becoming more active and vigilant, companies are having additional checks and balances in place to ensure everything is kosher,” said Supriya Verma, executive director of Forensics at consulting firm PwC. “Companies are bearing an additional cost, which even though is not a significantly large portion compared to their overall marketing budgets, is an important investment for their brand’s reputation.”

While influencers are not alerted about such background checks, they acknowledge that it is important.

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“We usually share our identity proof and, in some cases, income-tax filings with companies to get onboarded for campaigns,” aid Ashish Kaushik, a Bihar-based content creator with 56,600 Instagram followers on his handle @callmekaushik.

“But it makes sense for companies to be running background checks. No one has asked for our other social media IDs, but I am assuming they would be looking for the rest of their own and verifying before campaigns.”