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R-Squared partners with iProspect and Posterscope

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R-Squared partners with iProspect and Posterscope

September 14, 2020

R-Squared has announced its formal partnership with industry leaders iProspect and Posterscope of the international Dentsu Aegis Network. The move from informal collaboration to a formal syndication partnership aims to provide all R-Squared clients with a syndicated network of expert skills and services to amplify their influencer marketing campaigns.

R-Squared partners with iProspect and Posterscope

“We often find that influencer marketing campaigns are siloed by clients outside of their normal paid-for media and social commerce strategies. With this move, we empower clients to truly integrate influencer marketing into their overall marketing and advertising strategies,” says Stéphane Rogovsky, CEO of R-Squared.

The agency says that it works with existing client agencies where available, but should there be a need for further syndication assistance, the agency partner network is ‘at the ready’.

Services offered by the agency include:

digital OOH to broadcast influencer messages across innovative channels,
the marrying of paid media with influencer marketing campaigns to optimise budgets, and
performance marketing through opted-in audiences and social commerce by bringing shoppable posts into influencer’s feeds.

“Programmatic can also be used to bring the world of programmatic into your sphere of influence and to bring the authenticity of an influencer into the world of programmatic,” says Rogovsky.

Clare Trafankowska, managing director at iProspect South Africa, says, “We are delighted and incredibly excited to be able to partner with R-Squared on what we believe to be a pioneering approach to influencer marketing.”

According to the partnership, expert syndicated partnerships can bring authentic, personal messages to a wider audience and ensure that influencer marketing campaigns take place within an ecosystem where reach is amplified by emotion, where the human touch is enhanced by technology.

“Influencer marketing increasingly offers brands opportunities to address consumers with greater relevancy and perspective but with authenticity and credibility provided through the association,” says Trafankowska.

“Taking it to the next level and augmenting these influential conversations within the broader digital ecosystem not only enhances the influencer profile and visibility but also enables the brand to broaden its scope of reach and brand saliency,” Trafankowska says.

“We are proud of our syndicated collaborations with truly powerful agencies around the world. Together, we are creating real personalities for real brands. While not every client requires this type of syndication model, we believe that it’s an essential service offering for influencer marketing both now and in the future,” concludes Rogovsky.

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Freedom through syndication

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Freedom through syndication

July 8, 2020

We know the value of syndicated thinking and working between agencies, between influencer marketing, creative agencies, PR firms and paid media. But there is another aspect to syndication that is especially relevant to influencer marketing:
The syndication between influencer marketing agency, the brand and the influencer.

At R-Squared, we put this collaboration to the front of everything we do. It is what guides our strategic thinking, and it is what sets us apart – because it all comes from a belief in freedom.

There are many agencies who keep a ‘book’ of influencers, people they work with on a regular basis, people they know they can call and direct to add their campaign to the influencer’s feed.

Our thinking is a far more innovative and, together with other true influencer marketing experts, is fast becoming the way forward for this industry: find the influencer that fits the brand and message, not fit the brand to the influencer.

We do not keep a ‘book’ of influencers. Our clients have faith in us and give us the freedom to search out the influencer that will best suit the campaign. Which means we can find that person or persons who actually have an interest in our campaign, who have knowledge of our subject and who believe in what they are telling their audience. It tends to lead to a far more honest and resonant campaign.

Because added to finding the perfect fit is the giving of freedom. Our influencers have the freedom to be themselves, to speak as themselves. By finding the influencers in their own environments, in their own countries, we engage with the audience in their own language, their own style and their own culture. Influence is all about resonance, about believability and authenticity which you only achieve if your influencer is being open and honest – and having the freedom to add your message to their existing voice.

Giving someone a script makes them an actor. Giving someone the freedom to be themselves makes them an influencer.

This is not to say we let them loose like a kid in a candy store. Our expertise comes in the careful management of the campaign. We create a framework that combines the brief, the strategy and the influencer. They know the goals. They know the product. They know the audience. And they know the environment, including all local and international regulations and nuances. Everything is set up with an almost scientific attention to detail.

And then we give them their freedom.

This approach is only possible through syndication, through collaboration and trust between every person involved from the influencer to the agencies to the brand. By having the freedom to work with the best of the best we are able to offer you, the brand, the best. The best influencer, backed by the best influencer marketers, supporting the best creative, social media, PR and paid media agencies.

To bring you the best, most resonant marketing campaigns for local and global audiences.

We call it authenticity. And it will make a huge difference to your campaign.

Stephane Rogovsky

Stephane is a 41-year-old Belgian citizen. He grew up in Brussels, lived in Switzerland, before moving to South Africa. Authentic conversations with real people inspire Stephane, an entrepreneur with more than 15 years’ leadership experience, utilising strategic foresight, analytical abilities, and trend spotting in diverse areas. He founded R-Squared Digital, a leading Influencer Marketing Agency that partners with some of the largest brands, media, and advertising agencies in South Africa and internationally.

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One Voice Can Make A Difference

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One Voice Can Make A Difference

July 2, 2020

It’s what makes putting paid media behind your influencer marketing such a great idea. You get the power and reach of paid media, the vast audiences with their volume of impressions but with a select voice giving you true authenticity and bringing focus to your campaign.

Think of it as an orchestra. Paid media bring in the violins and flutes, the bassoons and clarinets, woodwind, strings, brass, percussion – all combined to give us a classical feeling of grandeur. Add in a perfect voice, a pure soloist rising from the background to emphasise, to counterpoint, to add goose-bumps that run along your arms, and you have a nuanced and impactful campaign that resonates with its audience.

At R-Squared, we are leading the move to integrate experts from every field into one powerful orchestra that gets brands the maximum reach and the maximum impact. We believe that syndicated partnerships between local and global experts, from big agencies to small boutique shops, is the way forward for the industry.

Paid media and influencer marketing – our particular area of expertise – is a case in point.

Paid media offers us a channel that reaches millions – billions – of people. The potential within that audience is massive, but the dangers of these unsolicited impressions is that once the user scrolls past, the message may be diluted by other unsolicited messages in a feed.

For influencer marketing, the opposite is often true. Here we have a specific audience that are looking to a specific influencer for views and opinions. But it is a much smaller audience.

Syndicating these two channels brings an entirely new dynamic to the partnership. Now we have the huge reach of paid media enhanced with the one-on-one focus of influencer marketing. Which leads to that audience engaging more with the paid media, and the paid media audience being led to an authentic and resonant opinion leader for validation. And this builds and builds and builds to a crescendo for brands.

Add in a maestro conductor, an expert in collaborative thinking and execution, and you are practically guaranteed a virtuoso performance.
This collaborative thinking, not just between paid media and influencer marketing but between any teams working on a brand’s image and message from creative agencies to social media to paid media to production to editing and everything in between, is how we take individual skills and turn them into a symphonic, harmonious whole that raises a brand beyond the ordinary.

While the R-Squared expertise is in the influencer marketing sector, our knowledge, skill and experience, locally and internationally, is helping this change from silo thinking to expert syndication. Our partnerships with other experts in the marketing world – from paid media, to PR firms, to big agencies and boutique specialists – and our on-the-ground teams have the resources and expertise to hand-pick the voices you need to add to your creative campaigns and your paid media and make you stand out.

Stephane Rogovsky

Stephane is a 41-year-old Belgian citizen. He grew up in Brussels, lived in Switzerland, before moving to South Africa. Authentic conversations with real people inspire Stephane, an entrepreneur with more than 15 years’ leadership experience, utilising strategic foresight, analytical abilities, and trend spotting in diverse areas. He founded R-Squared Digital, a leading Influencer Marketing Agency that partners with some of the largest brands, media, and advertising agencies in South Africa and internationally.

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The Perils of Isolation for Brands

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The Perils of Isolation for Brands

June 24, 2020

The traditional marketing model has undergone a dramatic shake-up that began before this world of isolation and quarantine. Old-school ad agencies have found themselves stretched thin through a fast-growing and technology-led hunger for new content and new ways of serving that content.

This was the birth of specialist digital agencies and media houses, of production studios set up to develop content for a new generation that lived with technology in their pockets and with instant access to the world and to the world’s views and opinions.

It also led to a growing sense of compartmentalised thinking and agencies working in silos. This sense of isolation often worked against the brand’s interests. Where you had a great idea for a campaign, the execution often seemed to lack that spark that elevated it into something extraordinary. It’s a natural progression when it comes to tech-led innovation. The innovators bring it to market. The early adopters test it out and work through issues. It becomes more accessible, recognised and accepted. And then gains traction with a wider audience.

This where you need proper syndication. As experts in influencer marketing, R-Squared are well aware of how the industry is changing to incorporate collaboration to a much greater extent.

Our dealings with the big creative agencies and the teams of smaller experts have given us a unique insight into how things have been operating and how they need to change. We are finding, more and more, that our value goes beyond the influencer marketer role and has become an integral part of expert syndication leaders. With the creative agencies creating content, the production houses producing content and the paid media agencies seeding content, we saw the social media and influencer marketers being led by that content in a top-down approach. Our model, that we and other industry experts are showing should be the industry standard, is to use the content to create unique pieces that come from unique influencers to bolster and emphasise that content.

It’s an approach that has also led to us becoming experts in the coordination and collaboration between agencies to truly amplify a brand and message.

By syndicating our thinking and output, by collaborating with best of breed from an agency creative to a PR firm to a digital studio to a paid media agency to our own specialisation of influencer marketing – and then coordinating every aspect to work seamlessly together and build on a campaign rather than plug into a campaign – we are able to create something truly remarkable, impactful and memorable.

Syndication is how the modern world will move forward. In marketing, in business, in politics and human interaction. Isolationism and silo-thinking are shown to be ineffective at best and detrimental at worst. And it will take the experts to prove to the world that this unifying of talents and specialisations will lead to a whole, and to outcomes, that are far greater than the sum of their parts.

Stephane Rogovsky

Stephane is a 41-year-old Belgian citizen. He grew up in Brussels, lived in Switzerland, before moving to South Africa. Authentic conversations with real people inspire Stephane, an entrepreneur with more than 15 years’ leadership experience, utilising strategic foresight, analytical abilities, and trend spotting in diverse areas. He founded R-Squared Digital, a leading Influencer Marketing Agency that partners with some of the largest brands, media, and advertising agencies in South Africa and internationally.

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