Dentsu strikes Meta deal to build plumbing for mass influencer activation

The Japanese-owned holding company is set to integrate the tech firm’s Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads into its operating system Dentsu.connect through an API partnership. In plain English, it’s allowing users of its internal systems to manage social listening, creator selection and paid activation within the same dashboard, blending Dentsu’s own data with Meta’s platform.

The deal is an attempt to “take creator marketing and make it more scalable, more predictable… a growth engine within the context of the broader social ecosystem,” Toby Benjamin, chief media officer at Dentsu UK&I, told Digiday. He said the company’s British arm had already run pilot tests using the API integration, but declined to name the clients involved.

“As creators play an increasingly central role in how people discover brands and make decisions, it’s critical that the tools powering that ecosystem work seamlessly within the platforms agencies and brands rely on every day,” added Edel Horgan, global agency development lead at Meta, in a statement.

The system allows Dentsu staffers to review different creators’ suitability for a campaign based on information like follower counts, location and video engagement metrics drawn from Meta’s database. Benjamin said it would enable the company to plan and activate creator campaigns faster and at a greater scale. 

“Connecting with those creators, contracting them, getting paid partnership ads live on the platforms … that would have taken days, [now] it happens in hours,” he said.

The holding company already employs several AI agents in order to speed up influencer discovery and selection.

According to Benjamin, Dentsu expected to roll out the system to other markets – and to strike similar access deals with other social platforms – soon. “We’re already in discussions about rolling it into the U.S. market next,” he said. “Our ambition is to scale it to other platforms and ecosystems.”

Leading advertisers have begun using larger numbers of smaller creators in recent months; L’Oréal now works with roughly 500,000 each year, while Unilever deployed 50,000 influencers for its World Cup campaign. So-called micro- and nano-influencers are projected to account for almost half of U.S. influencer investment this year, according to eMarketer estimates.

Those companies have the cash and developers required to build the necessary management and measurement software themselves. Most of their peers lack in either department. Holding companies like Dentsu, therefore, are keen to dissuade marketers from building systems in-house by demonstrating that they can provide the necessary plumbing 

“There’s a defensive need for Dentsu and other agencies to do this,” said eMarketer analyst Max Willens. “They would like to remain the fulcrum, the entry point [for clients], into this world.”