Thank the Lord of Creation! Communications agency M Booth has been working on a how-to guide to help combat inequity in influencer marketing campaigns beyond just pay. A pressing issue since post Covid times particularly. 

The Influencer Equity Playbook, as it’s called, aims to address these topics and provide steps to remedy them based on conversations with influencers, marketers, and other agencies. According to M Booth’s SVP Amy Shoenthal the hope is to “put a stake in the ground” and contribute to the industry dialogue on how to address inequality in influencer marketing. 

M Booth is happy to note that since they started working on the guide in 2020, issues around equity in the influencer world have improved. Having said that, there is still much that needs to be done.
It is one thing to encourage change; it’s another to actually make changes. According to Shoenthal, M Booth did an audit of its own influencer campaigns and found that many things, including pay, were inconsistent across the agency. For that reason, M Booth made training based on the playbook mandatory for all employees before rolling it out to the public.

While it can be hard to standardise rates given differences in goals and expectations across campaigns, the playbook encourages marketers to look at things like influencers’ average video views and engagement rates and aim for equitable pay.

The playbook also provides guidance on things like how to ID diverse influencers and look beyond the algorithms (which often favour slim, caucasian, cisgendered and able bodied creators), as well as how to be mindful of words and phrases that “can be seen as microaggressions within specific communities,” like calling something “not a culture fit.”

M Booth acknowledges that the guide will be “by no means finite” and expects people across the industry to weigh in and help it “evolve and grow” once they’ve had the chance to read it.