We’re up to over 60 episodes of this podcast since it shifted to be totally focused on influence marketing and in that span we’ve talked to a lot of the executives at various influencer marketing software platforms. We asked many of them point-blank questions about how they’re dealing with influencer fraud. Most of them put on their sales hat, telling us how their proprietary thingamabob has a transverse positive quotion in the 98th percentile of whatchamajigger or some such nonsense.
When I asked Caroline Duong, the founder and CEO of Zine about fighting influencer fraud, she was surprisingly candid about it. The fact is, fighting influencer fraud is hard work. And it doesn’t stop. She told me there are probably more new ways to cheat the system being created every day than there are influencer marketing platforms. And that’s saying something.
Caroline and I chatted recently about how Zine deals with that issue, but also discussed how the company got started, what all features and services it provides and beyond. Caroline hinted at some interesting changes to come for the industry and steered me away from a rabbit hole around the recent regulatory statement by the Advertising Standards Authority, which is sort of the Federal Trade Commission in the United Kingdom, saying it’s not cool for beauty influencers to use photo filters. Seemed like overstepping to me, but she course corrected my thinking, which was nice.
Zine started in 2015 and began with a focus on bloggers and providing content creators with demographic information about their audiences. In fact, to this day if you sign up as a content creator with Zine, they give you the pleasantly perfect gift of an automated media kit. You connect your channels, answer a few questions and you get a nifty PDF you can share with potential collaborator brands to show off your audience.
Caroline and Zine are great resources for influencers and brands alike. We had a great conversation I know you’ll enjoy. 
This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

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