K atie c ouric

Think About the Headline Your Partnership
Creates
Latham Arneson, former VP of digital marketing for Paramount Pictures,
explains that movie studios regularly use strategic partnerships to help get
messages and brand awareness out in larger ways. Sometimes his team

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thinks about the kind of headline that a strategic partnership can create—
one that people will pay attention to and that fits within the narrative of the
film. Studio executives always want to create something that helps people
engage deeper with their brand and that actually gets them to go see the
movie or engage with the content.
One time, Arneson worked on a partnership between Uber and the 2014
movie 
Transformers: Age of Extinction
. People could order a ride in
Optimus Prime, a fictional Autobot character from the 
Transformers
series,
through Uber in three or four major cities in the United States. It played into
the movie’s themes because of the relationships between humans and the
alien robots that can disguise themselves as cars. It was a unique and
creative partnership that received a lot of interest and benefited both
companies.
Before creating a partnership, Arneson suggests asking yourself two
questions: (1) Is anyone going to pay attention to the activity or
partnership? and (2) Does the partnership 
elevate your brand
—does it get
people to engage or take action in any way? Those are the critical
components. You can think of kitschy ideas, but if they don’t actually help
your brand, they’re not useful. Viral activity for the sake of virality doesn’t
mean anything. It has to 
enhance
whatever message or purpose you’re
trying to achieve.
Influencer Platforms
One way to find relevant influencers for your brand is by using an
influencer platform like CreatorIQ, Speakr, or Traackr. Influencer platforms
allow you to run searches with various variables. They can help you build
engagement groups or you can pay top influencers to like and comment on
your photos to help them go viral. You can also use these platforms if you
want to promote yourself as an influencer and find potential brands with
which to collaborate.
To choose the right influencers, you need to think about your company’s
goals and who your customers are. Then you can make a list of the people
who will best help you reach that audience. On the influencer platforms,
you can search by influencer categories such as business, finance, travel,

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skincare, food and drinks, and the like. There are categories related to all
fields. You can also break them down by location, platform, brand,
celebrity, post frequency, profile type, recent posts, how many followers
they have, and so on.
Keep in mind that you need to continuously test and try different
influencers. David Oh explains that over the years his team has tested more
than five thousand different influencers to find the ones that yield the
highest returns. Not every influencer is going to deliver and perform for
your brand. Just because they have an audience of millions doesn’t mean
you will automatically make millions from that collaboration. It’s all about
testing and finding the right fit.