Internet The man who 'invented' the network business: this is how the first 'influencers' agency in Spain was born

If I call you an influencer, you will think about money, travel, the great sponsored life

Internet The man who 'invented' the network business: this is how the first 'influencers' agency in Spain was born

If I call you an influencer, you will think about money, travel, the great sponsored life. Seems obvious, right? Now get off the Captain's ship a Lateri and go back with me to 2014, when Anglicism did not exist and the most influential were those who appeared on TV. Remember the hack, the thousand tricks to download free movies. The film producer and distributor Luis del Val was sailing in that ocean, racking his brains to place a foreign film in Spain aimed at a young audience that did not set foot in a theater.

He followed a certain AuronPlay who recorded himself playing video games and posted it on YouTube. The guy did it with such grace that he had half a million subscribers. And he wrote a tweet, for writing: "The best comedian of the 21st century is Auronplay", direct to the ego. "It was a great deal, a match," Del Val now recalls on the phone from Barcelona, ​​where it all began.

They had coffee and he proposed a plan: dub a secondary character, barely a couple of sentences but that appeared in the trailer, and challenge his followers to guess which voice was his. «In 48 hours that trailer had more than half a million views. My life passed me by, my head exploded », he confesses. You had to go there. Next action: rent a movie theater for a private showing with the first 300 AuronPlay followers to show up. They were 4,000. The Urban Police did not know how to evict those crazed teenagers who chanted the strange name of someone no adult knew. And Luis del Val had a revelation: there was a business opportunity there.

From that strange idea, YouPlanet was born, the first influencer representation agency in Spain that, over time, has also become a benchmark in influencer marketing and has returned to the production and distribution of films. To show brands, still skeptical, that what those original youtubers moved was not moved by a movie star who took AuronPlay and a very young Wismichu on tour. Tickets sold out in a matter of minutes.

And from those powders, these muds. The direct investment of brands in influencers exceeded 60 million euros in 2022, according to data from PwC. What's more, it grew by 22.8% from the previous year, and this without taking into account the items dedicated to branded content, many destined for campaigns with internet personalities. The boom in this booming market came, for the CEO of YouPlanet, in the midst of a pandemic. "The managers had to live with their adolescent children and they saw it clearly," he says.

In addition to guiding content creators to optimize their publications, Luis del Val's agency acts as an intermediary with brands: "We are judge and party." The networks ensure a segmented audience with real-time results and an immediate impact on millions of people. But not everything is fine. "The advertiser and what he wants to convey has to be aligned with the influencer's editorial line," he says, and drops a dart: "If a vegan advertises your beef burger, you are not influencing at all."

The preferred platform today to place products is Instagram, both in stories and in fixed posts, but Twitch is beginning to follow on the heels of the pretty girl from Meta. Fashion, food and travel dominate the majority of collaborations, but while sportswear focuses on profiles with millions of global followers, beauty pulls more local audiences, according to a Nielsen study. In Spain, two out of every 100 inhabitants have more than 1,000 followers on Instagram. It seems that, indeed, influence is a profession with a future.

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