Mountain Dew developed its own digital-media 'influencers' — and that's terrible news for digital ad middlemen

Last year Mountain Dew established its own network of digital stars
So far the effort has generated over 300 million video views
The brand has since pulled back on spending with influencer-brokers – and other brands may follow suit

Mountain Dew has built its own network of digital stars, and the apparent success of this endeavor isn't great news for middlemen who promise to help companies find "influencers" to promote their products.

A year or so ago, as the number of companies promising to connect marketers to digital creators and influencers was pushing beyond saturation, Mountain Dew introduced the Green Label MCN (or multichannel network) modeled after the YouTube-born media companies like Awesomeness TV or Maker Studios.

Instead of running ads with hundreds or thousands of YouTube stars, like those companies often do, the brand zeroed in on four. The results have has been encouraging.

During the project's first year, those four creators have churned out content that has generated 326 million videos views, including 17.5 million views of videos that were created specifically to tout the Dew brand, the company told Business Insider. Over that year-long period, the four creators amassed 4.6 million ‘engagements’ on social media–likes, shares, comments, etc.

The creators in the mini influencer networks include four very Mountain Dew-esque talents. There’s a basketball trick shot maker named The Professor, and a hip hop dancer called D-Trix — who has 3.5 million YouTube subscribers and even created an original dance competition series on behalf of the soda company.
Rounding out the list, not surprisingly, are two skateboarding athletes, Josh Katz and Nigel Alexander.

Michael Craig, Mountain Dew’s senior manager, marketing, said that the soda brand had previous done some work with companies that represent web influencers in the past, like some of the big name MCNs.

“It was becoming expensive,” he said. “And we were doing a lot of ‘one off' deals. We had questions about whether we got a return on our investment. So we sort of asked, ‘Why couldn’t we just do this on our own?'”

That sort of talk may worry companies that specializing in managing vast networks of digital influencers, since it’s a good bet other marketers are considering the same sort of DIY move.

According to Brendan Gahan, executive vice president at the social media agency Epic Signal, which Mountain Dew tapped to help find the quarter of video creators, over the past few years there have been a lot of less-than-fruitful attempts by marketers to blast out messages via hundreds, if not thousands of creators with some level of symmetry and automation.

Instead, he recommends taking the more labor intensive route of connecting deeply with a few.

“The human element is really key,” he said. “You want to find people who's eyes light up with the brand. There is a lot of hype around the space, an so much investment. It doesn't benefit the brand, the viewer or the creator if brands are just dipping in and out."

When making content with a web creator, "becomes a strategic partnership, it's really meaningful and a bit more sustainable. Rather than restarting things all the time these creators become an extension of the marketing arm."