Kobe Global Technologies moves influencers closer to advertisers

Step aside, celebrity bloggers.

The advertising and marketing industries have always relied on the expertise and prowess of so-called influencers in order to represent products and services. These influencers are responsible for dictating and promoting the values of the advertised items. However, at the end of the day, these preferences may be subjective.

The advertising trend, however, is now shifting. Businesses are now looking to adopt a more democratic approach, such as the one adopted by Kobe Global Technologies, an advertising marketplace that pairs advertisers with relevant everyday influencers. With this method, Kobe Global leverages on their ability to broadcast messages to millions of users so that businesses can get represented in front of their target audience in a credible manner.

“By democratising influencer marketing with aggregation and pricing algorithms, we’ve successfully made influencer marketing accessible to more businesses; hence our client base includes companies such as local food outlets and start-up mobile apps, which are atypical to the usual companies that used influencers such as fashion, and cosmetic brands,” shares Evangeline Leong, 31, chief executive officer and founder of Kobe Global.

According to Leong, this comes as a lack of digital advertising and marketing know-how has stymied growth among small businesses.

“Being in the digital marketing industry focusing on small and medium enterprises for almost 10 years, we’ve seen how slow small businesses' adoption of digital solutions had been due to unfamiliarity of digital marketing solution. Our self-serve, easy-to-use platform cracks the slow moving long-tail market,” she explains.

“What sets us uniquely apart is also the usage of artificial intelligence technologies for influencer profiling instead of traditional way of one-sided submission of interests by influencers,” Leong emphasises.

Under Kobe Global, everyday influencers replace celebrity bloggers in delivering better credibility and higher engagement with users. Further, influencers’ interest and psychographics are paired to advertisers on top of demographics, resulting in precisely-targeted audiences.

Based on initial research among industry players, Leong, 31, launched Kobe Global in a modest way, joining accelerator programs and securing a government grant. Now a nine-month old revenue-generating company, Kobe Global boasts of a seven-man team, plus a positive profit and loss figure and stable structured growth to boot.

In the next few years, Kobe Global is looking to expand—slowly but surely.

“This year is really about foundation strengthening – to get ourselves into a right linear momentum in our revenue growth and building a strong team culture. Next, it’ll be a expansion into neighboring markets,” Leong says.