On September 16-17, the 11th GDMS Global Digital Marketing Summit was grandly held at Hall 4.2 of the Shanghai National Exhibition and Convention Center, themed around 'Differentiation'. The event brought together over 6,000+ brand marketers and 100+ speakers from around the world to collectively seek the ultimate answer for brand marketing 'differentiation' in 2025.

Vincent Jin, Vice President of WEIMOB INC Marketing and Founder of Weimob Communication TEAM PRO, was invited to attend and delivered a keynote speech titled "A Great Performance: Influencer Marketing Enters the Role Era" at the GDMS "Influencer Marketing" sub-forum. Facing current challenges in the influencer ecosystem such as content homogenization, rising traffic costs, and widening tier gaps, Jin proposed the "Influencer Role Methodology," calling for brands to reconstruct influencer collaboration strategies with "director thinking." Through precise casting and script-based arrangements, brands can create immersive brand narratives, achieving an upgrade in influencer marketing from "traffic acquisition" to "value resonance," providing new breakthrough strategies for brands in differentiated competition.

The following is the transcript of Jin's speech:

Hello everyone! After listening to Director Zhang's sharing, I gained a lot and received much inspiration. Today's forum theme is "From Co-creation to Win-Win." I will share around "How to use director thinking to create great marketing performances in the role era."

In the past, we selected influencers much like reviewing resumes, focusing on data, labels, and follower counts, yet often encountered results that fell short of expectations. In fact, new-era influencer marketing has moved away from the "data stacking" model. It's no longer simply purchasing traffic, but more like "precise casting" - matching appropriate roles for brands and achieving goals like trust building, deep seeding, and sales driving through different roles. The core logic can be summarized as: When working with influencers, first forget their influencer identity and prioritize thinking about role positioning.

**I. Industry Predicament: Collective Fatigue in the Influencer Ecosystem**

Have you noticed that this year's Double 11 started earlier, moving from the previous November 1st to October, and now even entering September? Major promotional periods have degraded from "time symbols" to "traffic consumption," with influencer content falling into homogenized competition, while brands' demands for "brand-performance integration" further intensify cost pressures. Consumers are tired of buying, brands are exhausted from competition, and agencies are worn out from losses. The entire ecosystem seems to have entered a state of fatigue. Particularly in the influencer ecosystem, several common problems prevail:

1. Severe content homogenization. Scripts and formats from different influencers are becoming increasingly similar, with differences only in personas; 2. Continuously rising advertising costs. The combination of organic traffic and paid promotion has pushed up client budgets; 3. Obvious influencer premium pricing. Mid-tier influencers have gradually become mainstream choices for cost-effectiveness, but they're slow to gain momentum and deliver average results.

Meanwhile, effectiveness measurement standards for influencer marketing have fallen into contradiction: clients pursue both front-end content data (exposure, engagement, etc.) and back-end conversion data (store visit costs, ROI, etc.), making these two indicators difficult to balance. If data becomes the sole core assessment standard, it will only further push up traffic costs. To solve these problems, we need to analyze the root causes from three perspectives - brands, platforms, and consumers:

1. From the brand perspective, the core demand is "leveraging influencers to drive organic traffic." However, platform traffic is becoming increasingly precise, significantly raising requirements for influencer "verticality" - only when influencers' content and persona labels are sufficiently focused can they obtain effective traffic;

2. From the platform perspective, there are higher requirements for influencer role positioning. Influencers must not only achieve traffic monetization but also bear the responsibility of platform "community-building and content creation." Therefore, platforms balance the boundaries between organic traffic, community content, and commercial traffic during commercialization;

3. From the consumer perspective, scrutiny of influencer content is increasingly stringent, showing characteristics of "rational desire, emotional judgment." As product differentiation gradually diminishes, consumers increasingly pursue "sense of identification," hoping influencers "understand them" while expecting recognition from surrounding groups after purchasing products.

This shows that traditional influencer marketing models centered on "tier classification" (pyramid, inverted triangle, triangular matrix) and "data assessment" can no longer meet current demands. Influencer marketing needs to return to the essence of "people," creating perceptible trust through "authentic experience and expression" rather than relying solely on data and traffic.

**II. Key to Breaking Through: Strategic Upgrade from Tools to Roles**

Based on this, we propose the "Influencer Role Methodology," breaking the traditional perception of treating influencers as "advertising communication vehicles" and returning to the essence of "establishing brand favorability through others' evaluations." This clearly defines different influencers' roles, functions, and assessment standards, making influencers "stand up, come alive, and speak human language." Under this logic, brands need to act as "producers," flexibly combining influencer strategies based on communication goals - just as in film production, you cannot expect a single actor to handle multiple objectives like box office, acting skills, and awards. Influencer marketing also requires different complementary roles to achieve ideal marketing effects.

We categorize influencers into six core roles based on the soft/hard nature of influencer content and the conversion/mindshare goals of influencer communication:

**1. Veteran Actor (Expert-type Influencer)** 1) Positioning: Brand "cornerstone" with expert attributes and certain premium, enhancing credibility for secondary content dissemination after endorsement; 2) Function: Deep brand understanding, clearly conveying product advantages (not avoiding pros and cons), playing key roles in user decision-making processes; 3) Assessment focus: Content interaction depth, positive sentiment ratio, search information increment, etc.

**2. Lead Actor (Recommendation-type Influencer)** 1) Positioning: Pure style, centered on "daily good recommendations," with authentic content and high fan acceptance of advertisements; 2) Function: Building emotional resonance with users through personal preferences, strengthening trust connections; 3) Assessment focus: Front-end data (exposure, reading, interaction), back-end data (e-commerce traffic conversion), persona-brand compatibility.

**3. Supporting Actor (KOC-type Influencer)** 1) Positioning: Supporting lead actors (KOLs), with more native and authentic content; 2) Function: Focusing on actual product usage experience (compensating for KOL content shortcomings), presenting products from "first-person + second-person" perspectives, enhancing content credibility and comprehensiveness; 3) Assessment focus: Content nativeness, user trust feedback, supplementary effects on lead actor content.

**4. Star Cameo (Communication-type Influencer)** 1) Positioning: Influencers with high content value and communication power on social media, serving as marketing "breakthrough tools"; 2) Function: Easy to drive topic breakouts, amplifying communication effects when combined with traffic strategies, but at high costs, mostly participating in "cameo" roles; 3) Assessment focus: Breakthrough communication effects, topic heat, conversion gains after traffic investment.

**5. Box Office Guarantee (Celebrity-type Influencer)** 1) Positioning: Brand "safety symbol," requiring "celebrity influencerization," approaching consumers while weakening "celebrity aura"; 2) Function: Fan association deeper than ordinary influencers, with diversified cooperation methods (including pure publishing, deep seeding, soft placement, etc., not limited to endorsements); 3) Assessment focus: Celebrity-brand compatibility, fan interaction quality, cooperation content communication and conversion effects.

**6. Salesperson (Conversion-type Influencer)** 1) Positioning: Efficient "conversion tool" with low content costs, fast output, and strong directional focus; 2) Function: Obvious short-term conversion effects, but difficult to scale up, hard to batch replicate accounts, insufficient sustainability; 3) Assessment focus: Short-term conversion data (conversion rate, average order value), content production efficiency.

It should be emphasized that these six roles don't exist in isolation. In actual marketing, three major "casting" strategies must be followed:

1. "Comprehensive indicator" orientation, mixed role usage. Focus on both "full-chain mindshare indicators" (brand awareness, trust, etc.) and "back-chain conversion indicators" (ROI, store visit costs, etc.), shifting from "pure data assessment" to "data + content mindshare" dual consideration.

2. Strengthen brand memory through "multi-layer overlapping reach." Use multiple, multi-dimensional touches from different roles to drive consumers through the full chain from awareness to trust to conversion.

3. Adjust role proportions based on "node requirements." Like movies divided into commercial and art films, marketing also needs to match different "genres": for example, new product launches requiring "building awareness, breaking perception" can focus on veteran actors, recommendation bloggers, star cameos, celebrities and other content-oriented roles; major promotional periods like Double 11 need dynamic optimization of role combinations based on goals like "boosting sales, expanding customer base."

Here, I'll share a practical case from a well-known domestic clothing enterprise. This company centers on offline stores, with store sales staff serving as natural KOS (Key Opinion Sellers):

Initial approach: Using KOLs (recommendation blogger roles) to create content, with offline sales staff distributing content to private domains and offline channels. Initial 3-month conversion effects were significant, but growth subsequently stagnated.

Optimization strategy: First, transform offline KOS and KOC into "experiencers," combining product scenarios to weaken sales attributes and strengthen authentic experience delivery; Second, leverage collaborative new product launches through "star cameos" (creators) to create content endorsement, highlighting product scarcity and collaboration stories; Third, introduce "veteran actor" (expert) and "celebrity" resources to iterate previous single influencer product testing content; Fourth, combine North-South regional cultural differences to assign offline KOS roles as "promoters" and "experiencers," coordinating with traffic investment to optimize content and influencer structure in real-time.

**III. Core Objective: Becoming Clients' True Business Partners**

As a leading marketing group, WEIMOB INC Marketing covers almost all mainstream media and marketing services while continuously upgrading technology innovation to drive service efficiency. Weimob Communication TEAM PRO fully leverages synergistic effects, integrating group resources and driving integrated marketing through deep cooperation with omni-channel media. With "global business thinking" as the core, we focus on four core advantages to provide full-chain services for clients:

1. Strategy-first: Helping clients establish global marketing thinking, balancing "conversion" and "user accumulation" to build business models with short-term effectiveness and long-term sustainability;

2. Data-driven: Using real-time data as the core, combined with quality content to dynamically optimize marketing solutions for clients;

3. Systematic media management: Leveraging proprietary MCN resources, signing celebrities and vertical influencers (such as tennis field broadcasters), enriching influencer matrices for efficient resource matching;

4. Efficient execution guarantee: Ensuring professionalism and timeliness in strategy implementation, covering mainstream media and marketing scenarios, improving service efficiency through technological iteration and innovation.

Finally, I want to emphasize: Influencer marketing in the role era is essentially a transformation of "strategic thinking." As traffic gradually takes a secondary position, "appropriate roles" and "quality content" become core elements, shifting marketing from "purchasing attention" to "creating resonance." Looking forward, we hope clients can shift from "focusing on influencer prices" to "focusing on role compatibility," working hand-in-hand with Weimob Communication TEAM PRO to create marketing performances centered on "resonance." We are also willing to become everyone's true business partners with our omni-channel resources and service capabilities. In the fragmented multi-touchpoint marketing environment, we work together with clients to solve problems and achieve results! Thank you all!