Shift from traditional search drives Yango Creator

On Thursday, Yango announced the launch of Yango Creator, a new division specialising in end-to-end influencer advertising. Eb Yusuf, general manager of strategy, culture, and insights, explained to Mumbrella that as younger audiences move away from traditional search, creators become more important for brands.

“We really needed to find a solution for brands to become more discoverable in these sort of newer, more emerging search environments,” Yusuf told Mumbrella.

From a search perspective, people are moving away from traditional search engines and instead going straight to social media platforms like Tiktok or Youtube, or engaging with LLMs like ChatGPT.

In particular, she said Gen Z are 25% less likely to use traditional search engines.

“A lot of what happens in the social media space feeds the AI results. So AI search in particular was a big reason as to why we wanted to incorporate creator marketing.”

The agency said that Yango Creator includes influencer strategy and consultation, creator identification and vetting, content collaboration and management, campaign execution and amplification, performance measurement and reporting, and contract negotiation and compliance.

Eb Yusuf

Yusuf, who will lead the division, said briefing processes with clients brought up “recurring things”, and Yango Creator “felt like an answer to a lot of those things”.

“We work with a lot of small to medium-sized businesses, many of our clients didn’t have the capability to create that fit-for-platform content,” she told Mumbrella. “For example, TikTok has become such a huge platform and we would recommend it on plans, but they wouldn’t have anything ready to go on those channels.

“On Instagram too, creator generated content sees a lot more engagement than traditional brand advertising, so we wanted to create a solution and give clients these opportunities.”

She hopes creator marketing can sit alongside traditional media to achieve what the clients are after, particularly in competitive categories.

An Australian BYD creator on Tiktok

Using Yango client BYD as an example, Yusuf said the need for “explaining the brand’s core reasons to believe” had grown in importance, and traditional media didn’t grant that opportunity.

“We’ve seen that space become so much more competitive in the last 12 to 18 months with a lot of new Chinese brands entering the market. So that need for storytelling became more and more important. We didn’t necessarily have that chance in the traditional media space like we did a decade ago,” she said.

“But these days, the creator space is where we can help to build consideration for brands by doing more of that storytelling piece.”

Yango will also look to build out an ‘Insights’ division in the coming months, “very much around qual and quant research” to further brand relevance in culture. This will also sit under Yusuf’s remit.

Related Content

F.Y.I. Yango appointed digital media agency partner for Amber Tiles

F.Y.I. Yango appoints new GM of growth