LONDON — WeArisma, the data analytics company that measures the marketing power of online influencers and celebrities in fashion, beauty, luxury and travel, has raised 2.5 million pounds in its latest funding round led by the investment syndicate Adjuvo.
An announcement is expected on Monday.
In an interview, Jenny Tsai, chief executive officer and founder of WeArisma, said the money would be put toward refining the sandstorm of data that lands on her staff’s desks every day and ensuring that the business can interpret global trends in multiple languages for clients including Hermès, Unilever and Coty.
Tsai also plans to introduce new features to the platform and boost its coverage of leading social channels in Asia Pacific and globally. She wants brands to “unlock new revenue opportunities in markets where consumer purchasing decisions are heavily driven by influential sources.”
WeArisma also plans to scale up its team and help clients to understand the impact of influencers in generating “earned” content for brands.
Adjuvo’s funding follows an investment by Morgan Stanley in 2022 to help WeArisma accelerate growth. To date WeArisma has received a total of 3.5 million pounds in investment.
Tsai’s background is in media and financial engineering. She started WeArisma in order to measure the publicity that brands and retailers “earn” from third-party sources, which can often be difficult to calculate.
Similar to rival Launchmetrics, WeArisma uses proprietary technology to calculate the media impact value of brands and products when they appear on, or are endorsed by, an influencer or celebrity.
“Earned value is not very well understood at all, but it plays a tremendous role these days, because we all publish things ourselves, we all influence other people. The purchasing journey is so fragmented and customers are learning things” from all different places, said Tsai, insisting that brands need to know just how effectively they are being talked about, and recommended, by influential sources.
“There are 4.5 billion social media users across the world and most of these people are making purchasing decisions based on third-party content they are viewing, and yet most companies still don’t understand how their brand and products are performing on these third-party feeds. The value of earned media is still under-discovered,” she said.
WeArisma, Tsai added, “aggregates billions of different feeds and looks at the whole purchasing funnel” in an effort to help clients “generate a better return on their investments; help brands understand how they rank among their target audience across all social channels, and how easily their audience will find content that drives real brand affinity and health.”
The company crunches data on major worldwide events, such as the Met Gala, the Cannes Film Festival, fashion weeks and even the coronation of King Charles III to see how certain products and brands perform and why.
At the Met Gala last month, WeArisma’s analysis showed that engagement rates surged when celebrities talked on social media about what they are wearing, even if the mention was brief.
A single quip from Rihanna about her dress, “It’s Valentino, baby,” sent the Italian brand’s online popularity soaring, resulting in a media value of $496,800; an engagement rate of 1,945.4 percent, and a reach of 1.4 million.
At the coronation, Katy Perry’s lilac Vivienne Westwood outfit generated a media value of $4.7 million while Kate Middleton’s white Alexander McQueen gown had an engagement value of $349,700 based on a single image from Time magazine’s Instagram.
Most of WeArisma’s research is never released publicly. Instead, it’s delivered directly to clients so they can make decisions about how much money to invest in social media, experiential events and influencers who can help them shape their images going forward, and drive sales.
WeArisma has already banked six years of historical data across 15,000 brands in more than 70 countries, and the challenges going forward are many. Tsai said the company needs to scale, and her team needs to optimize its analytics, methodologies and use of AI.
“It’s a huge space, and it’s changing quickly,” she said, adding that it’s proving expensive to operate globally.
“We have engineers and product teams in place to interpret languages properly. There are loads of nicknames that people in China use to describe different brands. So if you track the brand, you have to track all the nicknames, too. It’s that quality of data that’s really going to help us to predict and understand this world,” she said.
Mark Foster-Brown, cofounder and CEO of Adjuvo, said the company invested because “assessing the value and effectiveness of influencer marketing is critical for retailers and brands.”
He added that Adjuvo’s aim is to help its founders and entrepreneurs, “so in addition to this fundraise, which is supporting and strengthening the global capability of Jenny’s team and optimizing their systems, we want to add value. Our network will share relevant expertise and contacts. It will advocate entrepreneurship, job creation and maximize potential.”
Sanghamitra Karra, managing director and EMEA head of the Multicultural Client Strategy group at Morgan Stanley, said “We have been impressed by WeArisma’s high-quality data platform and insights. WeArisma has a data-driven approach that has helped clients to optimize marketing spend and achieve their communication objectives. Jenny and the team bring a wealth of experience serving some of the largest brands across the globe.”