Every year we send out a big deck to all of our clients talking about the holidays. A big part of this deck is that we survey influencers and ask them a bunch of questions about holiday. Like when do they start planning it, do they do gift guides, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We do this because we want our clients thinking about holiday because I think nearly half of the advertising dollars in America are spent in Q4 to support holiday. If you don't know the way retail works during holiday, it is that as far as sales go each day is what they usually make in a week.

Each week is usually what they make in a month. Every single day from around Thanksgiving through the 23rd of December is as important as a week. The advertising budgets reflect that so we send this deck out because we want our clients to spend their money with us because that we believe is the best place for them to put their money. To all my brands out there, if you haven't talked to our salespeople yet, you should. They're lovely and very intelligent and they're waiting, so mail us at sales@fohr.co or just james@fohr.co What do we learn from this? A couple interesting stats. I'm sorry, these glasses I have, I can't see up close.

73% of influencers limit the amount of sponsored posts during holidays to avoid saturation and 46% charge a premium on holiday sponsored posts. Let's tie this back to chicken sandwiches real quick. I think one of the reasons the Popeyes thing has sustained and still been a thing is that it's hard to get. Scarcity creates interest. If we think about the influencer space and what could ruin it, any market is built on supply and demand. We could have a demand side failure. Brands could just say they're no longer that interested in influencer's sponsored posts.

There's a number of things that could cause that. Price is too high, it's not as effective as it used to be, some new shiny thing comes out that they're more interested in. All those things are threats and things that we are thinking about all the time at Fohr. The other thing that could ruin it is supply side. A lot of times when there is a new market where you can make money, in the beginning, there's not a lot of supply. Cut to the influencer space five years ago, there weren't that many influencers out there. Also wasn't a huge amount of demand, but there wasn't a lot of supply. As demand grew, people said, "Shit. There's a lot of money to be made here, so I am going to jump in and start doing this."

Supply grows. Now, in the influencer space, those two things have been growing simultaneously. I would say demand is growing faster than supply is. There is still just-- Luckily, brands are continuing to increase their budgets and continuing to invest more in influencer marketing, but what is unique about this space is- and scares me, is that there is no scarcity baked into it. With an influencer, you can create- I don't know if this is too technical but you can create impressions out of nowhere. Okay, let's talk about Vouge. Vogue is selling advertising based on the amount of people that read it. Those readers are counted as impressions.

They can't just, out of thin air, create more impressions but influencers can. You can always post again. If you say, "Okay, I usually post 20 times a month." You've posted your 20 times a month and somebody comes along and says, "I'll give you $5,000 to post again." You're going to post again. You could do that again and again and again. The supply is essentially limitless for influencers. It hasn't happened yet but a big concern of mine is if we don't bake scarcity into the space, then eventually, prices just fall because there's too much supply for the amount of demand there is. Where this is interesting with holiday is that it's a 73% of influencers are limiting the amount of sponsored posts they're doing.

They are, in this time of year, creating some scarcity, which is I think super smart. I think if you're not thinking about that as an influencer, if you're not thinking about how many sponsored posts you're willing to do during the holidays, you're probably doing yourself a disservice. It's not too early to map out, take a look at the calendar, look how many days are on there that you're willing to do holiday posts. Think about the categories, beauty, skincare, fashion, CPG. Take all the categories of where your advertisers generally come from and think about how many posts inside those categories you are willing to do and try and stick to that.

What's great about it is that if you set that and you say, "This is what I'm going to do." you can create that scarcity. You can say, "Well, look--" Let's say, I'm going to sell 20 sponsored posts in the two months leading up to the holiday, I'm at 18. Now all of a sudden, those last two might become a lot more expensive because I'm saying, "Hey, legitimately, I set aside X amount that I'm going to do for this holiday season. I'm almost there so I have to increase my price X amount. I have to double it." Creating scarcity allows that asset to become more valuable. Ferraris are more expensive than Hondas because they cost a lot more to make, but also because there's a lot less of them.

It's the scarcity of them that makes them valuable. It's a good thing for you to be thinking about it certainly during the holidays, but also just in general. We talked about how at Fohr, we are tracking the percentage of your feed that's sponsored. It's a metric that brands are increasingly interested in in making sure we're working with people who have a low percentage of sponsored content in their feeds. Think about scarcity this year in the holidays.

It is never too early to start planning out your holiday content calendar because brands will start reaching out, I'd say, in the next month to book those campaigns.