Let’s make influencer marketing safe again! That’s quite a common thought - if you have an escrow system, then your budgets are safe. However, traditional escrow payment protection doesn’t always guarantee the fairness of a deal.
The combination of the escrow system combined with AI fraud detection - that is what makes a complete protection from ad fraud. Escrow system with Entyx AI-monitoring is a whole new standard of budget protection in influencer marketing. Happy to share our thoughts on this topic in this short post!
The Limitations of Traditional Escrow Systems
Let’s look through the weak spots of the traditional escrow system.
Blind trust: Escrow system holds budgets but it doesn’t do any KPI manipulation, doesn’t check if KPIs were met.
Fake metrics: Influencers can create fake engagement, involve bot traffic or cheat subscribers but escrow will not be able to track it.
Misleading reports: when advertisers don't have access to AI-driven reports, they can only blindly believe stats of the streamer or influencer, with no ability to reality check influencer’s fraud.
Agency fraud: intermediaries can use escrow but falsify the data.
Have you ever been in a situation like that?
How Entyx Straightens Escrow
A dedicated escrow system ensures secure financial transactions between brands and influencers. Funds are held in a dedicated account until all terms of the advertising campaign are met, ensuring transparency and protecting the interests of both parties.
AI-powered audience analysis can go deeper than securing funds:
AI enables users to verify the number of followers and the engagement level of any influencer before signing the collaboration contract to ensure ad campaign security.
AI makes a complete performance tracking analysis on the previous campaigns to check if there were abnormal activity bursts.
We offer real-time KPI verification:
AI tracks number of views, engagement and interactions, sentiments regarding the campaign in real time.
AI-powered fraud detection makes it possible to identify bots and click farms.
We backup advertisers with an automatic fraud prevention:
AI immediately reacts to abnormal activities and signals to block the funds until the investigation.
The escrow functionality temporarily holds funds in an account until both parties fulfill the agreed-upon conditions of the transaction. This helps prevent fraud and ensures that funds are only transferred once all conditions are met.
Additionally, there is an opportunity to partially return money if the campaign was not on a high level as expected.
Advertisers take advantage of blockchain-based transparency:
All transactions conducted through escrow on the blockchain are verifiable. This guarantees transparency in the process and provides an opportunity for auditing, adding an extra level of confidence for the deal participants.
All reports are created via AI so that influencers, agencies or any other intermediaries do not have the opportunity to falsify the data.
Cases When Traditional Escrow Can Fail
Escrow system was initially created to protect both parties of the deal from scam. In influencer marketing they are advertisers and influencers or streamers. However, escrow failures are still possible when there are complex fraud schemes and influencer fraud cases like:
Influencers use bot traffic or “like farms" to increase their metrics.
The HypeAuditor research (2023) showed that 55% of Instagram micro influencers are guilty. So how does escrow deal with it? When an advertiser only focuses on quantitative indicators (for example, likes and comments), then escrow will not be able to recognize that the audience is bots.
Influencers hide ad posts after publishing or limit their visibility to their audience.
Surprisingly, this also happens when at the moment of checking the ad post is still in a feed however after receiving payments it’s gone. Such hidden ads mean that on paper, the post is posted, done deal but the reach is falsified. How does Escrow act here? It can’t verify how many real users have seen the post and can't track fake engagement.
Influencers and agencies create fake reports on such metrics like views, clicks and engagement using screenshots.
Escrow system would block funds once there’s a fraud alert. But if the advertiser can’t prove the fraud due to the absence of independent analytics in the system, the funds will be released in the favor of the influencer.
To cut a long story short, the escrow system secures funds until the KPIs are met and conditions are satisfied but it doesn't identify fraud related to fake engagement, falsified data, or fake followers. It doesn't have “intelligence” to track these metrics. Here steps in AI analytics which analyzes the influencer’s audience to see if there are bots or fraudulent activity.
Entyx AI Dashboards make advertisers see a 360-degree overview of each channel, of all campaigns and history of any influencer. And we integrated the Escrow system to secure all payments and collaborations on our platform. This is how AI straightens Escrow.
Sincere recommendation! Before signing a contract with any streamer or influencer, please feel free to check their activities on our AI-driven marketing platform to calculate a real Media Value so that you don't overpay and check the results of streamer’s previous collaborations. We advise using independent platforms like us to monitor efficiency of your ad campaigns anytime you need, without requesting it from a streamer and losing time. AI technology will help you immediately prevent potential scam.
Secure Your Budget with Entyx
Relying solely on funds blocking once fraud is alerted is like locking doors but leaving the windows open. Classic Escrow holds funds but has no ad fraud prevention. This is the AI which makes fraud-proof escrow, do you agree? AI-powered escrow can detect hidden ads, fake reports, fake follower counts, analyze engagement authenticity, verify campaign results and bot traffic in real time. Entyx AI monitoring was built to secure influencer marketing.
Only a combination of Escrow with AI and transparent data analysis gives brands a certainty that their ad budgets are spread efficiently and don't just land in the pockets of swindlers.
Trust but verify they say… so do we! Be aware of all risks and do your best to save ad budgets. Entyx AI helps advertisers to find trustworthy streamers, verify their channels and build long lasting relationships in their influence-marketing journeys. Fancy to check how escrow works with Entyx AI? We ensure your campaigns deliver real results.