Kolsquare

By admin

January 29, 2024

Kolsquare did not start out as an influencer marketing platform, though its pivot to become one was not some wild change of plans. We’ve seen many platforms born of the desire to latch onto a new trend from companies that don’t even have marketing in their DNA and, more often than not in situations like these, that lack of expertise doesn’t stop people from pressing on. We’ve seen platforms with origins in apps that were music recommendation engines, or retail shopping platforms.

Unlike these sorts of opportunistic attempts at getting into the influencer game, Kolsquare’s pivot wasn’t so much a pivot as it was a soft left turn. They were already well entrenched, and succeeding, in the marketing industry. Before it was Kolsquare, it was Brands & Celebrities, a marketing platform founded by former rugby player Quentin Bordage. Its central premise will sound familiar to you: B&C was developed to facilitate connecting brands with—you guessed it—celebrities for marketing purposes. At first launch, it was an agency focused on true and proper celebrities, leveraging Bordage’s connections with other rugby players and athletes throughout the sporting world.

Why the focus on old-school celebrities rather than influencers? That’s a simple answer: influencers weren’t yet a thing when Brands & Celebrities first launched in 2011. It’s not as if they made a conscious decision to avoid influencers. On the contrary, when the rise of influencers essentially redefined what a “celebrity” was, Brands & Celebrities was ready, willing, and able to add them to their roster. And when it turned out that brands were spending money on platforms to manage their influencers and influencer marketing efforts, the pivot to self-service seemed like a no-brainer.

Eventually, a rebrand was in order to better reflect the company’s new reality. Sure, they were representing celebrities, but the expansion into the world of influencers meant the company name was leaving some parts of the equation out. Besides, their original roster of about 6,000 celebrities was now dwarfed by the more than 3 million influencers they’d added to their platform. In 2018, the rebrand was completed, changing their name to Kolsquare. KOL means Key Opinion Leader, a more inclusive term that covers the value of the talent on their platform. Maybe they have millions of followers, maybe they have just thousands—in all cases, these are people whose opinions matter to their audiences. 

And Kolsquare is a platform that matters to the brands that use it. They must be doing something right.