Dubai-based Access Influence has a new digital platform that connects brands with customers. The platform rewards consumers for sharing experiences about brands and also allows brands to give back to consumers.

With FMCG experience at P&G and Perfume Holdings before, Nour El Chaar, says in a statement, “Working with some of the world’s biggest brands, I have understood the true value of word of mouth marketing. Spending money on advertising is becoming less and less effective due to general ad blindness. Companies, regardless of size, stand to make the most of their marketing budgets by rewarding passionate advocates and growing with them in a market environment where trust in brands is low. Overall, by creating real conversations within relevant communities, the overall authenticity of the brand is elevated, while influencing purchase decisions among more like-minded and trusted consumers such as friends, family members and peer-groups. In today’s gig-economy, consumers who become brand advocates also benefit commercially from working with brands they already love.”

Access Influence believes this is the perfect time to launch its platform given that trust in traditional media fell five points according to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer in the past year.

Brands can sign up to the new platform for free, where they are able to create their own briefs, and track their campaigns. Briefs can be self-created by the brand or open to influencers for their own creative submissions. Brands can preview proposed content, customers, and estimated results even before fully committing to the program. Payment is initiated once the campaign goes live, upon which they start receiving live update reports. Brands and agencies can monitor real time campaign analytics and results via their campaign dashboards and consumers get rewarded by the brands they advocate.

Following a year of research, focus groups and testing, the application is now available for free on iOS to register and potentially work with brands. Briefs are shared with consumers automatically via the Access Influence App. Algorithms filter through the submissions to build the perfect campaign based on the brand’s budget, objectives, target audience, and content guidelines.

Prospective influencers must link their social media accounts to the application. Users who sign up are vetted by a quality control process, analyzing the eligibility of the brand advocate by eliminating influencers displaying illegal, offensive content, having fake followers or followers not in target country – or simply not compatible with the campaign’s direction.

The influencers will further be segmented by age, gender, and location to ensure the most effective reach.

Campaigns are scalable, ranging from five to 5,000 brand advocates at a time.