Caught on Camera: Firefighters respond to dumpster fire at FGCUFGCU students affected by Covid celebrate first commencement ceremony
FORT MYERS Caught on Camera: Firefighters respond to dumpster fire at FGCU San Carlos Park Fire District responded to a dumpster fire Sunday afternoon.
FORT MYERS FGCU students affected by Covid celebrate first commencement ceremony Graduation is a right of passage from school to the real world, but for these students, reality hit them in 2020.
PUNTA GORDA Motorcycle crash leaves 1 dead One person has died after a motorcycle crash in Charlotte County.
LEE COUNTY Lee Deputies work to track down transient sex offenders who fail to register WINK News Anchor Corey Lazar goes on patrol with Lee County Deputies in search of transient sex offenders who don’t register.
National Hurricane Preparedness Week: Know your risk Hurricane season starts on June 1st, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has designated the week of May 5 through May 11 as National Hurricane Preparedness Week. Each day, Meteorologist Lauren Kreidler will be highlighting ways to stay prepared ahead of this year’s hurricane season.
Southwest Florida The Weather Authority: Stay alert – chance of showers and storms on Sunday Hot, humid, and more rain for parts of Southwest Florida on Sunday.
CAPE CORAL What we learned about Cape Coral’s water crisis after a ride along On Friday, WINK News got to ride along to see just what people are doing that could be wasting water.
The Weather Authority: A wet Saturday evening as storms move through Southwest Florida A rainy Saturday evening across much of southwest Florida.
FORT MYERS Lee Health Touch-A-Truck event educates families on Trauma Awareness On Saturday morning, sirens were ringing to celebrate Lee Health Trauma Center’s 30 years of service and to provide the public with trauma education and prevention methods.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA (CBS) CDC says bird flu viruses “pose pandemic potential,” cites major knowledge gaps Bird flu continues to appear to pose a “low risk to the general public” for now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. But the agency’s scientists ran into roadblocks investigating a human case of this “pandemic potential” virus this year, they said in a new report.
DOWNTOWN FORT MYERS Bay Street Yard set to open in late May A new place to hang out in Downtown Fort Myers is opening this spring.
Aetna agrees to settle lawsuit over fertility coverage for LGBTQ+ customers Aetna has agreed to settle a lawsuit that accused the health insurer of discriminating against LGBTQ+ customers in need of fertility treatment.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA WINK Neighborhood Watch: Robbery, Pawn Shops, and Child Porn This week’s segment of Wink Neighborhood Watch features an armed robber, fraud at a pawn shop, and possession of child pornography.
Southwest Florida The Weather Authority: Sun, clouds, humidity, rain – it’s all in your weekend forecast Saturday afternoon will be hot and humid, with a mix of sun and clouds.
LEHIGH ACRES Chaotic lake getting fence and security Now, with all the negative attention it has gotten, some think putting up a fence is a great way to keep that bad activity out.
FORT MYERS Caught on Camera: Firefighters respond to dumpster fire at FGCU San Carlos Park Fire District responded to a dumpster fire Sunday afternoon.
FORT MYERS FGCU students affected by Covid celebrate first commencement ceremony Graduation is a right of passage from school to the real world, but for these students, reality hit them in 2020.
PUNTA GORDA Motorcycle crash leaves 1 dead One person has died after a motorcycle crash in Charlotte County.
LEE COUNTY Lee Deputies work to track down transient sex offenders who fail to register WINK News Anchor Corey Lazar goes on patrol with Lee County Deputies in search of transient sex offenders who don’t register.
National Hurricane Preparedness Week: Know your risk Hurricane season starts on June 1st, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has designated the week of May 5 through May 11 as National Hurricane Preparedness Week. Each day, Meteorologist Lauren Kreidler will be highlighting ways to stay prepared ahead of this year’s hurricane season.
Southwest Florida The Weather Authority: Stay alert – chance of showers and storms on Sunday Hot, humid, and more rain for parts of Southwest Florida on Sunday.
CAPE CORAL What we learned about Cape Coral’s water crisis after a ride along On Friday, WINK News got to ride along to see just what people are doing that could be wasting water.
The Weather Authority: A wet Saturday evening as storms move through Southwest Florida A rainy Saturday evening across much of southwest Florida.
FORT MYERS Lee Health Touch-A-Truck event educates families on Trauma Awareness On Saturday morning, sirens were ringing to celebrate Lee Health Trauma Center’s 30 years of service and to provide the public with trauma education and prevention methods.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA (CBS) CDC says bird flu viruses “pose pandemic potential,” cites major knowledge gaps Bird flu continues to appear to pose a “low risk to the general public” for now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. But the agency’s scientists ran into roadblocks investigating a human case of this “pandemic potential” virus this year, they said in a new report.
DOWNTOWN FORT MYERS Bay Street Yard set to open in late May A new place to hang out in Downtown Fort Myers is opening this spring.
Aetna agrees to settle lawsuit over fertility coverage for LGBTQ+ customers Aetna has agreed to settle a lawsuit that accused the health insurer of discriminating against LGBTQ+ customers in need of fertility treatment.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA WINK Neighborhood Watch: Robbery, Pawn Shops, and Child Porn This week’s segment of Wink Neighborhood Watch features an armed robber, fraud at a pawn shop, and possession of child pornography.
Southwest Florida The Weather Authority: Sun, clouds, humidity, rain – it’s all in your weekend forecast Saturday afternoon will be hot and humid, with a mix of sun and clouds.
LEHIGH ACRES Chaotic lake getting fence and security Now, with all the negative attention it has gotten, some think putting up a fence is a great way to keep that bad activity out.
Influencer marketing fraud will cost brands $1.3 billion in 2019. (Credit: CBS News) Influencer marketing through social media followings is attractive but increasingly perilous advertising terrain for corporate brands. Influencer fraud, including purchasing fake followers and creating fake personas, is expected to cost businesses $1.3 billion this year, according to new research from cybersecurity firm Cheq. And those are just the calculable costs of fake influencer marketing. “The indirect costs are much harder to measure,” said economist Roberto Cavazos, a professor at the University of Baltimore who conducted the analysis for Cheq. Companies spend an estimated $8.5 billion annually to persuade influencers — people with large social media followings whose tastes in consumer goods and services are held in high esteem by their fans — to market their products, according to influencer marketing firm Mediakix. On a good day, roughly 15% of the corporate dollars spent are lost to fraud, Cavazos estimates, because influencers don’t always have as many real followers as they claim. “It’s a huge waste,” Cavazos said, noting his estimate is conservative. Influencer marketing has become a key part of many consumer brands’ promotional strategies as it is considered more appealing to digital audiences than traditional advertising. According to Edelman’s 2019 Trust Barometer, 63% of consumers trust influencers more than brands’ own advertising. “Influencers are much, much more powerful — six times more powerful — than celebrities,” Richard Edelman, the president and CEO of the public relations firm, recently told CBSN. “People are saying, ‘I want to hear it from someone who I identify with, not somebody who is just famous.’ ” Brands typically pay influencers based on their reach, as measured by their number of followers. The snag, however, is that influencers sometimes buy fake followers, or continue to count followers who no longer engage on a given platform, meaning brands pay for eyeballs that essentially don’t exist. “The influencer marketing industry has grown and become a more complex ecosystem, and the more intrinsically complex an ecosystem becomes, the more opportunities for fraud arise,” said Cheq’s chief strategy officer, Daniel Avital. “It used to be that advertisers picked up the phone and called Kylie Jenner,” he said. “Today, people are approaching influencers and buying followers through tech platforms. This is immediately an invitation to anyone in the ad-fraud business to create fake accounts and start meddling.” Mega-influencers, whose follower counts are in the millions, can earn up to $250,000 per social media post, about $37,500 of which is lost to fraud, according to Cavazos. “Many influencers have no access to 90% of their audience simply because it no longer uses the social network where they were followed. This doesn’t stop them from touting millions of followers, who will, of course, never see your content,” the Cheq report noted. Rampant fraud can erode companies’ trust in influencers — and influencer marketing as practice, Cavazos said. “Everybody does social media and you see the influencers and a person is saying this is a great product and you form an affinity. As this becomes more popular, and as fraud increases, you start to get a loss of trust,” he said. Companies then have to devote more time and resources to vetting influencers before engaging them. “Once they understand that this is a problem, in terms of fake numbers of influencers, the monitoring costs are higher because you have to spend more time checking people out,” Cavazos said. Companies also become more reticent to shell out for this kind of advertising. “Because of this perception, they won’t pay as much for influencer marketing anymore because of the assumption of fraud,” he said. Red flags for fraud include recently created accounts with many followers but little engagement, Cheq’s Avital said. “The easiest thing to do is look at discrepancies between how many followers the influencer has and how much engagement they get on the page, because followers are easy to generate, but creating engagement is harder,” he said. “If you see 1 million followers on Instagram but posts have 80 or 100 likes, that is immediately suspicious.” Social media platforms need to automate their vetting processes, Avital added. “For the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, they need to create technology that can automatically, autonomously find fake accounts and disable them,” he said. “This process is primarily manual, and it’s a game of whack-a-mole, where the moles are popping up at a much faster rate than anyone is able to whack them.”