How Digital Business Lab Leverages Favikon for Data-Driven Influencer Marketing Across Asia
"Favikon gives us clear data we can demonstrate to clients. It sets us apart from talent agencies."
— Hattie Trounce, Director of Social Media & Partner, Digital Business Lab
About Hattie and Xavier
Hattie Trounce is Director of Social Media & Partner at Digital Business Lab, where she leads creator strategy and partnerships. Xavier Schillinger is the agency's General Manager.
Together they run a creator practice that has to hold up in front of demanding clients. Every pick is backed by audience, performance and conflict data, and Favikon is the platform behind that data across every market the agency covers.
About Digital Business Lab
Digital Business Lab is a social media agency founded in Hong Kong more than 13 years ago, with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Mainland China and campaigns across the whole Asia Pacific region.
It is not a talent agency, and that shapes how it picks creators. Its core DNA is synchronisation: paid media, content creation and creator activation run as one plan across every social touchpoint a brand has in Asia. Because creators are one lever inside a wider paid and organic plan, every pick has to be proven with data, not just a follower count.
Sectors
- Finance, FinTech and Web3: regulated briefs where credibility and compliance come first.
- Entertainment and Events: local activations that depend on an in-market audience.
- FMCG, Luxury and E-commerce: consumer brands running multi-persona, multi-market campaigns.
ICP & Persona
Brands that need paid, organic and creator activity working as one plan across several Asian markets, often in regulated categories where every creator has to be justified to the client.
Clients
2nd Street, Christofle and a global medical device company, among others.
Before Favikon
Digital Business Lab had worked with Upfluence and Klear (Meltwater). Its briefs are specific, span several markets and are often regulated, and the team needed a tool that could see past headline numbers.
- Audiences that cross borders. A creator based in Singapore may reach mostly Malaysia, Indonesia or the Philippines. For a local event or a regulated product, most of that audience is unusable.
- Broad categories that hide the real niche. A personal finance creator and a forex educator can both sit under "Finance," but only the forex educator fits a trading platform campaign.
- Influence that changes by platform. One creator can be a macro on TikTok, a micro on Instagram and a nano on LinkedIn. The right tier depends on the channel in the brief.
- Clients who want proof. Winning a pitch against talent agencies means showing why each creator was chosen, not just that they look right. Previous tools also missed creators the team knew should be in the pool.
After Favikon
Every brief now becomes a creator scorecard before anyone searches. Objective, market, niche, platform, tier, budget and brand safety rules decide which metrics matter, so no one is shortlisted for size alone.
Every brief runs through five steps, then loops on client feedback
1. Multi-entry creator discovery
Instead of one search bar, the team works from nine entry points in Favikon: niche filters, audience geography, platform and tier filters, average views, Creator Search with AI, Content Search, Rankings, Lookalikes and the Chrome extension. Each one surfaces creators their previous platforms missed.
Nine entry points, each surfacing new creators.
Search narrows the pool for nuanced briefs but never replaces due diligence. The team still validates qualifications, past content, tone and previous partnerships, and flags compliance questions before outreach.
Result: Creators are qualified at the point of discovery, not after the shortlist, saving about one working day per campaign.
2. Audience geography checks for market-specific briefs
For a global medical device company in Japan, the brief called for parent creators with at least 90% of each audience based in Japan. Finding Japanese creators was not the hard part. Finding the right ones at scale and validating their audiences quickly was.
Favikon surfaced creators like Yuri and provided the audience demographics to confirm the 90% requirement upfront, before any outreach.
Result: A data-backed shortlist for a regulated, single-market brief, instead of assumptions.
3. Finding high performers that follower counts hide
2nd Street, Hong Kong. 2nd Street wanted creators who could talk honestly about reselling their own wardrobes, across three personas: Designer Fashion, Luxury Fashion and Handbag, and Streetwear and Sneaker. Niche and engagement filters combined with audience geography built a screened pool of 40+ candidates, far beyond a manual search.
- Amber (@ambertsui_), Designer Fashion, 5,206 followers. Sorting by followers would have buried her. Her 8.21% engagement and mostly Hong Kong audience made her a strong fit, and her tight community gave the content a personal, unscripted feel.
- Horace Leung, Streetwear and Sneaker. He runs two connected Instagram accounts, so one creator reached two matched audiences in 2nd Street's sneaker resale category.
Christofle, Hong Kong. For a luxury silverware activation, the team searched for luxury, art and lifestyle creators. Rankings opened up the Photography & Visual Arts category, one the team would not have thought to search. There they found Kris To, ranked #53 in that category, with a clean luxury aesthetic and 13% engagement at the time of vetting. The client approved Kris immediately.
Result: Kris To's post reached 9,169 views, a top five post across the whole Hong Kong roster, with a 93% reach-to-follower ratio, the highest of any creator on the campaign.
4. Client-ready vetting on every profile
Before any creator reaches the client, the team checks eight signals in Favikon:
- Bio and positioning to confirm relevant expertise and flag compliance checks.
- Topic weighting to separate real authority from an occasional mention.
- Performance trends to catch one viral post dressed up as momentum.
- Audience authenticity checked against views, growth and comment quality.
- Audience affinities to shape the creative idea, such as a travel angle for a cross-border banking product.
- Notable followers as a lead for natural creator pairings.
- Past collaborations to flag competitor conflicts and exclusivity needs.
- Collaboration Impact Score to see whether sponsored posts hold up against organic ones.
Client feedback on the first shortlist then feeds a Lookalikes search, and every new candidate is vetted again before it goes back to the client. Favikon's LinkedIn coverage adds a further edge on finance and B2B briefs, where credibility is built through written posts.
Result: Every pick comes with audience, performance and conflict data the client can see, giving the agency a proposal that stands out against talent agencies.
Results
1. About 1 working day saved per campaign. Creators are qualified at the point of discovery, not after the shortlist.
2. 5× more creators activated in sync. From around 4 creators per campaign to 20, all vetted to the same standard.
3. New client wins over talent agencies. Proposals backed by data help the agency win new business.
4. Stronger client trust. Every pick comes with audience, performance and conflict data the client can see.
5. Hidden high performers on the roster. Small, highly engaged creators like Amber and Kris To make the list and outperform.
Digital Business Lab is now building its creator practice on Favikon as the agency's data backbone, from the first brief to the final proposal. The team also values how quickly the platform evolves, including the new AI interface.
