Episode Transcript
Elise Stieferman: Hello and welcome back to the loop marketing podcast. Before we dive into our conversation, we wanted to note that we experienced some technical glitches during this recording, causing our host's audio to cut in and out during certain sections. However, we loved what Peter from Tagger had to say, so we decided to release the episode in full despite the audio issues. We appreciate your understanding and hope you enjoy their conversation as much we did. Thank you.
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Ryan: Hello everyone and welcome to the Loop Marketing podcast. I'm Ryan Green, the head of marketing and Innovation at Coegi and I'm happy to be joined by the founder and CEO of Tagger Media, Pete Kennedy. Thanks for joining us today. I know we have some big news to talk about but would love to hear a little bit about your background, a quick elevator pitch, and resume of how you got here today.
Pete Kennedy: Yeah. yeah, good to meet you. Thanks for having me here. So yeah, my resume is long. I've been doing stuff for a long time, but yeah, I've always kind of started companies. That's always been my thing. So I've started companies in the independent travel space back in the.com era, I started a medical device company, I started a water sports recreational business, and then obviously most recently started Tagger Media about eight years ago.
Ryan: So I guess, we'll, I don't wanna bury the lead here. Tagger just got acquired by Sprout Social, so congratulations. I'm sure that was quite the process. I haven't been a serial entrepreneur like yourself. I'd love to hear, and I'm sure our audience would love to hear a little bit about what happens during an acquisition and what the lead up time is. How do you know that the company that's acquiring you is the right fit? I'd love to hear whatever detail that you'd like to share about especially since it's so fresh within the past two weeks. What was that process like?
Pete: I think selling a company is harder than actually starting a company. Crazy enough. When they say that the deal changes a hundred times a day, it really does. I mean, the deal is just constantly changing and morphing. But we talked to Sprout probably in December of 2022 for the first time. They reached out and said, hey, we're kind of looking at this space. The real conversation happened about four months ago, and they came out and we met with their CEO, their president, head of business development, and what we were looking for is an opportunity to win in this space. Sprout has 30,000 customers and they're all doing influencer marketing, so a lot of the RFPs that they're coming in and, and all their customers are requiring are asking for influencer marketing. 'cause it's such a major part of the media mix, and it's such an important part of the, obviously the social space as well. What we were looking for is not only a company that we could scale with in a major way, but also the right cultural fit. This team is absolutely amazing. A lot of people are coming from Salesforce at that company, which is interesting. So they have this growth mentality and we have like maybe 10 sellers around the world. They have like 600. So it's just this machine that we can jump into which is great, and that the entire team is so excited about Tagger and the ability to sell influencer to all their customers. But yeah, that sales process is long and very, very difficult.
It's a very interesting view into human behavior. When there's money on the table and there's a deal. It's interesting how people behave. But yeah we're thrilled with the outcome. It's been great for us. I was just up in Chicago last week for a sprout all hands and dug deeper with the team and what does this really mean for our customers? That's kind of the third piece of this is like, how can Sprout and Integra combine to create a better experience and a better platform for our customers? That's what we're doing now.
Ryan: So I was a professional poker player in a past life, so I've been at that table and watched the change in human interaction and behavior when there's a lot of money versus how people behave off the table. I'm sure that was something that you were able to see firsthand too, at such a high stakes negotiation. But it sounds like, on the surface of it, at least from one of your Tagger customers, it's a partnership that I think makes sense on the surface, right? There's a good synergy, but not like complete overlap in your services. So we're really, really excited to see what the next 12 months looks like as your teams integrate. I'm sure I'll be bugging you for questions on a number of things here. Let's step back a little bit when you first were kind of coming up with the concept of Tagger. Most businesses, and you've started a number of them in various industries, we're trying to find a problem to solve, right? So what was the problem that you were really looking at and where did you see your ability and your team's ability to find a unique solution with Tagger?
Pete: It’s so interesting, that ideation stage. There's like five stages of a startup, right? There's ideation, there's launch, there's validation, there's growth, and then there's maturity or exit. Ideation stage is so much fun and there's two ways that you can really do this: One is, Ryan, what you talked about, which is the smart way to do it, identify a need, and then create solutions based on that need. Or you can create an idea that you think is interesting that might pertain to a market and then you build that. We actually did both of those things when we started Tagger. We first started with this idea, and the idea was we wanted to disrupt the music industry, okay? The music industry spends billions of dollars every year trying to find new artists and then promoting those artists. They do that by having boots on the ground all over the world, right? They have music bookers, they have doormen at venues who are seeing artists that they think are interesting, sound producers, all these different people. A lot of times they're able to find these people very early on, but what we did is we said, well, let's listen to everyone who matters in the music space, primarily on Twitter at the time. If everyone's talking about Ryan, we could predict that Ryan's gonna go somewhere. Not surprising. The most popular people early on are gonna go somewhere and it really had nothing to do with listening, likes, or views, which that market had been somewhat gamified. So we created this platform where we just tracked all these people, but we had to create databases of all these musicians. We had to create databases of all these people who were talking about musicians. When we turned on the platform, we found, like Dua Lipa eight years ago, we found Billie Eilish eight years ago. I mean, we found all these amazing artists go to the music industry, right? To validate this concept and they all said, what do you idiots know about music? I was like, nothing, but listen, we're doing what you're doing, but we're doing a million times a day and they said, we're not interested. Now, fast forward, most of those music companies are clients, not to find artists, but to find influencers. Then I went to New York and I took 40 meetings in like a two week time period. And every time I was just pitching a new thing because we had this really interesting platform where we could understand audiences and their propensity and we could find artists and all these things, but we didn't know what we had and how it might apply to someone else's business. Gary Vaynerchuk over at VaynerMedia, Gary V, his team heard what we were up to. We got a meeting and they heard about these crazy people running around New York meeting with everyone. Gary and his team were like, listen, we love your data, we love how you can understand audiences, but you need workflow around influencer marketing. I asked the most important question: what is influencer marketing? Because I had absolutely no idea and he said we have 30 people running campaigns for these big brands around the world and we're really doing it on Excel spreadsheets. So if you can take our workflow, and by the way, they were hiring like a thousand people per campaign. Absolutely crazy and they said, if you can take our workflow and put it into a platform, we’ll be your first customer. So I left my family, I moved to New York for a month, and I live with them to really understand what they actually need. Instead of just making a spreadsheet on a platform, we wanted to take that workflow to figure out how we can make it easier. My development team’s in Poland and so I was going back and forth during that month, but by the end of the month we were able to deliver them a product that worked for them. Then it was really interesting. We then brought on a couple more clients. So we could have gone big and just raised money and hired all these people, but we didn't, we slowly got another client and then another client. We focused on agencies because they had the biggest pain points. Just like I did with Vayner, we would get a new client and then I would go sit with them for like weeks and just go in their office and I'd watch the bouncing ball. Like, you discover influencers, but why are you discovering those influencers? Is there a strategy? Who's the strategy person saying we need to go do that? I'd go meet with that person and then we would have to go pay these people. I'm like, well, who pays these people? They're like, oh, that's, accounts payable. I go talk to them. I'm like, well, what are your pain points? So it was interesting, within like a year, I would walk into every agency or any brand, and I would know more about their business because I lived with all these different people to really understand what their needs were. That's really how we did it. So I was able to identify a need based off of them telling us this is what we need, then really just going in and understanding everyone else's needs so that you can build a unified platform that works for both brands and agencies.
Ryan: Alright, it's about 14 follow ups from that. It’s an amazing story. Interscope Records didn't buy you discovering Billie Eilish and their AM people didn't ? How did they bypass it?
Pete: No, it was interesting. So, I think that for that industry, a lot of people, when you reach a certain stage, they don't want to kind of mess it up. Like they don't want to take a risk and be like, okay, we're gonna go change the way we've been doing this and we're gonna go take a risk and try something new. Whereas certain agencies were like, yeah, what we're doing is not working. Let's go change that. Let's find better ways to do that. For the music industry, they're, they're not interested. They weren't interested in changing the way that they were finding artists even though we were finding these people way before anyone else. But they are using it for discovery. The other thing that we found too is you go to the music industry and they're like, well, who's gonna pay for this? I'm like, well, you are and they said, well, we don't have money. I'm like, well, who has the money? No one has money in the music industry apparently. So there was no one who could actually pay for the technology.
Ryan: They have money. They just didn't have as much money as they used to.
Pete: Probably.
Ryan: So, it's a comparative thing. It's like that's why they feel that way. But that's where you get into going into independence, right? With Gary, who's always known to be more of a risk taker trying to be at the tip of the sword. Maybe that's an indication a little bit. I mean, you didn't go to the holding companies with this, right? Or maybe you did, and they were legacy quite a bit like the music industry was. What was it about Vayner and what did you do to allow him to, or to allow them to give you a chance to embed for a month there too? That's quite the ask, right? To get that office space and to get that access because they're giving up time to you, right? Which is just as valuable, if not more than money. How'd you figure your way in there?
Pete: Yeah, it's interesting. I think Gary is first of all, he's an investor and he invests in early technology. He was very early on with some of the social platforms. He's very early on with a lot of really interesting MarTech solutions and I think that first of all, we got lucky. I think that if he didn't have that mindset, I don't think we would have been able to get it in there and really customize development for him. That's the other thing he kinda looked at. He is like, here's a team that's gonna custom develop technology for me. Advertising agencies and brands, they're not technology developers. Anytime that they try to do that, it doesn't typically end that well because that's not really what they do. All we do is technology development, right? So, I think that's what he saw and he saw a great opportunity to get essentially free technology, even though he paid us, still a customer of ours. But that's kind of what he's thinking and then we were able to migrate over to the holding companies as well. How did we get in that office and how did I get to spend time with them? I was invited in, which is interesting. But then after that relationship, I started to invite myself into these other agencies. It's interesting, Ryan, if I come to you and you're using technology or you're using my technology and I say, hey, I wanna come in and learn what you do to make our technology better, to make your job easier, and your employees more efficient, it's kind of a no-brainer for these agencies and brands. So, like, done. Thank you. That'd be amazing. Like, tell me one SaaS company that you guys work with where they've asked you to come in and really see what you guys do and how they can make your life better.
Ryan: It hasn't happened yet, I don't believe. We have a SaaS companies come in for a couple days, but it hasn't happened directly. No one's ever asked.
Pete: Yeah. I think that that's a good lesson for entrepreneurs too. Like, don't be afraid, that's if you think about like the launch stage, right? Where you're actually kind of launching this and getting out there, that's where you need to go in and meet with these companies before you can even validate your business model and your platform. When we first came out there, our platform was not great, it just wasn't. So it took time and it took learning from people like you and being like, okay, what are you guys doing? How can we make your life easier? And you need that collective knowledge because Vayner had a very specific workflow, but that's not the workflow that's in our platform today. That's also not the workflow that our other clients were doing. We realized we need a very modular workflow instead of a rigid one. So it's these learnings that you get from all of these customers that allow you to build technology that's gonna scale and be able to work for everyone.
Ryan: Continuing on that, what are some of the ways that influencer and content marketing has changed and how have those changes evolved the way your platform has changed? You talked about having a modular concept for different workflows with different agencies in house brands, et cetera. But the marketplace has changed quite a bit too externally, so what things have you seen change over the years and how has your company reacted to those changes?
Pete: Yeah, definitely. There's multiple different ways it's changed. First of all, what do you get from influencer marketing's changed dramatically, right? Back when I started this, it was very much a PR focus where it's just like, let's get these mentions out there. It kind of was replacing newspapers, magazines, and traditional PR because that had kind of died off and was really being replaced by influencer marketing. So it was very much awareness building KPIs. But that shift, that allowed money to flow into this space, is when agencies and brands started to look at this more as a paid media execution versus a PR execution, right? So we would go into agencies, especially PR agencies and train them about paid media. Really, Vayner was the one who kind of got me on this. I mean, the Chris Aldi who was running their influencer business, he works for us now, but he started Gary's paid media business. He's like, no, this is paid media. This is what it is. So, even if you're paying someone or you're giving them a free product, you're giving them something that costs you money, it's paid, right? So I think that was a big change. Then the platforms made it easier to report on these campaigns and measure an influencer campaign the same way we measure your other media mix. That was massive. For Procter and Gamble to put $200 million into this business, they need to be able to measure this the same way we measure their other media mix and that was vital. Then a big shift that we've seen, especially over the last two years, is we're not selling our platform to the influencer marketing team. We are now selling to the strategy team, the analytics team, the growth team, the new business teams at agencies, the technology team. All these different teams are using our platform really to get a holistic view of what's happening socially, right? It's important to look at –Social listening is important. Sprout has this amazing social listening platform and they're listening to everyone in the world. What we do is we fine tune that down to the people who actually matter in terms of moving culture and those are influencers or creators. So having that view is helpful when you create that strategy. then I think the last thing that's changed dramatically is just, AI and, well, I'm sure we'll talk about this, but AI has just allowed us to really get a better understanding of what's happening, being able to ingest billions of bits of data, consolidate that down to really specific things so you can be like, okay, yeah, It's raining, but how do I make it rain harder? Or how do I make it stop raining? You need a platform like ours to do that.
Ryan: That's really interesting stuff. You were talking about the new business team using your platform. I think one of the things that's really attractive about Tagger is being able to evaluate what brands are doing in the influencer space, not just what influencers themselves are doing. Getting to have a fingerprint of what your competitive set or your aspirational set is doing and being able to have an understanding maybe how much they're investing in that can be ways that we, from a new business or agency side, can go to our brand and say, hey, your competitor set is interacting with hundreds of different influencers. Here's the creatives, here's the message, here's how it works within their broader ecosystem of paid organic media.I know that's something that you've consciously built into your platform. It's not just the influencers themselves, but what the brand interaction looks like as well.
Pete: Yeah. That's a huge piece of it. So we track about 750,000 brands around the world, okay? They're all categorized into their different industries and so, yes, to your point, it allows you to really understand what's happening on your competitive set level. You can also look at it from an industry level. A lot of times people are looking not at their industry or their competitors, but brands that they emulate or wanna be like, because they're doing a great job, even though it has nothing to do with your space. Then you talk about the new business team. We have a platform called Signals, which I know you're familiar with, but this is our creator listening strategy platform, okay? So you can create a strategy and we have all these different interesting playbooks that allow you to build those strategies. If you're a new business team, for example, take 750,000 brands and then just simply rank order them in terms of who does the most influencer marketing. If you're a new business person, that's great, just, that's a goldmine to figure out who we should actually be targeting when we're going out and finding new brands to work with on the agency side. But then we also have a really interesting report called the Five Ws, the who, what, when, where, why. This really came from one of our clients who is thinking about it this way, but you can look at any industry brand or topic. So, let's say that you're launching an alternative milk yogurt, like an almond milk yogurt. I don't even know if those exist, but let's say you are. Let's take the who, what, when, where, why of that space. Who are the audiences that we're going after? Meaning let's take everyone who's mentioned alternative milk or almond milk or yogurt, and let's find out who is the audience ingesting all that content? Who are the influencers that matter in that space? They matter because they talk about alternative milk, or they talk about alternative yogurt, and when they do, they crush it, they get the best engagement rate. What content works best within this space? Oh, like chia seeds do really well when they talk about alternative milk and yogurt together. Okay, great. That's our content strategy. When should we do this? Is there seasonality? Do we see more content, better engagement rate during summer months versus fall and winter? Where should we do this? No one ever looks at this, what should be our channel strategy? Is it Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch? Where should we be placing these dollars based off of where we see volume within this space? But more importantly, where do we see the best engagement rate? Which then gives you your benchmarks for each one of these different platforms. Then the last one is, and this is probably my favorite, Why are we doing this campaign? Well, to your point, maybe your competitors are spending a ton in this space and we need to invest in order to kind of conquest them, or maybe there's benefits about that product that we should be talking about. So alternative milk, it's good for gut health, it's good for weight loss, good for babies, good for acne. Well, are our competitors talking about those benefits ? If they are not, we should be talking about those things because it matters in the world and people care about those things. So it's that who, what, when, where, why, that I think is just like changing the game for influencer marketing.
Ryan: When we think about who, what, when, where, why and we're talking about AI, I think AI has a lot of potential in the first four, and it's that fifth one that seems to still be the human element of it. I think that's almost true in your platform to some degree as well. I know you have why definitely covered there but that's where the humans are spending most attention. Thinking about the, why the marketers behind the screen are interacting in that area, probably the most, if I were to summarize.
Pete: Well, I think that that is actually where AI comes in the most, to be honest with you. So let's say that we are focused on the pickup truck market, right? Let's say that your client manufactures pickup trucks. Well, why are people buying your pickup truck versus someone else? How did those customers — marketers always say the customers actually position your brand. Marketers don't position the brand, right? The consumer positions the brand, not marketers. So if we can take all the content from influencers about pickup trucks over the last eight months, it's probably a million pieces of content. I can't actually go through all that content to pull out nuggets, but I can put that through AI. What AI will do is they will look at all of that content and they will pick out themes like within two seconds: Towing capabilities, technology, interior comfort, all these different benefits. Then you can then stack rank how your brand fits within each one of those based off of mentions. So if your pickup truck is mentioned the fewest times in terms of towing capability and the few times you were mentioned, you have the worst sentiment. Everyone's saying your towing capabilities are horrible. You as a marketer was like, I think our towing capability's amazing. Well, the market doesn't and the people who move culture are actually saying the opposite of what you think. So as a marketer, my strategy now on the why could be, oh, towing capabilities important for this industry because it's the most talked about benefit with all the benefits of the pickup truck and we're the worst. We probably need to create a campaign around our towing capabilities. Maybe we need to go back to product and say, listen, our towing capability sucks. We need to make it better. But I think AI allows you to filter all this data to understand what are the benefits and where do you stack up along those benefits?
Ryan: Well, especially if your towing capability is the best and the perception is that it's the worst, that definitely is the marketer's job then to fill in the perception versus reality. So that's certainly a place where you need to look, right? I mean, how often are our products that represent those features not being translated to the public, right? That's a big part of what we need to do to be able to tell those stories.
Pete: Exactly. I also feel like if you look at that alternative milk example, it's like, if I launch an almond milk yogurt, what's the first thing I'm thinking about? Taste. Tastes good, tastes better than any other product on the market? Well, is that how consumers think about alternative milk? Is that why they're actually choosing alternative milk products over, you know, traditional milk and what are those benefits? The benefits are weight loss and acne and all these different things? Well, how important are those things? If we have a competitor who's digging into one of those benefits, right? How can we take all that information to conquest that brand because these other four benefits are even better than that competitor who's digging into acne, for example. Without AI, it's hard to do all that stuff.
Ryan: There's obviously positive use that Tagger has with AI. Another thing that is a benefit to us is being able to sniff out fake followers and bots and things of that nature too. As AI becomes more sophisticated, as there's deeper fakes, things like that, is there a roadmap that Tagger has to help marketers at scale, identify where there's nefarious content? Where we're to avoid certain areas so that when we are looking at a plan with 2000 content creators on it, that we're able to get the 200 out that may be coming from a negative place to make sure that we're focusing our spend on what's gonna move the needle and what matters?
Pete: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that fake followers is definitely something that is important but there's two things that I think are even more important. One, it's content, right? That's what we're also seeing. Like I said, we're selling into all these different departments, but that influencer content is being used across the entire customer journey. So for example, yeah, you're gonna run a campaign and it's gonna be an awareness building campaign, or maybe you're trying to get conversion. But that customer journey, okay, they're gonna see that influencer content and then they're gonna start to see other social media ads about that brand. As you know, you have to see something multiple times before you go buy it. Well, what we know is that influencer content performs 300% better than branded content — on TikTok It's like 3000% better. Why? Because it's user generated content and does better than branded content. So now we're seeing all this influencer content being used in paid media ads and then when you go onto these product pages on an e-commerce site, we're seeing influencer content because again, it does better than branded content. Then when we look at like cart abandonment emails, they're AB testing that with influencer content, it's actually converting better. So all the way along this customer journey, what you're seeing is the influencer content. So yes, if your sole purpose is I just want to go out and buy an influencer, hire their audience essentially, and use that as my conversion, yes, fake followers is super important, but to me it's like, let's go find creators who make amazing content. Who creates content that's authentic to themselves and authentic to their audiences because we, through our affinity data, we can really understand, like, do these audiences care about these things? Then let's go take that content and use it across our entire e-commerce, our entire customer journey so that we're getting the most outta that content. So fake followers are becoming a little less. Then we're also looking at more in terms of first party data and saying, well, do certain influencers convert better than other influencers do? When you start to be able to get more and more of that data, then it's like, Ryan, you might have a hundred thousand followers and maybe 50% of them are fake, but you convert better in healthcare than anyone else. I don't really care. Now, maybe what that means is instead of paying you based off of your a hundred thousand followers, yeah, I'm gonna pay you based off of you having 50,000 followers, but if I know that your conversion is so high, your followers don't really matter because I'm paying you based off of what you're gonna convert from me anyways. Again, not always. There's multiple ways to think about that and I think fake followers are getting less and less relevant and more about, well, what can we do with this data and what's our ROI on this campaign as a whole?
Ryan: Switch gears a little bit. Thinking about brands that really do well in the content marketing space, there's obviously some brands that have built the almost entirety of their marketing function around influencers. I have some brands that don't spend a dime on influencers and that are performing very well for themselves. What are a couple examples that you see of brands that are using creators and influencers appropriately, making it part of their bigger ecosystem, but using that to really drive their brand growth, their conversion growth, their sales, all of it? What's a well balanced brand that is doing well but maybe isn't putting a hundred percent of their trips into influencer or using it as part of their larger transcript?
Pete: Yeah, I think that, as you mentioned, there are some brands who, they're billion dollar companies and they're all influencer marketing. That's all they do. I think for more mature brands or even challenger brands, influencer marketing is a major piece of their entire marketing mix. Companies that do it well are finding influencers that are authentic to their brand category, but whose audiences also care about those things. I think Lululemon's done a really interesting job of this, because yes, they're out there promoting all of their clothing, which is great. But they're also partnering with mental health influencers as well because they know that that's an important part. So when brands are partnering with influencers to, yes, talk about their products, but more importantly they're talking about things that matter to their audience. Mental health is something that matters to their audience and they realize that. So, back in the day, influencer content used to be polished and beautiful and just everything. And now it's real because people are looking for social connection and they're kind of rejecting this social comparison, you know? I think that companies like Lululemon have realized that. You're gonna see every size model in their content, you're gonna see them talking about issues, not about working out, but about mental health, things that matter to their consumer. Then another company that I think did some interesting stuff was Behr Paint. They create paints and they have a bunch of different colors and they partnered with Emily Zugay and she's this hilarious influencer that basically takes all of her paints and then she destroys the paint colors and renames them. So she might take like, green or something and call it like, cute green or way more clever than what I'm gonna come up with. But again, it's kind of rejecting this high gloss social comparison and being real and hilarious. Brands are able now to kind of take the polish off of themselves, I think which is kind of interesting as well. Letting an influencer who, this is what she does, and that's why she has a big audience, literally kind of like destroy the brand in a way because you know that that's what people are looking for. So I think those are two pretty interesting examples. But, there's hundreds of brands that are doing a great job of promoting their companies, but really bringing in social issues that matter to their audience, which is gonna be different from a brand next door whose audience is completely different.
Ryan: Very brave of Bayer to strip off the gloss, so to speak. A paint company stripping the gloss off of themselves is counterintuitive to their product, but certainly makes sense. I think that leads into my next question: what changes do you predict will come in influencer marketing over the next couple of years? You've talked about the change from that curated content to a lot of more unfiltered content brands that are looking to partner with longer term ambassadors. Then just one-off, activations with individual influencers as I'm sure you're looking at how your company's going to grow with the recent acquisition. Where do you see the marketplace going?
Pete: Yeah, again, I think that you're gonna see more and more influencer content being used across the entire customer journey. I think that's gonna be a big shift. Honestly, though, I think AI is gonna be a major addition to the influencer marketing process. Again, it's not gonna replace anyone's job, it's just gonna allow them to be better at what they do. So a couple examples would be, just sending out communications with creators, being able to analyze that creator's content and their voice, and then writing emails to these creators. You have to ask these people to work with your brand and not every creator wants to work with your brand. So being able to create a voice that's gonna resonate with the creator using AI and be able to do this across a hundred influencers at the same time, is gonna make you way more efficient in your job. So that's one quick example. Another example is just to take all of your content as a brand and look across all these creators instantaneously to find that perfect match of tone and thought and content in order to find those right creators. I also love this idea. AI does a great job of summarizing content. What it doesn't do a good job of yet is to say, hey, here's what's happening in my industry. I have a hundred thousand dollars. How should I spend that? It can't do that yet. I think in the future it might be able to, because again, it can just summarize data pretty well, but it can't tell you how to spend your money. But I think that that's gonna be another interesting use in the influencer marketing space. Here is all the information about this industry. What should my strategy be? Ryan, I'm sure that you've had this with some brands where they're like, okay, we're interested in influencer, let's just kind of tiptoe into this and let's put in $20,000. It's like, you can't go and buy $20,000 worth of Facebook ads and see a huge change in your revenue, right? You have to be thoughtful, but you have to invest money into the space in order to move the needle. So I'm hoping that AI can help.
Ryan: We've had clients ask us on both sides, hey, what's the minimum amount we need to, to be able to see results, but also how much could we spend till we get to diminishing returns, right? So it's both sides of that equation. We actually asked Bard or ChatGPT, I believe, to build a media plan for us and it was pretty vanilla what came out of there, right? The lowest common denominator of synthesizing everything on the internet into one place. But I do see the value of what you're talking about, of being able to analyze a creator's content and be able to speak in their voice when you do send out an initial email or a brief to them. So that already looks and feels in the language that they're talking.
Pete: That's right. Also when you think about our signals platform where, hey, I want to create a topic around alternative milk, or let's just say around soup. Well, in order to find all the content about soup, I have to put in soup, chicken noodle soup, you gotta put in all this stuff. With AI, I can just type in soup and then it finds anything related to soup at all, right? So it makes my discovery of influencers much easier, but it also makes my strategy, that who, what, when, where, why to understand an entire market. It's gonna pull in all of the content that's relevant to exactly what you're looking for.
Ryan: So can I surmise that there may be some changes or enhancements to your platform that artificial intelligence is gonna be able to fuel?
Pete: Oh, we're already doing it right now. So, I've already seen a lot of this. Like I've seen all this stuff already on our platform. We're still developing it and we'll be launching it over the next month or two, but yeah, it's just gonna make your life so much easier.
Ryan: Coegi’s gonna be a beta tester for that.
Pete: A hundred percent. I mean, there are certain agencies that are thought leaders and you guys are ahead of the curve with most of this stuff. So obviously we always look for partnerships with you guys to help us drive that product development. That's really where our product development happens, is with you guys, it's like, what do you guys need? What are you guys thinking about how the market's going and how can we build based on those needs?
Ryan: You've been very proactive with us. I know we've had several meetings and you're the president of the company and you attend those, right? That means a lot that I can tell that you care very much about the synergy between what your customers need and what your product is able to provide for customers. From your Gary V story, all the way through interactions that we've had here today. So I got a couple minutes. Is there any final thoughts or anything you'd like to pitch while we have you?
Pete: No, yeah. I'm just excited about this partnership with Sprout. It's gonna be beneficial for all of our customers. Even if you're not a Sprout user, you're gonna see the benefit of that. I think that when you combine social publishing, social listening, employee advocacy, all of this with influencer marketing, yeah, two plus two equals eight within this space. Again, if you're not a Sprout customer, you're not gonna lose much on our side. But I think when you have both those together, it becomes super interesting. You become much more efficient. There's way more stuff that you guys can do. We’re still working out the details of, what are the quick wins and then what are the long term wins? We'll continue to be two separate platforms into the future, but there's a lot of learnings that we can take from both platforms.
Ryan: Well, we're excited to see what that looks like both, with the quick wins and those longer ones that's fresh off the press. I'm sure there's more questions and answers, but I'm really excited to continue to partner with you. Thanks again for your time today and we'll chat again maybe a year from now and see where you're at and what's changed.
Pete: Amazing. Looking forward to it. Thanks, Ryan.
Ryan: Thanks Pete.
Pete: Yep. Take care.
Thank you for listening.
