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- [00:00]
Sarah Sluss
Foreign. Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast
- [00:15]
Alison Schiff
devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
- [00:24]
Sarah Sluss
Today's episode is sponsored by Verve. First, Verve captures over a billion daily search, AI chat and zero party signals, giving brands and publishers a real time understanding of intent.
- [00:46]
Alison Schiff
I'm Alison Schiff and you're listening to Ad Exchanger Talks. My guest this week understands the creator economy better than most. Ryan Detert is the CEO and co founder of Influential, an AI powered platform that connects brands with creators. Poobliss's group acquired Influential in the summer of 2024 for 500 million smackaroos. We'll dig into how Ryan's early experience with Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and even time spent at the poker table helped shape his approach to building a data driven business for brands that actually want proof their creator spend is working. Ryan also has lots to say about measurement creators as media channels, the impact of AI on brand safety and fraud in the influencer space, why live content and live shopping are finally going to happen soon, and lots of other good stuff. Let's talk about it. But first, mark your calendars for Thursday, June 4th at 11am Eastern for a webinar hosted by Ad Exchanger and Pebble Post about how to prove CTV performance in a way that keeps your CFO happy. You can register for free at adexchanger.com hey Ryan, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:59]
Ryan Detert
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:01]
Alison Schiff
So I usually ask guests to share something about themselves that not a lot of other people already know. But I'm going to prompt you with something that I already know about you, which is that you've been involved with the Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America since you were a kid. Your mom signed you up as a, as a little capital L Little. And I know that mentorship has been a big part of your life and also why you had the confidence to eventually start Influential. And now you're on the national board and you just made this big donation in honor of your mentor, Clayton Roth, who passed away. So tell me a little bit about your story, the origin story, if you will.
- [02:40]
Ryan Detert
Well, thank you for asking. Yeah, it's something that's near and dear to my heart. From 8 to 38, I was a little brother to Clayton Roth and he unfortunately passed of stage four cancer and you know, wrecked us as a family. But he has two kids. They're now my littles and they're now, they're now grown. They, they're in their like mid to late twenties. They're some are married and have kids, others are getting married. So it's, it's been this amazing journey where something that as a kid all I knew was someone that was going to basically take me to baseball games and give me a few hours a month in time in terms of like, you know, time and, and just kind of, you know, just being around led to being a true part of our family and really led to my, my passion for mentorship because of what it did for me and any way I could pay the Pay it forward obviously in the national board with donations but also doing Influencer campaigns to help bring awareness to get a lot of the original. There's so many people that are in the industry and in sports or in entertainment that were bigs or littles that you know, I've been part of these campaigns we've done to make awareness and yeah, the goal is to have you know, there's millions and millions of kids of all, all ages and all parts of the country that need a big and these people could be again someone that is just giving a few hours a month to those that are, you know. I was recognized alongside Rashad White NFL player. His big is also now his agent. So literally people have become like full fledged business partners, you know, have joined each other's families. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a BBBSA is something that truly does change lives and Cleveland changed my.
- [04:27]
Alison Schiff
It's also nice to be able to use your skills to promote something or to do something positive for an organization like using Influencer to promote Big Brothers and Big Sisters.
- [04:39]
Ryan Detert
I have a particular set of skills and like to use them towards things.
- [04:41]
Alison Schiff
That's right.
- [04:43]
Ryan Detert
A lot of outcomes for people. It's been a blessing and yeah and it's been multiple years so it's been exciting. Happened before the exit. Since then I've been able to donate more money and also I give a big shout out to Publicis and some of my Joel Linenfeld and Dave Penske. They also actually helped and put money in themselves joined the fight to help these kids. It's been a great effort.
- [05:11]
Alison Schiff
I'm going to spend a little more time in the past before we fast forward all the way to the acquisition by Publicis. You studied psychology and philosophy when you were at college at a small liberal arts college in Florida and it's not exactly the typical path to tech founder. So how did you get from there to building influential? In retrospect, it feels almost like on the nose for someone who built a company where a Lot of the premise is understanding how influence and human trust works, but I'm sure the journey wasn't as obvious while you were living it. And there were lots of twists and turns along the way.
- [05:48]
Ryan Detert
Yeah, my psychology knowledge helped me in my late 20s, early 30s when I was speaking to advertisers about audiences and people's behaviors in this new social media world. Yeah, but if you asked me back in my early 20s, I would have never expected to be a CEO of anything, let alone one of a technology company. I honestly spent most of my time outside of class using my skills at the poker table. Before I was 21, I was doing online. When I was post 21, I was doing it in person. And I felt as like that that led me to understand math and reading people and leverage and all these things that, you know, I guess applies back to the business today. And then when I moved out from Florida to Los Angeles, my brother had a PR company that he was doing. He was, he was in the industry for years. And I watched an entire industry in the PR side try to figure out how to get these audiences that are looking at celebrities and that are reading People magazine and Us Weekly to like integrate with products. And that was a whole business of gifting that existed. And I watched that. I didn't like the business model. I think it was very scalable and unfortunately those businesses largely didn't really didn't grow in the PR space. But while that was happening in 2009, 2010, I fell in love with creating content on Twitter. So I actually started to use my
- [07:23]
Alison Schiff
knowledge, Twitter, Twitter for the X.
- [07:28]
Ryan Detert
And it was, yeah, it was. I mean, this is back when like there was legitimately like parody accounts. So friends of mine were like the. The fake Will Ferrell or the fake Wiz Khalifa. I went more the route of like I owned, like at travel, at automotive, at usa, at fashion and style and basically the dot coms. I found that I could build up these audiences that I, you know, learned about in school and that I was applying in, you know, in this kind of new advertising lens. And yeah, early, early days it was. I got the 30 million followers and it was very hard to monetize. And I was like, how is I? I've done what I think is a really amazing feat of getting to large amounts of audiences and community. And in that world, it just wasn't monetizing much. So as I asked my other friends that are creators themselves or they were, you know, creating these different accounts, you know, how do they monetize? So we occasionally get a brand reach out to us, but there's no way to, there's no, there's no alignment between what is at a brief media measurement, brand safety. All the things that we now take for granted was not really, you know, misinmetal list with these agencies and brands. And what is it? What do you need to really start giving us consistent deal flow and you know, these larger budgets and that when we, after I assessed that I said, well I should, I should build that. So I actually went out and built that technology in a rudimentary sense and then I raised money for our C and A round and then once we got some traction and some significant sales from our technology and offering raised our series B and then, you know, now we are, we basically got to about 9 mid 9 figures in revenue before the, you know, the acquisition. And that was just a 12 year sprint of trying to solve the creator economy. One agency or brand's question at a time. Hey, if, if you could do this, I'll give you XYZ like, well, if I can solve brand safety, if I can solve footfall or in store sales, then I'll open up the call first for you and really convert this largely PR play that was for many years into a media and content play.
- [09:43]
Alison Schiff
So you brought up measurement. I do want to talk about that, so we'll put a pin in it for a second. But I want to make sure our listeners have a clear picture of what exactly influential is and does. Because you didn't go into as much detail as I want to. So it's an AI powered platform. Right. And correct me if I'm wrong, you're connecting brands with creators and then you're just managing the whole process at this point. So you find the right people based on audience data. So not just looking at follower counts, which was really a pitfall, I think of early influencer marketing because the idea was more followers will just translate into more sales. It didn't always work like that or often didn't work like that. So there's that then actually running the campaign, amplifying the content across channels, actually measuring whether it worked and then I guess getting people paid is that part of it.
- [10:40]
Ryan Detert
Also I think you have a sales job in your future if you ever want one.
- [10:44]
Alison Schiff
Oh no, don't say that to me.
- [10:47]
Ryan Detert
That was a great, great synopsis. Yes, it's the identification of the audiences you want to speak to and then across every social platform having these voices, the name, likeness of these creators create branded content that delivers a message, some trust and some conversion hopefully. And all of that is managed soup to not through technology, but also through a team. And really there are two sided marketplaces that exist. We've always been, we are servicing the clients. The brains are our clients. We have 15 million plus creators in our network. So we are helping them fund their passions. But we don't represent anybody. We're agnostic and we're just using the data to help inform why this millennial mom from the Midwest would want us hear from these 10 creators as opposed to the other 10 creators. So we have all these ways to determine the best voices to speak on behalf brand.
- [11:46]
Alison Schiff
I guess the millennial mom could be an influencer too. I mean when you said 15 million I must have really out of date numbers because when I was doing a little research for the podcast, I thought I saw 3.5 million creators. So that's just a lot of influencers. Is that, is that too much? I mean at a certain point does it all tip over? And if everyone can be an influencer, like what is influence?
- [12:13]
Ryan Detert
Sure. Well, everyone can have a community and there are people still on Facebook that can have 500 people in their community that can drive more value than someone that has tens of thousands. When I, when I say the 15 million, mainly people that have over 10,000 followers on an appropriate platform and part of that growth exponentially has been what the, you know, the, the growth of the creator economy, but also acquisitions that have been made over the last few years as well. And in that you have primarily micro and macro creators have been the biggest boom because with all these different subcategories, you know, for brands they want to speak to, they've all been able to essentially underwrite their content and fund their passions. Then there's the people that we all know that the Mr. Beasts that are the mega creators that you know, have hundreds of millions of followers that you know, that get these super bowl style paydays, but also can deliver super bowl style video views. While we are agnostic, we'll do everything from Nano to mega. I think most of the advertising world comes to us and does like media based campaigns. We think of influencers as a media channel are largely in that micro macro sense of like 50,000 to 2 million. It's a pretty big range depending on the platform. But that's where a lot of the most value you're going to see in terms of hitting that right audience. Because for example, I love the rock, I love Mr. Beast, but normally they have a pretty wide swath of audience. You have 100 million followers on Instagram. Maybe you only have a million or that Midwestern mom that you know, loves DIY or whatever the actual activation is for XYZ brand. But if you actually have a creator that has half a million followers, 50,000 followers, 2 million followers, a majority of their audience will probably be aligned. So you have no wasted impressions. And really the idea of a CPM business model, the way you can buy social digital TV was where we back 10, 10 plus years ago, really changed the market and said don't think of it as like a PR or production play, think of it as a media play. Because you're going to guarantee eyeballs with the content you're making. Right.
- [14:17]
Alison Schiff
You know a lot more about someone if they're part of a small community of 500 or 1,000 people than if they follow a Jenner. Like that doesn't really say that much about them.
- [14:26]
Ryan Detert
Yeah, agreed. Yeah. And listen, ultimately there's depending on the brief. The brief, because I want mass awareness and I want a certain level of cool factor around Coachella. Maybe that makes sense. But most campaigns, which I think was changed for the better is it used to be all right, we'll do one or two big campaigns a year, super bowl style with creators instead. Now there's an all we suggest and most brands have an always on every given week or month, there's people live talking about the brand integrating into their life, showcasing the value of it. That's where the market has led to and hence why you've probably heard the same numbers we have. It's $35 billion with a B TAM total addressable market for influencer marketing. And we think that's going to continue to grow to 50 billion and beyond. And you know, it's become a massive channel.
- [15:16]
Alison Schiff
So there is this concept that you guys and also your competitors are pushing pretty hard right now, which is this notion of creators like as media. And it makes sense to me. I mean they are publishers, right? And the idea is that a creator isn't just a person, they're also a publisher, a channel with an audience, a cpm, a targeting profile with reach and frequency characteristics. Of course, the reason why people engage with them is because they're very human. Although we will talk about AI powered and synthetic influencers later. So not every, not every influencer is a person. Um, but if I'm a media planner or a programmatic buyer, how do I plan against. Or I guess like, I should say with like how do I plan with a creator? Like thinking of that creator as a media Channel. Right. Because they have inventory and you, you would assume that could plug into a programmatic stack, but maybe not everything should be programmatic.
- [16:18]
Ryan Detert
Sure. So one of the way, one of the reasons we actually joined Publicis and I found the value of not just obviously having an exit, which is exciting for the industry and for our business, was the integration into partnerships like Epsilon. And for those that aren't aware, Epsilon is a stack of data based on identity that, you know, has been built and acquired by Publicis. So the ability to actually treat it as a media channel. Now I know inside of an influencer's native following how much of that audience is, you know, buying a certain product or taking certain actions. I can then amplify that influencer content towards custom audiences that we know for sure, taking certain actions and measuring that it led to foot traffic or in store sales. So part of this was the ability to actually take that programmatic lens and apply it across multiple channels. And then if I am a media buyer, the reason why, I think for many years, despite the scale and desire of influencer marketing, it wasn't getting the budgets, was it that people didn't know how to buy it. And it's something as simple as just changing the nomenclature around it, properly having technology to validate those impressions were delivered in a native and paid perspective. So a lot of that was done early on by us in the 2013, 2014 range. That led to this boon for us and then eventually for a lot of the market joined in that narrative. And it really does become like, if I'm, if I'm a creator, I want to be my own media company because I have multiple different channels. I have five probably different social channels. I have my name, image and likeness that can be extended even to digital, out of home or ctv. Like that person becomes an industry unto themselves for their community. And I think that's where PR was hinting at that. But they didn't know how to properly make it into a bucket besides pay us for FTEs or pay us for a one time fee. And then like this allows for a scalable way to bring in new creators, drop creators that weren't performing well, made it a more democratized process to find talent as opposed to like a talent agency model where it was just like who was the biggest people that we could pick off the list.
- [18:30]
Alison Schiff
Right. And influential is the internal influencer capability. Now for all of Publicist, like you were just saying. But you're also operating in this world where Omnicom just consolidated all of its influencer stuff. Globally under one brand. And WPP is doing some version of the same thing. And there's also just a lot of competition out there. The platforms are releasing tools that are very focused on influencers for obvious reasons, but like zooming out. What does it mean for the influencer category that you have every major holding company treating creator marketing as a proprietary internal capability rather than something they'd farm out to a partner? Because to my mind, it means they're finally really prioritizing it.
- [19:18]
Ryan Detert
I still think we're like in the third or fourth inning in this analogy of influencer marketing, but we are. We've seen the seed change and that happened probably it started to happen maybe in 2022, 2023, with a few different acquisitions that happened in the marketplace. People are coming to us, looking to acquire us. And obviously ours was the moment in the space in terms of size and scope and scale. And I think as much as the exits are exciting for the space, it is the discipline that now needs to happen. If you're doing these big, we call them power of one pitches. But every company, now, every holding company needs to be able to answer, we've solved this because the CMOs are asking. So in those rooms they go, great. We've solved programmatic, you've solved linear God and claim while you're better there. But a differentiator is not just access to talent, because I think it's largely been democratized. It's your ability to understand the talent or creators and the audience they have and have that be a through line through every part of the business. And I would imagine that every single Holdco will continue to invest in this in the coming years because it's a differentiator for to win new business. And then ultimately, if you're just thinking about it, forget the business part. I'm a cmo. I need to be able to answer to my board that I've solved the community issue or the fan issue of is my brand winning the, you know, the market share, the mind share and the love. Because if I'm not, if I'm being stale and I'm doing old channels, someone else is, you know, nipping at my heels. So we are helping them be defensible in terms of talking to the board, but also really defending their, hopefully their revenue by giving them, I think, the most powerful medium there is, which is the names, you likeness of a person speaking on behalf of your brand.
- [21:08]
Alison Schiff
So we've gotten to this point in the episode and we somehow haven't used the word authenticity, which is kind of insane to me because it's tossed around so often as a buzzword.
- [21:19]
Ryan Detert
I try my best to not bring it into panels and sessions, but it's inevitable. And it is. It's the reason that people are doing influencer marketing. It's, it's, the hope is that these creators can speak on behalf of brands and give them something that they can't do from a programmatic advertisement or a TV commercial. It's, you know, it's, it's really adding into a community and it's, it's, it's here to stay.
- [21:45]
Alison Schiff
It's just almost unfortunate that it's become a bit cheesy because it really is the best word to describe what everyone's trying to achieve. But, but you can't say it without an eye roll. What can you do?
- [21:56]
Ryan Detert
Well, maybe you and I will come up with a new word to permeate throughout the industry. I'm down for it.
- [22:03]
Alison Schiff
Well, if people have any ideas, email me allisondexchanger.com I'll include them in the article that'll accompany this episode. All right, we're going to take a quick break and when we're back, I saved a few super meaty topics for the second half. We're going to talk a lot more about AI and measurement for sure, which we only just teased, so stick with us.
- [22:39]
Sarah Sluss
I'm Sarah Sluss, Editorial Director of Ad Exchanger, and with me today is Samantha Dasher, SVP of Publisher Strategy at Verve, where she works with publishers on audience development and what may be one of the most interesting moments that open Web has had in a decade. So welcome, Samantha.
- [22:57]
Thanks so much, Sarah. It's great to be here.
- [22:59]
Audience development is going through a real shift right now. How are you seeing discovery actually happen today?
- [23:07]
Discovery is no longer a one way highway and honestly, I think that's a very good thing for publishers. A reader might find a story through Google, a friend texting them a link, a newsletter, a podcast mentioned TikTok, or increasingly through ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini. What's changed is that there are now more surfaces rewarding quality content instead of fewer. If you create something useful, authoritative or genuinely interesting, there are multiple ways for that content to travel to the consumer. At Verve, we have a unique lens into this because we see roughly a billion publisher searches and LLM prompts every day. That means we can watch behavior shift in near real time. And what we're seeing is that the strong content tends to win everywhere. A well reported article might rank in search, get cited by an AI assistant show up in a newsletter and spark discussion elsewhere. And that compounding effect is real. And for publishers, it means the opportunity today is broader than it was during the era where everyone relied too heavily on one channel. So diversified discovery is healthier, more durable, and frankly, way more exciting.
- [24:13]
So one of the biggest shifts that you just alluded to is that if I'm looking for information, I'm not typing it into a search engine as often, often anymore. I'm putting it in a prompt and it's giving me that full answer. So what does that open up? How does that change things?
- [24:30]
Oh, a lot. Search queries were often really shorthand, two or three words with very little context. And prompts are very different from that. People are telling AI systems exactly what they want, often in full sentences with details, preferences, constraints and intent layered in. And that gives a much richer understanding of what consumers actually care about. Someone isn't just typing running shoes anymore. They're saying that they need marathon shoes under a certain budget because they over pronate and train four days a week. That's a completely different level of signal. Because we sit across both search and LLM activity at scale, we get to see that evolution happen side by side. It's one of the clearest indicators of where audience behavior is going. And for publishers, I think this creates real opportunity. The sites with actual expertise, niche, authority and content that answers nuanced questions well are positioned to win. This is a much better environment than the old game of chasing keywords and volume for the sake of volume.
- [25:36]
So with discovery changing so much and happening in so many places and new places, how are the publishers that you think are the most forward looking and innovative thinking about where to invest?
- [25:50]
The smartest publishers we work with are doing two things at once. They're protecting and optimizing the channels that still matter today, while also investing in assets that compound tomorrow. Search still matters. It drives meaningful traffic and revenue, and publishers doing it well should absolutely stay focused to their. But we're also seeing real momentum behind newsletters, registered users, first party data strategies, direct relationships and content built to perform across AI surfaces. Those investments travel further because they create value across multiple channels at once. And part of what we help publishers do at Verve is understand where they already appear in search and LLM environments, where white space exists and where they can grow. When you can see a billion of these moments a day, patterns become very clear. I genuinely think this is one of the most interesting moments Publisher has had in years. And I've been doing this for 16 years. Now there are way more ways to reach audiences, more ways to monetize quality, and more value being placed on what great publishers do best.
- [26:56]
So audience development is expanding and it's important to think of audience development as something that's encompassing AI as well as all of these other tactics that people have been using for a long time. So thank you, Samantha, and thank you to Verb for supporting ADXchanger podcast.
- [27:14]
Thanks so much, Sarah. It was a real treat.
- [27:31]
Alison Schiff
All right, welcome back and yeah, let's get right into the nitty gritty and talk about measurement. So despite all of the progress with Influencer, I think measurement is still. I don't know if you would agree with this part of the credibility gap for this channel, even though it's attracting so much money because Traditional media has GRPs and programmatic has last touch, even though it's sucks with a little incrementality tossed in. But creator marketing for a long time has run on things like engagement rates and reach and follower counts and just like vibes, basically. So what does a rigorous incrementality test or a really sophisticated measurement approach actually look like for a creator led campaign? And also, are you seeing CMOs and CFOs actually demanding that level of rigor or are they still basically okay with softer signals and vibes?
- [28:33]
Ryan Detert
So I love the measurement question partly because I'm a nerd, but in my.
- [28:38]
Alison Schiff
Yeah, same.
- [28:38]
Ryan Detert
Yeah. In, in 2015, 2016 we noticed a shift of like, all right, you know, to make this next iteration higher of. Of spend we had to validate and everything came around, you know, come from MMMs was it obviously conflicts and conversions. There was the offline component piece to it and we didn't solve all of it right away. We basically systematically went one by one to find I call it a stitch. What is the integration point. And back in. They've changed the name of themselves now. But IRI used to was. Is now Circana was the original version. But in 2015 I was actually on the advisory board and we were thinking what is the way that we can showcase that these CPG companies that are loving doing Influencer marketing because it was a great demonstrable way to show their product, how do they actually show the efficacy? And that was through matched market tests, which is essentially tested control methodology. Those that were served it, those that were not served it, was there a lift in those markets that was essentially doing a dark versus all, you know, showing the post. And that does exactly. We've got hundreds of those over, over time and not all of them are always showing lift because sometimes every campaign is perfect. But most of them show that the efficacy of a creator married to paid media to hit those local markets is driving sometimes as much as 4 or 5x the investment. So there are those moments and those led to a lot of the growth I think in the CPG space in the influencer marketing world. Same thing happened in the footfall driving into QSRs, driving into retail stores. You can do that test control methodology before, I mean they all combined together to become one company. But like placed iq, you know, square all these different companies, I think they're all 9th decimal. They've all have had offerings that if you were to do a test control methodology or now even the full integrations into the metas and tiktoks of the world, you can actually do measure the, the efficacy of these, of these campaigns. TV TuneIn, do that for, you know, a number of great partners, sports leagues to different, you know, channels, you know, seeing obviously direct D2C conversions. And then back to the original part which is yes, now we're able to help solve the mmm of it all by really breaking down not just the paid portion, but the native portion and giving the approximate data from the APIs of the platforms in terms of number of impressions served, the approximate cost of those creators. And then also we extend a good portion of our content into digital out of home, ctv, other places and then also validating that as part of the NMM media mix modeling. So I think we're in a world where if you have the right technology and thesis, companies like ourselves have led to not just solving this, but I think also giving comfort and case studies and benchmarks. But yeah, I'd say most of the industry did not invest in this scenario with their technology. They're largely manual, more PR centric. So that's one of our biggest differentiators was doing that early on and I think that's led to hopefully a number of brands trusting in this space more than ever before.
- [31:48]
Alison Schiff
And you mentioned in passing the metas and the TikToks of the world. So they all have platform native creative tools. So things like AI powered discovery and built in brand matching and performance forecasting and all of that stuff is getting more sophisticated and it just begs the question of what that shift and true embrace of creator marketing means for the value that other providers can bring. So like what would the argument be for a brand to use influential rather than using what the platforms give them for free or close to free because they kind of just can.
- [32:23]
Ryan Detert
Sure, yeah, we are agnostic. So if you say I want to hit a certain audience instead of asking individual platforms, we're going to tell you the thing that they think is best for their own platform. We're going to give you the assessment across all platforms, all audiences, showcase the different cost structures, showcase where the most efficacy is. I think every single platform, I'm sure they have great stats and metrics, are going to claim that their platform was best at converting X. We just, we have the visibility across everything so we have to act as a really unbiased partner in the scenario. And with us doing so much scale, we get API connections to be able to get special insights that allow for us to then again help a brand really use our buying power and our scale and our growth over the years to get a better turn than maybe just kind of being out of the box and going to a link in a website somewhere.
- [33:20]
Alison Schiff
I mean they always get dinged for grading their own homework. It's been a long standing issue.
- [33:27]
Ryan Detert
Yes. And again, I think we've partnered a number of case studies and things and on stage with, you know, across YouTube, did it for possible with meta with TikTok. I mean they're all, they're all snap. They're all, they're all, they're all, they're all, you know, a key part of their ecosystem and they really have the distribution, you know, kind of channel and then, you know, they realize and I give a lot of credit to TAC in 2020ish. That was a big sea change when I think before that other platforms were just kind of, you know, able to make money off of the regular paid media portion of the advertising. TikTok is so much based off of the virality entertainment factor, the joyfulness they needed to be able to find a way to get brands to underwrite the content itself to get these people, you know, monetizations on their passions. And when that happened and we helped build some of those things in the back end, but I forever ago we did, it became a whole domino. Every single platform jump came to us first and said what are the things that are needed to make brands feel like they can come to our platform and identify the right talent and understand their audiences and measure this. So we're very blessed, the right place at the right time, enough scale to be able to provide that to everyone. And I think the next bastion will probably be the live space for a lot of these platforms. So it's a never ending process of finding ways to, you know, give a, give a brand or A cmo, an unfair advantage.
- [34:51]
Alison Schiff
I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about podcasting, and we're on a podcast right now. It's having a significant convergent moment with influencer and creator marketing. Podcast ad spend is also growing and video podcasts are exploding. We started. Even Ad Exchanger is doing video podcasts now. And I think hosts are increasingly being treated like influencers and they have these massive followings. And meanwhile, you have more traditional creator campaigns that are being distributed increasingly through audio first channels. So audio and audio combined with video, it's very powerful. But how are you guys thinking about podcasting as part of the creator ecosystem? And do you plan it differently or measure it differently, or does it fold cleanly into the same framework you'd use for like a TikTok or a YouTube creator?
- [35:45]
Ryan Detert
Yeah, most. Most of our work with podcasting is an extension piece to a campaign we're doing on other platforms. And then obviously, if given the right budget and availability and sometimes the podcasting costs more than the actual social campaign, you know, someone like, you know, think of like the, the Alex Coopers of the world, the Joe Rogans, the, you
- [36:06]
Alison Schiff
know, Theo Vaughan or whatever.
- [36:08]
Ryan Detert
Yeah, no, Robbins. I mean, they, they deservedly have a very high threshold to, to be a part of their network because it's reached by so many people in such an intense, engaged way. So, yeah, for us, it's like if they want to go to that audience, that'll be part of the marketing mix of like, hey, we'll do this. Maybe more of the content. Would it like. Because I, I will say most, most podcasts, they have a lot of read in or they'll have something that feels as though, like, everyone knows that. So it's like, it's like the, you know, throwback to the. I always use the jaw reference to like the 50s and 60s. Like, all right, time for the advertising versus still highly FTC compliant being like brought to you by this. But here is then a story or a demonstrable narrative. Less likely do I see that on podcasts, they usually. Or the more reading and they get back to the topic. And a lot of times, like a YouTube integration, for example, like, you know, the cost basis of like doing a full YouTube video for only one brand is very expensive. But doing the, you know, the, the bite size, you know, slice of life moment in between is far less expensive and it's far more integratable. So we'll do a bunch of those things across every platform. And then the audio piece, assuming they have A beta following an audience and they have the right guests. So yeah, it's, it's really, it's a, it's an audience play with an extension piece usually to like some branded content piece that might live on TikTok meta, YouTube shorts, etc.
- [37:36]
Alison Schiff
I'm going to jump around a little bit because I mentioned it during the first half but then I forgot until now to get back to it. But brand safety and ad fraud or just fraud in the creator space because those are anxieties that just never fully go away for, for brand advertisers. And so there are fake followers, there's engagement inflation there potential brand suitability issues when a creator maybe says something problematic. Undisclosed paid partnerships sometimes and not new problems. But the scale of the creator economy I think now means that the stakes are much higher and everyone's also just very sensitive. So is AI helping solve those problems or is it making them worse? Because AI generated content and AI assisted like Persona creation, like synthetic influencer identities or even real creators having their likenesses replicated to generate content at scale or whatever without actually making it. Those things introduce brand safety vectors that didn't really exist before. So it's just ironic, right, because AI is introducing new brand safety issues that didn't exist before. But it's also potentially part of the solution to that new problem, which is often true about AI in lots of different places.
- [38:57]
Ryan Detert
You called it directly AI is solving and has been solving for many years many of these issues of scale to identify video, image, text, entire timeline history scans a human couldn't do that would take too many hours that are non existent in a day, too many people. But yeah, it's new problems. So they basically have solved some of our problems represented new problems around misinformation or proper. I think platforms are getting pretty good at tagging AI content but obviously need more there as well. And then yeah, the, the, the, the likeness of a creator. I, I, I spent a lot of time at Possible. I was on stage for our digital fight club with my friend Shelly Palmer. I was an AI, an AI guru in AI Oracle. And yeah, the whole topic we had around, you know, AI content which you know, creators human creatives versus AI is it's one thing that say which can make more content but who's getting compensated for that when that, when that name is your likeness, makes that net new synthetic human or creates something, you know, that really in any other medium would be a copyright infringement or you know, at least someone have the right if they didn't get compensated at least have the right to say yes or no to it. That that stuff seem to be. It seems to be skipped in the LLM scenario doesn't mean we can't figure out a way to solve it and that the platforms, social and LMS won't do that. But right now I think it's a question of brand safety. It's a question of credit and compensation. So all these things are now in the mix and incrementally I think that we were all making progress. As we identify these things, we can then say raise our arms and say, this is not correct. I will say that the brand safety side has been a massive boon for AI because we can look at hundreds of thousands of videos in the course of a few minutes through technology and find if there's curse words, if there's music in the background that's unlicensed or has curse words in it, nudity, profanity, hate speech, all of that if properly trained and denoted by the brand or what they do and don't want to. The key part of our offering is do no harm Democratic oath.
- [41:18]
Alison Schiff
Seems like AI would be a great way to go back in time and scrub all of your past posts, the stuff that will haunt you if you run for political office or whatever. Right. Like something you said back in 2011
- [41:33]
Ryan Detert
on Twitter, Bonehead tweet.
- [41:35]
Alison Schiff
Yeah, yeah. That ruins your life.
- [41:38]
Ryan Detert
And we've. That's been a big part of our investment in technology and our infrastructure and in our pitch is, you know, it's making sure that you have a Page Six moment. I guess that's the number one issue is I don't think anyone questions whether or not influencer marketing is effective now. It's like if it's. It's so effective that you need to make sure that you don't have a gaffe, because that gaffe can be worse than the campaign. But if you protect it, you can actually harness this, you know, the power of the sun of influencer marketing without hopefully getting burned by it.
- [42:09]
Alison Schiff
This is going to make me sound so old when I say it, but there are so many influencers that I know have really avid followings and I never heard of them. And I know they're not like for me, they're for other generations. But it really is amazing how very specific an influencer can be for a certain group and how that group loves that person and their parents might never have heard of them or just don't, don't get it at all. But it's not for them.
- [42:44]
Ryan Detert
The fragmentation is, is Wild because there are so many sub like people that love to do seashelling that are gardening like just people that are famous in the community and if you want to really feel old and I feel when I watch it is like they'll show pictures of like Brad Pitt or someone, you know, some sort of like George Clooney to like a, you know a person under 25 years old and they're like I don't know who that is and then you show. But Mr. Beast is like the Tom Hanks, you know of influencers now. So yeah, I just, we're, we're have an entire generation that grew up on YouTube. They're not, they're not going to watch traditional TV or movies.
- [43:21]
Alison Schiff
All my friends kids want to be YouTubers. I is. Are they going to have to get other jobs? They can't all be YouTubers. Right?
- [43:30]
Ryan Detert
Maybe it's the universal basic income, maybe it's from the YouTuber. I think, I think it'll be and I give a tremendous amount of credit to YouTube. They are the most giving split, 50 day split in terms of ad revenue in that vicinity. So I think that I wouldn't unless otherwise said by the parents if I had a kid that wants to talk about their passion, they should monetize it on YouTube because that helps build the library for the future. It's like an annuity for the rest of their life. I don't know if all the content that's on the Internet needs to be made, but someone's watching it, then they should keep making more of it. I guess
- [44:17]
Alison Schiff
I want to go back though to LLMs because it really is underappreciated. The implications for creator marketing. Everyone's talking about the impact on publishers and that is so real. But when someone opens ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever and asks what what's the best moisturizer for dry skin or what running shoes should I buy or whatever it is, the LLM is going to synthesize the answer from a very broad range of training materials and that's going to include social posts in many cases and creator content. So you have creators influence like being extracted from the original context and then baked into an AI recommendation. And yeah, I can relate. It hurts, right? I mean there's no reason necessarily to click through and probably if someone clicked through they'd be very entertained. But people don't really click through or I often don't click through and so I just wonder what it means for creators if influence is getting sort of laundered through LLMs. Like that.
- [45:23]
Ryan Detert
Well I will say that largely Reddit and YouTube, a few other platforms also get kind of high ranking but like 50% of of the source material like ranking criteria appears to be going through social platforms and creator content. So the influence is undeniable. It goes back to what I was talking about on stage. Possible there needs to be some sort of crediting and I, I think it's trackable. I, I have not seen a, a platform yet that assault for but knows all neural networks but the source material is there. That tells you if you actually look at a lot of the back ends of these LLMs so they'll give you the credit the sourcing places. But then there should be some similar if you're a Spotify like if your favorite artist isn't just them, it's like the 10 writers, producers, the label. It's a bunch of things that happen the surface and I think a lot of times the content that is used to build that higher ranking LLM for a brand, you know, was built on the backs of you know, talent and creators. So I hope I'm happy I I called out on stage that I'm looking to invest to help that the overall I say creator community creators to me is like similar to your question about 15 million creators creators in this LLM world. I think it's creatives, I think it's business owners. I think it's really anyone that is creating something and creating content because the LM's actually unlike maybe Comscore and publications. Lisa, as of what we have seen so far, it's not about who's got 10 million followers and that's the person that informs the LLM. It seems to be right now pretty democratized that really someone that had the right keywords on a YouTube video that may be what makes this brand come up first versus third, you know, in a beauty brand or beauty kind of question for LLM. So and I think those are the people that need the most amount of credit and compensation that as opposed to those that maybe are the highest of all our guts.
- [47:33]
Alison Schiff
So we're at the end. Last question. You've been doing this since 2014 or even before 2014, which is a genuinely long time in this space. And I promise I'm not, I promise I'm not calling you old but a lot has would change in over a decade and you've seen and we touched on it the wave of mega influencers and then the move toward micro and nano influencers, the rise of TikTok, the creator economy becoming like a Holdco acquisition, target AI entering the scene, all of these things. So what's the next big thing that not enough people are talking about yet? If I were to add one more item to that list, but it hasn't
- [48:17]
Ryan Detert
happened yet, yeah, I'd say it's half what we just talked about a minute ago, which is LLMs. And the more that CMOs are asking about how they can put their thumb on the scale to win that, you know, that search, that chat, that conversation, as opposed to just like winning like an SEO war. I'd say LLMs with creators is just now really in the lexicon in the last few months. And then every year we're wrong, but eventually we'll be right. Live. Live content. I mean, the numbers are, are staggering. I see billions of dollars of revenue happening on YouTube on, on Tik Tok, for example, with like people going live. If you ever. On Tik Tok, every third or fourth post, it's like a live. They try to like put in your feed. There's a whole gifting where you can basically give like emojis and gifts to these, these people. Live content is the precursor to live shopping. And live shopping is what do yin. And most of the APAC countries are doing, you know, double the amount of revenue that's happening in North America or even parts of, you know, across the world, minus APAC for these major companies. So at some point, by appointment, watching live shopping has to hit. I can't imagine it's only one part of the world and not everywhere else. Even though we're a few years behind,
- [49:46]
Alison Schiff
it's a good bet. HSN for Gen Z.
- [49:59]
Sarah Sluss
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