← Next in Media
Next in Media
Shane Atchison and Seth Gordon on Building Zaaz Collective for the Creator Economy
00:28:56
Loading summary
Transcript89 lines
- [00:00]
A
This week on Next in Media, I chatted with former Wonderman CEO Shane Atchison along with Seth Gordon, a film director known for writing the comedy Horrible Bosses. We talked about their new initiative, ZAS Collective, which aims to use technology and data to help mid level creators think and act like big media companies. Zaz aims to help with deal negotiations, audience analysis and brand connections. All the things the average creator isn't necessarily good at or gets into this business looking to do. Plus, Zaz is now one of many companies that wants to make it much easier for brands to go beyond that. Top 1% of YouTubers, TikTokers, etc. So we talked about why these guys see an opportunity now and how they're going to differentiate in a crowded market. Let's get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to nexty Media. I'm Mike Shields, my guest this week. I have two, two for the price of one. Shane Atchison, he is the CEO of Zazz Collective and his partner Seth Gordon, who's a co founder of Zaz Collective. Hey gentlemen, thanks for being here.
- [00:50]
B
Hey, thanks for having us.
- [00:53]
A
I think it. In this case, this will be the easiest question you'll have the day. Who are you guys? Why don't we, why don't you both introduce yourselves and then let's talk about what Zazz Collective is. Shane, we'll start with you.
- [01:04]
C
I'm Shane Acheson. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a purist, human and a maker. So spent most of my career working in content creation and digital. Ranging from digital products to digital experience design to advertising campaigns. I spent better part of the last 15 years in the advertising, content and experience space.
- [01:30]
A
What about yourself, Seth?
- [01:32]
B
I'm Seth, Seth Gordon. I work in film, I'm a director producer and have done work in film and TV documentary, things like that. A real safe space in 2025, Seth.
- [01:49]
A
Who is going to buy Warner Brothers? Do you know the answer?
- [01:52]
B
Of course I don't know, but I. It's going to be entertaining for sure.
- [01:58]
A
Yes, that is a more fascinating topic. That is not why we are here. Okay, so you have backgrounds in content creation, advertising, film, what is. So let's talk about what's going on. What is this? What's the ZAS Collective and where did this idea come from? What's the opportunity?
- [02:16]
C
You see?
- [02:16]
A
And then we could talk about all the different avenues we might. This might go down.
- [02:20]
C
Yeah, well Seth and I mean we go back a long time as colleagues and friends and conspirators for good and for creators. About two years ago, Seth And I started talking about the kind of that talent agent model, both in Hollywood and also in the creator economy. And as we looked at it, we said, well, depending on who you listen to, there's 100 to 200 to 400 million creators trying to make an impact, trying to make a dollar, trying to make an impact through what they have to say and how do they connect with an audience. So we built the Super Zas collective, or zaz, as a collective. And the idea is having the machine, the data and the sharing of the intelligence be one layer where creators can learn from each other, share with each other things.
- [03:16]
A
I'm sorry, when you say a collective, are you talking about like a piece of technology, a software?
- [03:21]
C
What do you mean?
- [03:21]
A
What do you mean in this case?
- [03:22]
C
Great question, great question, Mike. It's both. It's both a. Any member of our organization, essentially there's a. There's an annual membership fee to join is a member of the collective. Their data is anonymized and all PI information certainly is extracted. But things like, what are you getting paid on a brand deal for this audience, for this type of brand, for this period of time, we want to give every member of the collective a reference point to know if that's a good deal or not, or if there's a.5 new prompts. You come out with a new version of AI for creators, rather than you acting as a creator to try to find those, try to find those answers and what other people are looking at. We will, you know, we will do leaderboards of, of the top, you know, the top prompts of the collective at any given moment, any given day, based on subject, based on function, based on industry or niche.
- [04:18]
A
And just to interrupt you there for one second, it's funny that you say that. I, I've actually just happened to have had multi. I've done a bunch of panels in this realm recently and several times I've had a creator on stage and it. They all tell the same story of like, the first time my brand approached me, I had no idea what to charge and I felt like I got screwed. So I'm imagining that and they have no one. They don't know who to ask before they're like established. I imagine that comes up a lot, that kind of thing.
- [04:45]
C
100. That's great. Yeah, it comes up all the time and, and I go back to, you know, I'm 52 years old, so. Well, this. When I was in high school, you know, John and Tom were the two guys that were sponsored skateboarders at My school. And they were the coolest, most ahead of us in pop culture kids, you know, and what did they do? They, you know, they rocked their shirt that they got from the brand that they got sponsored by. They had their deck and the trucks on their skateboard and they had some stickers to throw around. More importantly, you know, at that time, they had, they had a brag, they had a tout, they had something to be proud of. And, and I think in today's era, it's, it's wildly different, wildly evolved, right? There's lots of money and lots of influence both in real life and live streaming, where creators, you know, are the, are the area that advertisers are turning to for the most authentic reach and connection to their audience. That's the reason. Well, Seth and I joined up to, you know, to, to help, I mean, make this happen and then to make sure that there's, you know, there's good knowledge for, for a fair deal. You know, I spent most of my career with, with advertisers, brand managers, and I've yet to meet somebody who said they want to, you know, get one over on a creator and get a better deal. It's much more about how do you find the best match of content.
- [06:02]
A
So, Seth, you come. How do you. I cut you guys off for a second. How do you come to the table and what is your vision for maybe where this should go, why there is such a need for this kind of thing?
- [06:13]
B
I feel like this, the new world for creators is a sort of crazy one. The, the creators are making incredible content, but they don't necessarily have the protections that they might need in order to survive and struggle and grow to the their fullest extent. And I think that there's just real potential to support them in this. That's, to me, one of the driving, I guess, impulses for engaging with this is it's kind of a wild west out there. And I think that it's. There's nobody looking out for these creators. And I. And I think that the notion of creating a collective to help them look out for each other is really promising.
- [07:05]
A
And who are we talking about? I'm assuming, you know, the M, the Mr. Beast, the Dhar Manns, the Jude Perfects. They've got agents, they've got big business. They're probably fine. Right? Are you talking about the next tier, the middle tier? Like, what's the range look like?
- [07:20]
C
Yeah, Mike, we're talking about the micro creators. Then. They had 5,000 to 100,000 followers. And of those Followers, you know, those are legitimate humans. Those are not bots, those are not active. Those are, those are legitimate community followers.
- [07:36]
A
And are these folks making a living doing this yet or are they still sort of in an in between zone?
- [07:40]
C
Yeah, it's, it's a hustle, right? It's usually one of three hustles. You know our, our data, look in the data we're seeing is 96% of creators are making, you know, minimum wage or less. Four or 5% of creators are making six figures, US and above. So there's, you know, there's a lot of money flowing into the space. Right. 5, $500 million.
- [08:01]
A
Right.
- [08:02]
C
Going you know, greater economy by 2020, 30, 35% in growth year over year on media spend last year over this year. And the money's just not flowing, flowing to the, you know, to the kind of up and coming creators that are more niche, more specialized in their, in their skill and more specialized in their audience. And, and, and you know, they're not represented by you know, a Hollywood talent agent or a creator talent agent, nor probably should they think. I think it's more self serve and get, you know, and get the best knowledge, get the best context, you know, for, for us, one of the first products we built was helping creators understand their audience across all social platforms in one spot and then analyze the comments that people make on the content that they post. And that's, that's relatively new for most creators.
- [08:46]
A
So that's being naive, a little bit purposeful here that you, you would think, well don't they all have dashboards on these platforms? Isn't that easy to do. But it's, it's, that's not that easy for the average mid level creator to figure that out.
- [08:58]
C
Yeah, I think, I mean they could go into each of the social platforms and look at their, at their analytics, pulling that into one spot to see okay, which you know, how, how does this trend and where the, you know, where are the opportunities where the gaps and then what's real and what's inflated. Right. We all know people follow, follow, you know, not follow somebody spontaneously but not really be in their core audience. Maybe it says something funny to you that or that was yeah possible on the point in time but a year later like yeah, haven't looked on that person anything. They had to say or read it in a year. We try to true that out. We talking about look at quality analysis and then the comments. Comments is a whole nother story. If comments are negative about you as a person or post, that's not great for your mental health. And so quite a few people of our greater class will.
- [09:48]
A
You know what's worse is actually getting no comments. Which I find that is, that is the most depressing thing. But that's just me.
- [09:54]
C
Haunting. Haunting, isn't it?
- [09:55]
A
Yes. No one cares.
- [09:57]
C
Yeah, even worse.
- [09:57]
B
But there's a, there's like a related issue that comes up where some of these creators get so many comments that they tune out. They can't.
- [10:07]
A
I can't even swallow all this.
- [10:08]
B
It's too much, too much to process. I post and I ghost. I can't possibly like begin to handle the feedback, not to mention obviously the negativity that can come up in there. How many of them might be bots? How much is bogus stuff? How much is trash? So a real innovation in this company is filtering all of those comments and presenting you with the ones that matter.
- [10:33]
A
And ones why might they matter? Like I'm, I'm being Devil's app. You could say, isn't that just noise the fans getting? But there's a reason they want to be strategic and use their to have that knowledge.
- [10:45]
C
Right.
- [10:46]
B
A hundred percent. I mean if you're, if you're tuning out everything, then you're missing all, all the possible good leads. A real clean example is someone who may comment on something in your post or, or, or your clip or whatever about like what shirt are you wearing? What is that thing? There's a lot of interest that comes that could be turned into affiliate links.
- [11:09]
A
Right.
- [11:09]
B
And that, that's an example. You totally miss it if you're tuned out.
- [11:14]
A
Yeah.
- [11:14]
B
But if you're, if you're paying attention to it or if it's surfaced for you to, to help you see it, then you can, you can turn into a profit center. That's a clean and simple example of how engaging with the comments can make a big difference.
- [11:29]
C
Yeah, I love that. I mean we call that comments to commerce and it really is purchase intent comments or questions that the audience of a creator has answer them. And if you can give them what they're looking for and the creator could get affiliate commission on it and the end consumer gets the right quality, value, price, availability, many of the many the variables of the Amazon algorithm itself, that's key. I also think the second order effect of people who are commenting and viewing a creator's post, if somebody has half or double or equal content comments that you do and they comment, we're going to raise that up to the top in our Reply Lab product and say hey Mike, just Commented Shane. Respond to him. Right. You know Joe, Joe, Joe comments every day but only has 17 followers. Mike. Right, right, right. So just a very logical prioritization of your next best hour spent on impact is, is important so you can improve engagement rate, improve their media value which are two of the, two of the primary KPIs for, for a creator to monetize.
- [12:40]
A
And this shirt is Old Navy by the way. I think. Thanks for asking but, but I, I don't know if that's valuable. Yeah, the. Okay, so you're, you're talking a lot about this product is for helping, you know these, this mid range of creators professionalize, get smarter about data, take advantage of business opportunities. Is there another side to this? Like do you want to. Because you, we talk about this all the time on the show. It's, it's getting better but it's hard for you hear brands and media agencies and social agencies. You know, there's lots of options in terms of finding creators. It's not simple. It's the data's all over the place. Do you want to, do you want to play a role on that side of things? Connecting the two sides?
- [13:22]
C
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean discovery, you know, discovery, demand and supply. Right. We're focused on, on helping the creators be the best they can be, represent themselves the best possible way so they can make the biggest impact, have the best career, make the most money, need most fulfilled. And so first things first, they need to understand and connect their audience what we just talked about. Second is engage with that audience and grow that audience and retain that audience. Good old fashioned business principles. Third is, is growing, you know, growing that audience in all the ways and tying that into lookalikes of what you know, a brand cares about.
- [14:01]
A
Yeah.
- [14:02]
C
We believe there's still this, this presumption assumption of the creator has intermediate kit number of followers across all platforms, engagement rates, you know, maybe some, some core audience demographics. But, but where, you know, where's the momentum? Right.
- [14:24]
A
Do brands not think shooting deep enough for the, I mean generalizing if you're.
- [14:28]
C
Getting enough information from, from the creators. Because I don't and I don't think so.
- [14:33]
A
They look at followers or whatever and that's that.
- [14:36]
C
Yeah. So momentum. Right. If you, if this creator has a tremendous amount of growth of followers and engagement in the last six months, that's a different type of creator profile than might, that might have the same amount of followers but hasn't had growth at that rate in a year. Right. And so that you know, so, so what we'll do is essentially push a dynamic media kit to the discovery platforms that the brands are looking at to find the creators and then have those creators represented in the best possible way continually. So it's not just a one time, here's my profile and send it over like you would a resume before LinkedIn came about.
- [15:13]
B
There's so much power in understanding your audience, not just really in both senses. There's understanding it in terms of who's actually a part of it, which gives you as a creator power in, in the relationship, in the conversation with the brand, if you really know who your audience is. And then there's the other kind of knowing your audience, which is understanding what they're looking for, which is about a process in the comments, which, that enables growth, that enables all sorts of things. It can be about getting more interaction from them. It can be about generating those affiliate opportunities through. There's like, there's so many ways that understanding your audience can be marshaled and, and be made really powerful. It's something I wish, frankly, in like the traditional TV and film business we had more access to.
- [16:13]
C
Right.
- [16:14]
A
Historically, you're, you're cut off from that kind of demographics. You know, you might know your ratings for a show or your movie box office kind of. But that's kind of. That's kind of.
- [16:22]
B
Or you get Nielsen compartmentalized information where they're the mediator, but we're creating a different opportunity here. This is like deep understanding of who the audience is.
- [16:36]
C
Yeah.
- [16:37]
B
And that's really relevant when your audience is a niche or specialized in some way. And that's true of creators. They, they're growing, they're growing a fan base from the ground up. And, and there usually is something very specific about what is connecting those subgroups. That's enormously powerful information. And it's the equivalent of like in 1995 giving someone access to a camera and an editing system.
- [17:08]
C
Right.
- [17:08]
B
That was sort of the big access issue back then. Now everyone's got a phone camera. Right. Just the case.
- [17:18]
C
But.
- [17:18]
B
But they don't. This gives them the real power in the situation. And because there are no norms or standards or regulations or anything around the creator Wild west situation we're in, to start framing that up in a meaningful way is huge for creators. It's really huge.
- [17:42]
A
Looking to get more out of your YouTube advertising with ViewPlanner, you can buy with total confidence and clarity. ViewPlanner is a verified YouTube brand suitability and contextual targeting partner in the YouTube measurement program, recognized by Google as a trusted independent Leader in driving and measuring performance on YouTube. Their advanced technology gives you a clear edge. Only with ViewPlanner we're talking custom curated contextual collections, exclusive content strategies, transparent reporting and AI driven optimization to deliver real results. Don't let your budget go to waste. Partner with View Planner and experience the difference. Visit viewplanner.com now to unlock your full advertising potential on YouTube. That's V U E P L-A-N-N-E-R.com you often hear the. When it comes to micro influencers, however you define the middle tail, I guess they may not have this as big a numbers as the top 10 in YouTube but their connection is, you know, so much stronger. If you're really into, I don't know, curly hair, you're like so into this creator that talks about that or whatever. Can you, can that be quantified for brands like, because they're all, they all want to justify that, you know, doing the work to go deeper. Is there a way to do that broadly or is it always going to be individual?
- [18:58]
C
Absolutely, go ahead. I mean absolutely. We're, we're, you know, the engagement rate, earned media value of a creator. Quite often a sample will get picked from 5 to 10 creators that are at the micro. Maybe 20% of the creator spend will be allocated to micros as a first allocation on immediate mix model. And then maybe 10 creators are selected that fit the best profile of the brand on characteristics of the brand, maybe the safety of the brand geography and certainly categories or niches. And then they'll place that, they'll do a brand deal with these creators and then they'll score that work, score that engagement rate and earn media value more or less behind the back of the creator. And then the creator either gets a call back, I don't know why. Or they don't. Right, or they don't. And, and, and our goal is to actually get that earned media value and engagement rate to be as, I guess as transparent.
- [19:58]
A
And so they both have the same knowledge.
- [20:03]
C
Before that first deal so that the creator knows. Okay, this is what I mean. Scored on brand says okay, I'm actually taking less risk because I'm got more fidelity of who I'm, who I'm targeting.
- [20:12]
A
Maybe I could do something about it if my score is certain level or something.
- [20:15]
C
Exactly, exactly.
- [20:17]
B
The, it's also relevant to the, the current news cycle we're dealing with at the moment, which you wrote about too, right? The Warner Brothers acquisition because they're one of the last companies that does the $50 million ad model. Well, like we're, we're, we're where they try to reach a broad audience with a big movie. But that is a dying business. Of course, we all know.
- [20:46]
A
Yeah.
- [20:47]
B
And the future is much more atomized. Right.
- [20:50]
A
It's much more, you can't just, you know, blow the doors off with it with a couple of commercials and reach everybody for the big next big movie or whatever. And they got to figure this out.
- [20:59]
B
And of course Netflix does, the films from Warner Brothers do great on Netflix because they already had that ad campaign behind them by the time they get to Netflix. But the rest of what Netflix puts out does not have that ad campaign behind it.
- [21:14]
C
No.
- [21:15]
B
And I think they understand how to target people within their platform. But I think that, that it's really the, the rest of the sort of entertainment model that's emerging on TikTok and YouTube and everywhere else where the future feels like it really is or at least an important part of the future.
- [21:37]
A
Yeah, on that point. The future being more atomized. I like that way of thinking about it. You know, most of what we've been talking about, how you're going to, you're trying to help with data organization and discovery and, and those kind of things. What about like there are for a long time there's been attempts at trying to streamline the spending of media budgets in this world. And it's, you go back and forth between people thinking, well it's not going to be, it's never going to be, you know, like ad tech where you just make, you know, a couple of clicks and spend billions of dollars. But we'd like it to be smoother, I guess. Do you, do you either of you think that that's possible? That someone can either it's you guys or somebody else figure out how to make it easier to do a bunch of brand deals with micro influencers all at once versus you know, having to do the very custom. Which are great one off integrations.
- [22:28]
C
Yeah, I, I, I once a day I have this conversation about the friction to find, engage, deploy, analyze, optimize, you know, the, you know, this creator landscape. And the irony is I hear from the, those that have the money allocated to spend are frustrated, it's too hard to spend it fast enough. And then those that are trying to earn a living, creators are finding it's too slow for them or there's not deals yet. The money's moving more and more this way. Our belief is the audiences and the connection to the audiences and, and the lookalike audiences from One creator to another and finding those matches, just as we've done in the last 25 years in digital media buying. I think that's going to be key is getting that, getting that common understanding what is it, what is the definition of a key performance indicator for audience and getting that normalized. I co wrote two books on digital analytics and more before this, more before the creator economy came about and it was really the same goal, which is how we do. How do we get the brands and the creatives and the publishers to agree on what those KPIs are so that you can make that decision. That will certainly come with time. And then of course there'll be new things coming up, whether it be clippings or in real life or live streaming, which are all huge topics right now.
- [24:00]
A
Sure.
- [24:01]
C
And finding common ground across the ecosystem on what these KPIs are going to be absolutely key. You know, I think the waste right now and the lack of clarity of what is, what is real and what is not was a bot. What is it is not a bot. What is a boy looking at a girl following them on social not ever going to fit their. The target audience of the creator themselves, let alone the brand must reach that. Those are all things that we're doing and more of the scale of our collective. You know that it's almost like finding a virus protection. Right. Find a virus from one machine and it goes to the company that you're paying for virus protection. Hopefully everybody gets that propagated. It helps them out. We also have at the core of this whole engine, Mike is essentially, it's a workflow that is training data. It's a language model for each individual creator so that when we ask a question of an AI agent.
- [24:58]
A
Good. I don't have to ask the AI question. You got us there. That's good.
- [25:01]
C
Yeah. The data, the data on that is actually, you know, it's looking at that personal creator's comments and all the analytics that are in the social platforms, all their previous prompts that they've done. And so it's an individualized language model. Specifically that creator and their data. In addition to that, all the cohorts of them in our, our collective is a hybrid language model as well. So you get the benefit of what are other people searching on, what are other people in the collective getting as results. And then third, we'll certainly look at the public web results. And so I'm sure we've all done this. Right. You excited about AI and you go into any of your AI du Jour and then you start to bottom out with I'm not actually getting the answer that I want because it's not against my me or my date and if my data is behind a username and password, certainly it won't. And so like lots of different industries and AI agents, train specifically on purpose, built for your role and fed with training data every day. I love to go into our product and see what the top prompts are and see what the top ratings on prompts are as more and more people use the product.
- [26:19]
A
Fascinating. What's so what's next besides doing this podcast and how it'll change your life in the next few weeks? How do you get out there in front of the ad community? What's your plan to kind of tell the world about this? What's first quarter look like for.
- [26:37]
C
Yeah, we've soft launched in beta the analytics engines and the comment analyzer. We're launching the language model and then the ability to pull all of your content from the various social platforms in one spot and run analytics and transcription on that. Save a lot of time, hopefully realize bigger upside for creators. I'm in Brazil right now. We have half our staff here in Brazil. Brazil is the largest market in the world as far as social media engagement and also massive scale here. I'm in Sao Paulo with 28 billion people. So we're doing three different creator events, when we call it Creator to Creator series, where we're essentially the platform to have creators share their moves in the ways they're making a living, find ways to collaborate. We did a couple events in the States last month and you'll see a lot more of those coming. Those will be in real life and also streamed in the social Seth, I'm.
- [27:35]
A
Going to give you the last word. What should people start thinking about for Q1? What is your plan to tell the world about where this is headed.
- [27:44]
C
Really.
- [27:45]
B
To try to get the message out to creators that may not realize their creators that they can move comfortably towards that space. I think there's a lot of people that dabble in it that have one or two posts that really kill but haven't committed to that notion that they can put stories out themselves to try to sort of increase the size of the tent for people so that they feel comfortable moving into that space with both feet. That's, I think, a really important and long process that we're going to push hard on in the near future.
- [28:29]
C
Cool.
- [28:29]
A
Well guys, fun stuff. Super fascinating conversation. Really be fun to see how things evolve. But thanks so much for taking time out. Let's, let's chat again next year.
- [28:39]
C
Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, take care.
- [28:42]
A
A big thanks to my guests this week, Shane Atchinson and Seth Gordon of Zazz Collective, and my partners at View Planner. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button and we'll see you next time for more on what's Next in Media. Thanks for listening.