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Next in Media
The former President of Cameo Wants to Help Brands Go Shopping for Creators
00:30:04
Next in Creator Media spoke with Arthur Leopold, co-founder and CEO of Agentio, on how the startup promises to bring some order to creator and brand matchmaking. Leopold also talked about why other tech startups have failed in this realm, and why AI will help brands feel more safe about which creators they hand the keys to.
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Transcript65 lines
- [00:00]
Mike Shields
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- [01:23]
Arthur Leopold
Mike, how are you?
- [01:24]
Mike Shields
I'm all right. I'm stoked to talk to you cause the timing is great. You guys just had a big funding round. Why don't we just start with the easy one and then we'll get into all these different angles. But what is Gentio and why now? What was the thinking behind this launch?
- [01:37]
Arthur Leopold
We are agentio. I'm Arthur Leopold, the CEO and co founder that we've built an ad platform automating the buying of creator content. So prior to starting agentio, I helped start Cameo, the celebrity video shout out app. Was the first employee there. I was the first investor. Two of my best friends started it and saw the power of technology being able to break down barriers and connect fans with their favorite celebrities and favorite creators. Through my time there, we started receiving inbound interest from brands saying like hey, this is a really cool product. Could we use it in our advertisements? So I had the idea to spin up something called Cameo for business and my belief at the time was could you make a more frictionless experience between that?
- [02:26]
Mike Shields
Usually historically that takes a long time, right? You got to get the agents and get the celebrity endorsement and shoot for Three months, but all that stuff. Yeah. So that was probably very appealing.
- [02:35]
Arthur Leopold
Exactly. And we had broken down those barriers with fans, but the thought was, could we enable a brand to get in front of creators and work with these creators, knowing that today there's a lot of complexity involved. Right. If you are, and you're trying to work with a creator or talent, you have to fight through armies of people. Sometimes there's opacity when it comes to pricing. There's a lack of centralization. There's a lot of people that are incentivized to create and generate friction and make the process more challenging. And because of that, it makes it very unscalable. So my belief then and my belief today is that there had to be an opportunity to make it extremely easy for brands to work with the most creative people in the world. Had some amazing learnings and realized through some of my learnings there, that in order for there to be a real shift in the way that brands work with creators and talent, you needed to actually shift working media dollars to the space.
- [03:42]
Mike Shields
Because that, that is something of a debate of where this, the money comes a lot of ways, which is good and bad. And that's, and it seems to be called to maybe almost cause some of the friction you're talking about. Why is that shift important? You're, you're just, you're mentioning.
- [03:56]
Arthur Leopold
Because without shifting working media dollars to the space, then you're always going to be constrained by influencer budgets. And if you look at the two pools of capital, you know, one pool of capital, depending on what you read, is between 300 and 600 billion dollars. And that's like your paid media, digital media budget pool. On the other side, you look at influencer budgets and they're really constrained, you know, 10, maybe $15 billion. And then you look at the team sizes of companies that have a large influencer program and a large paid media program. And oftentimes you'll see like, the influencer team is 10 times as large as the paid media team, but the paid media team is deploying 10 times as much capital.
- [04:41]
Mike Shields
There's an efficiency problem there.
- [04:43]
Arthur Leopold
Exactly. But the reason that brands will invest so much in influencer and creators, because there aren't better people and there isn't a better way to have people share a brand's message on their behalf. And, you know, you and I obviously see a million different types of ads, but we probably don't pay attention to 99.9% of them. But when a creator shares with you why they love a product, you're much more willing to listen to that person.
- [05:11]
Mike Shields
And that's especially true generationally. Right? I mean, I would say that's true about me, but even more so with younger people.
- [05:18]
Arthur Leopold
A good way to think about it is if you're at the grocery store and you see seven different products in front of you and each one of those products has a Facebook or Google or display ad just blinking at you and blinking at you. Then all of a sudden you know there's the eighth product and it's staring at you. And the person you love and admire and trust comes up next to you and puts their arm around you, says Mike, here's why I love this product. Here's why you should consider this product. Here's what this product has done for me. Like which product are you going to pick up? And when you think about it that way, like it is so obvious. The problem is it's been way too hard to buy the influence, the individual who's coming up next to you and suggesting why a product is the best for you and why they adore the product. So long winded way of saying, our belief was that we could actually automate the buying of that relationship and that individual sharing with you why they adore a product. And we could do that for a couple of reasons. Number one, my experience of Cameo and building the largest celebrity network, we knew that we had to have a direct network to creators. Number two, large language models enable us to have these superhuman capabilities to do things like matching and brand safety checks and campaign optimization. And number three, this wouldn't have been possible without my co founder and cto, Jonathan Myers. Jonathan and I were actually in the same intern and analyst class 12 years ago at an investment bank here in New York. And he went on to lead Spotify's growth and innovation engineering org. He created something called automated content marketing. And what they did was actually take Spotify's user listener data. So all the listener data on Spotify. And rather than working with 10 or 12 pieces of agency creative per quarter per year to try to get new users to Spotify, they started trafficking tens of thousands of ads using the listener data. Where, you know, at 3pm in Tuscaloosa you might see Elvis and Mariah carey, but at 3pm in New York City you might see, you know, eight different artists and then they would continue to retrain the machine learning model that drove 30% efficiencies for Spotify's marketing efforts, which unheard of.
- [07:46]
Mike Shields
That's a big deal. Yeah, that goes along so he so he pretty good track record on using complex data and signals to drive engagement and revenue. All right, so let me ask you this. I actually looked it up. I wrote about, I remember writing about this space like in 2016, all of a sudden there was like a million startups claiming to bring some kind of like software analytics slash database to influence your marketing. You know, they were going to help brands sort through this crazy growing space and find connections and make them. And a lot of them are still around, but it doesn't seem to have taken off the way you thought. So in other words, we've heard this idea before. Why is this one going to be different and better in your mind?
- [08:26]
Arthur Leopold
Yeah, there's a graveyard of brand marketing, influencer marketing platforms. None of them have hit any level of scale for a few reasons. Number one, they're not overly differentiated. Typically they're scraping a bunch of data, they're acting as point solutions for, for a specific problem. Maybe it's searching for the types of creators, maybe it's a CRM for creators. But at the end of the day, oftentimes a marketer is actually having to do more because they're still living in a bunch of Google sheets. They're signing into a bunch of different platforms without the end to end platform. End to end being matching, contracting, negotiation, brand safety measurement and then you know, continuing to optimize the campaigns mid flight. Without that end to end platform then you don't have automation, you don't have scale. And that is why, you know, these platforms, the current agency model has constrained the pool of capital moving to influencers, somebody who's buying $100 million worth of Google Ads, they're never going to deal with thousands of one off negotiations and contracts and.
- [09:40]
Mike Shields
Right. They're used to frictionless buying automation. That's just not going to fly.
- [09:44]
Arthur Leopold
Exactly.
- [09:45]
Mike Shields
I have a bunch of questions about what you said there in terms of the end to end this, of your product. But what about, you know, there is, there is definitely a school of thought, it depends who you talk to. But this space, this practice is just inherently messy. You're never going to be able to, you know, make it programmatic because everything is so custom and everything and that's the only way to do it. Right. And so, and what's, what do you say to that idea? That it's always going to be hard and have it lends itself to one off ness.
- [10:13]
Arthur Leopold
Yeah, we're seeing the opposite of that. And during my time at Camia, like I did see a lot of the one off ness, right. We were essentially like a tech enabled agency. There was so much happening on the back end. But what we solve for through this end to end platform is ensuring that brands can bid on creator inventory. Brands can deploy a 50k budget one month or a million dollar budget the next month without much additional bandwidth. And we make it very easy for the creators to understand what the brand cares about, you know, the voice and the tone that they should be speaking on behalf of the brand. Similar examples of what has worked well for the brand in the past. And we use large language models to cut back a lot of the back and forth so that, you know, performance marketer could work with hundreds of creators on any given month rather than, you know, having a large influencer team that's spending, you know, six or 12 months trying to work with the same amount of creators. So elevating marketers and enabling them to spend a lot less time on all the back and forth and all the tedious and manual tasks that it takes to try to bring a single creator ad read to life. Now they can spend a lot more of their time doing strategic things and actually really moving the business forward in an impactful way.
- [11:34]
Mike Shields
So could you have done this a couple years ago if AI had not reached the maturation? No, I wouldn't call it mature yet, but it's much more prevalent than it was a couple years ago. These large language models. Could you have done this without that full stop?
- [11:47]
Arthur Leopold
No, definitely.
- [11:48]
Mike Shields
That's an easy answer.
- [11:48]
Arthur Leopold
Okay, for a couple of reasons. I think you could have done a shitty job at it, right. And it wouldn't have been interesting or impactful enough for brands. I'll give you a good example. We had one of the three largest CPG or consumer good conglomerates run a global RFP for a brand safety solution. And everyone's familiar with a large beer advertiser having a brand safety issue. All the major companies of course, want to avoid that. And through their RFP they shared with us that our brand safety solution, which we give away for free as part of this end to end platform, was quote unquote, light years and years ahead of the competition. And so we then had to look at how much time it would take to work with a thousand creators and have a 10 year look back period. And what we were able to find is that.
- [12:44]
Mike Shields
Right, because that's a nightmare if you stick that on intern. Hey, find it. If this guy said anything bad, you know, in the last eight years, that's just like it's not scalable or efficient. At all. Right, right.
- [12:52]
Arthur Leopold
And is the intern going to watch every piece of content? Are they going to be hungover one day? Right. Are they going to have 12 different tabs open? And what we were able to find is while our solution could do that literally in a few minutes, it would have taken 113 human years years to do so. Like that is the paradigm shift of what previously was possible and what is possible today. And that is how we can shift, you know, billions and billions of dollars of ad spend into creators pockets. Creators who are the best storytellers in the world on behalf of a brand.
- [13:30]
Mike Shields
That is kind of insane. So a couple of interesting things you've said here that you were not only are you trying to make influencers, brand and creator connections easier, but you're, you're kind of also offering a couple of products slash tools in the mix that would be in the past have been like standalone companies or point solutions. One of them being the brand safety thing and I guess the other being the back end reporting attribution. Can you do all that well and still, you know, do your main value proposition and then isn't that going to be very disruptive? I guess in good ways and bad.
- [14:02]
Arthur Leopold
We know that marketing dollars flow to efficiency. And what we're proving with many of the best brands in the world, companies like Doordash and Warby Parker and Mint Mobile and Masterclass and Bombas and HelloFresh, Squarespace, truly iconic, incredible brands, we're proving that we can help them scale and see much better roas than other digital channels through these creators telling their story on their behalf. And what that means is that as you think about the future of marketing, there's certainly people that think the future of marketing is going to be like more tailored display or banner ads despite privacy changes or higher quality content in skippable video ads. I don't think those people have ever watched a skippable video ad aside from their own. Right. The future of marketing is a creator, somebody that you trust and you adore sharing with you why they love a product. And we're willing to bet all of our time and build this incredible team and put every waking moment into this company because we believe the future of marketing is creator led. It's not more skippable and banner ads that you're not paying attention to. So until Argentio that's just been too hard to buy. One thing that's also important to note, We've started with YouTube as our.
- [15:33]
Mike Shields
I was going to ask you that that why that focus? It sounds like that. Is that the biggest opportunity right now?
- [15:37]
Arthur Leopold
We think so. And based on early learnings from our brand advertiser partners, like all the data suggests, that's the case and we decided to start on YouTube for a few reasons. Number one, we spoke with the biggest creators in the world today and they across the board almost unanimously can't sell through their inventory. And inventory being a YouTuber in their video, in their 20 minute long video saying thanks to DoorDash for sponsoring this video. I love DoorDash for all these reasons. Use code MIKESHIELDS20 for 20% off your first DoorDash grocery purchase. Similar to a podcast host read. But this is the visual.
- [16:20]
Mike Shields
When you mentioned you're working with a Rhett and Link for example, I would just assume those guys are selling out. No, no problem. They're huge. But you find this problem with lots of creators.
- [16:29]
Arthur Leopold
Those guys are getting across their channels, they're getting a larger audience in like 60 minutes, right? Even for channels like that, they can't sell through all their inventory because there's no aggregation of demand. It's too hard historically for brands to buy it. But Rhett and Link have been around for 10, 20 years. They have super fans, they sell out stadiums when they go on tour, right? And they sometimes can sell through their inventory. But they are some of the best people in the world to share a brand's message on their behalf. So you have this crazy situation where there's unlimited inventory on the creator side, on the people who have access to the most engaged, highest trust audiences. And then on the brand side, we learned from our early partners, the three largest spenders in the space, that this is far and away the most performant ad unit in their arsenal, these YouTube creator integrations. But they've built big teams over 10 years to really dominate this market. Eight people, 10 people. But they all work with a thousand creators a year. They want to work with 5, 6, 7, 8,000 creators a year. They can't because of time and people constraints. So the question became could we automate all those hard problems to enable not just those brands but any new entrant that hasn't spent in the space before to come in have those brands capabilities. And whether it's a, you know, a dog food company or Whether it's a DoorDash or an Expedia, all of a sudden they can scale their spend on YouTube creator ad reads through Agentio as easily as they scale Meta or Google or on the trade desk and see just as good, if not better efficiency through these Creators storytelling on their behalf.
- [18:20]
Mike Shields
You've kind of hinted at this, right. But I wonder if you can just walk us through, like either a hypothetical or a real example of how, you know, so and so brand comes to you. They do a couple of things in there and their host red ads are running like, what does it look like?
- [18:32]
Arthur Leopold
Yeah. So our brand will meet with the typically the paid media team, sometimes with the influencer team as well, but usually we're tapping into paid media budgets. The performance marketing team is looking to acquire more customers. Right now we're predominantly focused on brands with lower funnel goals.
- [18:51]
Mike Shields
So that's what I was going to ask you. Okay.
- [18:53]
Arthur Leopold
We haven't taken a dive into like brand awareness players yet. We're really excited to. We think there's a ton of opportunity there. But we'll meet with a team, they'll set up campaign on the platform. You know, they set the cpn, they set the target that they want to hit, the audience they want to hit. We then match them with the best creators. We know who the best creators are by their content, by how those creators have converted for other brands, by, you know, which brands the creators have received renewals from. We have all this data and then the brand just starts bidding on the creators and there's no negotiation, there's no back and forth. The brands send out the bids, creators accept the bids. Creators then upload the ad reads. We run brand safety checks. Creators go live on YouTube, we measure the performance through clicks, QR scans, a few other ways, and based on the initial cohort of creators and how they perform, that then retrains the model to suggest similar creators to ensure that the campaigns only get more efficient month by month. So what this means is an iconic brand can spend 500k in under 36 or 72 hours across 30, 40, 50 of the best creators in the world and have their budget not only get filled, but also see insane performance through these creators going live over the course of the next month or six weeks.
- [20:24]
Mike Shields
And is the idea this. Maybe. Maybe this evolves over time. Is the idea really? Let's stick with somewhat standard creative execution, mostly host red. This is not the way to get a big creator to make five different custom videos for your brand, that kind of thing yet I'm guessing, right.
- [20:41]
Arthur Leopold
Part of being able to really crack the space and enable this level of, of scale was this belief that we had to create. First we had to identify and then we had to create a standardizable ad unit. Right. If you're doing like a big bespoke video or a bespoke set. We're not going to touch that. That's a different game. That's a different team. We are talking about 60, 90 second post reads storytelling on a brand's behalf. Brands can now then license that content. They can use that content for their YouTube ads. And YouTube's leadership, they, they've shared and something that we know that one of the biggest challenges advertisers face is the content that they put on YouTube. Right. A lot of people put their TV spots on YouTube. You go to YouTube not to see like a Chevy truck ad running during the Super bowl. You go to YouTube to see your favorite chef in a more authentic and UGC style.
- [21:39]
Mike Shields
So why not, why not have that chef in your ad doing. Talking about your ad.
- [21:43]
Arthur Leopold
Exactly. And you know, as you think about like the proliferation of these creators and YouTube as a channel, YouTube's so powerful because a. It's number one streaming platform in the world now. Right. Like they, they've won when it comes to capturing audiences, you know, across Netflix, across Disney, so on and so forth. Yeah.
- [22:02]
Mike Shields
Bigger than them on television for totally.
- [22:06]
Arthur Leopold
They are the future of media, these creators. And even if you look at like the top three cookbooks on Amazon, number one and two are by a creator, unbelievable creator named Joshua Weissman, number three, another incredible YouTube creator named Nick DiGiovanni, number four is Anthony Bourdain. Right.
- [22:28]
Mike Shields
That's pretty amazing.
- [22:29]
Arthur Leopold
Yeah. This is the power of these creators. And I think they're so underappreciated, especially the ones on YouTube. But the ones on YouTube have the most engaged audiences, right? Like you sit down to watch your favorite creator for 20 minutes, you're not doom scrolling past like 60 seconds with regularity.
- [22:46]
Mike Shields
Right. Like another Mr. Beast video came out Saturday. Like people, people anticipate them, right?
- [22:51]
Arthur Leopold
Like these are their favorite people in the world. And we're willing to make the bet all day long that the future of media is, you know, this type of creator. It's not another CBS show. It's not another, like, you know, whatever's running on cable TV these days.
- [23:07]
Mike Shields
Right. No offense to Matlock, but. I know, I know what you mean. A couple more things I want to ask you that you mentioned. I've heard this before, that brands, lots of brands know they need to be in the space more. And they've done some great campaigns. They know when their Amazon ads work. Right. They know where their TV campaigns work because they have benchmarks. They don't always know how to evaluate these creator partnerships. It sounds like you're trying, you've kind of zeroed in on, at least initially, a common way to judge how if whether these things worked or not.
- [23:39]
Arthur Leopold
It's really hard to stand up these programs. Right. You need people, you need a strategy or you ship your dollars off to an agency and then you lose a lot of control, you lose any transparency around like pricing and how much the creator is getting paid and you just sort of turn a blind eye towards things. We A want to help the agencies, they should be hands on keys on agentio executing on behalf of their clients. But B, we want to make it as easy for a brand to start working with the best creators in the world as it is to turn on a Google Ads account or to start running spend through the trade desk. We want to be the trade desk of the future. We believe that creators have inventory that can be easily purchased and that inventory is the most premium inventory on the Internet. It's just been too hard to historically buy.
- [24:31]
Mike Shields
Right. The obvious question is YouTube's first, does this translate to TikTok, Instagram, et cetera. And then what was the funding climate like when you were trying to, when you were out there with this idea, I wonder? It's probably an interesting different time.
- [24:44]
Arthur Leopold
We are building this to be multiplatform. We can turn on the second platform at any point. We've tested it, it's working well. It's, you know, we're adopting a lot of the same technology, the betting technology and so on and so forth. It's just a matter of focus. And frankly we think that YouTube is so underappreciated. We hear every single time we speak to brands, brands are like, yeah, we want to crack YouTube, we just don't know how.
- [25:12]
Mike Shields
Right, so nail that one first before you have to go everywhere else.
- [25:15]
Arthur Leopold
Exactly, exactly. There's so much opportunity there. We know from the biggest spenders that it's their number one channel. We know from the biggest creators, those who have like true meaningful audiences, that they have unlimited inventory. They want to work with more brands who are a great fit. So we think going unbelievably deep on YouTube is going to provide the most value for our advertisers and for the creators on the platform. We're already starting to get pull from our advertisers and partners today to like, you know, open up.
- [25:44]
Mike Shields
Where else can we do this?
- [25:46]
Arthur Leopold
Exactly. They're like the like holy shit, this is unbelievable. Right? It's like having if you're a farmer and you know, you spent your, the last 20 years with a horse and a saw or whatnot. And all of a sudden you have the latest John Deere truck tractor with, you know, all the right, I don't.
- [26:05]
Mike Shields
Want to use the horse anymore. What are you talking about?
- [26:07]
Arthur Leopold
Exactly like it works. But there's a future state and we want to usher that pleas to that future state so that they can spend a lot less of their time on these like overly laborious, insanely manual tasks that are sort of the necessary evil to get these partnerships done. Regarding the funding environment, it certainly challenging. We raised our seed round in June of 2023 from Craft Ventures and from Alicor. Alicor's Kevin ryan, founder of DoubleClick and MongoDB, their CEO of DoubleClick, his venture fund. So no better person in the world. Godfather VAD Tech.
- [26:51]
Mike Shields
Yeah, that's a pretty good company.
- [26:52]
Arthur Leopold
Totally. And then we started to hit escape velocity following our launch last October in October of 23. And we grew at least 110 or 120% quarter over quarter, every quarter. And we got to profitability. We had most advertisers increasing spend usually somewhere between like 2 and 2.5x quarter over quarter. So it was very clear that like this was working. The advertisers on platform like love the platform. Like they're happy. The creators absolutely adore it. They're like, this is a godsend for them. Right. They get to work with the coolest advertisers. It's so easy for them. They're getting these like multi.
- [27:33]
Mike Shields
That's what they've been waiting for deals.
- [27:35]
Arthur Leopold
Exactly. They're finally like tapping into this new budget pool that they never had access to. So it's a dream for them. And we're bringing them the smartest, most forward thinking, coolest brands in the world. So it's really exciting for the creators. And we ended up getting preempted by a great venture fund that led to this very quick process with multiple term sheets. But we landed on Benchmark as our partner. Benchmark is arguably like the greatest fund of all time. So it's a really interesting structure there where they only have five partners. They don't have like a support team. It's an equal partnership. So every partner is equally incentivized, which means you get a ton of amazing support. But these are the people who are the first investors in ebay and Uber and Twitter and.
- [28:26]
Mike Shields
Right. They're picky and they're smart. So that's a good.
- [28:29]
Arthur Leopold
Totally, totally, totally. So our conversations with them we found to be just incredibly elevated. And one of the things they were so excited about that was really differentiated. We heard from a lot of venture firms, like, how quickly can you go to Instagram? How quickly can you go to TikTok? And we were like, oh, hold on, hold on, hold on. There's a huge opportunity on YouTube.
- [28:48]
Mike Shields
So much upside. Chill entry.
- [28:50]
Arthur Leopold
Mark was like, guys, how deep can we go on YouTube? Like, how quickly can we spin the flywheel here? Like, how can we add more value to advertisers and creators on YouTube? Like, let's unlock this. This is where the real dollars will end up being, because this is where the highest engagement is. So that really resonated with us, and we're so excited about our new board member, Sarah Towell. She's just incredible. And, yeah, we announced our $12 million Series A, I guess, yesterday. So glad that we're on today. But, yeah, it's been an incredible journey. Just so grateful for our team and our investors and everybody who's just working their asses off and just absolutely love coming to work every day and getting to build something, like, truly magical with this team.
- [29:31]
Mike Shields
Well, exciting stuff. Thank you for taking your time out on. I'm sure was a crazy week for you, but it's gonna be really fun to watch how this unfolds and good luck with everybody. Thanks so much for your time, Arthur.
- [29:41]
Arthur Leopold
Thank you so much, Mike. It's been great chatting with you and big fan of the pod and yeah, looking forward to diving in further in the future.
- [29:48]
Mike Shields
Definitely. Thanks so much. Thanks again to my guest this week, Egentio's Arthur Leopold, and of course, my partners, 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. We'll see you next time for more on what's next in creator media. Thanks for listening.