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Evolution of AI in the Influencer Marketing Ecosystem with Corbett Drummey
00:43:43
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- [00:17]
A
Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. Today I have a special guest for you. But before we get into it, I just wanted to give everybody a quick update. I know I hadn't done a podcast for a minute. I was at the Brighton SEO Conference. There was a lot of things going on with all things related to AI with digital pr, with link building. And so went on and found a great guest for you that we're going to be talking about AI influencer marketing in that ecosystem and what's going to impact it. I know everybody's worried about AI. You know, got a lot of really cool stuff. I'm going to do a training in a couple of weeks as we move into the new year. Please go check out Matthew bertram.com if you're interested in kind of coaching ewr digital if you're looking for your business needs marketing. What I'm seeing in some enterprise level data is there's not a lot of crossover between our agency and the podcast. So I think a lot of podcast listeners are not aware that we've been running an agency for 25 years and have clients small and large and are good at everything from search, marketing, web design, et cetera. So please go check that out. But let's just jump right into it. I got Corbett Drummy with me today. He's been involved in this space for a long time. He's also part of Y Combinator. Corbett, you know, you were introduced to me from my network, somebody that I should definitely connect with. I want you to introduce yourself. I think you could do it better than me to the audience and then we can jump into it.
- [02:01]
B
Absolutely. Well, great to meet you Matt. I'm excited to talk through these things today. And yeah, to start with a bit of background, I'm a startup founder. I had co founded a company called Popular Pays and Influencer and Creative marketing Platform about a decade ago. And then two years ago we were acquired by Litrix, who a lot of people know because of the popular photo and video editing apps they've made such as Facetune, PhotoLeap and VideoLeap. We were their first kind of B2B product acquisition. And then since then in the last year I've been focused on the AI video platform called LTX Studio. So we've been building a platform there as well as an underlying foundational video model that powers it. So there's a lot we can touch on kind of where AI intersects with content creation and influencer marketing. But yeah, happy to follow wherever it might go, whatever it might be interesting for your audience.
- [02:56]
A
Yeah. So to kind of tee it up, right? Generative images, right? So if we start with generative images, which that's turned into like generative video, right? Listening to some of the Google people out there talking about AI stuff is, I mean, now there's copyright issues and you know, that's going to be duress at a bigger level from training the AIs and that sort of thing. But the images that are created and the videos that are created are unique, right? So if we, if we focus on SEO for a minute and understand how the search engines are looking at everything, they're looking at this stuff as completely unique. So over even stock or stock video or something like that, AI gets a win, right? It gets a win. Also the tools like midjourney and all the other things that are going on are getting much, much better. Right? And so you've got completely unique content. You can start to kind of build out themes. There's ways to maximize productivity from a graphic design standpoint to help brands build. You know, you're able to take, you know, blogs and turn them into videos. Like, you know, Google released their kind of podcast thing. Like, there's, there's so much going on and you know, every podcast that I've listened to or person I've interacted with, they're all worried about AI, right? And you know, I think that, that some people should be right. And one of the stories that I actually shared is I had a content manager, probably about time Chat GBG came around and she was like, no AI, right? No AI. And there was, there's a lot of companies out there are using tools and they're like, you know, enterprise level tools. And they're like, if it's 99% human writing, 1% AI, it's like, no, go back. And then you're having to play with the content of like, this was human written. But you know, there are certain ways that writing happens that is going to show up as, as AI is like kind of false positives to, to a certain degree. And I just don't think people can get away from it. And so, you know, the conversation started to become, okay, you're not going to be replaced by AI immediately. You're going to be replaced by people using AI, right? And that was kind of the kind of intersection of like, hey, we're going this direction and we're going to lean into it and we're going to be cutting edge with what's going on and we're going to certainly follow the Google guidelines. We're going to do all these things, but we need to embrace this because the world's changing. Just kind of like money is changing with crypto, whatever. Like the world is moving forward and you need to move forward with it because you're going to be replaced by people that are leveraging it. Well, now they're just like absolute noise proliferation bots. I mean, it. What's real, what's not? Like, we're getting into a real murky world and I think it's caused anxiety for a lot of people out there. So I would love to just kind of hear your perspective of the AI kind of evolution within the influencer marketing ecosystem to kind of bring those together of. And then that could spawn a couple other questions and conversations. But we got AI over here, we got influence over here. I mean, these two things are colliding. What. What does that look like? What are the things you're seeing? What are the things that you're concerned about just to kind of set the table for everyone?
- [06:32]
B
Absolutely. I mean, you touched on a lot of good points in terms of like, one big topic is brand safety and rights and usage for AI in the industry. Another is this colliding industry, especially because one thing I think is worth talking about is that really what's unique about marketing and content creation is AI has impacted our space first and hardest compared to almost anything out there. Yes, AI will change everything, ranging from finance, healthcare, et cetera. But the very first applications were in content creation. So we've had to deal with that as an industry earlier and harder than anyone else has. And so we've seen that this can mean a few things. Number one, AI is changing how content is being created in the first place. So how, like the tools that creators use and marketers use, that's one big pillar. Another is, you know, this element of displacement and people are worried if it will, you know, take what, take their livelihood. And that might be a creator displaced, might be a marketer. I do agree with you that in general I think you should be worried more about people, people using AI than just AI by itself. But I. And then the third part of that is rights, usage and worries around that, whether that's creators worried about worrying about their art and livelihood or about, like, brands wondering what is brand safe to use. There's some huge pillars here and interestingly, we've had a perspective across all of them because we make tools for creators and marketers, we've built foundational models We've been operating the industry, so we've kind of had a front row seat to all those different pillars of topics.
- [08:09]
A
So. So one of the things that I thought was interesting is like, I forgot the article I was reading. I, I'm not sure if it was ChatGPT or what, but it was clear that something was trained on the New York Times as far as, like, the response was right. And also at Brighton, there was a lot of talk about, okay, I mean, there was a lot of different segments on the tracks on, on AI, but it was really like, what was the language model trained on? And it was really talking about kind of taking your own data, creating those kind of subsets and the human kind of quality of creativity. Now, I think images. I've seen the stuff that AI's done and it blows me away from a creativity standpoint. Now on the content side of things, I mean, you got to still figure out, well, what are people interested in? What are people talking about? Now a lot of that's going to start to get automated and churned out and it's really like, how big is the inventory online as far as like what, what you're talking about? But, but I think that that's why Google even added the, to the eat the experience component, right? So it's like, you know, you talking about what you did and what your experiences with and interjecting that human component in that, I think is, is really quite, quite critical. But I mean, what are, what are you seeing if you're like, you know, people are using content, I mean, certainly people were talking about using it to create topics, but now AIs are doing the full boat, right? Like they're doing the heavy lifting and then even you got stuff. I think it's interesting, like if I was in school today, like, how do you grade test? How do you figure out like information? Like, it's pretty crazy in my eyes. Like, you know, what world we live in and what's going to be available. I would even tell you me the credit or I had a big thing with calculators, right? Everybody like put their stuff in the calculator. You put a bunch of codes on the back end of it, all that. But I was like, I am going to use a calculator forever in the future, forever. Like, I will never not have a calculator when I am doing math. So why do you have to learn it now? Like, okay, teach me how to do it. But if you're going to give me a test, let's have a real world Application. Right. So I think that there's a lot of issues that I'm kind of tapping into. But I think the thing that people, what I want to hear from you is, okay, AI is happening. You know, AI is impacting stuff like where does the human fit into it? Like, how do you see that?
- [10:44]
B
That's an excellent question. And you know, by the way, one other thing worth noting is we recently surveyed a thousand marketers to ask them questions about their usage. So we do have some good data on this. Most like one interesting note by the way is that executives are using it more often than entry level people. And I think it's because the executives are realizing that it will change everything and they're trying to get ahead of it. Whereas sometimes it can be rough around the edges and entry level folks are saying that's not there yet or you know, but one, when you ask about like where do humans fit in the picture?
- [11:19]
A
I think it has to do with leverage. Okay. I think. Well, I mean I think that if you're, if you're entry level and also like if you look at the question of the data sets, right. So if you look at the data sets, a lot of people are just playing around with it, right. They're not using it for business. If you look at like the total set of searches like it's 4%, Google was a little concerned about the growth rate. But if you like dig into the data, you're just playing around with it. People are still using it. Like you said, I think the executives are trying to create impact of, okay, like a big proposal or this or I'm trying to communicate this or I'm trying to translate that they have things that can create more value and more impact and so they can see AI as creating more leverage potentially based on their visibility of what they can impact individually. And maybe entry level people in their specific job, you know, depending on what that is, might not be as impactful. But I, I do think like knowledge workers across the board are certainly impacted and executives could, could fall into that category. So if you have any kind of information like you thought it was going to impact like the lower end people. Yeah, first, but it's actually impacting like the lawyers, it's impacting healthcare. I mean like all the things that you learn that I can do, depending on what capacity you can create a lot of leverage to do things that might, might take someone very skilled that in pattern, pattern recognition or something like that that other people couldn't. Maybe. I don't know. I know I kind of cut you off.
- [12:54]
B
Yeah, no, it's all good. And you bring up that's a good interest. Like the thing is we have the data and the reasons underpinning it. We can only. There's only hypotheticals and that's a good one. One might be that the leverage is a good one. One could be that, like as I said, we think that maybe executives realize how fundamental of a shift is coming and they're trying to get ahead of it. But as you mentioned, like with almost every tech trend, it's usually driven by the entry level teammates first adopting things and then the rest of the organization. And this is dramatically different. However, it is definitely being adopted as fast as like anything we've ever seen. 90% of marketers are using it weekly. A big percentage say it's like crucial to their job already. But when you ask about where do humans fall in the loop, I really think that I agree with you around how the folks you should be worried about are those that are adopting and leveraging AI versus, you know, AI operating by itself. Over time we'll see more and more of that. Hopefully it's things that the AI takes off our plate that are more annoying. So we can focus on the bigger and more important things. But we've already started to see a few examples of where AI is taking the lead. One standout example is in brand safety. There are some agencies we've seen vet creators manually and it takes like four to six hours per creator. And now AI can we like you know, we built some tools and played around here and the tool we built for example can do it in like minutes and look back for years. And that's one where now conclusively I think you can say like AI is just flat out better at brand safety in flagging things. However, you still want the human in the mix. So I think what we'll see is like people, whether it's an engineer working with these code assisting tools, copilot tools, an agency person reviewing drafts of things or reviewing like flags that AI is flagged for targeting and or safety purposes. You still, I think we're just going to have our work scaled but then one other thing like humans kind of being scaled by AI is one theme. And then one other theme is humans becoming more technical. For example, I'm not technical but I can use these tools to rapidly draft content that I never could have with like Adobe before. But now I can get like something from my mind's eye onto paper with tools like you know, Mid Journey or our LTX Studio. For video, stuff like that you can get from concept to content and it makes marketers technical now, which is pretty cool.
- [15:16]
A
So, so I think the interface has been a big part of it, right? Like even like the evolution of Mid Journey, you know, things like that. I think that it was designed by coders for kind of coders, right? And now they're bringing more people into. I mean you even look at like all the different ad platforms, right? Like how they were structured, how they're set up. Like there's a little bit of pain around that, but they're, they're, they're improving that process. And I think even prompting, like setting up like prompts for people to, to achieve what they're wanting to achieve, I think it unlocks a lot of creative potential for people that aren't technical to do things right. And I'm seeing this with a lot of different platforms across the board, even building websites, right? Like, you know, you got drag and drop builders versus having to code stuff. I mean you just look at like what, what WordPress or some of these different platforms like WIX are really doing. And then like again that pattern recognition or AI detection, you put in those variables like for backlinks, for example, like you can, you can like, you can assess data. I think again those application, even outside of marketing specifically, like, okay, identifying this cancer or identifying like these illnesses, you run it through pattern recognition and you can like pull a data set and then it can kind of spit out an answer most likely. And so these applications can be applied broadly. And I like that as far as like you know, brand detection. And you can set up kind of different triggers to have like automated things happen. Right. And I think that the automation is what I'm scared about of really. You know, people are setting up like content machines or you know, like the AI bots that are just, you feed it a prompt and it just goes, goes, goes and it's going 24 7.
- [17:09]
B
Yeah.
- [17:09]
A
And then there's a proliferate. What, what is it? The dead Internet theory. Like what is your point?
- [17:14]
B
So interesting thing. And one last note on the making marketers technical before going on to the, the proliferation of kind of bad content sometimes because that's fascinating too. But one if for folks listening, like if sometimes you'd say this like, oh, you can now be technical even if you're a marketer who wouldn't consider, consider themselves technical. I would try two things. Like one thing I use it for all the time is like spreadsheet manipulation. So for example, like hey, upload A file to chatgpt and use this to combine first and last name fields and make new column and more or longer things. Like add a new column and research all these companies and add the industry they're in. Or like basic spreadsheet manipulation that some of them you can do if you know Excel shortcuts really well. But if you don't, like, you don't even really have to learn them now. You, you can just prompt ChatGPT and then basic data analysis you can do there too. So that's one quick example that I use like every week because now instead of manually looking up things, I'll have it look them up for me and append a new column.
- [18:13]
A
Are you concerned about. So chatgpt for everybody that's listening, like, pay the extra 20 bucks. It's like one of the most powerful tools out there. And yes, you can get it for free, but if you're talking about uploading documents and stuff like that, you got to pay for it. But, but if you're giving a bunch of data, like, this has always been my opinion and I would love to hear your opinion. You know, like, okay, if you're running ads and you upload a bunch of stuff to Facebook to like hash match to say, hey, target these people or build this lookalike list, right? People are like, oh, this is our data, right? And they're like, this is our data. I don't want to share it. I'm like, Google has everybody's data, Facebook, everybody's data. Like we're just organizing that data. There's Nothing like there's 1, 1/2 of 1% that you might add to the overall mix. In my opinion, it's just organization. But, but if people are doing stuff and there's a lot of companies that are limiting the use of chat GPT, especially from a. Okay, this is, you know, maybe it's trader codes or you know, whatever. But, but what is your, how do you do that if you're concerned about the data set and just giving it up to the public domain?
- [19:27]
B
That's a great question. I'll answer in two ways. Like, number one, you know, as an enterprise, like I should say we use a business tier for Litrix, you know, our parent company, you know, we have, you know, 500 plus people. We do use a business tier because that, then they guarantee they're not using that data in training. However, I would say if you're a startup, do not worry about it. And to be honest, I think the fears are overblown even from a Traditional perspective, you never know. Like for ex. I think that the reason there's the compliance issues, the reason that these like larger companies are worried about it is that they're trying to do their best to comply with all these things like gdpr, et cetera. And so they need that contractual guarantee that you're going to handle my data properly. But from a practical point of view, like if you're a startup and you're being like I just would not, your biggest risk is not growing. And usually you don't have to worry about the compliance things as much in the beginning when you're just getting started. And I do think the fears are overblown about are they going to use them in some other way. It's just really you're signing the business contracts because you are trying to get the contractual guarantee. But realistically I think you'd be fine. The other part of that is, you know, like we, yeah, we use the business tier to have like access to these other features and things. But you know, if you are concerned about it even as a person, like let's just say you're uploading something that you personally are worried about, you can just do a temporary chat which they say explicitly they won't use. Like that data is deleted. So there are, there are options even for like your everyday user. But 100% probably the best money you'll spend as a business user is like the 20amonth to access these higher power models. It's like a different experience. I haven't yet tried the new $200 a month Pro version to be honest. Like you don't need the Pro version unless you're actually pushing the boundaries of like scientific literature. I've, I've used it for one particular thing I was trying to like stump it with. But like it's, it's if you're asking questions about like a science paper or medical paper or something like your day to day usage, you probably are fine with 4.0 just uploading documents and things. Maybe.01 if you need some like extra juice. But yeah, definitely try the Pro as a marketer. It'll make you technical. And I want to give one more example with the proverb like $20 a month for example. You might think you're not technical, but really to dispel that in like five. No, dispel that in 60 seconds, go into the version, go to the new Canvas which was released yesterday I think and just say like I want to create a working game of Pong and you can create it with One prompt, double click it, say like, Save it as an HTML file, double click it. It opens your browser and it will work right out of the gate. And then you can just say like in the cursor. Say like. Well, can you make the background blue? And can you give me a button to increase the sensitivity of the arrow keys? You will be able to code with English. And so now I think it's important for marketers to realize that these tools make you good enough and can help you cross that chasm. So where you are, you can be technical. And that will be a hard thing for people to shake if they've been in this space for a while. But people just entering it will kind of grasp it intuitively. But yeah, I'd say you should be worried about the marketer that's 10xing their own capabilities by leaning on these tools.
- [22:34]
A
I would say that I think the pendulum swings back to creativity, right? Like if you don't have the foundational knowledge right initially, you don't even know what to ask, right? Or, or how to, how to kind of structure it because it, it's a support tool in that. I mean, what are, what are you seeing? How is AI impacting the platforms, the creators, the brands, the audiences? Like, how would you, man.
- [22:56]
B
So I'd say there's definitely some underlying anxiety, for example, both on the creators as well as people making the tools like us, because there's always a new model, we're always having to upgrade and stay on top of it and it's moving faster than ever. And for creators, they're having to learn new tools all the time. I think there's some anxiety that they might be replaced and, or taken advantage of because of, for example, the training data and the training sets. They're worried, you know, am I as an artist or creator, is this unfairly using that data? And there's a lot of things pending, like you said, like the kind of a landmark, the New York Times suit lawsuit is a landmark example of that. So there are some anxiety about its IP issues in the creative field. But I think you also mentioned this beginning. It's just inevitable and inescapable that it is impacting things. And when you think back to artists of the day, they were using the most up to date and latest technology to make their works. Like the thing that we consider like you know, kind of classical art back then was really pushing boundaries and the things that we think, whether it's music and old production techniques, like they were, they were pushing these like tapes and things to the limit. And I think the, like, modern artists using that and embracing it will be able to build a lot more interesting and amazing things with it. So it'll push the boundaries as well. So there's this element of, like, democratizing and making everyone technical, whether a creator, engineer, whatever. There's that element of anxiety about, like, people wondering about where their place is and people always having to adopt the next thing or for us, build the next thing. But I do think it. I am an optimist and I do, I do think it opens up possibilities more than anything else. And we will have a golden age of content creation. I think you're right in that there is going to be this proliferation of a thousand times more stuff that's bad. But with AI, you can also surface the gems better than ever before. So there's a stat that's like every two years, there's more content created that year than entire history of humankind before that. And that will accelerate. I think. It's like, it's inevitable and it'll hold true. It'll continue holding true. But I think that, yes, there'll be a lot of bland stuff created with AI, but we have the technology to also surface the best things for people to see.
- [25:04]
A
So I think that's a great, great point. And that's what I'm definitely seeing, right? So a lot of content's being created and Google stopped indexing a lot of content. Right. If it's local content, it's like, we can't even keep this in our directories of our search engines because it's just not valuable. Right? So one, it goes away, right? If there's too much inventory, and then out of the inventory there is a lot of people can answer the question. They're trying to just keep you on Google's and say, hey, here's the AI summary. Like, zero click, here you go, here's the answer. So if you're going to be producing content, it needs to be like a couple tiers above that. And how many people do you really have that are competing on that level? Like, I've seen with like, very big companies versus startups? One of the biggest things that I remember when I was like, really heavily in that world was, okay, Microsoft. My mom was like one of the first employees at Microsoft. And, you know, she would always tell me, yeah, we got like two people at the whole company working on this, like, one thing. Right? You know, or whatever. And so you, like, look at this whole company. You're like, I can't beat this whole company, but depending on like, whatever the problem is you're trying to solve. You know, like, it was like, like just the analogy. I was like, one person's really working hard, so you're competing against that person. One person's looking for their next job, right? And they're like, whatever. And then one person's like, screwing off. Like, and so it's like, so, so, so you're, you're not, you're not at that big of a disadvantage. Where you have, the advantage is you're, you're, you're more able to move quick, right? Like, you don't have approvals, you don't have all the red tape. You, like, you, you can pivot, you can, you can figure stuff out so you're more agile. And I think that, you know, if you're trying to be very narrow and you know what you're solving for, you know, AI, whatever you have, you have that leverage in like a Reddit post or social media, like these algorithms, like, okay, you're producing stuff for TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, whatever. It's going to go viral. One post could go viral. The game has changed. I would love to hear your take on lessons learned as well as how is influencer, right? Like, how is it. So they got AI influencers. You got like fake AI bots that are posting stuff, generating money. Like, you hear about a lot of that in the news. But if you're an influencer, how do you leverage AI? And also like, where is, where is influencer marketing fitting into the broader scope of the digital landscape, the marketing mix, like when you're, when you're looking at so kind of go big, big picture and kind of narrow it down to AI and influencers. I love to kind of see what, what you've learned there. And those that to start, there's, there's.
- [27:54]
B
Two things on it ties into the question of like this proliferation of content and how can you make content and stand out in this world as a creator, as a marketer, et cetera. A few notes there, but as you mentioned, like, there's still some things that have to be shaken out, but there's some emergent business models such as like Reddit licensing their data to people to train their models on it and you can definitely put a premium on new data. So places that are, that have that data, whether it's, you know, you know, Twitter X Reddit, et cetera, New York Times with topical new things, these are all still really valuable. So hopefully that the people producing like classic publishers, creators, et CETERA I think there'll still be value in that, but we still have to. I think there's still more cards to be played and chips to fall in terms of, like, where that all nets out. As a creator, you might be worried that, like, an AI influencer is going to take your job because they can create endless content and post it and over time just gets better and better and better. I have seen, though, like, an oddly high durability of influencers. As someone who's been in this space for over a decade, probably 12 years actually, it is remarkable how robust influencers as a channel are and will, I think, will be even in the age of AI. Who knows if they'll get to a point where I as a creator can license my name and likeness and use models built on that to easier, more easily create content or drive experiences, etc. I think that's a way that creators can scale. We don't see much of that today, but just the trust that people have in those channels is as high as it's ever been. I still, I think we'll see a little bit of a resurgence of classical channels with authoritativeness in an age of AI where nothing can be really verified, but people will be looking also to these creators that they know and love and trust and follow. So even I actually am not as worried as others might be that, like in AI, they will be influencers, but I don't think that they're just going to take over. There's also not the emotional connection. Like, if I showed you this, like, amazing impressionist, you know, seen in France and told you one was made by like, Matisse or something, and the other is made by AI. Humans are like, ah, screw that other thing. Like, the Matisse thing's brilliant. Even if in a blind test they couldn't tell. Once you know the provenance of something, it just shifts something irreparably in your head. And so I do think that no matter what, like, influencers have a big, huge foothold in this media landscape and just simply the providence of them being a real person and this coming from them and being curated by them, I think it will remain to be a huge asset.
- [30:30]
A
Man. I think that what you just said there is so powerful for everybody that. That didn't hear what he said.
- [30:35]
B
The.
- [30:36]
A
The providence of something. Like, like art. Like, people buy the art for the story that's behind it to show it off.
- [30:44]
B
Yes.
- [30:44]
A
Like, they, they follow people that they know like, and trust. Like, okay, I got some books out there called that, but, like, the reality Is it's true, right? Like, it's absolutely true. Like, that's why, like, I've been talking about this for forever. Because the communities grow and if, like, you don't trust anything and there's so much information, you're looking for this person to provide me the news, right? And, and I think that some of the platform channels, you know, and there was, okay, we, we're. We're, you know, we're. We're limiting content. We're doing all this kind of stuff. Like, they're not the sources of truth that, that they once were. You're really looking at everything like, is this real? Like, I mean, right now, I don't know, but I creep on Twitter. I need to get like, more personally on Twitter. But I can tell you, I get so much great information from it. But right now there's like UFO sightings, like, all over the place, you know, And I'm like, I don't like, so someone posted and I'm like, wow. But if I knew that person and they posted it, I could message that person. Or like, there would be a level of like, is this AI generated? Is this real? Like, I think there's probably a blend, but. But, but I don't know who to trust and I don't know if this information is good or not. Like, even Elon Musk just landed a rocket and he's like, not cgi. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, yeah, well, and one, let.
- [32:10]
B
Me give an interesting, like, thought experiment too. Like, I think, like, taste and curation is going to be really important. You've mentioned this. You earlier said, like, you think creativity would be such an important asset and differentiator. And I agree. I think that curation and taste will remain a differentiator since AI is democratizing for the production of things and really shrinking that gap between imagination and creation, which is really like our mission as a company, by the way. But if that's happening, then creativity is that ultimate, like, final asset and taste is the asset there. Where, if you can imagine it, you can put it to paper now, more and more every day. But as a thought experiment, like, let's just say that there is an account or like, let's just say that, like, if I was an influencer, I'm not very influential online. But like, people follow you. You might just be curating images generated by AI, but your. The. What you curate still adds a bit of the story to it versus an account that's just spitting them out. And so I think even, even If a creator is not creating it themselves, but curating, I still think there's power in that. And so I, I really think that influencers as a channel, if you asked me years ago, I wouldn't have guessed that they'd be as durable as they are, but I think they have like a really strong foothold. And so I think it's still worth investing in. I don't think creators should be as fearful as they might be. And I think they can take advantage of the media landscape and kind of the lack of trust. We'll see. I do think actually, by the way, the biggest problem with AI, near term, I think long term there's like tons of opportunity and tons of problems that will come up. But near term it's misinformation. And creators, influencers posting like content that they, that's originating from them will have a piece where people can trust certain outlets and creators. There will be some that, you know, might be known more known to rile up people, but then, you know, that'll be attached to them. They'll have kind of a low authenticity score in the communities that they're in because of that.
- [34:02]
A
No, I would just like, I love what you're saying right now. I think this is super golden for anybody that's listening because curation is a lot of what we did with our podcast over the last 12 years is like, okay, someone wrote this. Let's analyze this from our eyes and share from real world experience what we've seen and how this applies. I love the durability component to that because I think a lot of creators are like, hey, I've built this big audience. What's going to happen? So I think that there's some concern about that. But also online, you're exposed to so much information. And to your point, yeah, if there, if there's people that are adding value, I follow them. Right. If there's somebody that's posting like, and I go check this outlandish comments, I remove them because I don't, I block them. I'm like, I don't like, I am trying to get a truth feed here of whatever I'm interested in or have the curation to that standpoint. And you can, you can, you can, you can group that together. My last question for you, I feel like we've just kind of started to unpack. This really is, how do you influence. Where do you see the bridge between influencers today and businesses? Right. So you, you have a big platform that connects influencers with brands. Right. And so where is that business opportunity, where are people missing out? Like I think a lot of people are still running a bunch of Facebook ads, running a bunch of, you know, Google Ads, right? They haven't really branched out into kind of the digital PR landscape and maybe they've heard about it or they put a little bit of money towards it and didn't see anything. Like what are they missing? Right, like what's the bridge?
- [35:51]
B
That's a great question. It also differs a little bit like who you are as a business. And so I'll answer it in a few ways like whether, let's say you're a startup brand on Shopify or maybe you're an enterprise company. It depends a little bit. Overall, creators are amazing at creating content and scaling content, driving like awareness to your product and consideration and building a community. But the Shopify type, smaller brands also excel at using them for conversion and sales. So I'll split it in a few ways. At its most basic, if you're a small to medium sized business or a startup or Shopify brand, something like that, you can use creators as an engine to create a lot of content. Start building a community like seeding a community with your product, etc. Driving things like posts and even reviews online. And then if you end up working with a lot of creators, one thing I'd heavily call out is that if you're using them for conversion, it follows a power law, not a bell curve. So bell curve, it's like the average is in the middle. A power law means that 20% of the creators will drive 80% of the results. So really what you should imagine them as is if you worked with 100 creators, 20 of them would drive most of the sales and of that 20, a few of them would drive the majority of those. So it's really a power curve. And what I advise people working with creators, if they're working with creators for conversion, test and learn, try a lot of things and then keep doubling down with the ones that are working and kind of use them, work with them as brand ambassadors. The most successful people I've seen on that side are almost using them like an outbound, like a commission only salesforce. And they're like training in like having regular talks and calls even with these group of creators telling them like, hey, here's what's working for other people, sharing tips and tricks. But that's one thing on conversion side and as a bigger brand, I would really lean on creators as a way to stay as agile as possible, creating content as quickly and scaled as possible. Because you need a ton of content for your ads and you can use them in like, your ad units. So I'd say, like, the bigger you go, the more we find our brands use them for content and just raw influencer posts. And then when you go lower on the size of the company, it's often geared towards conversion.
- [38:09]
A
Yeah, no, I, what I've seen, you know, and tell me what, what you think. But like, if you mapped it out, right, certainly on the affiliate side. And like, I mean, I think TikTok store is just, I mean, people are driving sales and commission, commission sales, certainly for a lot of SaaS products and all sorts of things. But like, when you look at it from a broader standpoint, I work with some B2B companies, B2C, but, but, but some big companies and, and we're doing thought leadership and we're, we're creating influence. And it's not just about the bottom line. Right. And so, you know, you run into advertising to just get the word out there, to get your name out there, to kind of like let people know how you're positioned in the marketplace. Then the influencers come in and the PR comes in to help position it. So you're on someone's radar with the advertising, but they don't know what to think. They don't know the trust. That's where the reviews, that's where the trust comes in. So the PR gets in their face of like, okay, I've heard this brand before, but this influencer that I'm aware of, like, just mentioned it, like, okay, now it's on my radar, right? But I've seen, you know, that fall off pretty quickly, right? You use an influencer, it's initial attention, right? Like, it gets someone's attention, but you got to get them into your funnel, right? And you got to have your strategy of your content. And you need to be hitting with SEO. You need to be email dripping. I'm like, you got to, you got to, you got to use the influencer to get them on your list, right? And then, and then, and then you got to reel them in, like hook some. And then you got to reel them in. I don't know that that's kind of the model how I've kind of seen it fit in, into the broader perspective of people are thinking about influencer.
- [39:50]
B
Yeah, I would say also like to go off of that. Like, influencers drive consideration better than almost any channel. And then you can use that. Like, let's say you work with 20 TikTokers to promote your product, you give them a basic brief, but they all do their own riff on it. One or two of those ads or one or two of those posts will perform better than the rest. You can use that as like a kernel for an ad that will be very successful. And so something I'd recommend to everyone is like, we made popular Pays, for example, to make it easy to like organize your work there, scaling creator campaigns. But I'd also recommend that everyone have like an editor that they. There's. You can reach out to people on Instagram. You can, if you're just buying one, you don't even need to use a platform like POP Pays. You can just like DM them, but find an editor whose style you like and get a rate with them so that when you have all these assets, like if you have a bunch of influencer posts, they can stitch them into ad units and you can find, you can find editors online who can just, you know, add a few motion graphics, text, et cetera, text overlay, and turn a really great influencer post into probably your best performing ad unit. So that's one like really tried and true playbook we've seen.
- [40:57]
A
All right, Corbit. So, okay, so I think that that leads us into to the big question here. Right? Like so and I think you kind of tipped at some stuff. So you know, what is like maybe one or just, you know, however you want to kind of frame it up. But what's one unknown secret of digital marketing that you don't think people use enough and they, they should be leveraging?
- [41:21]
B
I mean, amazing question and hence the premise for the podcast. I would say current and top local one is most people don't realize how technical they could be and how AI tools can make them good enough at anything they want to learn. And so we kind of are stuck thinking about ourselves as having a static skill set. And what I would really encourage people to do is try using that new cursor on ChatGPT and make a quick pong game online and you can do it in less than a minute. Try, you know, like LTX Studio to make a movie you've always wanted to make in five minutes. You can now do anything you want to do. And so creativity is really the only boundary and barrier there. But yeah, I would say that the main secret and trick is to expand your idea of how technical you can be at anything you want to learn.
- [42:14]
A
Awesome. Love it. Okay, so you've mentioned some of your platforms. Make sure to get those to me and we'll get those in the show notes so people can check them out. But if someone want to kind of find out more about what your you know, some of the topics we've talked about, more about you, more about your businesses, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?
- [42:33]
B
Since we covered so much ground, I would say go to lifetrix.com where you can see our whole roster of products from Popular Pays, the creator and influencer marketing platform to LTX Studio, our AI video platform. But that way you can kind of direct to whatever of the things I mentioned appeals most to you.
- [42:50]
A
Awesome. Well Cor, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone. Thank you for sticking with me. I realized halfway through this that I didn't have my sound, so hopefully I didn't have the right mic on my sound. So hopefully that was okay. Sometimes people leave me comments about that, so hopefully you stuck through it. Really appreciate it. If you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the Internet. All right, reach out to EWR Digital for marketing your business. Check out Matthew Bertram.com we are launching coaching program in January. There's a lot of good trainings and things that we're coming out with, so please check it out. And until the next time, bye bye for now.
- [43:40]
B
SA.