Cracking The In-Store Attribution Code In Influencer Marketing

0:12Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.

0:24Emily Steele: Today's episode is sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous advertising. Its enterprise AI solution transforms campaign briefs into strategies and media plans that integrate directly into omnichannel activation. You can learn more at basis.com.

0:51Hey everyone, and welcome to today's episode of Ad Exchanger Talks. If your first thought was, hey, that doesn't sound like editor-in-chief Alison Schiff, first let me commend you on your discerning ear. I am actually Joanna Gerber, associate editor at AdExchanger, and I'm very excited to be guest hosting today's episode of AdExchanger Talks. My guest today is Emily Steele, CEO and co-founder of the creator platform Hummingbirds. We're going to talk about why creator content, especially small-scale local creators, resonates so deeply with consumers today, as well as Hummingbirds' new solution for tying in-person sales back to creator content.

1:26You'll also get to hear how Hummingbird's got its name, which I find to be an especially sweet story. But before we jump in, Programmatic I.O. is right around the corner. So if you haven't grabbed a ticket yet, you better hop on that. It's taking place September 28th and 29th at the New York Marriott Marquis, and you're going to want to be, as they say, in the room where it happens, because we have got a good agenda lined up for you, with speakers including Chris Kane, Martin Sorrell, Colleen Coulter, the Global Ad Solutions lead over at OpenAI, Alexa Raff, the CMO of Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, and Bob Lord, the president of Horizon Media.

2:01We've also got folks from Yum Brands, Dentsu X, the Brands Tech Group, Razorfish, Zoom, Time, PMG, and The Guardian. If I tried to list everybody, we would run out of time on the podcast, so you're just going to have to visit the event website to see for yourself. Podcast listeners get 10 % off with the promo code POD10, so what are you waiting for? Grab your ticket and we'll see you there.

2:27Hey, Emily, it is so good to see you again. Yes, you too. Glad to be here. I know we spoke back in April about Hummingbirds, but I know a lot has changed since then, both for you guys specifically and in the creator economy at large. So I'm excited to hear more. But first, I want to ask you kind of a fun, not super work related question, which is just off the bat, What is something fun about you that our listeners might not know from either reading your LinkedIn page or working with you? Oh my gosh. My normal fun fact, which maybe I need to shake things up because it's been a beat, but out of college, I biked across America and that's something like very random.

3:05And then I tattooed a bicycle on me and I don't really bike as much anymore. So, you know, it becomes a conversation of like, oh, you're a cyclist. I'm like, I was more so prior retired cyclist. Yes, exactly. But that's kind of my fun fact. And it was like one of the coolest adventures I've ever taken that really taught me a lot about mind over matter and how resilient humans can be. So cool. Also, shocking how many people you ask this question to and their answer is like some crazy feat of physical endurance. We have a lot of jocks in the industry. And I am not like you would meet me and be like, that doesn't make sense for her.

3:39I'm not athletic in any way my parents were like you can't do this like you're not built for this and I'm like well now that you said that like I'm gonna prove you wrong maybe that's entrepreneur in me right but that um yeah well excellent transition um which is that I don't know if all of our listeners I was gonna say readers I'm so used to everything being written but some of our listeners might not be familiar with hummingbirds so I would love for you to just give us a little bit of background on what hummingbirds is and how it came to be so a little bit of background on you as well? Yeah. So I'm in Des Moines, Iowa.

4:11So I started this company out of running a marketing agency and I was working with a lot of different brands that were trying to drive local behavior. And a lot of what works in a local environment is word of mouth. And so a lot of my clients were looking for ways to grow their word of mouth strategy. And it was around the time that influencer marketing was really picking up. But I was like, influencer marketing in a local environment isn't quite the same because you really need local people to influence local people around what you're doing locally. How many times can I say local? And essentially, I realized that the people who were influencing me the most locally were my neighbors, the people I did stand volleyball with, the people I bumped into at the grocery store, at the coffee shop.

4:53And so I had this thesis that, you know, everyday people who had at least some sort of social presence could influence their peers and ultimately drive business for my clients and for other brands in the community. And so I spun this out out of my agency, came up with a concept called hummingbirds because my father-in-law loves birds and I'm apparently the hummingbird who like flits around and is like a local pollinator. And it was like this aha moment for me. I'm like, I'm bringing people together who are like almost influencers, would never call themselves that, love hyping the things they love about in and around Des Moines.

5:28They're absolutely pollinators. But turned out using the word pollinator in marketing just wasn't landing. I'm like, we got to go creator influencer with our marketing. You know, that makes sense to me. I hear pollinator and I'm like, oh, they're going to make me sneeze like steer clear. I know. But leaned in, right? Because people get it when you talk about a hummingbird. Oh, I think it's such a clever name. I was actually going to follow up and make sure you explain to the listeners where the name came from because I think it's so fun and creative. Yeah, it's everyone's first question, right?

5:57Like, how did you go with hummingbirds? And so I always give – my father-in-law always gets a shout out. So I hope someday to make him famous. But essentially, yeah, I gathered these people in and around Des Moines, and I noticed that a lot of clients started coming to me to my agency for this type of service. And I was matching people on spreadsheets and Google Forms, and I was like, this feels like it has a lot of potential. And I started getting some inbound emails from other brands like Chicago or Minneapolis. Like, how can I tap into this? And creators were moving from Des Moines to other cities.

6:29Like, how can I join in another city? And I always knew this had massive potential, but I was really in it to be of service to my community. I love Des Moines. I've always been someone who's like, how do I make Des Moines better through marketing? And so when I really like got my mind outside of kind of this local like Des Moines thesis, I realized that no one was really touching the local influencer space the way that we had really designed it in and around Des Moines. And I tested a few opening a couple other markets like in, where did I go? I'm totally blanking on the first one, Milwaukee and Omaha.

7:05So like pretty close to Des Moines. And I realized I didn't have to be there to grow the creator community or bring in the businesses. And so I wanted to prove that it wasn't like me, Emily, needing to facilitate and bring community together, that it could be something that grew without me in the epicenter. And so I think those were the moments where I was like, okay, I really think this is a potential venture-backed type of business that could be, yeah, that could be backed by a VC. And so I ended up finding a co-founder who had been there, done that, had raised capital and built a team and scaled a tech company.

7:39I took the service outside of the agency and in 2023 launched it as its own kind of like SaaS offering. And we've been growing pretty much exponentially since we went to the market, went live in 2023 as hummingbirds.com. And essentially we work with CPG brands that are in retail. We send our creators into the likes of Target, Walmart, Sprouts, Whole Foods. They create content in store, show their followers the product on shelf, and then they bring it into their everyday life at home. And it really depends on what the brand is looking for, but we're very focused on the in real life, the in retail, everyday creators who have influence where they live.

8:23And so that's been our wedge since the very beginning is this kind of local authentic flavor of creators. And to date, we have about 350 brands that pay an annual subscription to access our creator base and really scale out their retail efforts inside of retail, like I said. So when you said that you kind of, the very, very beginning of the idea was you realizing that the people who inspire you the most to, you know, change your purchase habits are people in your direct life. Are those people who you saw posting on social media about it? Or do you literally just mean like, you'd strike up a conversation with your neighbor and she'd be like, oh, I got this awesome new shampoo, you got to try it.

9:03I mean, it was both because I think being so out and about, I was, you know, like, oh, you smell really nice. Where'd you get your perfume? Oh, I got it over at like Fresh Time, right? Like you can't have that experience online. But I would notice things. Not yet. Yeah, exactly. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine? I don't want to be able to smell through the computer. Let me preface that. I would notice things, you know, they'd be out at a picnic. I'd be like, oh my gosh, I love that like picnic basket. Where'd you grab that? You know and it's like the natural DM stories or like a quick comment on like a carousel.

9:37But it was both and, right? Because I live so much in Instagram but also so much in real life or like run into someone and like I saw that post you did. Oh my gosh, that looked like such a fun trip. I loved your hat. Where did you get that? Like I think that's the beauty of social and local is like you have these touch points online that you can then surface into real conversations in person. So how local, how small are we talking? I know you said you focus mostly on smaller creators who are hyper localized. You said most of them wouldn't even call themselves influencers. How big are most of their followings and how much of their following would you say is like a fan base versus people they know in real life?

10:13Yeah, I think, you know, the creator economy continues to evolve. And because it's growing so fast, we do see a mix of kind of these aspiring influencers who are maybe at the nano influencer stage and trying to grow more of that kind of fan base and go beyond that kind of local flavor, but they're still smaller creators at this point in their journey. And then we have like the true mom with a few kids, does this as a hobby, finds it really fun, gets some extra money to pay for groceries or take a trip at the end of the year. And that's someone, both of them typically have between like 500 to 5 ,000-ish followers and really focus on that kind of everyday life type of content.

10:56So you're telling me I could be a micro-influencer. I'm saying it's possible. In New York City, I might have some steep competition. Okay. You could try. You could sign up. I'm not sure. Subtle plug. Something else I wanted to talk about was a challenge in the space that is influencer fatigue, which is a term that you actually introduced me to last time we talked. So for other people like me who don't know what influencer fatigue means and think it just sounds like really sleepy creators. Could you tell us what actually that refers to? Yeah, I think like we all are getting sold to all the time.

11:34And I think as a creator, we have grown so much. Like we know that most influencers have something to sell us. And so there is a little bit of fatigue around like what is, you know, I think it's like celebrity endorsements. It's so ooh, ah in the beginning of its time. And now it's like, yep, okay, there's another sponsored piece of content. I think there's a similar thing that's been happening probably the last couple of years around influencers. Like, oh, another big deal. Like, we're smart as consumers. We know it's an ad and you can sniff it right away. And so, yeah, there is less and less trust in the larger influencer category, which has always been our thesis.

12:13Same with celebrity endorsements. That was kind of how I was anchoring a lot of the early beliefs. It's like a lot of trust does erode over time. And so how do you tap into people who feel like this is just another fun recommendation for their friends and followers because they love the product and they've tried it? Do you think trust erodes over time like with specific influencers or do you just mean that people get so tired of seeing it that any influencer is just kind of written off? Maybe a little bit of both. I mean, it probably depends on the person. But I think, yeah, over time, seeing kind of the same influencer create the same ads, it can be a little – feels a little bit more transactional.

12:57And I think some influencers do an incredible job of like balancing like their own organic content with ads, but some don't do a great job. Right. It's all ads all the time. It's like, okay, you love that shampoo and maybe I was willing to believe that, but now you love this body wash and then you love that shirt, how much can you really love? You have endless love for all things. Wow. Yeah. And maybe that's beautiful. Maybe we should be warmer about that. Maybe we're missing out. But something I wanted to know about the problem of influencer fatigue is, I guess, why do you think smaller influencers are part of the solution to that and how can smaller influencers kind of use that to their advantage?

13:35I think there's just an inherent, if you're a smaller influencer, you likely have your friends and family and people you've met either at college or in your own community following you. And so you have a natural trust gap, a natural trust facilitated with those individuals. And so, and I think if brands are willing to look at it in a way that's really like, hey, go try my product and share about it on social and not overly scripted and not overly try to control the creative, it just feels really natural. And so I've seen too, as brands go more upmarket with influencers, there's a lot more risk.

14:16Financially, you're putting like$50 ,000 into one person. So you, as like someone who runs the marketing department, like you probably want a lot of control over how that person creates content and what goes out and win and like trying your absolute best to make it perfect, right? Because it's one big investment. Or if you're a brand working 500 small everyday creators at the same time, you kind of have to let go of control. And you have to be able to let people have kind of this creative experience with your brand and share about it and be open to it not being perfect or highly overly curated.

14:52I think that's what keeps the creator economy so wonderful is is allowing people to express their creativity about a brand in a way that is true to them or if we all see the same scripted hashtag ad types of content like it's just noise over yeah and i think that's one of the biggest things that kind of makes uh creator content divergent from other types of ads which is that so many brands have such strict limitations on you know this is the type of language we use and this is exactly how we market our products and this is the way we place them in ads. And to be a part of the creator economy, they have to let go.

15:29So let's talk a little bit about how you connect brands with the right advertisers. And then from there, I'd love to talk a little bit more about what we just touched on, which is how much say does a brand get in the way that influencers talk about their products? And obviously you can't name names, I'm sure, but would love to hear if there's any tension there about brands saying, oh, I'm really not sure I like giving up this much power. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a big part of our sales conversations we try to get to right away because they're not necessarily approving content. They create a creative brief that most platforms that have a creator matchmaking have a brief that do say like, hey, you need to put like gifted or sponsored or ad.

16:16And we work with those teams to determine that. There is direction that even creators are telling us they want. They're like, we want to do a good job for brands. We want guidance. We don't want to just totally go rogue. But the brands have to have enough risk appetite. We usually don't work with publicly traded companies, for example, at this stage and what we currently offer now. because it's just too risky for them to allow someone to create something that isn't overly controlled or approved. And so we definitely have to work with the brands that understand that. And you know, not all brands want that or have like, or are able to sign off on that.

16:56So I would say it's a real gap with just how some teams orient themselves to risk ultimately. That makes sense. How, so before actually, before we get into how you connect the right brand with the right creators. How do you market yourselves to brands in the first place? How do people hear about hummingbirds, speaking of how people hear about new products and new technology? Yeah. So we have a pretty, I mean, we've been doing this now for almost four years. So we have a pretty amazing go-to-market, I call it an engine at this point. We do spend quite a bit of time and resources on Instagram ads because that's where we're meeting brands who are using social.

17:35so that's a huge lead generator for us as a company we love trade shows as well we try to create a ton of partnerships and collaborations and events and experiences around those and like go meet teams go meet customers and show up with a lot of curiosity and like how can we be helpful like if hummingbirds isn't right for you that's totally cool like let us help you find one like a platform that is right for you so I would say those two are really big we have kind of like an outbound team that reaches out to brands that we think could be a really good fit. So we kind of do like a mix of a lot of different things, which is a huge part of our growth story.

18:11And you said most of those tend to be, I mean, I don't want to say smaller brands necessarily, but are they smaller brands in general? Are those the ones that tend to be a little bit less risk averse? It really does vary. I would say like a lot of the brands we're working with are the challenger brand. So they are either like really, they're venture backed. They have really big growth goals. They haven't been acquired yet. Like that's definitely a path most of our brands are on. They're probably around 50 million plus in revenue is like the sweet spot for us to really integrate as being kind of your always on everyday creator strategy.

18:49That's not always true, right? Some brands are really small, but it just raised a ton of capital. So they need to go deploy that. But But yeah, smaller can be a little challenging because we focus on retailers. So we really need to have enough overlap with our cities and the creators that live there to be able to send them to enough targets or to enough Harris Teeters or to enough locations that make sense for the brand. So if they're too small, it just doesn't quite make sense with our marketplace play. But yeah. And where do the creators come from? How are you finding these like super tiny localized creators?

19:22I would say the first couple of years we had two people recruiting. So we would like we knew how to find them based on how they talked, the hashtags they use, the businesses they were tagging that were trendy in that city. It was kind of this incredible machine that team built on finding and sourcing the right people and inviting them to participate in the campaign. And then they would post content and they would do like DSM Hummingbird. Like what's a DSM Hummingbird? Oh, it's Des Moines Hummingbird. What's that? I want to join. So it kind of has its own viral nature because the whole point is like social sharing influences others and so it influences them to sign up as a hummingbird.

19:59So – but over time, we grew a pretty big wait list. So – That's awesome. West Coast and New York City had massive wait lists by the time we were ready to launch those cities because people wanted to be a part of it but we gave them. They're not allowed to join until they can join at their specific city. Speaking of waiting, we are going to be right back. you guys are going to listen to an ad, and then we're going to talk more about other people's ads. It all comes full circle.

20:35Emily Steele: I'm Sarah Sluice, Editorial Director of Ad Exchanger, and I'm here with Mark McEachern, VP of Product at Basis, which is supporting our podcast this month. Hello, Mark. Hello. How are you doing? I'm good, especially because we're going to talk about three-letter acronyms, which I think is one of AdTech's favorite things, although this goes beyond just AdTech. So help explain this to our listeners. What is an MCP server and how are advertisers using it? I do love a good TLA. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Anthropic built it. Open sourced it in late 2024. and then handed it to the Linux Foundation.

21:18It's plumbing that connects the systems to agents. It lets an AI model reach into a piece of software, see what's available, and pull the right lever instead of hand-developing of the spoke integration for every tool that the model touches. And over the past year, Google, Meta, Amazon, and others have rolled out their own ad platform MCP servers, as have DSPs and SSPs. A buyer can now say, pull my campaign report or build this audience in plain language and have that request land correctly inside whichever platform is listening without building a custom connector for every combination. And eventually those instruction sets, they begin to look like standard adapters.

22:06Okay.

22:07Emily Steele: So MCPs are taking off like wildfire, I would say, and with good reason because they're very useful. So tell us a little bit more about what advertisers are able to control when platforms have an MCP server. So control depends on who built the server. An agent can pull reporting, diagnose a stall campaign, or explain a CPC spike. But in most cases, a human still has to make the change. Some folks like Meta have enabled agents to create audience, set budget, and launch a campaign all by itself. But where it's furthest along, advertisers can do all that. You can let the agent read performance data, build and activate audiences, adjust the budget, launch campaigns, and even generate creative variations all through natural language.

22:53Letting one agent shift budget across platforms on its own is where the industry says it's heading. But that's not the standard practice yet. The industry direction is obvious, though. Fewer read-only endpoints, more agents with their hands actually on the wheel. And at that point, governance and guardrails become the real conversation, not the pipes themselves.

23:16Emily Steele: So you're talking about a lot of new ways that people can connect and companies can connect to each other. So does that mean we're going to be solving for media fragmentation? Marketers run dozens of platforms to get to all that media. DSPs, walled gardens with the clean rooms, measurements. They're all bolted together with their own quirks and logins. Each of them historically needed their own bespoke API integration, its own authorization, and some team member who knew how it all fit together. MCP doesn't unify the stack, but it has the potential to unify the interface to the stack. One agent could sit on top of all of them.

24:00As an example at Basis, we have Compass, our proprietary strategy and planning agent. It has direct integrations with buying platforms, including our own DSP. Advertisers use it to upload briefs along with their research, performance history, which is then synthesized into a proposed media mix, audience personas, and creative strategy. Initiating an omni-channel planning conversation through one interface.

24:26Emily Steele: Okay, so if I'm thinking about MCP servers as a shorthand, it might help unify my interfaces if I'm a buyer, but the platforms themselves remain fragmented. Indeed. There's a lot of room for innovation under the hood. MCP is the unifying layer. There's a command and control on top of it. Well, thank you, Mark, for helping explain MCP servers. I know I understand them a bit better after these few minutes. And thanks to Basis for supporting our podcast. Thank you.

25:01And we're back. So I did promise conversations about ads and I'm going to deliver. So Emily, what I wanted to know is a little bit about the matching process between a specific creator and a brand who has the initial outreach, who has the final say. And then once the ball is in the creator's court, how much free reign do they get after reading that brief about how they go about creating this ad? or whatever. I don't know if we call it an ad or if we call it creator content, but this paid marketing endeavor. Exactly. It's like, what's the intent of the asset, if you will, that they're creating?

25:42Gosh, we could call a lot of things. But essentially, they put a campaign out. Our creators express interest. The creators the brand wants are selected to ultimately deliver on the campaign brief by the deadline. Essentially, the requirements are there in the guidance. Like we give them like three or four pieces of like content inspiration, if you will, from prior posts the brand have done or their vision for what they want to see come to life. And so the creator does that and then uploads it to the platform, obviously uploads to social as well. And then the brand kind of determines like how they want to move forward with that piece of content.

26:19And that's kind of where the ads come in, right? Like do they just let it live in organic and let the word of mouth do its thing on its own organic path? Do they take the asset? The assets are all available to the brand as well to repurpose on the website, repurpose in their own organic feed. And then some choose to do whitelisting, which I think is a really, really great way to tap into such like authentic messaging. It's not a huge thing that happens at Hummingbirds, but we're hoping to kind of grow that pathway for brands that are either looking to drive a really good CPM or they're just looking to drive more awareness around certain zip codes that touch that retailer that that creator just visited.

27:02So the creators actually kind of like, I don't want to say bid because it's not financial, but they're all vying for the given brand and the brand selects from the interested creators. The brand isn't doing specific outreach. Yeah. At this point, it is kind of like the creators need to raise their hand. We believe like the most authentic engagement comes from them saying they want it and leaning in. We may over time allow for them kind of cold outreaching to our creators. We've just found such a great response when we allow creators to say like, hey, here's why you should pick me. Here's why I'm a good fit.

27:37And brands are really excited about that. It just probably feels like a little less work than them having to go out and recruit. Right. It's like, no, here are all these people who are excited about your brand. Yeah, it feels more authentic that way too. Yeah, it's just been what I've done since the very beginning of the agency and something that feels really core to kind of our DNA in the selection process. So obviously, part of the reason that creator marketing is so beneficial or so effective is because you're hearing it from this person you trust or this person that you might even know personally.

28:07But what do you think is so valuable about the format of the content itself, not just who it's coming from? like why do you think this is better than you know a written poster or a scripted commercial or something like that I don't know I'm like I don't necessarily think like oh this is better I just think different sometimes is better than better right so it's like it's a different format different is better than better yeah I love that phrase I can't remember who said it so I'm so sorry the credit is not given um but I think it's more about meeting people where they are discovering and making decisions.

28:43And so for our customers, they want to reach a lot of times millennials, millennial women, which is the core of our marketplace and the 70 ,000 plus creators we have. And so they know that for millennials to reach other millennials, it's likely in the platforms like Instagram. So that's where we've really indexed the majority of our time and decisions is that customer feedback. And we know there are millions and millions of creators out there. Our customers are saying we want Instagram creators. We want Gen Z and millennial women because women are oftentimes the purchasing purchasers for themselves or families.

29:22And so a lot of it is just like this is the right pathway for this brand at this moment with this audience. Something else I want to touch on as the AI reporter at a trade publication about ad technology is AI. So some one question that I just personally have been grappling with both as a reporter, but also a consumer is that, as we all know, AI generated video has gotten a lot better in the past year, and a lot more accessible to more people. So the whole concept of AI influencers is on the rise. Absolutely. I struggle to, I guess, understand the idea of an AI influencer, because the whole idea is that it's somebody real in your neighborhood, in your community, whose taste you trust if it's it you know generated avatar that is not a real person what is what is the appeal sorry that's kind of a leading question I've already made my opinion on it clear but why do you think that does sway people still I mean it's not swaying our customer base so it's really interesting oh that's actually good to know yeah I don't know if it's a totally different cohort of like different verticals like what about like mobile apps maybe that works really well for that industry but like when it comes to real people going into your into a store so I also want to say like brands work with us because they need to drive velocity at the end of the day like you do marketing because you need to drive like your KPIs which are sales so for them getting a product move off a shelf is one of like a very key moment in that influencer experience and turns out an AI creator isn't going to target for you.

31:05So I think that is a huge part of the CPG and retail space that AI creators just aren't going to touch that in the way we are solving kind of the awareness and conversion for these brands and retail. So I think it's like maybe it's super helpful in other verticals. It just doesn't really touch ours. So we don't feel like we have to spend all this time learning about it and defending it. So it's kind of where I'm at with it. Cool. We're on the same page. Great. How do you trace back purchases to creator content though? Because obviously sometimes it's really easy. It's like, you know, oh, if you use this code or this link, it literally says, you know, use code influencer name or use the link from their site.

31:52But, you know, I feel like there are other times where I've been at the grocery store and I was like, oh, I think I like just saw someone posting a review of how good this new mac and cheese was. I'm going to buy some. Yeah. How do we attribute that? So I would say one of the biggest things we are and we're trying to solve ahead of our product launch is how do you prove that a creator who talks about a product at Target, at Sprouts, at Whole Foods, actually goes in, those followers actually go in and buy that product. And that has been kind of a missing link. Because as you said, like, okay, I want to share Goodles to maybe if they have an Amazon presence, I can just link to Amazon.

32:31Also for context, anyone who doesn't know, Goodles is a brand of mac and cheese that unsponsored, I will say is quite delicious. Yes, absolutely. Yes. So we'll give Goodles as the reference of this. So you can track almost everything digitally, right? Dotcom, e-commerce has been happening for decades. What no one said is like, how do we attribute a creator's content, piece of content to in-store. And so what we did essentially in our app is our app will display offers. And these offers are comprised of different brands like Goodall's that, hey, if you save this offer as a consumer, you'll get cash back.

33:07If you go to the store, scan your receipt, you'll get money because we want you to go try Goodall's because Goodall's says we want people to go buy our product and target. We need to drive velocity and target. So as you can imagine, if I'm a creator, I see these offers and I can share an offer. So I say, okay, all these products, here's Goodles, Chetty Mac. I'm going to share this with you, Joanna. And if you go buy this Goodles at Target, you're going to get$5 cash back and I'm going to earn an affiliate commission from it. But it happens at the receipt level. And where do you scan the receipt?

33:39Do you scan the receipt like on your phone? Yep. You would scan it after you shop at Target. you scan your receipt we match the product purchase to the receipt the shopper gets cash back you are an affiliate commission but it all comes to the receipt so when it comes to creators influencing people in retail like right now the receipt is the best method to prove that the transaction happened there's more friction than dot-com but i learned recently which is crazy i learned this so recently but 83 of all retail dollars are still happening in store 83? Yeah. Isn't that wild? That's honestly shocking.

34:17I thought that a lot more was happening online. Yeah. But you think about grocery. Okay. You know what? Great point. You know, like most of the stuff I buy every week, I would never buy online. That's true. My consistent purchases are in person, but my fun purchases are online. Absolutely. The face masks, the other things, that's the online purchases. I would say knowing that, like what a massive problem to solve in the creator space because creators aren't incentivized to share things in retail because they don't earn. And so for us, what we wanted to solve was kind of this retail affiliate layer where creators could be incentivized to send their followers into the store to grab a product and still kind of get that commission.

35:01So you're basically incentivizing people to track their own attribution. Essentially, they get like all that happens automatically. But if you share a link and like 16 of your friends go and buy Goodles at Target, we would make sure we have all those receipt transactions tied to your name and you would get that payment inside of our platform. Right. Sorry. I just mean that if someone doesn't do the scanning, you still don't know it. So you have to incentivize people to scan and that's the point of the cashback. Totally. That's very clever. And if there's one thing AdExchange your listeners love, it's attribution.

35:35Like truly a top 10, top 10 vocabulary word. And I know that's why we're like, we've got to solve this. You know, I think at the end of the day, people love creators and they get it. And they have a real like a CFO and a CMO who's like, show me where this like actually is driving velocity. And would you say that's been able to prove that? Sorry, would you say that's you think the biggest challenge in creator marketing? Or is there another challenge you feel like either marketers or influencers or both are facing in this kind of new economy as it continues to evolve? I think for us, like in our cohort of just working with CBG brands at retail, that was our biggest thing we needed to solve for our customers is proving that creators drive product off shelf.

36:21And right now we're showing the visuals of that and driving the brand awareness top of funnel. But we couldn't prove it until this product like affiliate launch. I think when I look at the creator landscape, I feel for marketers. um myself included there are so many different creator channels to tap into so like some brands are using us for the everyday creators but then they're going to the talent manager for bigger ones and they're using another software for another type of influencer and i think there's a lot of different ways you can work with creators and influencers like e-commerce influencers are totally different than our creators and so they have to do a lot of different types of channels and a lot of different softwares and teams and agencies to kind of to work with a lot of different types.

37:10So I feel for marketers in today's world that are in charge of influencer because there's just it's pretty disparate. I imagine the next five to ten years there will be like quite a bit of consolidation in this space, but we don't always want to overly consolidate, you know. So that's probably the challenge I see the most with people trying to juggle a lot of the different tiers of creators. And I have my guesses, obviously, but what channels are the most effective at generating, you know, new interest among consumers?

37:47I think TikTok does a really good job on the discovery side of things. That was one of my guesses. Yeah. Instagram does a really nice job as well. That was my other guess. I'm so good at this game. You're like, yes, ding, ding, ding. I think YouTube is getting pretty good at it. I will say like I do listen to quite a bit on YouTube. So I have like something I listen to my morning meditation and I like I still don't pay for YouTube subscription. So I'm hit with ads all the time. And frankly, the ads are really good. And I'm like, you know what? Yeah, I do need that. So and that's not as much in the organic space per se, but it does like it's kind of nailed it for me.

38:26kind of gets me enough that it's converting me. So obviously I'm like kind of in a vacuum giving my own like perspective and feedback on that personally. But I think it's good to have the consumer perspective. It's easy to get lost in kind of the backend marketer jargon, but we're all consumers at our core. Thank God. Yeah. Cause I'm like, I couldn't just live in the vacuum of data and like what's happening. I'm like, I get to see and experience this on my own too, to really come to different conclusions. So I'm asking you this, I guess, as a marketer and as a consumer, I think you'll have a really, really interesting answer.

38:58But what's something that you think a lot of brands get wrong about creator marketing at this stage in the game? I think some try to index too much control on the experience. And like, trust me, I get it as a founder who like does want to shape the stories people share about my company. And, you know, if I especially if I'm putting any sort of payment behind it i think it it just loses kind of its soul like the more you try to control the narrative so i think that's like the get it wrong part and i get it that it's risky but i think if you're if we're going to make the creator economy thrive and be something really magical for brands and creators we have to find that middle ground that feels really good to the creator and really good to the brand.

39:47And it's kind of an ebb and flow. So I know I shared about that earlier. So I think that and also just creator compensation, it can feel like really like up and down. I don't know that we could ever truly standardize payments to creators. I think some bring something to the table that is very nuanced and hard to price around, but it does make it, it can just be really challenging, you know, when like, wow, you are$10 ,000 more, but like on paper you're so similar. So I think that's a lot for the different folks to juggle and experience. And before we wrap up, I have one more final question for you.

40:26It's just a little bit more on the fun side. But if you were a creator right now and you were getting, you know, paid to sponsor some brand's item right now, like what's a product you're obsessed with right now that you would just love to be a creator making content for? Oh my gosh. Wow. I'll just answer one, I guess. You can give me a couple. Okay. I was just thinking I actually like did my hair today, which is rare, but I use Crown Affair. It's female founded. They have great hair oil and I think it smells amazing. I've been using their stuff for years. I get it at Sephora. So I go in store and I buy like I preach.

41:07So I love their stuff. For anyone who's listening to the audio version and not watching the video, I can attest Emily's hair looks excellent today. I had a good hair day. You know, it's rare, but it does happen. The other one I just interviewed someone on a webinar we host, it's called Force of Nature. It's like really, really, it's regenerative agriculture, leaning meat. And it's just a really, really cool brand story. Great mission. So I like, I feel so much pride when I'm like supporting female founders or I'm going in retail and supporting brands or I'm buying a product that's like better for the environment.

41:43So those are two examples, but I really could go all day and I'm not going to. I'll give a quick shout out. Now we're just doing product placement. But no, I last week at a local bar and I ordered a beer from this brand Talaya and they just happened to, I also know, be a female founded local lease stores. I think they're based in Brooklyn and I've like walked past their brewery. So every time I get a to lay a brand. I'm like, yeah, supporting local. See, it feels really good. And I think that's like the thing to come back with consumers. Consumers want to do things that feel good and they want to be associated with brands that align to who they want people to perceive them as and who they believe themselves as.

42:20And so that's why I love the creator space so much is like it's this expression of who you are and who you want people to see you as. And I love the kind of the core message too that you started with is just that, you know, we're all pollinators in our own way. We're all listening to the people around us and what they like. So go pollinate. That is the message today. Be a pollinator. Be the pollinator you wish to see in the world. Well, thank you so much, Emily. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great to chat. All right. Go off and pollinate, everyone.

42:58Emily Steele: This episode is sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous advertising. Its enterprise AI solution transforms campaign briefs into strategies and media plans that integrate directly into omni-channel activation. Learn more at basis.com.

43:20Thank you.