Creator Marketing Is Growing Up

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. Today's episode is sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous miss 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.

0:51Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of AdExchange Your Talks. I'm Senior Editor Victoria McNally, and I'm filling in for our usual host, Allison Schiff. You already know this if you're a regular listener, I know, but Programmatic I.O. is coming up at the end of the month. It's kind of a big deal. And I've got a great guest with me this week who will be speaking at the event about a part of a digital advertising agency that doesn't tend to get a whole lot of programmatic play, which is the creator and digital marketing space. So my guest is Jennifer Quigley-Jones. She was the CEO and founder of Digital Voices, which is an influencer marketing agency that was acquired by PMG earlier this year.

1:26And she's now a VP of strategy and partnerships at PMG. And she's so knowledgeable and so passionate about the creator marketing space. It's really infectious, as you're about to find out. But before that, if you still haven't gotten your ticket for ProBio, I don't know what you're waiting for because it's so soon. It's taking place in New York at the Marriott Marquis on September 28th and 29th. And you can register with a pretty good discount if you type in our code for podcast listeners. That's P-O-D-1-0. So pod 10. Now with that out of the way, let's get into it with Jenny. Hi, Jenny. Thank you so much for joining us here at AdExchanger Talks.

2:05It's great to talk to you. Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to our session. Awesome. So the first thing we like to do with AdExchanger Talks, first question we ask, what is something that people who are listening to this podcast right now might not know about you? A few secret hidden things. I actually spent two years learning Arabic every day. And when I was at college, after doing my master's, specialized in the Syrian refugee crisis. So I am now do not speak Arabic very well. I've forgotten most of it. But that was my My initial career plan was to go and work in nonprofits in the Middle East.

2:47And with no family background in it, I'm half Irish, half Welsh, just really, really love the pain of learning difficult languages. That is so interesting because I had wanted to ask just from looking at your LinkedIn bio, you know, your early career, your education seems a lot more focused on that sort of international relations, like Middle East kind of stuff. Aside from just thinking it would be hard and wanting to try it, like what brought you to that? I guess this is timely because it's, you know, the 25th anniversary of 9-11 a few days ago. When I was a child, I lived in Kuwait. So I moved to Kuwait age six and left when I was like 11, 12.

3:26And so I was actually there during 9-11. And my family was supposed to move to Islamabad in Pakistan for my dad's job three days after 9-11. So all the facts were just grounded at that point. and I came back to the UK and I remember just being very confused because my childhood there was quite idyllic and Kuwait had a very interesting political um situation being because because the Gulf War they had historic kind of ties with the US and then so it was a a kind of a very it was a complex situation to grow up with and so when I came I remembered having a very safe, sweet, idyllic childhood. And when I moved back to the UK, people were like, how did you live in that awful place?

4:15And I remember just being really curious about like, how these identities formed? How do people, how do you democratize media? How do you help people speak for themselves and define themselves? So I just kind of got very obsessed with politics and ended up doing my master's in Middle Eastern studies and working on the Syrian refugee crisis. And then straight after college, I was working at Oxfam and I was bored to death. Like the work was just very, was not the most challenging. It was a lot of following processes that had been done before. There wasn't much innovation in the space. And I was working on this incredible project and I found it was still moving too slow.

5:01So I read this article in The Economist that said, there are two career paths you should go down. if you're young and you want to grow your career quickly and one was if you're a very well-rounded person go and go into management consultancy and the other was like if you're a bit quirky and strange which hands up school that was me it recommended going into tech so I on the basis of reading that article applied for a job at YouTube and got the job at YouTube um so yeah it was very very random circuitous route that's so interesting yeah because i you know i feel like a lot of people they either start from the very beginning of marketing and they never know anything else or they come from like the strangest other backgrounds and i know a lot of people who are uh you know former entertainment journalists who get into marketing pr like that makes a lot of sense because you're still writing you're still developing relationships but going from like humanitarian crises to YouTube is like a very interesting juxtaposition.

6:08Yes, I actually applied for a Middle Eastern role at YouTube to work with Middle East creators. And I was obsessed because there were actually more female rather than male creators in the Middle East. And then Saudi women driving, it happened partly because a woman uploaded a video of herself driving on YouTube. So I thought this would be really interesting to see how a region defines itself and it kind of ties back into that childhood confusion but then they interviewed me in Arabic and said your Arabic isn't fluent we want fluency in multiple dialects and um definitely wasn't there they said there was this role in the UK do you want to um do you want to take it we're not even going to advertise it because we will be flooded with applicants so it's funny I have this theory that a lot of marketers are anthropologists and they have done all these other jobs and just got really curious.

7:01So that random career path sometimes makes sense. Yeah, it's, um, there's that meme that went around from a couple years ago that's a YouTuber that I enjoy following did like a presentation at Dashcon and there's that, um, there's that image of her with like a birthday hat and pointing to a slide that says like, it's just being a nosy bitch who lives for drama or something along those lines. And I think that's a very common refrain, maybe not with those words exactly but like I think there's there's that level of like be interested in human curiosity yes I think marketing is so fundamentally about being curious especially even in the ad tech space it's like does this work why doesn't this work how can I make it work let's just peel back another layer and I think with them with the role of like agentic AI and the growth of AI there's so much more you can build if you're willing to test and be curious so So maybe there's a mixture of like anthropologist and curious, willing to break things person.

7:58Aside from, you know, the being nosy and being curious kind of thing, I'm curious when you move from one field to another and sort of got into marketing, like what were the skills or disciplines that you found really overlapped or really helped you from your beginning stages of your career? Yeah. Okay. there are two things that I think firstly it's that starting from zero mentality so being willing to look at a problem and literally say hang on let's dissect all our assumptions here and see if we can build it better that was happening in in both a lot of like refugee and international development contexts there was a lot of that work going on there was a really interesting movement when I was working there about do you give people vouchers or do you give them cash grants and like giving refugees and displaced people cash which again was like taking it back to that first principles thinking and I really like this like monitoring evaluation testing and learning starting from scratch mentality which I think translates really well to marketing and the second thing is being really human centric with with advertising so much of what we do is how do you slightly amend or influence behavior with these little nudges?

9:15And that happens in advertising and product in tech all the time. And it's just being willing to, again, willing to experiment with it that I think makes a big difference. So I know you spent some time at YouTube, and then you kind of founded your own agency pretty quickly after joining the marketing world. I'm sort of curious about how you made that decision, why it felt like the right time to start something new? Like, what were you seeing at YouTube that you thought you could improve on or that really like interested you? Yeah, there was, it was interesting because a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs statistically start in their 40s or 50s, which I think gets lost in this like Mark Zuckerberg myth of young founders.

9:58But there is something for being young and not having a huge amount to lose. I was working at YouTube and I worked with like 500 of the UK's top creators and I loved my colleagues. Everyone was very smart. People were willing to break things, willing to build new products. And we had like internal hackathons. And so I loved that environment. But at the same time, we were working on the, my role was on the creator side. So it was helping creators grow their audience. It wasn't necessarily monetizing with brand deals. And I looked around the industry and there were a lot of influencer agencies beginning to spring up, but they were all doing only pretty much Instagram at the time, only Instagram ads.

10:42TikTok didn't exist. YouTube was driving so many sales for the brands that tested it and were courageous enough to test it. But most agencies weren't even thinking about that opportunity. They weren't thinking about YouTube creators. So again, I really like learning. I felt like I was getting a bit bored and told myself right if you if you don't hand in your notice now you're never going to do it because there are so many people who stay at Google for decades so I I handed in my notice and just decided I was going to freelance in this space and see what happened and try and pull together brands and YouTube creators ideally if you could show impact and sales incredible but I was like someone needs to fill this gap because these creators have such a powerful parasocial relationship with their audience they should be able to monetize it um and then spent nine months freelancing hated freelancing um there are some people who are cut out for it but the uncertainty the not having a team was really hard especially when you come from being surrounded by great people yeah it can be really lonely so I at 26 I had never managed anyone I'd never worked in marketing I never worked at an agency I decided nine months later when we won our first big client that I was going to invest all the money into hiring people and actually start building a team around me for offering this service to brand at scale and that that was a real it was nice to find product market fit because when I was first freelancing and saying yes to working with startups or running socials or producing content or doing strategy or training you do feel a bit directionless whereas when we started actually getting paid to bring youtube creators and brands together and run youtube we were running youtube channels and then doing content that lived on the creators channels it felt like you'd finally is something had finally clicked into place and so yeah quite quickly after that we we started scaling so i'd say a year and a half later we had like six a team of six but coming into covid in that one year post covid we grew our revenues 500 and quadrupled the size of our team because every brand suddenly realized all the traditional marketing channels that were open to them were shut down and actually creators could continue to work from home everyone was buying online so we all you could track sales and demonstrate the impact.

13:15And it was just the moment where creators became production companies. And it was just a phenomenal time to be part of the industry. Yeah. Going back to when you first started with Digital Voices, you were looking at sort of the gap between, you know, brands like kind of exclusively going to Instagram and not going to YouTube or other places. I'm so curious for what you thought was happening at the time because I was still in entertainment journalism at the time. And that was like a very pivot to video kind of time. I mean, that comes around every couple of years, you know, but like, you know, like we did a lot of stuff for YouTube.

13:55We did a lot of stuff for Facebook. Video was also a big one. And so I'm sort of curious, like, what do you think the disconnect was at the time? Why marketers weren't getting on board? And how were you sort of helping them to see where those opportunities were when you first started? I remember that time we had so many decks that were like have you thought about running social video ads and now it feels it feels archaic that we're like I remember I used to say this stat four times the number of people would rather watch a video than read the same information I don't know who those people are by the way I'm like I have to thank you I do watch like video I'll have stuff on the background and I'll watch videos but like if I need to know how to do something I need like a step-by-step photo tutorial like I need eight different versions of the thing to show me how to do it maybe it's that that neurodivergent thing I don't know spicy brain podcast yeah I'm completely with you I love give me something visual on a page I can read over yeah um completely with you so I think there would there were a couple of contributing factors to the fact people weren't doing video one I put it down to industry laziness which as someone who like obsessively always tried to have the right answer it really frustrated me Instagram was much cheaper to turn around and much quicker and you could say a creator didn't have a limited Instagram inventory you could so I think a lot of the agencies found the quickest path to revenue and in some ways very well done to them at that at that point I was I the injustice of it all was shocking to me like why when YouTube exists where creators are driving more sales and have a deeper parasocial relationship would you ever do do instagram i think also a lot of the tech tools that were built to source creators initially didn't have access to youtube's api i think you had to have a further along engineering team or you had to specifically plug it in and a lot of um tech just went straight for the instagram api so you could source creators very easily there even until recently creator iq and captivate were charging extra for access to YouTube creator data.

16:06So I think it was speed, efficiency, cost, and access were some big issues. And then also the cost of these YouTube creators was so much higher. So those creators were, they could make maybe four videos a month. So if you're thinking like one video a week and you're doing editing a 20, 30 minute video, it was, so limited inventory means the price goes up and the creators were also making money from YouTube monetization so they weren't necessarily desperate for the advertising partnerships the dollar budgets were lower so you ended up having to convince clients and still sometimes clients will say it today 10 years later or YouTube is just a bit more expensive isn't it and the thing that I was just shocked by was that every YouTube video had a link you could put in the description so you could actually track sales.

16:59You could have a custom UTM link. You could literally track sales and see if it works for you. Yes or no, double down. We have a creator we've worked with for years. It's$100 ,000 a video and they drive that in sales within 30 days. Attributable sales. And the clients that were willing to take that risk saw the benefit massively. But a lot of clients just couldn't get over the price. And back at that time, you were playing with test budgets of like$5 ,000,$10 ,000 and you just couldn't get them to that stage. So a lot of the time we would have to put examples in front of them of, hey, this creator has done this for another client.

17:36They have driven these results. Test it and see. And then some clients would be really bold in scale and others were still too scared by the numbers. Did you find, especially in those early days, that there were certain types of clients that were more on board? Because I'm thinking about, I feel like what I know of YouTube ads also really um is tied to what i remember of like podcast ads during that time like you see a lot of the same players yeah yes exactly i think um it really helped to have a digital product so again like um surf shark vpn nord vpn better help like their digital products that you can distribute without having to worry about global logistics supply chains i think it's also it's something that was easy to buy on subscription was like function of beauty, the shampoo.

18:29I don't know if you remember those ads. Yeah, yeah. That and Proz, I think, were sort of similar businesses. And I saw ads for them a lot. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So there was also this trend for a while, because it was during that same D2C year and COVID of like pushing to a quiz to customize the product in your head, like which product should you use and then sign up for a subscription. so um i think that's the way a lot of brands that were really trying to drive repeatable revenue where we're signing up um to work with youtube creators vpns as well you again vpns better help um beauty subscription services razor subscription services it's harder to to leave the one that i always thought should have doubled down and it would have made complete eight cents for like a Netflix or a Disney class to really double down on YouTube partnerships.

19:20Again, a subscription, you can remind them of all this content that exists. When new products like films come on or series, you can talk about that. I was surprised that they didn't jump on the opportunity there because the attribution model was so clear. Well, and it's interesting now that so many of them are going after the talent, like, you know, Disney just struck that deal with Dhar Mann. Netflix is grabbing all kinds of video podcasts and stuff like it's interesting that they're they're going for that but they're not going for i mean i guess at this point they have their own tech for that but it's really interesting i think yeah there's this real battle for creator ip at the moment between amazon netflix um and disney it's it's fascinating to see that they are doubling down on oh even like tubie and paramount are getting in on this they're doubling down on these really deep creator ip partnerships like Netflix and the Alex L series has done really well.

20:14But I think that's because Netflix didn't ever go for the hardcore performance marketing angle. They always tried to market based on the shows or the films. So they'd have the cast do interesting things. They'd always try and be creative campaign-led first, and then they'd localize it to different markets. So I think this is their way of making it still feel that creative integrity type of show-first marketing and IP first marketing. But yeah, it's really interesting to see the explosion of creators on Netflix at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. So now that you've sort of been in the game for a decade, like does it feel like other agencies and businesses have caught up to you on the influencer front?

20:57And especially like now that there's so much more in that market, like how do you think the technology and how do you think just tracking all of it has changed? Yeah, this is Victoria. That's such a good question. um I I read a stat the other day that said the world federation of advertisers said 99 percent of brands are using creators in some way and I think when a decade ago it was you know five ten percent and it still felt experimental and it felt risky uh we had this like retweets and not endorsements style partnership like if the creator does something wrong we promise it's not coca-cola's perspective of course it's not like no one thinks it is right well so now we have got to the stage where i think brands have caught up to the necessity of creators as a strategy not just a tactic so they're not even thinking about creators as only doing campaigns on their own social the brands who are getting this right are thinking about creators as a conduit to access all these different communities they're thinking about i'd say it's shifting approaching advertising from having a megaphone and shouting a message to having hundreds or thousands of conversations at once if you think about like Unilever sending 50 ,000 creators the world cup that type of scale is is insane and that's where we're going so I think the scale has changed a lot the second thing that's changed is that creators are now becoming part of all these different media mixes so you're seeing creators in paid ads and actually the content And the ads produced by creators are often outperforming ads produced by the brand.

22:32You're seeing creators as partners on podcasts, which is trying to drive AEO. You see creators in retail media, creators in live commerce, creators in own social, creators in experiential. So, so much of content now or any marketing strategy is designed creator first. So, I think we're seeing a lot of brands have caught up to, oh, we need to do creators. But I don't think they've realized how much they need to elevate that work with creators strategically and in terms of scale. And that's where your question on technology is so good. Because, yes, there are lots of agencies that now offer influencer marketing.

23:14They can do, a brand said to me the other day, oh, we're really happy you worked with 25 creators last year. I was like, 25? out of compared to the Unilever World Cup example that's a different league so I think there are lots of agencies that are offering it in just this very basic it's kind of like they've caught up to

23:382016 and here we are trying to use agentic AI to fundamentally transform the way creative marketing's done my belief in it and the approach we're taking at PMG is we have 250 engineers So we're really doubling down on tech and scale. So Agentic allows you to unlock creator briefs at scale, creator sourcing at scale, brand safety checks at scale, even potentially outreach, brand approvals at scale. So you can reach, you can really raise that floor from 25 creators to a thousand. Let's be conservative, which is great. I really love democratizing media spend. I think it's a wonderful thing. um the second thing we're really doubling down on is the strategy piece so investing in partnerships with entertainment ip platforms investing in having strategists who does who come up with bold ideas that really get cut through like the aloe yacht in um this summer i don't know if you saw aloe had like a 900 million dollar yacht that they converted into a wellness playground in the mediterranean oh wow was that for can it was hilariously it was at can film festival but not Cannes Advertising Festival.

24:49It did Cannes Film Festival. It did the Monaco Grand Prix. But they had creators go out every day and they would work out on the yacht. They'd work out on Aloe brand. They'd be on Aloe branded jet skis. They'd have wellness drips, like IB drips. But that became the basis of their paid content, their own social, Aloe's own social, and on the creators' channel. So it got so much mileage and everyone was commenting, I want to get access to the Alloyacht. Even Jake Shane did a wellness spoof, like a parody advert on the Alloyacht. So they even poked fun at themselves, which is really clever for Gen Z to not take yourself too seriously.

25:31Right. So that strategic thinking where you're like, how am I putting creators at the center of my media plan and center of my marketing strategy, but doing it in a way where I'm getting loads of mileage from the content. so we're investing a lot in actually like humans and insights for strategy and then the third thing is looking at how you can demonstrate impact so um how are we proving that this works when this is like a test budget that's like five ten thousand dollars no one really cares if it doesn't work i mean they want to see that there are some green shoots but there's no this doesn't make or break someone's career but if you're saying like fernando fernandez is asking 50 of marketing budget should go to social and influencer you need a way of ensuring that you can demonstrate the value of that to a CFO and that's another challenge where we're trying to tackle and I think that's the next wave of influencer partners it's not just can you activate influencers it's can you activate it improve the impact can you activate it and show that it actually wins attention can you activate creators and do it at this insane scale globally and that's the excitement I have for the industry and the next phase of where it's going.

26:45Cool. Well, let's we'll get into that. I hate to interrupt, but we do have to take some a bit of an ad break ourselves. So when we come back, we can maybe dig into more of that. I want to give them lots of marketing.

27:04I'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.

27:14Jennifer Quigley-Jones: 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 ad tech's favorite things, although this goes beyond just ad tech. 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. It'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.

28:03Jennifer Quigley-Jones: 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. Okay. 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.

28:50Jennifer Quigley-Jones: 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. They 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. Letting one agent shift budget across platforms on its own is where the industry says it's heading.

29:28Jennifer Quigley-Jones: 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. 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.

30:08Jennifer Quigley-Jones: 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. As 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.

30:51Jennifer Quigley-Jones: initiating an on-the-channel planning conversation through one interface. 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.

31:31All right, we are back. So part of the reason that I'm chatting with you, I mean, obviously I'm really interested in this creative marketing stuff and you're great to talk to, but also we've got our own event coming up, Programmatic I.O. and you're speaking in a presentation during the event about sort of the programmatic potential of creator influencer marketing obviously we don't want to spoil the whole session because people should definitely come see you in person but like maybe just as a teaser like how do you see programmatic ads manifesting in this space particularly when so much of it is based on creative and on like influencer relationships like where does the programmatic part come in yes uh well spoiler alert I think it's impossible to make creator marketing truly programmatic Like, I think there are some fundamental principles that are similar, like buying audience first is very much done.

32:23Like a lot of the platforms that exist allow you to source creators based on who their audience are. But the human in this is so essential. And creator pricing is a minefield. Like, we have done analysis on, and this is at Digital Voices for PMG, we did analysis on what are the correlations between pricing like out of all the factors is it verticals is it platform is it you know the only thing was more followers means higher pricing and technically more followers doesn't mean more views doesn't mean more conversion so there's i would love to see some programmatic approaches to pricing coming in um some form of valuing based on outcomes some form of valuing based on audience that would be really helpful but that comes from agencies first and I think agencies haven't necessarily set those structures in place so far but I think there will be a huge shift to automating what is possible to automate with influencers so what can you operate at scale is that sourcing creators is it producing custom tailored briefs is it brand safety checks is it um approving content is it pulling reporting so I think a lot of the manual tasks we do actually will transform at scale and be done with agentic AI and yes that scares a lot of people there are brands who say oh I would never ever let AI approve my content when it comes down to the fact you're hiring one of your most senior people on the team like someone who you're paying like two, three hundred thousand dollars a year, some of the heads of creator roles and you're asking them to sit and watch a hundred pieces of content to check they adhere to brand guidelines.

34:14That does not make sense to have a human do. So I'm hoping that when you, as we see the scale change and as we see what this industry is capable of technologically change, we're going to see a very different attitude to running create campaigns from the day to day. And that could be inspired by programmatic. Gotcha. Yeah, I've heard some people in the industry more on the influencer side sort of speculate that like the bubbles already burst and marketers aren't interested in spending as much. They're still investing in influencers, but you're not getting like the same like huge contracts. Is that something that you think?

34:50Or I guess I should say, is that something you worry about? Or from the agency side, is that a good thing for you that you're able to sort of like, do more with less as far as budgets go? Yeah, I think there's a shift to I think there's a shift away from oh my god we have to have this creator and we have to pay them whatever amount of money they ask for to advertisers who actually have larger influencer budgets but they're thinking more critically about how those should be spent for example is it worth partnering with one huge name when you could sponsor 500 people through say a gifting slash affiliate model where you paid them an upfront fee and then you can track the impact or should we pay for one big name that we think symbolizes our customer or should we test 10 different communities and see what resonates and then scale up I think the other thing we're seeing a shift from is again that from creators is a tactic to a strategy.

35:54So previously it was great, we'll pay for a post, we'll pay for others on their channel. Now we're seeing customers be far more critical and thank God they're being critical. We're like hand-holding them, dragging them to being critical. Things like how many assets can we get from this creator and then how can they help service our bottom line? So okay, for example, historically, and some agencies are still doing this day, I was on a call this morning where a client said this was that every creator they worked with there was one organic post and it went on that creator's channel and then they got the rights to only boost it on that one platform for one month and what i found so shocking about that is that one that the incremental cost of giving them the right to run it in on other social channels isn't that high so that agency is is making their life as easy as possible and giving the client the minimum amount possible.

36:56The second thing is that piece of content might be great for organic and it might really resonate with that creator's audience, but it is not optimized for paid performance. The ABCDs of Google, like putting the logo in the first second, if you can, all of that is antithetic to organic social and does so well in paid. One of the things we're doing a lot with our clients is we're having a creator commission a piece of content for their social plus the repaid ads assets that we briefed them the edited and optimized perform in paid. If you might end up still paying one creator a lot of money but you're getting content that gives you a lot more mileage and the usage rights to run it.

37:39So I think brands are just perhaps being more discerning over their spend. I don't think the bubble's bursting. I think we're just having to be more strategic because you can't get away with oh we paid someone like two hundred thousand dollars for one post and did it work or not we're not sure it got some views on instagram like that's that's not enough and i think the best the marketers who are growing their careers now are so social and influencer first that they also are critical of that as being a win so we're just getting a more hopefully a more sophisticated approach where creator is going to become a line item in every budget doesn't mean the budgets are going to disappear it means they're just going to be more distributed because creator has to work as an integrated part of your entire media ecosystem gotcha so something that um i've talked to it by uh colleague alissa a lot i think we we've mentioned it on the big story podcast our other podcast before but just the idea of um you know we go to like up fronts and we go to a lot of events that there are also creators at um and the way that like talent from a TV show talks about this stuff versus talent in the YouTube space or in the creator space talks about this stuff is so interesting because like when you get like a TV star to talk about advertising stuff like it feels like they're reading a live like you know that they're not actually they don't understand what they're saying often they'll make jokes like oh I don't know what this means but it's on the teleprompter and then you get like the creator where they know intimately like the business side of whatever platform they're working with and they can kind of talk about these like marketing tactics do you find especially over time like does it feel like you have to do less hand-holding with the creators themselves in terms of figuring out the business strategy like if you're you know for example if you're talking to a creator like we need this for organic we need this for paid like do they already kind of know what you need for paid more than traditional talent but actually there is still this huge gap and this is where it's it's really interesting um we did a panel recently with creators on the panel and we said oh how do you feel about use rights to run your content and some of them said oh you should talk to my manager and some said well if it's going to do me a benefit great fine and you could see the managers in the front like stop talking like oh we upsell this and so I think it's very interesting there's still a gap in understanding there they know their audience intimately so I think you've got traditional talent that until a couple of years ago didn't want to make any social content especially you know musicians or actors they were like we're above this we're artists now you've seen the shift to they're willing to make the content but again the people making content still don't know how marketers work we've had creators at points say oh yep sorry um I can't do the content by the 30th of November but we can just push it to the following month right you're like no that's black friday the offer is black friday it's it's so interesting a lot of these also these creators who have grown up online they've never had to work in a job where they've had to send emails like there are some incredible um platforms coming up that only speak and communicate with creators via phone by sms because the creators do not want to be on an email thread with you they don't want to they don't want to read the contract so I think they're getting savvier but the part you need to handhold them in is um even like this is what a brand wants to achieve this is how you say the product name this is why especially for regulated products you have to you have to say this they hate the idea of being told what to say but you're like this is an FDA requirement um even things like no one shares data back with creators on how they perform unless it's affiliate.

41:25So a lot of creators will do an ad campaign view and they won't know if it drove sales or drove impact or if the brand was happy. So they're very good at producing the content, but they just don't understand all this marketing speak optimization around it. And I think there's a lot to be said and still investing in the automation where you can automate, Like manually having a human manually pull results makes no sense. Let's have that automated. But let's have a human handhold the creator and say, hey, this is what Google says you should do for ads. So if we want the ad to work, this will be helpful.

42:04A lot of creators push back when we need to storyboard an ad because, again, to get signed off in certain client contexts, you have to storyboard. Creators are like, I don't want to do that. It's completely fine. And I understand it's not your process, but this is so that we know that ad will perform. And so I think that handholding is still so much more necessary than most people realize. I would say the YouTube creators are better at editing. That part, they're really, if you're producing. That makes sense. If you're producing ad cutdowns, working with YouTube creators over other platforms is really, really helpful.

42:39because that makes sense because i i don't know if youtube has an in in app edit the way that like tiktok does so i could see like you kind of have to know how to use procreate or something yeah they they at one point tried it but only for short form video but yeah for long form creators and and the quality is better and so the clients are often much happier and then you can take those edits and run them on other social platforms gotcha yeah so it's interesting you bring up the idea that like the creators aren't getting any data back and i'm curious like do you think that you know back and forth needs to be more transparent in order for the this side of the industry to get more robust and like better yeah i yeah i think it's essential for a couple of things but primarily for pricing when we often we will be working with a creator especially if it's a performance focused client i'll come back and i'll say by the way my fees have gone up by 40 and we'll say great why is that because your views have stayed the same they often won't have an answer it's just because demand is what's made there it's kind of it's like they're doing their own auction pricing i guess their own auction in their head um but it's really interesting they'll say how did how did it perform and we want to increase our fee.

43:58And we'll be like, actually, based on the sales numbers, yes, you should increase your fee or no, you shouldn't, because here's how we set your price. And here's how we justify it. And having that conversation helps them know what pricing is fair. And often, they might be in the one off getting another customer to come and another client to pay extra another brand to pay more. But if that brand is a one off, and they're turning down a 12 month opportunity, there is still a huge opportunity cost there. Because it's okay, would you rather have one$5 ,000 deal or one$3 ,000 deal for 12 months? It's a no brainer.

44:33And if we're not having that conversation back with them, or if we're not sharing that data, how can you expect the industry to get better? Why do you think it is that agencies and brands aren't sharing that data? Is it just that the creators don't know to ask and so it gets kind of dropped or are people being too proprietary with it? Yeah, I think it's a combination of factors yeah the the brands sometimes are worried about sharing the data which to me doesn't make sense you're not giving any pi like personally identifiable information it's just hey you drove this revenue i sometimes i understand if it's you drove so much revenue and your fee is here and it incentivizes creators so but i i don't i i think you just need to align interest ideally what you do is have a an affiliate link as well so the creators would be earning you'd earn together second thing is i think the agencies are so squeezed on time so again procurement is trying to often you see with influencer people are trying to price influencer like media when it takes so much more human time so you can negotiate with a creator for two weeks for for one contract you can have a lawyer that's you know eight hundred dollars on a thousand dollar contract it's insane but that um level of human engagement is necessary and then brands are trying to squeeze the margin so i think often influencer agencies don't invest that time because again they're trying to cut every corner they can which is why i think a lot are still recommending short form algorithm short form content all the time because they don't want to do anything that's strategically difficult um but i understand it if you're justifying human time why would you have a human sit there and have a conversation with the creator about whether the content performed or not when you don't need to um and then thirdly yeah the creators don't no to ask they might sometimes reply and say how did it go but often their talent managers are on to the next partnership they they're not prioritizing it the creator assumes if it's gone well they will see it in another offer so i think that there needs to be more transparency and i think perhaps there needs to be platforms where when creators sign up to submit their content or sign up to to submit their invoice it also has a paid feedback or how is your performance tab that they can that they can have a look at that's interesting yeah i know they're you know i think tiktok and youtube have put together some dashboards that are supposed to kind of sync up brands and creators but i don't know if there's that analytic component to it yet But I think there is a it's YouTube shopping or if they're sharing through an affiliate site, they can go back to like an LTK or a shop and have a look.

47:16But yeah, I don't think it's. I don't think they've they've standardized that. Gotcha. So beyond the analytics and the data and the tech side, I'm also really curious for your take on how the culture of influence of marketing has sort of changed or at least gotten more prevalent over time because I feel like maybe it's just I sometimes end up down those like de-influencing rabbit holes where obviously like everybody's very anti-influencer but I feel like I've seen a lot of interesting criticisms about like the industry is incentivizing people on social to become creators and be more performative to appeal to brands and then it's incentivizing viewers to buy more than they need and then it becomes kind of just another like wave of advertising hitting you in another channel and like that becomes overwhelming over time obviously so i'm curious like what do you what do you make of those criticisms do you worry that like if everybody's trying to be an influencer the power of influencer marketing might change i think there is a culture where everyone's being being being trained to be a creator or being a creator is normalized.

48:24I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it will reset pricing expectations in the industry. So it's not so much about getting crazy, crazy deals, because if there are more creators, it's more supply. So hence the demand's still there, but the price should stay consistent or should drop. For me, I try and approach it through the lens of we were always being advertised to growing up the adverts that i saw i don't know i'm a 36 year old woman i don't know your age actually the same perfect the stuff we saw was toxic we were exposed to advertising all the time we were in i still remember jessica simpson being called fat for being what a size eight usa crazy but there were sponsored spots in like america's next top model that were i didn't even notice we're advertising again that whole space was so toxic women have always been advertised to in every way we can to me what I find fascinating about the creator space is there is so much space for democratization of media and it's created an ecosystem of entrepreneurs who did not exist before and so yes I think 96 percent of creators make less than a hundred thousand dollars a year so it is not often going to be their full-time job it'll be something they do on the side however ever isn't it amazing that a person with disabilities who can't get into a workplace can make content and get brand deals and make money from talking about their lived experience isn't it incredible that when you look at youtube you think about um it was one of the homes of people with different texture hair producing content pinterest you could search by hair texture that's because that's because the traditional media space wasn't catering for it the way they should do.

50:14Single parents at home, able to make content and be there for their kids. I just, I think there's so much benefit this entire ecosystem that's created and so much excitement that traditional media dollars are going to people who are building small businesses and kind of also shaping the way people feel seen online. My view of it is very positive because I think what's the alternative? Those dollars will still go somewhere, but we've seen them go to a far more toxic place. So yeah, my view is actually quite positive, even if it doesn't make millionaires, if it makes people's lives that much easier so that they can have a slightly more flexible arrangement and so they can make the people who watch that content feel seen, great professionalize away.

51:06Well, so on the other side, with the more toxic ad thing that we're sort of talking about. I know you've been very vocal about having certain ethical considerations regarding what kind of businesses you'll work with, which is really refreshing, but I also imagine can feel like a bit of a drop in the bucket when you see all these different ads for like gambling for children or like weird off-label GLP ones or like, you know, all that kind of stuff. The peptides? The peptides. I still don't know what they are. And at this point, I'm too afraid to ask. Is it a pill? Is it a... I don't know. yeah they can be a lot of different they can be in creams they can be an injection yeah it's very interesting I think there is a space where we're so sure can get very toxic and there are there you know it's like the dark met there's access to things you know there shouldn't be access to I'm I think I'm very I feel very lucky that when I founded digital voices I got to set the red lines of who we worked with and who we didn't and there's this quote from um Rob Pierre who was the founder of jellyfish she had this quote i saved it because he said it to me at canon i was like oh so this is a direct quote this is a direct quote yeah success is achieving desired outcomes without compromising values and yes we could have made far more money far more quickly by taking unlimited like casino app money there was a weight loss product which basically they said they were just gonna switch through their weight loss solutions and weight loss apps and it was it was not an ethical product so I actually let let tobacco products I let the team vote on any that were in gray areas and we turned them down I always thought that there would be a point where that like came back to bite me but I wasn't willing to work on those products it's really interesting at PMG we had a um because we've had a no gambling policy and PMG has worked some sports betting partners and i was worried that we were going to be forced to work on it and the ceo was like nope if people don't want to be on certain accounts they just opt out and i think it says a lot especially in this space where people are willing to turn down brands because that's not the impact they want to have um yeah and to me with influencers specifically i think it's it's much more dangerous because that content cannot be age gated with media you can target specifically at certain age ranges whereas if we do say say a gambling ad there might be one percent of people who see it are 14 and think it might be great to go on that site and take mom's credit card and it's just it's not um an impact that i would be okay with having right yeah i guess the the only reliable um sort of guardrail I've seen so far is like if somebody who's a bit too big makes an ad that everybody gets mad at then they yell at them but as far as like those kind of guardrails go like especially on the programmatic side because obviously like there's a lot of you know you hear a lot about bad ads getting through moderation and that kind of thing like it do you think that's something that might exacerbate that problem or like what do you think it'll take for that to feel like less of a less of a challenge to kind of have to deal with like does it does it require everybody to have the same principles or do you like is there some kind of moderation system or some kind of agenting thing that can keep this kind of stuff out you mean like a double verify for influences maybe yeah that's that's a business idea there are a few moves to train creators to think about the brand deals they accept there was someone doing a a business where they were like certifying creators um which is really interesting i think you'll always get to the stage where it's a matter of individual choice and that does impact credibility so if i was watching someone who i follow and they suddenly were promoting an illegal peptide something they were saying oh go to this site and you buy it illegally from brizal i would not trust any of their future recommendations and i think a lot of creators are approaching ads that way they are thinking very carefully about what they accept and what they don't it was very interesting to watch the louis theory documentary on i haven't seen it yet the manister one on um yes the content that certain people are willing to promote and you can't i i think it is for the individual viewer to decide look at the people you're following look at the ads they do look at where they make their money is that the lifestyle that you want to influence your brain?

55:42Is that the type of person whose moral values feel consistent? And if they don't, great, you can choose unfollow. You can choose don't show content like this on my feed. Amazing, but I would, maybe it's because I'm in the industry and you seem very aware of it as well. I do judge creators based on the brand deals they accept because that, again, that is them choosing the impact they want to have. Right. So I think it comes down to personal choice. I wish we could, of course, I wish we could ban loads of things, but I don't think it should be my choice, sadly. Fair enough. Yeah. Well, at the risk of ending on like a little bit of a downer, I feel like I could talk about this for like another hour, but that's not fair to our listeners.

56:23They got stuff to do. So let's wrap it up here. Is there anything else about this topic or about your upcoming ProGio talk that you're really excited to share before we wrap up? just if anyone's coming to the talk, I would love to hear from you at the end of this space because there is so much change in the industry and every day there's a new tech offering popping up or there's a new perspective on how to work with influencers at scale. So I would love, love, love to meet more people who actually work in this every day because it's such an exciting time to be on the cutting edge of the industry.

56:59So please, If you're there, come and say hi. All right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jenny. This was so great. I'm so excited to hear your full talk at Programmatic I.O. later this month and then get to chat with you after, clearly, because it seems like that's in the cards too. See, that was ending more positively. Yeah, exactly. There we go.

57:30This 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.

57:59Thank you.