Social Is Becoming a Revenue Channel. Most CMOs Aren't Ready

18:33Viren:And so essentially that sounds to me like they're really capitalizing on those private conversations that are happening inside their social channels. But if I'm a CMO today, what does that actually look like for me? What do I need to hire new community managers who are specifically trained on answering dms do i need to train an agent on that that's how do i make sure like yeah scale that engagement i think i think everyone needs to be hiring for a role called marketing engineer and that is a new category that's being

19:03Misbah Uraizee:defined every cmo every ceo that i talked to over the last six months is trying to figure out who is the persona that i'm hiring for in my organization what is the tech stack that i'm creating how am i disrupting my existing legacy tech stack with an AI native tech stack. Those are probably the number two questions, like the top two questions that every single person is going through right now. It is, who is the person I'm hiring for? This is someone that is going to be AI fluent, or at least eager to adopt AI versus being scared of AI. So that's step one, just in terms of cultural definition.

19:37Misbah Uraizee:Number two, I think the roles are shifting where instead of doing the things like manually step-by-step, having five different tabs open, having spreadsheets, copy pasting, handwriting, like all the things, you're instead hopefully re-imagining your tech stack to be AI native and then setting that up for success, connecting it to the right context points, making sure it's connected to your commerce stack, to your brand voice, to your consumer and customer data. If you have all those three things connected, you can actually do a lot. Agents can help you do a lot. And then that marketing engineer role is essentially making sure that the platform is set up for success.

20:14Misbah Uraizee:It's being maintained. It is continuously being optimized versus them actually doing the exact job. So I think that's a big shift that's happening across the industry pretty rapidly right now. That's something that I think about a lot in terms of the people that we hire internally at Nectar. It's a role that we call AI strategist, which I think is really, really cool. It's the same persona that I would want someone on the other side, you know, working at like a different company to be able to hire internally that is taking them longer to do. But for me, I know exactly what I'm looking for. So faster for me to do it so that we can start leading the space of like, here's marketing engineers that work at Nectar that can show you exactly how to ramp up to AI, reimagine your workflows.

20:58Viren:That definitely jumped us forward a couple of questions, but actually that's a great lead off point in terms of like what is actually happening and to kind of dial us back to the thing you mentioned about TikTok shop I feel like that's a new relatively new invention for the most part and like it seems like brands are spending a lot of time there and audiences are spending a lot of time there so does that I'm kind of really interested to understand like how how do you figure out like buying intent on those types of platforms which are new again um is that again in the room of the marketing engineer or is that something that the cmo needs to do right out the

21:39Misbah Uraizee:gate so putting that question back how do we figure out buying intent on these platforms i think from a cmo's perspective you need to invest in all of these platforms because they are where consumers are discovering you and where you need to show up i think the kpis that you care about ultimately is the number of impressions that you're generating, the engagement that you're getting, the conversations that you're driving. And ultimately you're starting to see a sales lift. TikTok shop specifically is going to help you build awareness about your products. It's going to get people hooked in to maybe become early adopters to try or test those products.

22:15Misbah Uraizee:It's going to be optimized for, you know, purchases under$35. It's going to, you know, build just a lot of organic content that you can then start upselling and using as part of your meta ads play. So I see a lot of those loops happening, but it's not ultimately going to be your reoccurring for many brands. I mean, for some, yes, it absolutely will be, depends on the category and vertical and what you're selling. But for a lot of brands that have, you know, a pretty diverse product line and not everything fits under$35, it's not necessarily going to be the always on, you know, way to drive a ton and ton of revenue.

22:51Misbah Uraizee:I think what you're going to actually start seeing is what we're starting to call an industry halo effects. And so that is the holy grail where I talk to a lot of our customers day in, day out, and they're saying, hey, we pulled back on TikTok as a platform and we started noticing that brick and mortar was going down. What's happening? So now we know, and it's not about, oh, I just drove like$5 million in sales last month on TikTok shop. It's more of, hey, we generated this many thousands of influencers, this many thousands of people that are micro influencers, not even like these mega large people that are talking about us everywhere inside these platforms, essentially building social proof.

23:27So ultimately, if you're the CMO, you need to be building social proof in every

23:31Misbah Uraizee:single platform that matters, whether that's Reddit, whether that's TikTok, whether that's meta, because ultimately those are what's going to feed into sources of sales. And then it's like, lower in the funnel. Every platform is unique. You can start connecting the dots and understanding, hey, someone discovered us on TikTok. Then they went to Amazon. This is actually the person, how they converted. That is the orchestration that you can start doing. But baseline, you need to start investing in these platforms, understanding what your content strategies look like and who you should be working with.

24:00Misbah Uraizee:And that's a very iterative process if you're just getting started.

24:02Viren:I'm going to ask a question in a second, but I'm going to hold that one first. I wanted to ask, if we're saying that that whole dynamic has changed and you know we've moved past this era of like vanity metrics of like likes shares kind of meaning anything if a cmo does want to prove that actually this organic community strategy is predictable and like it's a revenue engine what should those sort of like new north star metrics be that they should focus on you mentioned it's not necessarily just like five million dollars in revenue driven so what what are those metrics?

24:35Misbah Uraizee:I think they should be measuring engaged community and ultimately what the value of that community is. And that's something that we measure for a lot of our customers where we are building single digital personas and profiles of every single handle that is engaging with them actively, intentionally. We are building like timeline histories. We know a lot of data about them across the platform. And that's a number ultimately that you should be moving, you know, up and up month over month versus follower count. Like again, X meta, we got rid of follower following feed for a reason, right? People that follow you are not necessarily guaranteed to see your content.

25:07Misbah Uraizee:That concept doesn't even really work inside of platforms like TikTok. It's kind of old. And I still see because it's a hero metric on a lot of profiles, it's more of a metric of, hey, you're a serious business. You have a million followers. A lot of that is paid often. And so it's not even an authentic number in many cases, but that's it. It's a vanity metric at the end of the day. I think ultimately, if you're still indexing as that being your hero metric, you're falling behind because then you don't actually know what's happening with the consumers are actively engaging with you. You're not trying to incentivize people to actively engage with you.

25:41Misbah Uraizee:They're not sliding into your comments. They're not DMing you. They're not tagging you, mentioning you. All of those things allow you to show up and reach additional audiences. So it is the network effect that you want to capitalize on versus the follow effect, which is silent and in the background and not guaranteed to kind of grow you month over month.

26:00Viren:Okay, that's a great answer. And I'm going to ask this question at risk of sounding like I'm just trying to get a cheesy clip out of it. But if I'm a CMO today, how do I game the algorithm today?

26:13Misbah Uraizee:How do you game the algorithm today? A few different ways. I think if you can incentivize your customers through a loyalty mechanism to actually tag, mention, comment, tap share on your content on a reoccurring basis, you're gaming the algorithm. Because ultimately the algorithm cares about conversations as a primary metric that you're driving. It looks at the comments that you're responding to, the shares that you're driving, the DM conversations that are being generated, the depth of those DM conversations, how many back and forth people are having, are they having a true conversation? And that drives more people to get notifications to then open up their Instagram, their TikTok, their Reddit platform that drives up time spent inside of these platforms.

26:57Misbah Uraizee:So if you help the platforms, the platforms help you. That's how you should think about it ultimately. And if you can build that virality loop by tapping into your existing customer base and understanding that obviously 90 % of them have a presence on social and they're probably you know paying attention to you and if they aren't incentivize them to do that then you've unlocked one great mechanism that scales quite nicely to continuously become viral inside these platforms.

27:22Viren:Awesome and one of the things that we kind of started speaking about a bit before was this idea that actually there's a lot of noise now on these platforms like AI is definitely taking over the platforms whether it's like automated bots that are responding to comments and things like that or even just like the content that we're seeing on these platforms so i want to we will get into the specifics but i want to just get your quick take what's real versus hype when it comes

27:50Misbah Uraizee:to ai marketing right now did you see adam laseri's recent um content guidelines on instagram posts so this is very top of mind i think for the platforms themselves as well where they're trying to incentivize authentic content versus ai slop like that's going to be an ongoing problem. I think that's one approach for them to do that and really tell creators, hey, if you're doing AI slop, it's going to get de-promoted inside of our platforms. I think they probably need to go a step further, to be honest, and just detect that the quality of content is not good quality and stop promoting that content.

28:25Because ultimately, I think it's

28:28Misbah Uraizee:pretty clear that most content going into the next few years, like five years from now, I think most content is going to be AI generated. And so if you take that off the table, and it's rather less of a conversation about whether it was generated using AI or through your camera, but more of a conversation around, is this actually valuable high quality content versus low quality content? And how do you define low quality versus high quality? Then I think that becomes more interesting. Because I think trying to push back against creators using AI, I mean, creators themselves don't want to necessarily use AI, but the ties are shifting.

29:02Misbah Uraizee:Like it's just, for certain types of content, it just makes sense to do that. The cost savings are there. I think from a business perspective, it makes sense to do that. If you're paying millions of dollars in photo shoots and campaign shoots, you no longer need to do that necessarily. But I don't think your content needs to be, you know, promoted less because it was generated using AI. I think it needs to be deranked inside of the algorithms if it's just not high quality content. And that's where I think it's a fuzzier conversation.

29:31Viren:Yeah, that's a really tough conversation as well, I think, because I think we're living in this weird period of kind of almost like a hangover of like low-cax and like CMOs being forced to justify$1 and$10 out kind of thing. And so for a long time, at least in the way I've seen it, CMOs have kind of, and marketers generally, have kind of deprioritized what good creative taste looks like. not everyone but there's a huge population which have been kind of forced by their boards or CEOs to do that and now you're kind of seeing this resurgence that everyone needs to have like really really good taste like in a world where everyone is a creative director and everyone's a designer because Claude Design can help you do anything like you have to have good taste right that's the only distinguishing factor exactly and I think that's true for every role to be honest

30:21Misbah Uraizee:like we were talking about earlier around AI, what does a marketing engineer need to do versus how is a CMO thinking about hiring? I think they should be optimizing for people with taste that are also AI fluid versus people that don't have strong opinions on where we should be going, who we should be collaborating with, what is the content that we should be creating, who is the ultimate audience that we're selling into, how do we differentiate ourselves against our competitors, what is the niche? Like all of those are signals to hire the right person versus someone that is outsourcing their brain to AI per se.

30:55Misbah Uraizee:So I think there's a lot of that happening as well. Like when we interview a lot of that, not a lot of the candidates, but a non-zero percentage of the candidates have stopped thinking for themselves. And that's really alarming. And so that's something that we then are starting to probe on further is just understanding what is your thought process? I'm going to assume that you use Claude to come up with this presentation. That's okay. but what did you put into context into Claude? How did you think about these micro decisions? Do you have taste? Like, do you understand, you know, what a business should be doing in this scenario versus scenario B?

31:31Misbah Uraizee:How do you make trade-off decisions? I think all of those things are going to continue to be differentiators. Going back to your statement around CMOs have been primed for such a long time from their boards, from whatever the external sources are, pressures are, to just have that hangover from CAC. I think that's 100 % on point. Like, it is it feels risky to invest in anything else and yet the brands that are leading the way that are those fast-growing viral challenger brands are and understand that they need to start building a business with a different lens versus relying solely on optimizing for a single metric which is CAC I think that comes with time so it is yeah it's fascinating to kind of see that divergence

32:11Viren:in the market right now yeah if I if if I came to you today and I was like hey Misbah I'm starting a cpg brand like i want to sell on social social storefront all that type of stuff will be the top three things you would tell me to go away and do before i did anything else if you're just starting

32:29Misbah Uraizee:the brand yeah like i said in the beginning i think you need to hone in on who is your exact audience who are you selling into and why does that product stand out to them because if you don't if you don't have answers to those questions starting off you're going to be you know spinning for a long period of time. Like you can probably throw ad money at it and start selling products and then start kind of capitalizing on that. I've talked to so many brands that have successfully done that all the way to like hundreds of millions of ARR, but then they're capping out and they don't know how to scale beyond that.

33:01Misbah Uraizee:And if they stop their ads engine, the sales stop. They don't actually have any customer loyalty. Those customers are not necessarily coming back. So if you look underneath the hood, it's directly correlated how much money they're spending on ads and it stops there. And so I think there is a loyalty aspect of it, of nurturing your core audience of fans of the early adopters of your product and really understanding what is a differentiator for your product. What is ultimately going to get more people to buy it? How do you position yourself in the market to differentiate yourself? And I think if you don't have those answers in the first few months, figure it out, then it's going to be hard to have the scaling conversation.

33:42Misbah Uraizee:I think if you skip to the scaling conversation, that's where you start struggling.

33:46Viren:And one final question from me, because I actually realized we're like 45 minutes in already, which is great sign of a good conversation. And I'm learning a lot. If you mentioned a lot about like, these social native loyalty loops that you should try and engineer. Like, can you give me an example of a brand who has the best loyalty loop that you've seen? Hmm.

34:12Misbah Uraizee:Olipop has one of the best ones that I've seen. And I think they get a few things right where they're thinking very intentionally about who are they collaborating with? What are the activations that they're doing? They do a good blend of digital activations, making sure that they're part of the cultural moments that drive fan engagement. They understand their audiences and how they differ between different platforms. like I can tell you they have a very unique segment on TikTok which is different than their segment on Instagram which is more millennial focused which is very different than their segments on Reddit that might be talking about them which are like you know the soda nerds essentially you're not going to find those nerds necessarily having the same conversations inside of other platforms and so one they understand their customer base two they've done a great job cross-pollinating and being part of the spaces and conversations that their customer base cares about relative to those platforms specifically.

35:09Misbah Uraizee:Three, the in-person events that they do are also optimized for virality. So understanding when they are hosting an event that it is going to show up on social and reverse engineering how it shows up on social. Four, in terms of how they work with creators, it is tasteful. Like they are trying to scale, but it's not just like a mass scale play. five um they really it's like a no-brainer to their team that they need to respond to their fans on these platforms they have tens of thousands of messages that are flowing in every single month and they actually prioritize responses you know personalized responses acknowledging all of their tags and mentions making sure that they are you know engaging with other viral content and being part of those spaces.

35:57Misbah Uraizee:I don't know if you remember Super Bowl a couple of years ago and how they versus Poppy, that was like a catalyst point for both brands where Poppy was sending a lot of vending machines to influencers that were quite expensive. And so their broader fan base was like, okay, you're, you're, you know, pandering to only a subset of the 1 % of like folks that are already pretty well off and you're sending them these expensive Wendy, Michigan, and Zero, you know, maybe going to be not so great. And so Olypop was able to capitalize on the moment by sliding into the comment sections, engaging, building fan love.

36:32Misbah Uraizee:And so how do you find those moments? How do you tastefully scale and hijack the variety of other content that's trending inside these platforms? And ultimately, how are you everywhere all at once? So I think they've kind of approached it with multiple angles versus relying solely on paid, I would say. And that's worked quite well for them. I think another brand that comes to mind is also Rode with Coachella Activation. They were amazing in terms of the activations that they did in terms of how they leveraged Haley in the audiences and how people started getting surprise and delight, essentially, of all the places that Haley was showing up at, of the folks that were standing in line to even get into Coachella.

37:10Misbah Uraizee:And it's obviously very hot and the swag and product that they were essentially giving out for free and food that they were giving out for free in those lines that was only because if you're in the line so they had very specific activations that were reverse engineered to show up quite well on social with their face masks and like their stickers and stuff all of that you knew that this is like someone that had been to the road booth that had you know road products and it felt like it's a cool thing to be associated with the brand and so how do you think about those micro decisions ultimately um really matters to drive conversation.

37:43Viren:Yeah, Rode are such a great brand. Both Rode and Olipop were on the Rival 50 that we produced for the top challenger brands of 2025. Both incredible brands across differentiation, relevance, and talkability. They are always just driving those things. So yeah, really great examples. Final question before I let you go. I'm not going to ask you what social looks like in five years because social is moving way too quickly so i'm going to ask you what does social look like in five months in five months oh my gosh i think it's

38:18Misbah Uraizee:i think the path to purchase is shrinking even more in five months so if you pay attention and you're reading between the lines between all the new launches between meta tiktok reddit a lot of youtube even they are trying to shrink the path to sales as much as possible so creators being able to, you know, have links directly on their posts to drive sales. That's a new launch that just recently rolled out last month. That's never, you know, something that hasn't been possible till date. That's why you got LinkedIn bio and like, you know, very few people actually go down that funnel or TikTok shop.

38:54Misbah Uraizee:I think there's a lot of innovation happening there and continues to be. Amazon I know is investing more in this space as well. YouTube as an umbrella and what they're doing for creators to make it easier for them and brands to be able to manage conversations. I think they're building a whole DM inbox, et cetera, et cetera, internally as well. So a lot of the APIs, the new products that these platforms are launching are going to only accelerate how you can do commerce inside these platforms and drive more sales, both for the brand side, but also from the influencer side.

39:27Viren:Awesome. All right. Great. A quick lightning round and then you're you are all done if your brand were a pizza as well what type of pizza would it be if my if nectar was a pizza yep oh that's an easy one kind of a gross answer probably

39:43Misbah Uraizee:but we recently had a cake received into the office that was a peach cake and so that makes more sense but probably something to do with peaches or you know nectarines something along those lines um probably a weird pizza taste to be honest but i'd have to give that answer because that's generally what our logos you know is about never never try to peach pizza but it feels like something like one of the beauty brands will do like you know garden i don't know herbal peach something i don't know we'll replace pineapple with some one of these fruits i mean yeah i heard

40:18Viren:that road did like that pickle lip gloss thing so maybe there's there's an angle there pickles are

40:23Misbah Uraizee:having a moment that's something that we have been watching pretty closely with our nectar data actually so it's really interesting to see pickles globally having a big moment right now yeah yeah cool what's the best campaign you've seen recently the best campaign that i've seen recently um this is not that recent but last year in the fall i saw the liquid death and elf cosmetics campaign collab and i thought that was really interesting um a really well done campaign huge kind of cross-pollination between two audiences that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be collaborating with one another. So I thought that was pretty innovative.

41:00Viren:Great. And final one, what's the biggest missed opportunity in marketing right now?

41:04Misbah Uraizee:Biggest missed opportunity in marketing right now? It has to go back to doubling down on AI to scale all these workflows even faster. I think that's it. Making sure, AI is such a buzzword right now, but if you can identify the platforms and like solutions that are actually driving revenue, that are driving workflow automation, that your team can get behind. I think that is worth the investment. That is worth reimagining kind of your tech stack and thinking about your entire team because that's what the challenger brands are doing. That's how they're growing and scaling. So it's a lot right now, which is cool.

41:41Viren:Great. Awesome. Well, Misbah, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a great conversation. I think our audience will get a lot out of this in terms of like the future of social and how social is actually being played today. So thank you for joining me.

41:55Misbah Uraizee:Thank you so much for having me.

42:25feel if we don't hear that truth has been on the story we've the screen Thank you.