Building Billion-Dollar Brands in the AI Era | Zeta Global & Cameo Founders 🌍 EP143

0:05Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very, very, very special edition of the Money Mondays podcast where normally I'm inside of an RV motorhome driving around the country. But today, because of my dear friend here, we're at his conference called Zeta Live. His company, Zeta Global, it's a multi-billion dollar corporation. And he decides to put a lot of time, energy, and effort to throw an event for over 1 ,000 guests. And the number might be 1 ,100, 2 ,000 people. Last year was like 1 ,100, 1 ,200. Now there's 2 ,000 executives that are here inside the building. And luckily, I got them for the next 15 minutes.

0:34So we're going to keep this podcast is very short and straightforward. As you guys know, we cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. He's done all of the above. He's very philanthropic. And so without further ado, David Steinberg, give us the quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to the money. A, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I founded seven companies, sold four, taken two public. I'm chairman of another. Zeta Global is the premier artificial intelligence-driven marketing cloud today. We help very large enterprises to create maintain, and monetize customers at a substantially lower cost by using our AI and our data.

1:11Wow. You got dialed in. That was great. I've never said that before, right? All right. When you're running a multi-billion dollar company, how do you make the time and energy for this, to have 2 ,000 executives here in New York City? How do you do it? How do you pull it off? Well, if it was just this, it would be easy. We started on Monday, Monday morning, Sunday, I flew from LA to New York. Monday morning at 7 a.m. Eastern time, I was on Bloomberg. We then had a crazy day. We closed the New York Stock Exchange and rang the bell. Ding, ding, ding. It is really loud. It is louder than you expect it to be.

1:46And you push it for longer. And I almost pushed it at the wrong time. The guy freaked out. So it was good I didn't. But we did that. And then Tuesday, we had our global town hall for our 2200 global employees. And then I flew to Dallas to give a speech. I gave a speech at my friend Emron Khan's conference. Then after that speech, I flew back to New York, landed around 1230, got to bed at one. 6am was up on Wednesday. Yesterday, we did our customer advisory board meeting. We did our biannual Investor Day. And then we took 150 people, including you, to dinner. And then today is Zeta Live. Oh my goodness gracious.

2:27And then a few minutes ago, I heard you debuted something really big. We did. Who is Athena? What is it? So Athena, which is the biggest product launch in our corporate history, is a conversational artificial intelligence super agent. So you can speak to Athena like you were speaking to me right now, and you could ask it any question you want about your business, about marketing. It will then tell you the answers, and it can automatically control the Zeta Marketing platform in real time and run marketing and then give attribution all in one user interface. I have so many questions. Yeah. Well, ask Athena.

3:10Wow, that's magical. So who uses Athena? Who is it perfect for? Athena's to really help marketers today to no longer need data scientists, no longer need operating people to run their marketing. Everything can now be done via Athena. So we have 567 global enterprise clients today, including 44 % of the Fortune 100 largest companies in the world. and they are going to have Athena fully integrated into their platform that everything goes voice enabled by Q1. Wow. Why do you like to create these experiences? Why bring these 2 ,000 people together? Why do you create this? Well, first of all, I find that even in an artificial intelligence world, serendipity plays a big part of innovation.

4:05This in person. Yes, just getting people together and learning from each other and spending time. I mean, nobody does this better than you, right? We throw an event. We plan for 1 ,200, 1 ,300 people. We end up with 2 ,000. You throw an event. You have 50 ,000 people show up. By the way, it's amazing what you do for kids. Serendipity last night, it was so fascinating. You had Heather Ray Young and Tarek sitting next to me, and you replaced them with the CEO of AOL. Well, he's the former CEO of AOL, former head of global sales for Google. Tim Armstrong is one of the most accomplished individuals in the marketing ecosystem.

4:45Today, he runs an incredible company around helping businesses to connect digitally with the real world with a special edition QR code. Yeah, it was fascinating. It was two hours. The serendipity was fascinating because my mind was blown by just listening to him. Okay, so you're running a publicly traded company. You're on the news all the time. How are you juggling the world? You've got a beautiful family. You're traveling around. You've got, you said, 2 ,000 plus employees. This is a lot going on. How do you, David, manage all this? Well, first of all, it comes down to having one of the world's greatest teams.

5:19If you look at our executive leadership team, which is the 14 people that sort of work with me and I meet with every Monday, each one of them could be CEO of another company. And if you look at our senior leadership team, which is 66, 67 people, they are some of the most accomplished executives in the world. In fact, Dan, one of the things I'm personally most proud of is the individuals who have bet their careers on working with Zeta. Yeah. They feed their families. They build their future based on what we do as an organization. And we take it very seriously. So you recently bought another really big company.

6:01I think you spent a couple hundred million dollars? 325 million to be exact, yes. Why did you buy that company? Why are you in the roll-up phase? You bought another big company earlier this year. We're not in the roll-up phase, just so we're on the same page. That's not a term we use. In fact, if you look at our four pillars of M &A, the number one pillar is we have to be able to fully integrate them into our tech stack within 12 months of purchasing. Roll-ups generally run a lot of individual businesses, And they can work, but that's not what we are. We bought Marigold's enterprise business for a number of reasons.

6:34One, we picked up one of the largest enterprise-grade loyalty programs for very large enterprises, which allows our models, our algorithms, to now train on that loyalty data in addition to our data cloud and our clients' data. We picked up one of the most important messaging platforms for publishers in Celligent, which we're going to merge into our publisher cloud. We picked up a very large footprint in Europe and EMEA, which is Celligent. And we picked up Cheetah Digital, which is one of the premier platforms in the marketing automation space. We got an additional 40 Fortune 500 customers and over 100 additional enterprise clients to cross-sell our products and services into to make their businesses better.

7:23So we, and by the way, we bought the business at a substantial discount to the multiple at which we trade. So the deal is accretive from the day we do it. Wow, cool. Now, we haven't closed yet. We expect to close sometime in the fourth quarter. So how do you decide when you can, say, let's say you have the pick of the litter, right? You're out there, you're working with so many thousands of companies as your clients, and you have a lot of relationships because you're throwing these large conferences. So you have a lot of options. What do you think about when you're deciding, I want to acquire that company, that'd be a good fit for us at Zeta Global?

7:54It's a great question, Dan, which is not to say your other questions weren't great, but that was a good one. Thank you. So this is, as I said, I've been doing this. I've been CEO and founder of seven companies over 35 years. When I started my first company, I was the youngest person in the room for the first 20 years I was CEO. I am now universally, Dan, the oldest person in the room when I walk in. No, it's okay. But some of the things you build these incredible lessons along the way. And one of the lessons I learned as it relates to M &A is don't take your operating people off of their day jobs to go do M &A.

8:29So we built effectively a boutique investment bank inside of Zeta. And we look at 100 different companies a year seriously to buy one. Because it has to hit all five of our criteria. One, we have to be able to integrate it in 12 months. Two, we have to be able to sell them their clients, our products, or vice versa. Three, the deal has to be accretive from the day we do it. Four, there have to be additional synergies to drive incremental profit, and we have to be able to grow it at at least our own organic growth rate, which is greater than 20 % a year now for four years in a row. And number five, we have to pick up incredible people.

9:16Wow. All right, so I know you're going to be running back shortly. So I just want to ask you one last question on the philanthropy side. Why do you think that companies or corporations should have some type of charity component for either their employees or their customers to like to see it? You know, if you're successful and you're not giving back to society, I don't know what you're doing. So I started the David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation a number of years ago. And, you know, one of the things I love about what you do, Dan, is your focus on children. Our biggest focus is disadvantaged children around education, around nutrition, and around helping them to move up to the next level of success.

9:55And it's something that, honestly, it brings me so much joy to do it. And, you know, I often say that the charitable giving that my wife, Kristen, and I do is almost selfish in that it makes me feel so good to do it. And I think it's, in all frankness, when you and I first got to know each other, it was the thing that I think bonded us the fastest. Okay, so where can people find David Steinberg, Zeta Global? Where can they find your world, your ecosystem if they're out there listening? Well, first of all, we can go to ZetaGlobal.com. Second, I'm on Instagram and X and post there pretty regularly.

10:41And very excited to have people join me. All right, I'm going to let you get back to your conference. As you guys know, on the Money Mondays, we want you to have these discussions with your friends, family, and followers. It's not just about yourself that needs to understand about money. You might have to have discussion with people from your past, present, and future. Have discussion, talk about money. It's not rude to talk about it. We need it in our lives. There's loans, credit, financing, taxes. These are real things, part of your daily life. So have discussion. We'll see you guys next Monday here at themoneymondays.com.

11:13Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast. Normally, we're inside of an RV motorhome traveling around the country, But today, we're at the Zeta Global Live Conference. We've been coming here for the last three years. It's so impressive. They bring in over 1 ,100 chief marketing officers, CEOs. And our guest today is just like that. He has actually built one of the biggest brands in the space. It's been fascinating to watch him grow over the years. I think he's on year nine of this company and building something that everyone around the world has talked about because he combines celebrities, influencers, athletes, comedians all into one platform.

11:47I'm fascinated by it. So what we're going to do is cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. And this episode, we're going to keep it much shorter. They're using me around 20 to 25 minutes. Normally the episodes are 40 minutes because the average commute to work is 45 minutes. The average workout is 45 minutes. This episode will be around 20 to 25 minutes for your listening pleasure. So without further ado, Stephen Galanis from Cameo, give us your quick two minute bio so we get straight to the money. Hey, I'm Stephen Galanis, the co-founder and CEO of Cameo.

12:15Cameo is a marketplace where you can book over 60 ,000 of the most influential people in pop culture to create either personalized video shoutouts for you or to become brand endorsers for your brands. We have this marketplace. People can come on, search by what they like, and then find the people that are there. I'm based out of Chicago, and I'm in Miami as well. We've been at it nine years, as you mentioned. It's been a crazy, blessed story. We actually had the idea at my grandmother's funeral of all places. and the problem we were trying to start from solve from the very beginning was the internet was creating a new world where there was this gap between fame and monetization so for the first time people are kind of more famous than rich and we were really thinking about what if we could create a platform that helped people get paid to become more famous get paid to become more beloved because if you get a cameo from somebody you like them more than you liked them before you'll buy more of their merch you'll listen to their podcasts you become a go from a casual fan into a rabid super fan.

13:14Okay. You mentioned it happened at grandma's funeral. How did that come to be? People are crying. This is a big moment in your life. And how did all of a sudden become this zillion dollar company idea in this moment? Yeah, it was crazy. So my, uh, my uncle on my, uh, on my mom's side is a movie producer and he had done movies like Rambo Conan, Lone Survivor. And a bunch of the guys that he produced movies with came in for the day for the funeral from Los Angeles. One of those guys is Martin Blenko, who ended up becoming my co-founder at Cameo. At the time, Martin had become an NFL agent near one client, Cassius Marsh, a good buddy of both of ours.

13:52And Cash had just recently gone viral for having his Magic the Gathering card stolen. Martin was trying to find any marketing deal for him because as the agent, you make a higher percentage of marketing deals than you do for like a rookie minimum contract. And yet, even though he is an NFL player that made them go viral, he couldn't get Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Magic the Gathering, to get any type of money. So we were really thinking about this big gap. And he was really down on his luck. He had just sold his watch to pay for his kids' private schools. He's like, Stephen, I'm losing money flying up to Seattle every month.

14:30I don't know what to do. But he's like, I know this guy's a star. And one of his ideas was if he found a big defensive lineman with, like, big aura and a personality, maybe that guy could be the next Jason Momoa or the next Rock. And he thought that my uncle could cast Cassius as a Rambo or a Conan. So that was his whole idea in finding him. And you know him. He's got that look. So he pulls his phone out, and he shows me this video as we're stuck in traffic driving from downtown Chicago all the way back in O 'Hare, just gridlock traffic. He pulls out the video, and in it, he's getting his buddy Brandon Boone, who I think now is the chief marketing officer at Wingstop.

15:06And Brandon literally had just had a son, and he named his son Maverick because he was very close with Mav Carter and a bunch of the guys in LeBron's camp. But he loves the Seattle Seahawks. And in it, Cassius Marsh, who was playing for the Seahawks at the time, goes, hey, congratulations, Brandon, on Maverick. If he gets your athletic ability, I know he'll be playing for the Seahawks one day. Go Hawks. and I saw this and immediately there was that eureka moment. I'm like, dude, we should sell those. That's the new autograph. Okay. So when you say that's the new autograph, what's really interesting about that is a lot of people for many, many years would wait outside of concerts, festivals, basketball games to get an autograph.

15:44And then about seven or eight years ago, the selfie became the autograph. Correct. That's right around the time, obviously, cameo started to become big. Walk us through the concept of where the selfie is the autograph. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just simple. When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, 98 Bulls, that whole Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippen era, if you saw Dennis Rodman at a restaurant, what did you do? You grabbed the menu, you grabbed the napkin, they signed your hat. Today, if you see somebody famous, what do you do? Go up, take a selfie. and one of the things we're thinking about is in the digital world where your Instagram wall or your Facebook wall or your Instagram grid is kind of the equivalent of like your office, where your office wall used to be.

16:25Instead of getting the signed jersey that's sitting in your office, like you need, you know, people want that kind of that digital experience that's on their grid post or it's on their Facebook wall at the time. And that's really, again, selfie is a new autograph. Okay, so on the how to make money side with the Money Mondays podcast, you have 60 ,000 creators, influencers, athletes, comedians, et cetera. They're on the platform. Let's say someone is one of those. They are an influencer, celebrity, athlete, and obviously you have other categories. How do they sign up? How do they come to you? How do they find out?

16:53How do they make money? Yeah, three main ways. The first is we have a team of people that are constantly DMing people that we think could be good. One of the cool things about Cameo at this scale now is our search bar is kind of a window to the zeitgeist. So all of a sudden, we'll see these names that are popping on the trending list that we never heard of. And it may be somebody just went viral for starting a new TikTok trend or some new show on Hulu came out that we wasn't on a radar yet. So the second we see that, our team will go attack and go get those people on the platform. Secondly, we have a talent-to-talent referral system.

17:25So that allowed us, once we got into the locker room, so when we got Cassius Marsh on the Seahawks, anyone else on his team that he referred, he got 5 % of their bookings for a year out of our cut. And those referrals were 17 % of our marketplace were referred by other talent and they've done 65 % of the lifetime GMV. So a lot of the biggest people we ever got came from our really happy talent on our marketplace, referring their friends and getting them on. And then third, and this is something we changed a few years ago. When we first started the business, you had to have about 25 ,000 followers to come on.

17:59That's just the level where we thought you could be, you know, but what we're noticing when we looked at like the beginning of COVID all the way to Mother's Day 23. We looked at all the people that had applied that we hadn't let on. And it's kind of, it was a static thing, right? If you apply and you're like, I have 7 ,000 followers on Instagram. We don't follow, like we weren't tracking every single one of the people that applied. So they just ended up in kind of a no man's land. And one of the things, when we looked at the purgatory, we realized there were thousands of people that we had missed.

18:30Like maybe they were going to get cast in euphoria and becoming the biggest model in the world. 7 ,000. Now they have 60 ,000. Or they have 6 million. Somebody goes viral on TikTok. Someone was in the minor leagues, and now they're starting for the Yankees. We miss some really big people. So what we decided to do a couple years ago is open it up. So now anyone in the world can just go to cameo.com slash enroll, join Cameo as talent, and if you get booked, the algorithms will push you up and make you searchable. But the cool thing about that, if you join through enrollments, you can only get booked by sharing your link.

19:02So ultimately what you're doing is you're enabling all these people to do influencer marketing for you. And then those who there's demand for will end up kind of rising up in our system. Wow. Okay. So someone comes on there, they got approved. Bam, I'm approved on Cameo. They're excited. How do they now make money? How do they tell people? Is it all through social? Is it email, text? They mentioned it on stage? How do they promote it? Yeah, all of the above. I think obviously most people on the internet, like their biggest followings on the internet. So we always tell people, like, play where your fans are.

19:33And in this case, like, one of the things that happened just technologically right when we were coming up, the Instagram story swipe up ended up being a huge thing that kind of happened, like, right as Cameo was going. So at that time, only, you know, verified accounts originally could post a link in their Instagram story, and there were way less stories. So what would happen is first we would tell people, like, hey, you have this link in biospace. Go put that there. So like to this day, you still see so many people, www.cameos slash Dan that are just like right there. Secondly, they'll be like, hey, you know, I'm on this thing.

20:08Cameo, swipe up, come book me. And then third, you know, people have gotten really creative. If they have a newsletter, if they have an email list, if they're doing a tour, like they found ways to integrate that into the other co-marketing that they're doing to their fans already. And it's pretty organic. But by far the most important driver of Cameo's marketing is actually the fact that these videos all get shared, right? So 85 % of the videos in our marketplace are booked for other people. So if I book a Cameo for you and you think it's funny, what do you do? You put it in the group chat and suddenly all these other people know about it and that's really how we grow.

20:43So there's been a lot of competitors that have come and gone and faded away. What do you think made Cameo stand out? Let's step outside. Obviously, you're the CEO and founder. Let's actually look at it pragmatically. Why do you think that came out stood out versus all the other ones that came in and went? I think it was a variety of things. Number one, I think the timing was really important. There had been people, and you know all about this, that had tried to do this earlier. But until Snapchat became what it was, the people filming a selfie video was still like, if you tried to do it five years before, nobody had really done that before.

21:15So I think by the time we started in 2017, everybody was pretty comfortable filming a selfie video. So I think that meant a lot. and the iPhone camera had kind of gotten good enough to go do it. Secondly, there's a lot of teams out there around the world that either could build the tech to do Cameo or they could have the talent relationships, but there were very few people that could do both. And when I look at the founder market fit that our team specifically had, my co-founder Martin was an NFL agent and movie producer. Now, if he was Ari Emanuel or if he was Jerry Bruckheimer, he would have been too big that he wouldn't have cared to go do this, if that makes sense.

21:51so the fact that he was like in the space he knew enough to get he knew enough to get you know but he wasn't as successful enough at that point to go do it that was big secondly my co-founder uh devin who was our founding cto actually was one of the first people in the world on vine with over a billion loops really right so he was like a top 100 viner in the world his best friend cody co was like a top yeah of course top 30 viner in the world and one of the stories I'll never forget. The year before we started Cameo, I went to the Mayweather Pacquiao fight with Devin, Cody, and our friend Adam Q.

22:26And I'll never forget, Cody ended up tagging a picture of me, of our group, the four of us, like in the hotel lobby of the Aria. And I didn't know to have my notifications off. And suddenly, like my phone was charged for a whole night out in Vegas. There were so many likes and comments that my phone overheated and died in my pocket. and that was the moment where I'm like holy and I'd known Cody since college I'm like holy shit like this vine thing's huge like and and keep in mind even with those likes the two of them had not made a dollar on social media yet at this point so I literally am getting stopped more from Cody and Devin than I am from my buddies that are in the NBA or the NFL and that was a big unlock to me because they hadn't been able to make money and I think Devin being a creator and fundamentally understanding that as our founding, you know, CTO, like that's a really, really unique, uh, skill set that got brought to the table.

23:20And then lastly, like I'm a marketplace guy, I'm a ex options trader. So, you know, thinking about pricing was big. And one of the things that we were able to do really early was find an equation to help people price themselves. Cause when Cameo started, nobody knew what it should be. Should it be a thousand dollars? should it be that and i had this idea of you're basically getting a minute of their time so take their salary which for nba and nfl players which we started with were publicly available divide by 2 000 hours in a work year 50 40 hour weeks and then find out what they made per minute so when we on when we onboard andre drummond from the detroit pistons who was a 25 million dollar max salary player at the time we did that equation and first he thought he needed to be 40 grand or 10 grand to do a cameo because he's like I got paid 40 grand to go to our bar mitzvah but for me I was like that's flying I'm like dude like the math's actually saying you know 25 million divided by 2 ,000 hours in a work year divided by 60 you make 208 dollars a minute so if you're charging a hundred dollars and you do two videos per minute you're making the same effective rate as you are playing in the NBA on a max salary and that was a really big I think that pricing ended up being a really big unlock.

24:32And then once we had that set and the price was cheap enough that people could go buy, then you started getting the reviews because a lot of the early competitors we saw, yeah, they had Dwayne Wade, but he was$5 ,000 and nobody ever tried it. So starting with, and also I think a lot of people too, try to start with the A plus list. And we really had this idea of solving the problem for the 99 % of talent that really needed the money. All right, so there's a story I've been wanting to tell you for six years now. And really about the last half of decade in particular, I've been wanting to tell you about the butterfly effect.

25:03So in 2019, I actually went to visit you in Chicago and you took me to a restaurant across the street. And I got this message from Gary V. He was at the National, at the sports card convention. I didn't know what the National was. He said, come over to the card show before you fly out. So I thought I was going to go there for three hours and I'm there to see you. So you're the butterfly effect for hundreds of millions of dollars of sales, by the way. what gets you to the punchline. So I go to see Gary Vee. I go to the show, and I'm walking around with his son. And three hours turns into three days.