1664 -Viral Of The Day with ViralGains’ Dan Levin

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0:58with us right now it's dan levin dan you are the president coo and co-founder of viral gains you're found on the web at viral gains.com dan thanks so much for joining us it's such a pleasure to be here thanks for having me yes absolutely what does viral gains do all right so you know So in a nutshell, we help, you know, what we say sort of in the industry is we're a zero party data gathering engine for enterprise brands. So let's break that down a little bit. So advertisers, they need to be able to target specific individuals when they're trying to reach them with, let's say, an ad. And, you know, it's somewhat easy to do that in the, you know, somewhat easy to do that in the walled garden.

1:43So if you're in Facebook, if you're using Google, if you're using any of these tools, they have native sort of audience targeting tools that are available that, you know, when you're reaching certain people, you can select those things. But, you know, what a lot of people forget, marketers certainly don't, but some, you know, regular people don't know is just how much of the Internet is not the walled garden. So you've got, let's say, a handful of walled gardens. Maybe there's five of them. And then there's millions and millions of other websites, whether it's the New York Times, whether it's Clash of Clans on an app, whether it's MotorTrend.com.

2:17there's millions and millions of publishers and we call that the open web and so what we do is using the open web we help marketers build highly relevant audiences to themselves so they can then target those either with us in the open web or they can do that then by themselves inside of the walled gardens yeah so where did viral gains come from you know when I was five years old I had this idea for a programmatic advertising platform I'm just kidding that's not that's not that's not what I was thinking when I was five I was thinking about being an astronaut or something but no so the idea came at the beginning of I would say the social media revolution and one of the things that was so interesting about social media is that it was the first time that media became you know sort of from a unilateral one directional form of media to a two directional.

3:14Before that, whether it was print or television or radio, it was always, hey, you have a set of sort of, you know, call it a tastemakers that would determine what is the zeitgeist of the day. You know, it didn't matter what it was, it was always editors. And even in the early days of the internet, you know, you'd go to newyorktimes.com and whatever the editors determined was, you know, the interesting thing was there. And then social media came around and it was this revolutionary idea that, you know, consumers controlled what was popular. You know, if you went on Twitter, what's viral of the day is not what the Twitter editorial staff determines it's going to be relevant.

3:55It's whatever the people wanted it to be. And so when brands were sort of first starting to put their content online, they were met with a big middle finger, right? Consumers, you know, because they're like, hey, let me put my repurposed, you know, 30, you know, two minute TV ad from two in the morning on reddit.com and you guys will all consume or YouTube and you'll all consume it. Right. And consumers are like, absolutely not. And all of a sudden brands had to deal with this idea that, you know, they can no longer control the conversation. They have to have a two-way dialogue with consumers that just changed forever.

4:32And we're still there. Now the internet is all very, very, very conversational. brands are engaging, posting interesting content on platforms like TikTok and others. And so the sort of fundamental way that we build audiences that sort of completely different viral gains from the way that I think most of the industry does it is we do a ton of survey-based audience collection. And so just a little bit of insight, the way that usually audience targeting works is maybe someone was reading an article about trucks on some website three months ago. And there's going to be a set of data providers that are going to say truck contender.

5:09Josh is interested in trucks. It's why everyone jokes that you look at something and ads follow you around for like five years after you buy something and you're still seeing the ad for that thing that you put in your shopping cart five years ago. And so what we do is we take a very different approach. We ask people, hey, are you interested in trucks? If you are interested in trucks, are you interested in buying a truck over the next period of time? And if you are, what's important to you in a truck? Is it that it's roomy? Is it that it's powerful? Is it fuel efficient? Is it that it is a safety of it?

5:40And we drill down and we keep drilling down. And so what zero party data really is, is everyone's heard of first party and third party. Zero party is data that you have as an entity that someone volunteered. It's a slight difference from, let's say, first party data. First party data would be, let's say, if you were on Facebook and you're there to talk to your grandma or your friends. But in the meantime, as a proxy of having that relationship with Facebook, Facebook is pulling all this information about you. Yeah. What do you like? Where do you like to go? What kind of things do you do? So they're building these giant profiles about you, even though you didn't want them to have that.

6:20You didn't want them to know what brand of cereal you eat. You just wanted to talk to grandma. But as a proxy of the relationship, they have that data. Zero party data is data that somebody voluntarily gives you and says, I want you to know what's important to me in a car brand. I want you to know what kind of cereal I like to buy. And so the idea was sort of born, to get to your question in the sort of beginning days of social media, this idea that there's now this huge two-way dialogue mechanism that started with social media. And we've taken that and said, wait a minute. If it works in social media broadly, couldn't that work in advertising?

6:59Why does marketing always have to be the talk, you know, the sort of listener and advertising has to be the talker? We said, no, you can put two-way interactive sort of dialogue into an ad slot. And that way, when you're seeing an ad from, let's say, I'm making it up Toyota, rather than just following you creepily and trying to show you the same ad five times or buying data from some unknown marketplace, they can literally ask you, are you interested in us? Because if Android were just to ask me, am I ever going to get an Android? The answer is no. Stop advertising to me. Yeah, right. They get it.

7:34And so our clients are seeing huge efficiency gains from, A, knowing where the data came from. There's a privacy component to it. Knowing that it's recent. Knowing how it was sourced. And being able to basically ask any question that their imagination can come up with. It's a very powerful tool. So the ads, if the goal was like, well, how might the ads look? or maybe give an example of like an ad that you recommended or revised on for a client? Well, I'll just stick to the generic use case, which is it could be, pick any vertical, any example. Again, let's say making it up, let's say it's a Pampers is the brand.

8:18And it's a normal ad that they would be normally buying anyways in any environment. So that was sort of one of the realizations, which was, wait a minute, you've got someone's attention. And that's a very difficult thing to get in this day and age. And you've got their attention in that moment in time with all the noise happening, and they're right there. And you're just going to show them an ad. And that's it. It's just a waste. And so what we do is, we're very good from a UX UI perspective. So imagine an ad now for Pampers. And on the bottom, it just says in a nice translucent, sort of very very translucent, non-disruptive way into the ad itself.

8:58It could be even a portion of all the people that are seeing it. It'll just say, hey, is Pampers your favorite diaper brand? It'll say, yes, no, and I don't buy diapers. Boom. They're still watching the ad. It's all within 30 to 60 seconds. Watching the ad, and then maybe it keeps going. At the end, depending on what they did early on, at the end of the ad, before it goes to the next piece of content, let's say, it'll be another quick little survey. And it depends on what they said. If they said, I don't buy diapers, the answers, you know, we might want to know why were we originally targeting these people?

9:30We might say, you know, the answers could be someone else in the household buys diapers. We're like, oh, it's a household thing. Gotcha. Maybe it's not Josh. It's someone else. They could say, my kids are too old. Oh, so they used to be in a segment of parents, but now they're a little bit older. Or maybe it says I don't have kids. So we know that we know that we can, we know that, well, if they say, you know, they say, I don't buy, yeah, exactly, that could be it. If they said, if they didn't say, if they didn't say, I don't buy diapers, they just said, no, Pampers isn't my favorite diaper brand.

10:01Maybe the questions are what's important to you in a diaper? Leaks, it prevents, you know, it's softer the touch, it's eco-friendly, it biodegrades, and it's all happening in the context of a normal ad that you would see anywhere on the internet. It's just that we said, why waste these media dollars? I mean, waste is not the right way to put it. The better way is why can't we extract more value out of that? And everybody wins. The consumer wins because they're going to be able to volunteer information. They get to state their preference. That's it. Josh, you know, that's really what it is in this day and age of everyone just feeling like they're constantly being followed and every nook and cranny, you know, from your, you know, from the phone companies knowing exactly where you are, everywhere you go, every time you do anything, as long as you're not like a cave person, data is being extracted.

10:55And sometimes it's just wrong. It's the wrong inference. It's offensive. And we just said, hey, clearly consumer. And that's why you have ad blockers as a thing. Oh, yeah. Because it's irrelevant. They feel like it's creepy. And you know what that does? It hurts the publishers. And that's the worst part of it is that the big giants, they can command a subscription. Spotify, you subscribe to. Netflix, you'll subscribe to. YouTube Red, you'll subscribe to. But as a consumer, you're only going to subscribe to a handful of places. What are these sort of independent content creators supposed to do if they can't monetize with advertising?

11:38They'll just go away. And so in some ways, it's a sort of defense of free speech, you could say. So, yeah, I'll tell you, you know, not to derail the conversation, but, you know, something that, you know, made me think of this. A few months ago, I was just getting I was getting slammed with ads on Facebook for like marketing services and, you know, just like selling stuff to me because I'm a decision maker with a business or something like that. So I got in the habit. I started just clicking X on every irrelevant ad and I get better ads today. Now I get ads for stuff like concerts in my area, you know, arcade games, like just like stuff that I'm actually really interested in.

12:22I'm just not going to click on and go through someone's funnel. If you're a marketing agency, sorry. I'm just no thanks. But that would be, you know, kind of an example. You know, a really good book. Have you met Mark Schaefer, Marketing Rebellion? He would probably really love this book right here. But Mark Schaefer, you know, really has kind of done a lot of great work around, you know, how marketers really need to be a lot more empathic to consumers because they're the ones in charge. I love it. This is really, really cool. And I'll tell you, I mean, I just have not even heard the term zero-party data until I was today years old.

13:05It's music when I heard this, and it makes perfect sense. I love it. That's music to my ears. I just, it's just, you know, for us, it's all we live and breathe music to my ears. And also like, you know, you know, an annoying drum solo because it's like, oh man, we got to get out there even more, but also just goes to show you how big the opportunity out there is for this. Yeah. Your website, viralgains.com. What would you recommend? Maybe someone's listening to our podcast because they, you know, they did a search on you, found a podcast. Now they listen to a conversation. Now they're kind of ready to do a little bit deeper dive with you.

13:39what's next in that journey? For them or for us? Yeah. So our listener right now, where do they go from here? Oh, well, look, I mean, our website's the best way to engage with our company. And everything that we do, you're not going to be able to go on our website and just click a bunch of buttons and check out. Because when you think about it, these things are highly bespoke, right? What one brand cares about in particular is different from what another one cares about. Now, don't get me wrong. There's the amount of technology behind it. We haven't even talked about the AI piece of it, but we don't have to necessarily.

14:20There's a lot that goes into the sort of the business and that the technology required to understand consumers, to scale them, but also, you know, in particular, you know, again, And someone like Pampers might want to know, I need to find people specifically that care about the biodegradability of diapers. And then someone like Ford might want to say, I specifically need an audience of people that want something sporty, but also conscious of the environment. I need that over one. And so we do a real intake with every single brand and agency, a lot of agencies that we work with on behalf of those brands, to just make sure that what we're doing makes sense for them.

15:04And also what they're going to do with the audience. Because the other piece of it that we haven't talked about is, well, again, we did a little bit. There's the insights that you're gathering, which is what is important to my potential consumers. If I take a million of my generic customers, if I'm Pampers, I kind of want to know why they're buying me. I want to maybe understand what it is. But just as importantly, the ones that aren't buying me, everyone's got their CRM and they all have their existing customers. But if they're trying to find net new, they want to understand what makes those people tick.

15:36So first they get the insights and then those insights turn into addressable audiences. So just engaging with us directly is the best way. Awesome. And again, the website is viralgains.com. There's a lot of great information. You can learn about the platform itself. I love it. And Dan, it's been great having you on the podcast as well. Again, co-founder, president, COO, Viral Gains. Dan, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, it was a pleasure. Till next time.

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