2223 - How Can Brands Effectively Leverage Influencer Marketing with #Paid's Adam Rivietz

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1:05With us right now is Adam Rivietz. Adam, you are the co-founder of Hashtag Paid. Your website is hashtagpaid, all spelled out,.com. So hashtagpaid.com. Adam, it's great to have you. Thanks, Josh. It's great to be here. All right. So before we get going talking about what Hashtag Paid is, you and I were just talking briefly before we started, and I always love finding out what our guests are kind of into kind of geeking out on lately. And you mentioned that you have become quite passionate about standup comedy. Tell me more. That's true. I it's funny, you know, if you flashback eight years and I was afraid of public speaking and I was afraid of flying.

1:47And then in my role at hashtag paid, I've had to speak at hundreds of events and I've fallen in love with it. So now eight years later, I love public speaking, but I'm still afraid of flying. And so I want to level up that ability I've had from public speaking and take it one step further. And I've always loved stand-up comedy. So I'm reading, I'm watching, I'm taking in all I can to hopefully do my first open mic this year. Wow. So are you actually taking a class or are you just kind of watching a bunch of YouTube videos? Or like, how are you learning this skill set? So far, YouTube videos, books, Netflix specials.

2:25and then through hashtag paid actually met the cmo of second city last week or a couple weeks ago and she said hey you know what why don't you take a course i'll hook it up and you can learn improv or you know get trained as a stand-up comedian through our courses and i may just take her up on that wow wow well um and i can listen i'll just tell you i didn't take any classes in stand-up I'd like to. I took about a year of improv and I would recommend it for anybody, particularly, you know, those of us who are in leadership positions. And I'd say the biggest thing for me is that it's just helped me kind of get out of my own head a lot more because I'd stop pre-judging what I'm going to say or judging afterwards what I said, like, oh, that wasn't perfect.

3:13Like now it's, you know, again, it was kind of that muscle you just kept on working with, like, hey, whatever comes out, it's going to be fine, right? Because you don't, in improv, you're not expected to carry a whole show, but it's really fascinating. You know, I'd love to learn some of the elements of standup. Just any high-level notes that you'd recommend for someone who's considering this about like what the structure of writing a set is? Yeah, I mean, the general theme that I've gathered is you can take any personal story, something you've experienced, something that's deep inside of you an emotion that you actually felt one time and exaggerate it and make it funny but you can't pull a joke out of thin air and make it personal and the personal stories that are then exaggerated and made funny are the ones that we all remember in our favorite routines those stories about the comedian's lives that you know uh that connect with us that we can relate to versus just a joke that feels impersonal because they wrote it to be funny versus writing it from a real experience.

4:18One last thing, I don't know if you have any advice on this, is, you know, I was just talking with my wife. I'm like, you know, I like stand up is just I feel like it's just so subjective. Right. I mean, I think there are objectively amazing comedians, but not everybody resonates with every comedian. And I was just thinking, gosh, it would be great if there was some kind of tool or platform where I could say, you know, I could basically just rate all of the standup comedy that I watch, and then it can get smarter and recommend other comedians that are going to be in line with my type of humor that I love.

4:51Like, how do you find great standup? I watch everything. I've seen so many Netflix specials. I'm based in Toronto, but every time I go to New York, I'm at the Comedy Cellar. Literally, I've probably been there seven times in the last six months. I just exposed myself to it. And there are amateurs who someone may have never heard of that's on the come up that's hilarious. And I'll go back and see them. Others are the big names that, you know, people are talking about at the water cooler in the office or, you know, rumbling online. So recommendations and just watching as much as I can. Well, I would love to get your recommendation of hashtag paid and who Hashtag Paid is for and how it works.

5:37Yeah, for sure. So Hashtag Paid, we've been around since 2014 and we help the world's largest brands like Coca-Cola, like Walmart, like Wella, like Sephora connect with creators in meaningful ways and then attract new audiences to grow their businesses. So we began in 2014, as I mentioned, my co-founder, Brian Gold, my best friend, he's also our CEO. and we thought of the idea when a close friend of ours from high school blew up on Instagram. A girl that we knew back in 2012, 2013, she was one of the first people we saw on Instagram and she was going through a pretty difficult time in her life.

6:17Her name's Ronnie and her handle's inspired to be fit. And what we saw was that Ronnie committed to a fitness goal. She was going through a difficult time. She was unhappy in her skin. She was exploring all these different ways to change her life around and committed to that fitness goal. But what was interesting is how she held herself accountable to that goal was by posting on Instagram. So every time she went to the gym, she'd shoot a selfie. Every time she'd make a healthy meal, she'd shoot a flat lay. And six months later, Ronnie racked up over 100 ,000 followers on Instagram. And so Brian and I were scrolling through, we're looking at her feed and we realized that these people are not just following her.

6:52They're asking her, what sports bra are you wearing? What blender are you using? What protein are you drinking? And she would endorse these products and services. and her followers would comment back, bought it, loved it, tried it. And that was our aha moment where we said we need to be at the intersection of these relationships that creators have with their audiences and that brands are now having with these creators. Yeah. Well, let's talk about how influencer marketing historically has worked and the problems with that. I mean, I could just speak from, I'm a little, little tiny baby, baby, baby influencer.

7:30And I can just tell you, it's just, I hate getting spammed at. It's just so, I mean, it's just such an inefficient way of, of engaging with brands that, you know, I'd love to work with. And I've done, you know, I've done over the past, you know, and again, more on my personal finance brand, you know, when there is a great connection, like, um, USAA is a brand that, I mean, it's just, it's so on point for me, military veteran, I teach consumer skills. They've got consumer products. Like, so we were able to collaborate on some great stuff together. What a great find. And I'm so grateful that that happened.

8:02I don't know how it happened initially, but it was very successful for many years. Adam, can you give us a little bit of a lay of the land? Yeah. I mean, flashing back to 2014, let's start there, right? The word influencer didn't even exist. The word creator surely didn't exist. It was not creator marketing. It was hardly influencer marketing. And so I think the challenges in the early days for us as a company was educating marketers that these people even exist. Social media ads were just starting to evolve. Paid social was becoming a bigger investment bucket for these marketers. Now, all of a sudden, you have a new narrative saying, hey, don't put these pieces of content and paid dollars through your brand's account.

8:45Trust someone else with your brand. And so it was years of education showing marketers the value that they can extract from these partnerships with creators, whether that's content. Most brands today cannot capture and push out enough content to keep up with the demands of the social networks. That's bucket number one, one of the biggest challenges. Whether that's organic content or photos and videos for paid ads, that's a huge challenge at every brand, large and small. Remaining in the zeitgeist, keeping your brand top of mind. no matter how many people you have internally, there is never enough to capture those assets and put them out.

9:25So creators are a great opportunity to have an outsourced team of photographers, videographers, voices. So content is the first bucket, the challenge that brands were facing. Second is organic. We've seen every social network dial down the organic reach that brands get as they've amassed their following. Facebook from early days told every brand to build a brand page on their platform. And in the early days, you'd have a million followers and many and many of them. Now, less than 1 % of your Facebook audience sees your posts. Instagram, less than 5%. TikTok, somewhere around 5 % to 10%. And then growing because their algorithm's a little different.

10:07And it might be seen by folks outside of your following, but we're not going to go into those details right now. So essentially, organic reach is dropping and brands need to rely on creators to crack that algorithm, to develop that new trending content that will get them seen in this age where organic reach is declining. And then finally, on the paid side of things, paid ads have been around for a decade plus now on social. Brands are investing so much money. We saw digital take over traditional in terms of spend over the last handful of years. but what we're seeing now in the last year or two is that return on your paid ads the costs are going up on meta and so brands are now looking at creators as a solution to paid ads because since the invention of whitelisting or what's known as allow listing or what we call creator licensing this allows you to take creator content and get access to the creator's accounts and run your paid ads through the creator's account.

11:14So imagine you're a consumer, you're scrolling down your feed. Instead of seeing Coca-Cola sponsored, you're seeing Adam Riviat in partnership with Coca-Cola. And it's this hybrid of an organic ad where it's coming from a person you know and trust, the creator. But through the paid component, you can target exactly your audience. Whereas in organic, you cannot. You don't have that targeting. Very few people see it. So those are the challenges that we've been solving for brands, helping them capture more content by partnering with creators, helping them solve the challenges around the reach or the lack there of reach because of the algorithms turning it down and thus partnering with creators to get content and put it out that will break the algorithm and go viral.

12:02And then finally improving their paid social results with creator content. Wow. Wow. Okay, Adam, that's quite a bill of goods, man. That is the full nickel tour. Yes. All of this, by the way, is at the website, hashtagpaid.com. I guess what I want to ask, Adam, is at what level does someone, in terms of maybe it's budget, maybe it's goals, how does someone know that they're ready for hashtag paid? And what might be some indications probably not quite ready. Yeah, for sure. So historically, we have supported brands large and small, but even though we are a growing startup and our team is 100 plus people now, we have to remain focused.

12:50And what we've seen over the last handful of years is our product, our offering, our service, the combination of humans and technology that we put forth in market is best suited for enterprise marketers and enterprise brands. So what we consider our ideal customer, the people benefiting from our offering most, are typically companies with 500 plus employees. They're typically spending already hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And they understand the value of creators. And they're already making that investment or they've tested it and are now looking to scale with a partner. our you know average sort of offer or or test pilot that a new partner will come in with they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars it might be 200 to 500k for a pilot and then our key accounts are spending millions of dollars a year because they understand the benefit we've shown them the roi they've gone from these transactional one-off posts with creators to developing longer term relationships, ambassador programs, their goals are spanning from top to bottom of the funnel.

13:56We're designing the whole strategy and integrating creators outside of social as well on their out of home, on their digital, on their programmatic, on their connected television. So it can start with a simple, you know, one off campaign for a few hundred grand to launch a new product or to reinvigorate a brand or to attract a new audience or get folks to an event. But once we show the results and our clients are happy, we're planning always on just like a typical agency would, but we can do it better, faster, stronger because of our technology. That's the scale. It's this combination of agency depth with the breadth of the platform.

14:38And it looks as though you work with a lot of agencies as well. So for our agency friends, which I would suspect there are quite a few in this audience, or a brand, what are the next steps? Yeah, typically about a third of our revenue in any given year comes from agency partners. That's both in Canada and the US and expanding into other markets. And so if you're an agency and you don't offer influencer marketing today, but you have clients that are interested, that are asking, then we should have a sit down and explore what creator marketing would look like for that client. And our strategy team can help you put the best foot forward in engaging with your clients to offer creator marketing.

15:25If you are already selling it and you want to scale, you want to offer paid media, you want to offer usage rights, you need assistance with strategy, that's where we come in. whether it's a boutique agency or some of the largest holdcos that we work with. It just depends on the client and their needs. And we'll do some discovery, uncover it, and build a plan to help you win that business. Adam Rivietz, again, the co-founder of Hashtag Paid. The website is hashtagpaid.com. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. Awesome. Thanks, Josh.

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