Christian Brown
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Christian Brown is the co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer at Glewee.
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Transcript
Danielle (Scrunch) (00:10):
All right. Amazing. Christian, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to have you on the Scrunch Influencer Marketing Show.
Christian Brown (00:20):
Yes, thank you for having me. It's been quite some time. I know that you are quite literally across the world from myself, so this is so fun. I think we might even be in different days.
Danielle (Scrunch) (00:29):
Yeah. Oh my God, I think you <laugh> I think you're right. I'm on Wednesday. Are you on Tuesday? Yeah.
Christian Brown (00:33):
No, I, yeah, it's Tuesday night right now, so.
Danielle (Scrunch) (00:36):
Wow. Well, I'm coming to you live from the future, and let me tell you, it's amazing. <Laugh>.
Christian Brown (00:42):
Well, and yeah, I have nothing to say about the past otherwise that I'm stuck here. So <laugh>, hopefully. No, we'll, we'll get onto that.
Danielle (Scrunch) (00:48):
We'll, we'll, we'll meet in the middle somewhere. So look, let's start out, so you are the founder of Gluey, which is an influencer marketing co-founder, my apologies, co-founder <laugh> of the influencer marketing platform glue. And I'm so stoked to have you on the show today. Why don't we just start off by telling everybody how you got here. So how did you actually get into influencer marketing and starting a company? Okay,
Christian Brown (01:18):
Yeah. Okay, cool. Huge question there. In high school, like grades, I don't know, like nine through 12 living in Massachusetts, which is like, I don't know, kind of smaller suburban area of the United States, pretty close to New York, like all my friends, just traditionally, right? When Instagram had started, we were all like, okay, Instagram's so fun. And I was like, you know, 15, 14, 15. And so just posting tons of stuff on Instagram. Here's Stewart Pierre, our little
Danielle (Scrunch) (01:41):
Guest. Oh, I'm so happy. Yes. <laugh>.
Christian Brown (01:44):
I was mocking on my keyboard. So back in the day, we were like, wow, social media is awesome. I originally used Tumblr as like my first form of using like an, I don't know, https coding on a website. And I was like, wow, this is so fun. So with that in mind, I wanted to be like all the cool guys on Tumblr. Everyone like had was using Instagram here and there, but Tumblr was kind of where like all of like the rap scene, fashion scene, social scene that I had looked up to was, yeah. And so I was like, okay, what's everyone doing? Everyone's on Photoshop, everyone's making all these cool edits and stuff, so, ok, I'm gonna start p taught myself Photoshop in my like, bedroom. And I was like 14, 15 made like these really embarrassing edits like of myself and my friends photos of like putting us in like Alana Del Ray album cover and I dunno stuff. I thought that was cool and
Danielle (Scrunch) (02:27):
Like, I love this. This is so cool.
Christian Brown (02:29):
<Laugh>. Yeah, it's a match what I looked up to. So got really good at Photoshop, brought that over to Instagram. Started getting like the local following, which like kind of went to like a state level on, on Instagram and stuff. And to kinda like grew my following up from there, went growing, like my following, I guess a lot of my friends that were also like becoming different, just, I dunno, personalities on Instagram or YouTube and stuff. We kind of just all like gravitated towards each other. And that led us into kind of like the fashion scene, which then got us connected with a lot of kids out in New York. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So we, we'd go, we were in New York all the time, just like working with all the kids that were in like the, this like little bubble of fashion that had existed only on Instagram at the time and like fit picks, like outfit pictures and all that stuff.
(03:09):
And there was just this world of people that understood, understood influencer marketing. Like, oh, this brand's paying us through this. Oh, we're gonna work with this brand. Oh we're gonna do this activation. Oh, I'm gonna get paid this much money to this. And it was just this world that we got thrown into. And it's like, okay, everybody understands the same language, right? You work with the brand, you post something, send 'em a link, you get paid. And there was these like transactions that were like way bigger than any normal job anyone could get at our age, right? Yeah. So with that, we are in New York and we were like just playing this game with all these people and seeing like the modeling scene, the fashion scene the clothing brand scene, seeing it all like expand. And then everyone in New York would start going to LA and all the LA kids would come to New York.
(03:48):
And I was like starting to see these two worlds, right? And I'm like, okay, this is really cool. Cause everyone in New York, cuz everyone in la So all the LA kids would come to New York, we'd hang out with them and like, we're really young at this point and like, I'd skip school on Fridays to like go to New York on like a Thursday night and like just hang out and literally do nothing all weekend except just like, take pictures in the street and like hang out with people. So that's so cool. And like obviously try to run around and like hope to run into ASAP Rocky are like one of those guys that I thought were the coolest people ever. So the New York people in the LA people, there was a bridge. So at that point, it was like my first year at my university, we started going out to LA a lot.
(04:22):
Like all the brands, all our friends in LA were kind of on like a different world than the influencer marketing. They were in like real influencer marketing, doing like YouTube activations and stuff. And they had like multimillions of followers, all our friends. So I'm like, okay, I'm out in LA mean, and a bunch of kids and like, it's just all the friend groups that I start like rolling around. Everyone has these millions of followers, but no one really had the business mindset. A few kids did, don't get me wrong. And like, I really started to watch what they were doing. So, okay, I need to study on that. Like, okay, what's working for some people? Then you start to get this tier system where some kids are just running it on their own. Other people have management. If you have management, is it independent management or is it label management?
(04:58):
If it's label management, okay, we're hanging out with the people that manage Justin Bieber and I'm like, okay, what's going on here? How does someone that manages like an A-list celeb, why are they working with a kid that's also 19 years old? Oh. Cause we have millions of followers running around. Like there's, there was leverage to work with. So my whole friend group and I were like, okay, there's a lot to work with here. There's lot to see. So one of my really close friends had a couple million followers and was just doing brand deal after brand deal after brand deal, one brand deal turns into the next, then outta nowhere my friends prop up this giant West Hollywood mansion and they're like, oh yeah, the brand deal's covered it. Right? And it's like, okay, this, this is so cool. So now anytime anyone wants, we fly out to LA hang out for a week, all we're doing is content.
(05:40):
Everyone's just managing content, looking at content, doing content. This is before TikTok, before the TikTok houses, but there were all these houses that were popping up that you would see on YouTube, but you had to be in the scene to like start to go from like party to party or house to house. And there was this very calibrated, organized scene of kids, whether it was like the phase clan house or like all of these different houses that were like these little tribes, these clans of like influencer marketing teams that all worked with each other. And so we're like, okay, like we're either gonna pick a team or we're gonna look at this. And one of my best friends and I Dylan Duke, who is, he's the founder of Gluey. Like literally we go so, so, so far back. I used to go out to his house and like stay on his couch.
(06:19):
And I was like, dude, there's so much here, right? We have to tap into this. At the same time we were in the econ world drop ship stuff, just building stores, creating econ websites. I would create stores left and right cause I was so good with the Photoshop and the branding. I could prop a store up, sell a couple hundred units, flip the store, get rid of it, move it on to the next thing, just pick up what trends were going on and that would kind of like fund our lives in college. Awesome. And then right when school, school went online right around the time that Covid was happening, I was in my last couple months of my university out to graduate. Covid goes online, Dylan calls me in LA when chatting and he's like, yo, like let, let's, let's get this, let's platform deal.
(06:56):
Let's get it off the ground. And so we kind of look at a map and we're like, okay, there's all of America, there's Florida, it's a really warm place. Neither of us had ever been there, but we knew some people out there were like, let's just go there, let's go there, let's figure it out. Let's see what we can do. Dylan came to me with the idea and I was just like, I'm on the next flight. And so I had, I bought the literal next plane in the morning. So like eight hours later I was on a plane. After the phone call ended, we went down to Florida and we're like, all right, we're gonna prop up. We're just gonna live here for a bit like this. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the covid stuff's starting, we need to be safe, we need to be smart. So yeah, we just propped up shop, we like just, I don't know, worked out of a living room.
(07:38):
And then we had the idea, we whiteboarded it, talked about, talked it through, started to meet with devs got a team out down here and we kind of just hit the ground running. And that was about like, let's call it 24 months ago or so. And then took us at least a year to get like our MVP coded, oriented tested, ready to go, like product market, all that. And then, yeah, so we launched last summer. And it is always, and it always has been, it always will be just like our, our project, like our baby basically. And it's something that came from, I have the original sticky notes and now we're at a point where like we have, I don't know, 22 employees, thousands of users like an office with like, like I said, glass tables and you know, we're <laugh>, I dunno, the startup stuff you see in a movie. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's so fun. So I know that that was a loaded answer. How did what
Danielle (Scrunch) (08:30):
That is No, that's, so that's that's amazing. It's like, what I love about that is it's not like you are kind of you know, say a tech person and you just kind of saw what everyone else was doing in influencer marketing and built a platform. Like you lived it, you actually lived it, you grew up with influencer marketing, you were in the scenes, you went, okay, now this is actually something cuz I've experienced it.
Christian Brown (08:53):
Yeah. We were like, okay, all we know is pain points or like there's gotta be something to solve it. And this was, I mean we were, I don't know, I had just turned 22, almost 21 at the time, and we were like, okay, like tech, tech company, tech platform. It was so foreign to us. And then we're like, hold on, let's just do it. And then we started to realize like, oh, there's this world of like tech people that love making tech companies and all this stuff. Yeah. And we weren't like, we didn't have that orientation. We never wanted to be this like big whatever, right? We had no like goal in the personification sense. We were just like, we wanna build a project. And then, you know, and you learn about everyone that's like, oh, I'm a founder of this, I'm founder of that. And it's like, oh, that's cool. Do you love your project? And be like, oh, I was here for the money or the exit. And we're like, all right. You know, do do your thing. That's cool. We're just kind of head down focused on our stuff right now, so
Danielle (Scrunch) (09:40):
That's so cool. So tell me then, what is the platform now? So what pain points do you solve? Who is it for? Like what does the platform look like? How is it different to other platforms on the market?
Christian Brown (09:51):
Yeah, great question. So, and like the answer to this kind of relays as a segmentation to our previous answer. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's two sides of our coin, which I'm sure you know, there's the brand and the creator on that. Our app, our apps, plural, actually work on two different like forms, right? So let's talk about creator first and we'll go to brand. So creators have to download on iOS and Android or Auto Web. They can download the Google application and apply as a creator. So creators download and apply. We have a team that reviews and vets each creator. So we look at total follower count, typically a minimum of 10 K. We kind of bump it up to like 1520 k depending engagement rate, 3.5% or above. We look at professionalism overall just generalized across platforms. We look at past brand deal, experience. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like their portfolio to see that they have professionalism.
(10:40):
And we look at just overall criteria to be a part of the blue community. So following generalized guidelines across social suitability for work, all that stuff. Nice. If admitted, a creator can come into our platform, authenticate their accounts, track their realtime following metric, authenticate with Stripe, which is our payment processor industry leading. We have a great partnership with them. Awesome. So you can track your total sum of all your followers, you can see your growth over time. You can see what posts are succeeding and excelling as well as the feed. So the general feed is like where we really are solving the pain point, which is lack of work for a creator and lack of organized structure. So a creator based on their categorical input and based on their follower count, can scroll a feed of all the different campaigns that the brands have posted.
(11:24):
So if you fit based on your age, based on your gender, your categories, your minimum following, you can apply for these campaigns in app, the brands and creators chat all in one centralized location. If a brand accepts a creator, the brand goes in and assigns a post day. So let's say that you and I are your brand, I'm a creator. You want me to post a TikTok next Thursday? Yeah, well, I can go to my Gluey calendar and I see that next Thursday I have a post do. So it's all integrated into one organized fashion. So I can click that. I can see that I have to submit content for approval before next Thursday. I'll create my content. Maybe I'm working with like Faragamo, right? So I go in like take a couple selfies, I write up my caption, maybe it's a TikTok video. I'll do a little 15, 32nd run there.
(12:05):
I'll pick my sound and then I'll submit that to the brand in app. The brand will then either decline and give feedback or approve it. If it's approved, then I get a notification on post day. The post goes live. Since I've authenticated my account as a creator, I grab that live link from Instagram or TikTok, wherever, and I submit it to our platform. And then Gluey does the rest tracks all the data, it shows me the data reports and my success metrics shows the brands. And then immediately upon that, the payment gets, seems the creator review team. And then Gluey tries to pay out within 48 hours of that. So we cut out the net 15, net 30, net 60, all that. We want instant payouts to our creators because we want people to monetize their following in real time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that's the creator side brand side.
(12:47):
Huge issue is search and discovery and authenticity. So there are an array of the big boy platforms out there. Some with some immense level of funding in the US markets that are big databases. So they'll tell you that they have 10, 20, 50 million influencers on there and they cost thousands of dollars per month. And then brand users can go on and fiddle around and export CSV list of emails. Well now in that scenario of a database, the brand user, whether it's a social media marketer a marketing manager cmo, anyone in the marketing or ad department, that individual is now stuck with more work to do because now they have to go back to square one and email DM, whatever, reach out to that influencer. So search and discovery, finding the right fit creator, we solve that because we allow for brands to set their parameters and launch campaigns and creators opt in.
(13:36):
They say, Hey, I want to be a part of this. I want to be your next brand advocate. I want to be a part of your brand at your digital footprint on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Twitter, on Twitch, et cetera. So search discovery is covered, payment processing is covered. Data tracking is all covered. So any brand member can come in and see whether it's last two weeks, last month, q1, q2, q3, year to date any timeframe. We can see the total data metrics being tracked across platform. We can sum it all, we can break it down per platform. We see data distributions as well as be able to track all the content. So if a brand wants to own the right, the content and perpetuity and like a UTC sense, they can do so, so they can work with a creator to license it in perpetuity.
(14:18):
And then the brand has that in their asset library on our platform. So we act as like one big mainframe for anything and everything. Influencer marketing and creator marketing on the brand side and the creator side, we're solving the biggest pain point of it all. We want more work. We want to monetize and we want to make this our full-time gig. So we do, and we are a like, buy creators, four creators platform. Awesome. And that in a sense, that essence is what really sets it apart. Yes. Because we knew like there, you know, you look at the influencer space, especially in the US it's like there are no apps. Everyone's manager is doing something on a platform, on a computer. Yeah. <laugh>, the creator never has the power. The power is, it's distanced from the creator when the creator is the real organism in the cycle, right?
(15:03):
Like the creator is what's bringing things forward. And so to give the power back to the creator, that's everything for us. And we're not some like, oh, we're anti societal. Like we're anti, you know, the talent agents and stuff. The talent agents are great. We're, we also have a platform for them too. So we try to encompass any and every user base and just solve pain points just around the board for them. But to answer the main differentiator factor, it's, it's the app it's the lingo, it's the experience and it's our openness. So we do creative focus groups every single week. We do brand focus groups biweekly. So we're constantly talking to users and identifying what do people want, right? We have a team. Yeah. We have a roadmap. We have a 24 month runway at this point in time. So we're building what the industry wants and needs and we're having so much fun along the way.
Danielle (Scrunch) (15:51):
That's so cool. And I mean, look, to be able to bring that to life in 12 to 24 months is absolutely incredible. I know <laugh> having built a tech platform in the past that is unheard of. That's crazy. Good. And I'm wondering, so have there been any challenges for you along the way? Was there anything as you were building the platform, as you were talking to brands, talking to creators, anything that kind of surprised you that they were looking for? Or any challenges that came up that you're like, wow, we didn't really expect to see that in this industry?
Christian Brown (16:22):
Yeah, of course. There's challenges every day. There's, there was the big challenge on the board was the chicken and the egg. Like yeah, jokingly, like, I feel like my desk every day and all that comes at me are fireballs. And they're like, oh, like mini challenges.
Danielle (Scrunch) (16:34):
I'll catch this,
Christian Brown (16:35):
Solve it, this one, solve it, delegate this one off. And then we all day long to solve problems. Mm-Hmm. But a big challenge was the chicken and the egg to begin. So we always asked ourselves, what's gonna come first, you know, an army of creators or a plethora of brands? And the answer was the creators. And that was, it was a natural feel. We didn't want to push our marketing towards a direction we wanted to be open. We wanted to be 50% pushed to brands, 50% to creators, and just get industry insight. And it was a no-brainer. I mean, we, we just, we did it ourselves, right? We just marketed organically at first and we started to push in what felt like an organic sense. So like it's a no-brainer that what, what works well for us is when we launch a campaign on Gluey saying we want Gluey creators to post on TikTok about being a glue creator. We pay them through gluey. Yes. Like that's, yeah. You know, of course we do that, right? Like, so of course our
Danielle (Scrunch) (17:26):
Biggest challenge. Yeah. It's like you believe in influencer marketing so much that you use it for your own business. It makes perfect sense.
Christian Brown (17:33):
Get this, I yanked we pulled our entire Facebook, Instagram ad spend out. So we are removing our paid spend on Facebook, Instagram, because we put our data reports out and our KPI metrics that we track actually six x and i I sound like I'm trying to sell you something here. They six x. No, I love it. <Laugh> on our new, our new user download and application as well as accepted qualified users, that's a very, very heavy stat that we track in internally. So that six x grew when we put our money into Gluey away from Facebook, Instagram, and we were like, of course it did. Yes. Yeah, why wouldn't it? Right? Like, exactly. You
Danielle (Scrunch) (18:12):
Know this. Yeah. It's so good.
Christian Brown (18:14):
<Laugh>, right? So so that was a challenge in itself. Now we have thousands of users. Now brands can quite literally connect with like tens to hundreds of users in real time, like instantaneously, which is awesome. Another problem we're still solving is the brand side. So we have tons of SMB brands on the platform utilizing the SaaS aspect. We have enterprise brands that are coming to us for our done for you models. We're just navigating the space, finding our product market fit, and really like going, hammering that home as best as we can. And that's the most fun project in itself, is like finding our home because we know our, our champions. Yes. And we know our competitors and we know all the swim lands that exist. We know all the tech platforms that are the big boys and the kings. Where do we fit in that?
(18:56):
Who do we wanna be? Like who do we wanna act? Like, do we wanna put ourselves on an island? If so, we certainly need to build a castle on the island and make sure people are coming and we have a moat around the island, right? If we wanna be like everybody else, well maybe, you know, that's what we need to do. We need to start talking like Shopify so that when it comes time for that Shopify integration plugin, it's like, oh yeah, of course Shopify's cool with the guys. Like look, they kind talk out. Like you guys, the product market fits a big one. Users funding was obviously very, very fun. I have a a great quote. It's that people, you know, I didn't make this quote, I think you may know who did, but like people don't want to invest in just anything. People like, I've read this, people wanna invest in people that know their shit. So it's something that I truthfully believe in. And, you know, we went out, we talked to an array of different funds and partners and people like that. And we found a team that really fit for us and amazing. You know, we were yeah, blessed with the opportunity to continue our ventures in such an amazing, expansive way. So that was a hill that we climbed, rigorously got over, got to the top of stuck our little glue.
Danielle (Scrunch) (20:02):
Congratulations. I know that's not easy, <laugh>.
Christian Brown (20:05):
Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. And then, yeah, there's just beyond, those are the big ones right now that we have a lot of that settled. It's more focused on expanding, right? What are we gonna do in the next two years? Where do we want to be? Who do we wanna be? How do we want to act? Where do we wanna be placed? What amazing partnerships can we launch? And how can we work with, you know, amazing brands? I still, every single day find myself talking to brands and organizations, even at the enterprise level that like, if you look at like university me, I would, you would ask me like, oh, what companies do you wanna work for? And I'd say all these big brands or agencies or platforms, and like, now we're, they're coming to us for projects and stuff. And it's like, it's, I don't know, it's just amazing.
(20:46):
That's awesome. We have an army of people ready to go and we have data to back it. And we, we are so passionate about the space and the project itself that we have some amazing data companies being like, Hey, we'd love to work with you guys cause you guys have the answers. So, I don't know. It's, it's a blessing all the time to be able to say we've overcome that initial getting off the ground and now it feels like, you know, we're doing one of these and we're still going up and up and up, and then we're trying to get to a, a spot that we can just coast. And yes, from there we'll be we'll be rock and rolling.
Danielle (Scrunch) (21:19):
I love it. I love it. Well, so I mean, speaking of brands and, you know, knowing how how many creators you've seen, how many campaigns you've seen, all of the different types of things that you've done, I'm really interested to know. So if I was a new brand coming to you mm-hmm. <Affirmative> maybe I'd done influencer marketing before and it hadn't gone so well and, you know, want a bit of advice on how to approach a campaign or how to a approach my influencer program. Do you have any advice for brands?
Christian Brown (21:48):
Yeah, funny enough. So like that is what if I could do one thing all day long, it would be that it would be like <laugh>. I almost like, I I don't like, I don't
Danielle (Scrunch) (21:58):
Like Word No. The strategist.
Christian Brown (21:59):
Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely, I don't like the word audit, but it's just like a word that I've learned, like, oh, you're kind of auditing. I'm like, no, I'm not auditing, I'm just looking. So, and we get this question a lot. So a lot of brands, even big brands right, will come to us. And the big question on the board, I I swear everyone writes it across like a wall, the TikTok logo, and then a question mark. And there's only a few, only a select few that have it mastered and they can wipe it off the wall. Everyone else has a question mark. And everyone's trying to play the TikTok game. And I think that right now, as, as the highest top of funnel form of marketing, that's where it needs to begin. It's that mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's looking at your TikTok strategy. So let's take, let's say we're a new brand for the sake of the example, let's say we're like, we can use these sunglasses, we're like a sunglass brand, right?
(22:45):
So awesome. Direct to consumer very easily placeable with influencer marketing, right? Like very, very easy to do so mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. First we need to look at like, who are we as a brand, right? What's our tone? What's our identity? We need to look at what's worked in the past. We need to look at the messaging and positioning. We first need to go and look at like, the traditionals, the Instagram, the YouTube, the Twitter, right? Like, Instagram's gonna be your, your champion there. Yes. We're gonna see like, okay, are you a high level fashion brand or are you maybe like a 30 to $40 sunglass brand that your everyday consumer can have? Let's say that that's the case. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So now we know that we're in a price point that's really gonna convert on TikTok. So we need to go back to Instagram and say, okay, look fun outdoor pictures of people wearing the sunglasses u gc, like creators making content, or like people that tag the brand when we repost that, that does really well.
(23:39):
But traditional product shots don't do well. So at least we know, okay, the followers and people want to engage with the, the brand when the brand's more relatable. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So now we need to be relatable across TikTok. Tiktok gives you the ability to step out of the photo and actually give life to it on video in that short form video sense. Yes. So now it's like, okay, we need to position this correctly. So now let's get the product. Let's use, like if you were to come with us and say, let's set out a budget. Let's work with 25 creators. Let's say we'll do 13 male, 12 female, or just like evenly split down the middle, however we want to like, play the cards and let's just test what works. Let's get everyone one to two pair of shades. And then what we can do is let's just do a generalized campaign.
(24:20):
So let's say all the creators that are unique in their own way, that have garnished a following of, let's call it 25 K minimum plus, they've all done it for a reason. They all have their unique value prop as a creator. So let's just get them the product. Let's say that they have to be outside. It's a sunglass brand. No one wants to see a photo, like a video inside. It's just like a notebook, <laugh>, let's have them go outside and let's have them be themselves. What we could do is then license that content through a platform like Louis, and then from there we will have that content that'll be posted by the creators. So the creators are the top of funnel now. So the creators are top of funnels showing their followers that brand awareness of this brand. Now it's a, there's a relatable factor cause everyone's like, oh yeah, so-and-so wears that, so-and-so, where's that?
(25:02):
Oh, so, so-so where in that, so let's get the brand awareness out top of funnel, and then let's take the content and let's put it back. So we're gonna recycle the content onto like said sunglass brands page. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So now we have not one, not two, not five, not even 10. We have 25 unique, let's call 'em like characters, creators, whatever you wanna say in the storyboard. We have them to splash across the page. So now you look at the TikTok page of the sunglass brand, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And now there's 25 people all diverse and unique in their own way, all pertaining to various niches and categorical backgrounds so that the everyday consumer of the sunglass brand, the icp, the buyer, right? When they come to that TikTok page, they have someone to relate to. Yeah. Cause we just had, we splash 25 people on there.
(25:46):
Someone's gonna relate to somebody. And that I think is your great foundation. And then once you have that foundation, let's look at the stats and say, okay, of the 25, let's say you post every video at 2:00 PM once a day, right? So 25 days of posting content calendar, let's see what videos do well, which ones get the most comments and shares, obviously, which ones get the highest impressions. Let's back it up and see who drove the most followers. Let's work with them again. And let's start to create brand ambassadors that are gonna be repetitive faces on the brand account. And then from there you have a storyline and it looks like you set out and you found this crazy team of 25 actors Yes. And creators. And went on this like multi international, I don't know, video shoot and volley and did all this stuff when realistically the social media marketing manager just kind of pressed a few buttons, launched a campaign, worked with some people, shipped them product, and then this stuff is all posted. So it's perception mm. It's all like, well
Speaker 3 (26:41):
That's, and that's brand,
Danielle (Scrunch) (26:43):
Right? Like that is how to build Yeah. Like a awesome brand 1 0 1,
Christian Brown (26:47):
Right? It's like, and at the same time it is relatability. I think a lot of times brands struggle with that. Yes. And you have to put yourself, there's empathy involved in anything business oriented, anything, anything in life. There's empathy involved. And you have to think like, what do my users or my like end consumer, the people you're marketing to, what do they want? What do they need? How do they talk? Where do they eat? How much do they spend? Do they take the train to work? Do they drive right? You have to know your consumer and your ideal Yes. Customer profile like the back of your hand. And then think, yeah, what do they wanna see? And then it's up to you as a brand to like fulfill that with content mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And if you who, as a marketing manager, you want to sit behind your computer and you wanna run the show, well, you need people that are run. You need people to facilitate that running of the show. So instead of hiring all these people, why don't use a platform to connect with creators to do it for you. It's like a vehicle. It it's a new channel. It's, I don't know, it's a, an endless amount of different opportunities to, to hit virality on the for you page. And it's, it's a way to build a foundation of relatability for a brand.
Danielle (Scrunch) (27:55):
Yeah. I love that. And you know, you mentioned TikTok and everyone's trying to play the TikTok game. Do you think that that is the biggest trend in influencer marketing right now? Like what are you seeing? Is it, is it TikTok? Is it just video in general? Like what do you think the, the thing is at the moment?
Christian Brown (28:14):
Yeah. Overall. Yeah. It's TikTok. Yeah. Like there, that's a no-brainer. Everybody's talking about it. And what's so fun is that for a while it was like, okay, TikTok is blowing up. That's the way's huge. And then it's like, okay, it's a monster. And then it was like, okay, no, it over. And then there was a tipping point where over through Instagram, and then it became normalized that it was just TikTok. Now you talk to people and you're like, ah, IG reels, IG Instagram just gave out that report that 20% of their users are utilizing reels. So they want that to be a hundred percent. Cause they wanna compete mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but they're only at a one fifth mark and TikTok. I mean, that's a multi, it's all million dollar algorithm. Yeah. It's everything. I mean, it is, it is the content consumption vortex. It is, it is a way that like this algorithm and, and what's so fascinating about it is that going back to like my original answer of like how we got into the space.
(29:05):
Let's say that it's, you know, it's 2016 and everyone's on Instagram and you have, let's call it like 50,000 followers and you post a, a photo, it's only gonna go to 50,000 people at its core, right? The max you're gonna get on impression counts or engagement, the max impression you're gonna get is that core 50,000, maybe some people are gonna share it, right? Let's call it like 0.005% are gonna share it or 0.5% depending on your content. So now we're up to like 51,000 maybe, if you're lucky. And then for the grace of who knows what type of algorithm, you could land on the explorer page if you were one of the very few lucky's, and then you can get a little more exposure mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But no matter what, you're locked into your bucket of followers. Yes. You're locked into your little room of an audience of people.
(29:49):
Like everyone has their own auditorium and no one can enter unless they like, follow and like sign up to enter. Whereas TikTok, you can have, you can be talking into like a black hole, you can have no posts and you hit that algorithm. Next thing you know, you have 20 mil 20 mil impressions and a hundred thousand eyeballs on you. And then you just keep up, right? Yes. And now you're a creator in one day, like now someone that goes viral right away, we can tell based off like our algorithm sourcing that like, okay, if someone did 1.3 million yesterday and this is their first big hit, well we know that their next video is gonna do at least 600 k cuz they're on, they're on like tra So then it's like, okay, for us, we should look at that and be like, okay, there's a music label, right?
(30:31):
And the music label wants to input a sound into something. Well, that was the right time. Mm-Hmm. And like, you can do this overnight. You can have a viral video, you can get on a platform you can expose out there and you can work with a brand like within days. Yes. Whereas like back in the day when it was just Instagram, people would be like, oh, very judgmental. Oh, I know what your Instagram is. Like, oh, you're in this bucket. Like, oh, you're that influencer. It's like TikTok allowed for like the lack of the face tune and the lack of like, the editing of the photos. It just made it so real where it's like, no, this is real time, real stuff. It's your personality. It's you as a, as a person or as a creator. And everyone had a stage in their own auditorium mm-hmm. <Affirmative> with like the world as your audience rather than like the four walls of your following. So I think that yeah, in its sense, TikTok, it's, it's stardom and like king level.
Danielle (Scrunch) (31:25):
Yeah. And I love how you said before relatability. Like, so giving brands the ability to access that is super cool.
Christian Brown (31:34):
Yeah. I mean it's, you know, it is, it's the wild wild west. No one knows what's really going on and no one will for a while. And yeah, I mean even if you just like look on LinkedIn or anything you type in like hashtag TikTok or hashtag U G C, it's like, oh my gosh, people
Danielle (Scrunch) (31:49):
Are, everyone's losing their mind
Christian Brown (31:51):
<Laugh> hundred. I i, I once posted like about u cuz we get a lot of like U G C requests, so like mm-hmm. <Affirmative> brands come on, get, get user generated content for their paid ads on TikTok through Blu. And so I posted about it one day, I was like, Hey, like we offer this. I had like 60 people in my inbox, like how do I do it? How do I do it? And I was like, whoa, <laugh>. Okay. I mean there's, you know, we're working on like a, a new, a new type of campaign in the coming months where it's a U G C campaign, we'll test the waters on it, but like everybody's talking about it from the brand side to the marketers to the ad spent up to the CMO level, nobody can get away from the TikTok question anymore. And I don't think anyone's gonna get away from it from a long, for a long time. So I think everyone just needs to embrace it and they need to put their TikTok boots on and try out the feed. I mean, it is, it's frightening. It's horrifying. You know, we,
Danielle (Scrunch) (32:39):
We make, but I think like you need to experiment though, right? Like there's only one way to figure it out and that's just to get amongst it and find out what's working and what's not working and do more of the stuff that's working.
Christian Brown (32:50):
Yep. Yeah. And like there is, what's so fun is that there's no how to manual. Someone can tell you There is, I'm sure, I'm sure there's a,
Danielle (Scrunch) (32:58):
So there's an abook for that. <Laugh>.
Christian Brown (33:00):
Yeah. Oh, and I'm sure it's gated and I'm sure that they're gonna try to sell me something after I put in my <laugh> my email on it. Cause it's in their HubSpot crm. But yeah, I mean there's no, like, there's nothing. Right In the beginning when we first started this, we were all like hanging out. I'm by a friend of ours pool, and we were like, I was like, Hey, run across the pool on like these little floaty things, right? And I was like, I'm gonna film you. We're gonna put it on TikTok and it's gonna blow up. Everyone's like, no it's not. And I was like, yeah, it is. And this was like right when pandemic started. So TikTok was still like seemingly a little kind of like, oh you're on TikTok. And I was like, yeah, yeah,
Danielle (Scrunch) (33:33):
Whatever guys.
Christian Brown (33:34):
Yeah. And so I posted it and I'm like, trust me, I'm all my friends. I'm like, trust me, watch's gonna hit, it's gonna hit. And that night we were playing Xbox and I like looked down and my phone's going crazy and I'm like, I, I show, I'm like, ha, haha, it's not gonna blow up. We
Danielle (Scrunch) (33:47):
Did
Christian Brown (33:47):
Like, I like couple mil, couple mill views and like in a couple days we were on like Good Morning America and all this stuff. Like on the news it was like people doing fun stuff in the pandemic. But I was just like looking at it, millions of people watching the video. And that was my first time that I, I saw like the paradigm shift where I was like, you know how hard this would've been on Instagram to get 5 million impressions? Oh yeah. Pops in with like 20, 20, 30, 40 K followers. It's like, it would be, that battle in itself is too uphill to even like think about. Whereas like boom, just like that on TikTok. So that's why it is the br it is the brand awareness machine. It is like, it is where every brand can set forth like a new frontier cuz they can test anything that once didn't like rely in their like brand book.
(34:35):
They can test it all and whatever works, sell products in that category and let it work. Right? Even cuz if, even if you have an older demographic and you have a product that pertains to a lot of people test out TikTok test millennial, test Gen Z, see if it sticks and if it sticks, you know, why do we have to, you know, brands don't need to box themselves in anymore. I think that even the pandemic has shown that like social media in a sense has made people so open to so many things that mm-hmm <affirmative>, even brands are open to like experimenting, which back in the day, and I might be too young to even make this claim, but based on my research, people didn't like to experiment years ago. They like to invest.
Danielle (Scrunch) (35:14):
This is true. I can tell you <laugh>.
Christian Brown (35:16):
And they never, no one at any at Oldman or Havas or any of the major agencies mm-hmm <affirmative> I always used to look up to, no one wanted to test new verticals or horizons. They just wanted to put money where it resulted. So I think that now
Danielle (Scrunch) (35:29):
Everyone has the opportunity, the hilarious part of that is the testing. The new, the experimenting used to just be social media. So it used to be Facebook and Twitter and then Instagram. Like that was, oh my god, this is so outrageous, it's so new. And now like that's passed. Like if you don't have a handle on that, you are dying. But it's like influencers, creators, they are the new, new TikTok is the new news. So it's kind of like this is the new world of experimentation. But I'm like, you know, I think people just used to need to get used to the fact that there's going to be something new every couple of years. And if you're not ahead of the game, you know you're not going to win. I mean I love, I love the idea of user generated content like you were talking about. Cuz there's some cool brands where you look at them and you're like, wow, all of their customers post about them. How do they do it? How do they do it? And they blow up and it's like, you can do that now. You can just tap into influences and create that for yourself. Like, you don't have to figure out how to get all of your customers to be your content creators. You've got a whole pool of them that are like right there that you can tap into.
Christian Brown (36:30):
Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's fun cuz like, you don't need to, like you said, you don't need to rely on the current customer cuz like chances are some of your customers don't want to be on camera, you know, and they don't need to be, you don't need like exactly ask you don't need to ask these like, charitable favors of your customers to like go out and record themselves doing a testimonial. Of course if they're like, you know, your ride or die people, then that's like a different story. But yeah, like if you want 50 people to talk about your product, it's gonna be a lot easier just to deploy a team through a platform like our ours or anything else. Like, we're just going out and finding people, creators. It's just, it, it it's just better that way. So, I don't know, I think that like, it, it, it's just so fun cuz there's so much to do and I know and this is something that we look forward to in the future, but like programmatic ad buying is so huge.
(37:18):
Everyone wants to buy into a D S P and like put a banner ad somewhere and they want to tell their manager, Hey, we spent this much and the banner ads are on everything. So we know that influencer marketing is in the future gonna take a shift towards a programmatic sense where brands are putting in money and the right fit creators are just picking up on those campaigns. Yes. And running them kind of in the background. I see influencer marketing just expanding in so many different ways that it is gonna be the new, I mean like, look at how much money goes into Instagram for paid ads. So like, it is, those reports are like, I'm in awe at the stats. Right? Or meta meta into meta. Right. but like if you think about it, everyone just skips 'em. So it's the same thing as like when people have an ad blocker.
(38:03):
Okay. Why, why, why is a brand? Am I paying to throw stuff in like a YouTube video when everyone has an ad blocker or a vpn? N okay, well if that's the problem, then how do we solve it? We put content in the real feed, we put content in front of people so that they actually can't get away from it. Yeah. If you wanna be a part of a creator's life and you wanna consume content that creator's making, you're going to hear the points of injection where a brand deal has earned its right to be in there. And I think that's the best way to like position a brand organically and seemingly authentically, is just in a natural sense. Like when you find, when a brand finds a creator that they mesh with, and we, if we set that up and we see a long term deal, go, we're, we are so happy. Cuz that's like our mission statement at its core is to cultivate authentic relationships in real time through technology. So if we can, I
Danielle (Scrunch) (38:55):
Love that.
Christian Brown (38:56):
Create a relationship that's like long term and ongoing. I mean that, that's why we're here. And that's like, that is influencer and creator marketing at its core. Is is that happening?
Danielle (Scrunch) (39:09):
That's so good. You have been amazing. Thank you so much for spending your time with the Scrunch community. You know, just reflecting on that conversation, I'm like, oh my God, I need to be on TikTok. I need to up our influence again. Like, you've given me a lot of inspiration so I know anybody watching would've gotten value as well. So appreciate you so much. Thank you for spending your evening with us and we'll link up everything as well so people can find you and, and jump in and, and check you guys out as well.
Christian Brown (39:40):
Yes. And in the future, one day, I, I will love to help in any way we can with this press award. I think it's fantastic. Congrats that you guys are doing that. This, it's so amazing. I checked out the deck and everything. I'm so excited to see more about that and hopefully be on a panel one day. Absolutely. I mean, you're in the future. I'm in the past. You're Wednesday, I'm in Tuesday, you're in Australia. I'm in America. This has been so fun that we can connect quite literally across the world and you know, this is the power. Look at it at its core, right? How did we meet social media, you and I. Exactly. So look at that. Cultivating authentic relationships,
Danielle (Scrunch) (40:14):
Bringing people together. I love it. That'ss. So cool. That's such a cool mission statement. I I absolutely love that.
Christian Brown (40:22):
Yeah. Kudos Dylan Duke, CEO o you know, that was his
Danielle (Scrunch) (40:25):
<Laugh>. That's what he's doing. Said that
Christian Brown (40:27):
Dylan wrote it on the whiteboard and we said that's it. That's cash. That's that is
Danielle (Scrunch) (40:31):
Oh yeah. Statement.
Christian Brown (40:32):
Yeah. That's what we're here to do. So yeah, incredible. Here on out, we will continue to be having fun building platforms and watching everybody in the space grow.
