Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

As we enter 2024, I told you we were going to dial in our pursuit of changing the mindset in the influence marketing industry to help brands and agencies focus on influence, not just influencers. So we’re going to have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people along the way to make that happen.

We’re going to kick off the year talking to one of my favorite people. Krista Neher has been a leading authority on digital marketing for as long as I can remember. She’s a six-time best-selling author and found of Bootcamp Digital, an education brand that offers digital marketing certification.

Along the way, Krista has had to not only teach people about influence marketing, but dig in and practice the craft a bit as a consultant, too. But her wide range of expertise and ability, plus her focus on making digital marketing a practical and cost-efficient investment for her clients gives her that broad perspective I look for in someone to just chop up and chew through the conversations in the space.

Today on Winfluence, I’ll dig into influence marketing with Krista. We’ll talk about how to build an influence plan, calculate the value of your influencer relationships and I’ll see if my assertions about influence marketing hold up to her scrutiny … it’s a perspective I certainly respect and know you’ll enjoy.

This episode is presented by CIPIO.ai. Scale acquisition of user-generated content and flip those social videos into ad creative using powerful generative AI toolset. Sign up for a demo at https://jasonfalls.co/cipio

Find this episode online at https://jasonfalls.co/kristaneher

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It’s been a minute. If you haven’t noticed, Winfluence has been on a bit of a holiday hiatus. Honestly, its a good thing for me … client work ramped up toward the end of the year and I simply didn’t have enough time to fit in the weekly interviews and production to give you an episode worth listening to.

Instead of rushing to crank out something mediocre, I opted to step back, focus on the client work and reassess what Winfluence is and can be. For the last few weeks, I’ve thought long and hard about the show. I even entertained the notion that maybe it had run its course and wasn’t worth the energy to crank out more episodes in 2024. 

But then two things happened. First, I thought about the state of things. And to be quite honest, we’re not done. There’s a lot still to accomplish in influence marketing. A good portion of the industry is still falling over itself doing things poorly. 

The bigger the creator, the more likely you’re going to have to deal with talent managers. 

Every talent manager I talk to these days seems to be more and more out of touch with the reality brands face with budgets and return on their marketing dollar.

Brand managers are still pushing influencers to just be advertising shills.

And we are still thinking of influencers as the key to success, when the whole premise of this show and my approach to the craft is centered around the influence … not the influencer. 

It’s about to be 2024. And most of the people in the industry spending dollars on influence marketing are still functioning like it’s 2007.

The other thing that informed my thinking, I want to save for later, so listen to the full episode for that.

In this episode of Winfluence, I’m going to list some things that are still broken about our industry. I’m going to carve out a few ideas on what we can do to fix them. And I’ll recommit to you that this show is not only not going away, we’re just getting started.

Watch or listen to the full episode at jasonfalls.co/2024reset

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When someone says they run an influencer marketing agency, what comes to mind? I’ve asked a few brand-side folks I know that question in the last week or two and have received a number of different responses.

Some people say they think of an ad agency only that only focuses on influencers. Others say a consultant or small shop that handles all that busy work for you. Another contact said they think of the team at the software company they use, like CIPIO.ai for instance, which does the cat herding as it were.

The truth is none of those answers are wrong. The third party that handles some degree of influencer marketing for you is probably the right answer, regardless of which pieces of the puzzle are theirs. 

But in truth, there is a difference between a software company that has managed services and a strategic consultant. That’s different than an influencer marketing agency that focuses on influencer campaigns and one that does more media buying using influencer content. The “influencer marketing agency” is a big sea of muddy water. 

Brad Hoos runs an influencer marketing agency. It’s called The Outloud Group. They’re based in Detroit and they handle all aspects of influencer marketing from soup to nuts. They aren’t a software company … though they use software to help manage their work. They do more than just strategy. And they do more than just execution. 

Who better to break down not just the various facets of what a brand might need out of influencer marketing, but the ins and outs of influencer campaigns, choosing the right creators, negotiating with the big (and little) egos in the creator world and such than Brad?

I asked him to pay a visit to the old Influence bar here on Winfluence and chat a bit about the state of things. The Outloud Group’s approach is a little different than some agencies and they’ve got some interesting clients and case studies of course. 

But it’s also an opportunity for me to bounce one of my rant-y ideas off someone who can push back and tell me I’m wrong if I am, so we’ll get into that a little bit, too.

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We’ve had a couple of episodes and conversations in the past that talk about gamers. The online video game industry is worth billions of dollars. Its content creators have some of the most captive audiences in any medium. Twitch is one of the biggest and most impactful social networks and it is dominated by video gamers who live stream themselves playing video games.

And yet, this behemoth of a segment is still a mystery to most of us in the influence marketing space. Some consumer brands have played on Twitch and sponsored various gamers to some degree of success. But the businesses and agencies that succeed with the gaming segment are almost always the video game companies themselves. 

It’s like gaming is some sort of nerd herd stratosphere few of us are able to find entry to. 

Emilee Helm is the Head of Influencers for a company called Gamesight. It is an agency that focuses on helping video games and their parent companies market their products. And tapping into influencers is a big portion of what they do. 

But Gamesight does more than that. It monitors and ranks top Twitch channels, as one example. In fact, data is one of the company’s leading propositions. They track and measure things I’m not quite sure can be measured adequately. Imagine my delight when Emilee agreed to come on the show.

On this episode of Winfluence, Emilee and I are going to dive into this cryptic world of gaming and gaming influencers, learn about what Gamesight has that other agencies and influencer marketing firms don’t, and see what doors open to that world, plus which ones we can kick open wider by taking some of that expertise and applying it to our brands and campaigns.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/emileehelm.

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Do you know what this show is about? If you said “influencer marketing,” you’re close, but not necessarily wrong. If you said “influence marketing” you’re more right. And if you said, the exploration of how brands can apply influence in all its shapes and forms, to aide it their marketing, you’re spot-on.

But if you weren’t spot-on, that’s my fault, not yours. It’s an example of my marketing and communications with you failing to deliver the point.

It’s an exercise in clarity. And Steve Woodruff is probably the person on the planet with the most expertise and focus on helping business, brands and leaders nail clarity. His new book is called The Point: How to win with clarify-fueled communications. 

It is a handy guide and reminder to its readers of how to get to the point and not allow your communications to get lost in translation. Or drown out by the sea of noise that is our media landscape. 

I asked Steve to come on the show to talk to us about getting to the point. Why do we have so much trouble doing so, even when we’re supposed to be professional communicators? What barriers are in our way to communicating effectively? And how can we as brands, or influencers and content creators, check our work to ensure that we are always, getting to the point?

We’ll ask him all those questions and more today on Winfluence.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/stevewoodruff.

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We’ve been talking to some talent managers of late. They play an important role for many creators, managing the business of their influencer status while the creator, well creates. Many of them add another perspective to the creative process, contribute ideas to shape partnerships into something more than they would be otherwise and are valuable to the brands and agencies in the equation as well.

But allow me a moment to be rather frank. Those are exceptions to the rule. Most talent managers are in it for one thing: maximizing the take so they maximize their commission.

Too many managers ask for inflated rates that show no economical connection to how many people will actually engage with the content. Yes, there is value in just the content, usage rights and the like. But if the purpose of an influencer collaboration is to get a message in front of their audience, then there has to be some attention paid to how many of said audience the message will reach and resonate with.

I've also been frustrated with conversations around usage rights.

But, I digress.

As much as we’ve been propping talent managers up lately on the show, I feel like we need to have a different discussion about them and the practice. Just so happens Jessy Grossman also thinks talent manager roles have changed and should be changing.

Jessy is the woman behind Women in Influencer Marketing. She’s got a great community and podcast, both by that name and abbreviated WIIM sometimes. 

You may recall she was a previous guest on the show, back in May of 2021. We talked mostly about WIIM back then. 

But she reached out recently and said, “Traditional talent management is becoming obsolete and needs to change.” Color me both curious and delighted.

Now, I’m not implying Jessy agrees with my semi-rant about fees and licensing and such. But I did think it was suitable to bring her back to Winfluence to have the conversation.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/jessygrossman2.

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Those of you who have watched or listened to Winfluence for a while know that I got my professional start in radio. I marched myself into the local radio station at 14-years-old and said, “I wanna be a deejay!” And for some reason they said, “Okay. You start Friday.”

I pursued radio through high school and college, navigated the world of broadcasting and sports hoping to one day land at ESPN. I actually interviewed there the same week I interviewed for its parent company, ABC. My first full-time job out of college wound up as a producer at ABC Radio Sports in New York.

My experiences included working on a nationally syndicated radio show, managing stringers and reporters for day-to-day sports coverage, producing longer-form feature pieces you could argue were essentially podcasts. But this was well before most people had access to the Internet and devices, bandwidth and such were affordable. Or even possible. 

We talk about influence on this show and radio is one of those mediums that we’re quick to overlook. My mother developed a nationally recognized, award-winning communications program a few years back in my small hometown in Eastern Kentucky. It wound up being a success because she knew what most of us don’t know. In a rural community, the local morning show deejay is probably the most influential person in town outside of the county judge. 

Tony Garcia knows the power of radio. Like me, he worked in the broadcasting industry back in the 1990s. He is the co-founder of a company called Now! Media. You may not recognize that company. But the other “company” he co-founded in conjunction with it is the Bob and Sheri Show.

It is a nationally syndicated radio show hosted by Bob Lacey and Sheri Lynch. They’re based in Charlotte, but are syndicated on 70 affiliates across the U.S. The weekday morning show is also heard in 177 countries and on 150 ships at sea along the American Forces Network. 

Now, a traditional, terrestrial radio show isn’t something you’d think would flourish in our on-demand, always connected, internet world. But the Bob and Sheri Show is different. Not only have they spun the show and segments of it into podcasts and an active social media presence that includes a Facebook Group number over 115,000 members. But they have hacked the advertising and sponsorship model for even small businesses. 

When I learned that, I knew we had to have Tony on the show. Because what they’ve built is a hidden gem of influence, both online and off. And we can learn from them.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/tonygarcia.

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The evolution of a content creator is something brands and agencies see, but don’t watch. Bear with me on this for a moment. It’s like the difference in hearing something, and actually listening with the intent of understanding.

So we on the agency or brand side of things may run into a content creator we find on Instagram who is doing interesting things around the topic we’re focused on for our brand or client. We reach out to them, maybe do a sponsored post or some other type of trial run content collaboration. We appreciate their work and their, let’s say 50,000 followers there.

And then we move on to other clients, other campaigns, other creators. A year or two passes by and we think, “Hey! That one creator might make a good candidate for this campaign.” We reach out to them and chat about the possibility, then have to swallow hard when their rates have grown exponentially. Because they have changed.

Now they have 1.5 million followers on TikTok or their YouTube channel exploded. Or they were hired to be the host of a TV segment for some brand. Now they have a talent manager and have turned their content into a business. 

We saw it, but didn’t watch. If we had, maybe we would have kept that relationship going. 

Content creators who are doing so with intent are trying to become media properties. They want to hire teams of people to do all the busy work while they create the concepts and sit out in front of the camera. They build audiences to sell advertising or brand partnerships for so they can grow their empire.

It’s that leveling up that falls into the purview of Kevin Grosch. He is the founder and CEO of Made In Network. The company does a lot of things, but its core capabilities are focused on creating content and building media properties for content creators.

They do the same thing for brands, too. 

When I connected with Kevin recently, I had a ton of questions. When do content creators turn to outside help for doing what they already do? What tricks do you have to build those big media properties? Can you make me famous?

Instead of just chatting about it offline, I asked Kevin to come to the show and help us all understand more about that evolution of today’s content creator past influencer to media property and brand. How his company helps them and brands and how we can all benefit from knowing how its done.

We learn more from Kevin Grosch today on the show.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/kevingrosch.

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There’s another “State of the Industry” report out this month. It actually came last week from Linqia, which is one of the enterprise influencer marketing software companies out there. These reports are always useful, so I like to report on them here on the show. 

If you want to read the full report for yourself, which I encourage you to do, you go to their website and sign up and trade your email address for their research. You become a lead in their platform … that’s how B2B marketing often works. But it’s a fair trade and, who knows? Linqia might be just what your company needs. So, go do it. We’ll certainly share the link to do so in our show notes for this episode. 

But Keith Bendes, who is the vice-president of strategy for Linqia is here today to dig into the highlights of the report with us. He is also the co-host of another great podcast, by the way. It’s called Creator Economy Live. So go check that out when you have a moment as well. 

Keith knows the influencer space as well as anyone. And you know what that means … we just turned on the mics and cameras and had a fun conversation I think you’ll enjoy. We hit on plenty of the report insights as well, so you’ll be informed as much as or even more so entertained today on the show. 

Here are some of the nuggets the report surfaces we’re going to touch on:

Influencer Budgets are increasing. 75.5% of Linqia’s survey respondents either increased or remained unchanged from last year’s spending. 

Brands are using influencer content in more places. It’s no longer about organic posts with a few paid ads. Influencer creative is driving brand creative now. 

Paid amplification is bigger than you thought. More than half of brands are spending at least half their budgets on media amplification.

But there are still challenges. ROI is still the big one. 

And of course, new topics like AI, Threads, and Creator Generated Content … which we’ll distinguish from User Generated Content makes its first appearance in the Linqia study. 

We dig in more with Keith Bendes from Linqia today on the show.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/keithbendes.

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Depending on where you are at the table in the influencer marketing space, your meal is slightly different. Creators can range from nano-influencers who barely consider themselves influencers or creators at all … to those who achieve true celebrity status and have full production teams they employ to create all that content while they live off their personality and audience connection.

For brands, you can be super nimble with your budget and work with the former of those. You can go big and work with the latter. But most find themselves somewhere in the middle jockeying around a mix of small and medium creator partners with a few big ones popping in from time to time.

That same range is found in the software space. You can find influencer marketing solutions for free or close to free. And you can also sign up for enterprise solutions that run thousands of dollars per month.

Then there’s the talent management segment. You don’t find many who work with creators under around 40-50,000 followers. But there is a huge difference in those who work with that level and those who manage six figure brand deals with the biggest stars on social media. 

Temima Shames falls into that last category. The 24-year-old former child actor started Next Step Talent at age 21. Its employee roster is all people under 30. And they are responsible for amplifying creators to become some of the most followed influencers in the world. Their roster includes a bunch of Gen-Z creators I’ve never heard of, but that’s what makes the next tidbit most impressive. 

That roster has more than six billion YouTube views, one debuted an album at No. 7 on Spotify. Another was TikTok’s biggest POV or point-of-view star. They had talent featured in YouTube’s Black Creator Class of 2023 as well.

I’ll drop a link to their roster page in the show notes so you can go see who they are. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I’m certainly not their target audience. 

Temima knows how to shape content creators into influencers with massive followings. I asked her to come on the show to share some of that knowledge with us, as well as talk about the impending threats to the big influencers businesses as brands recoil from inflated prices and an abundance of UGC.

She’s a smart one, gang. Get ready to learn a thing or two from the queen of influencer talent, Temima Shames today on the show. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/temimashames.

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