what's up DTC pod? Today we're joined by William Gasner, who is the co founder and CMO of Stack Influence. So William, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you guys do at Stack influence.

Awesome.

First off, appreciate having me on the pod. And yeah, I'm the chief marketing officer at Stack. We automate brands and micro influencers and do it all at scale so think hundreds to thousands of promotions a month. My background is actually in the D to C ecommerce space, so been an ecommerce seller since 2019. Had some big failures and big successes. Became a million dollar seller actually during the fidget toy boom, which was a pretty interesting story in itself and used lots of influencer marketing during those days, which actually led us to create stack influence and solve a lot of the issues we were seeing in the market. Brief background.

Yeah, I'd love to kind of understand a little bit more about. So when you were doing the fidget spinner sort of stuff, what was the influencer strategy and what were some of the pain points that you guys were looking to solve?

Absolutely. So a few different things, and I think this is a challenge across all D to C brands, is when you first start out, getting your first customers, building up content and building your brand itself are quite challenges.

Right.

And so what we found is specifically the smaller creators was, it was kind of the best bang for our buck because we not only were able to generate a whole bunch of content that we could use on our marketing, our ads, our social media, but we could effectively get promotions and awareness out there predominantly by just sending free product away. Right. And paying certain creators depending on what their reach and their engagement was. But it was a really effective tactic for us to just kind of get the ball rolling, because once we generate some great content, and then we started getting some initial sales, building up a newsletter list, et cetera, we were able to use that content, start running ads. The ads performed much better than the kind of professional content that we were paying actually photographers to generate. And then from there, it kind of snowball effect.

Right.

You start to build up a community of people who love your product. They can consistently promote for you, become ambassadors, affiliates, and get on the roller coaster and get going. So that was really where I had used it in my past e commerce businesses. But during the pidget toy trend, especially because it was a massive trend, was really where we took advantage of it full force and we're able to actually really leverage it. We had huge success actually on Amazon, and I can go into how we leverage those tactics specifically for online marketplaces. But, yeah, that was where we found a huge amount of success.

Yeah.

I'm curious, what was the scale that you guys were working at when you were doing it for the fidget spinners, like manually? And what was the stack that you were using then?

So originally we were using a lot of the other, most of the tools out there, I think, as you know, Ramon, is they're kind of like influencer CRMs. Like they'll give you a database of people and then you're left to reach out to them, negotiate with them, get them product.

Right.

So we used a few various tools like Grin and it's been a while now, but a few others, but those were predominantly the software we used, and we also did a bunch of manual outreach ourself, right? But the biggest challenges we faced during that were economics of scale.

Right?

Like finding enough people, especially the content side. You only need a few pieces of content to really have like a strong, for example, advertising campaign, et cetera. But if you want to make the promotional side for nano micro influencers effective and leverage their high engagement levels, kind of their trustworthiness, you really need to work with a lot of them. And that was the first challenge we really faced was even using these CRM softwares, finding enough people, and then even if you found enough, managing them and getting them product, making sure they do what they say they're going to do. That was the largest challenge we found. And we were really trying to get to hundreds of collaborations a moNth. And that was the initial impetus to start developing some softwares in house that we could leverage to outreach to people to manage them, to make sure that they actually did what they say they were going to do. And I can go into some of those strategies that we've now incorporated into stack influence, but that was in essence the birth of stack.

And the two biggest issues we were trying to solve was like scale and then automation, right?

Yeah, I think it's an important topic for brands because, for example, a lot of those softwares aren't cheap and then not only are they expensive, but then you don't know that the creators in there are also then going to have really high rates, becomes a six figure play. And also a lot of those databases don't discriminate for other companies that might be in your same space and you might exhaust that database you're in for a year long contract. And so how do you navigate or see like, and this might tie into what you guys are doing the database space for when it comes to the influencer CRM management process.

Totally. That space is honestly evolving a lot. And where I see it going is honestly those huge monthly fees, yearly fees are going to become nonexistent just because of the competition that's out there and the social platforms competing in the space.

Right?

So now you have Meta's own influencer platform, TikTok's influencer platform, those things, they have unlimited users, right? They have all the users on their platform, or at least who have expressed that they want to be a creator. And so now you can use a lot of those for free. Some caveats to that, they might limit types of collaborations, cost of collaborations. I think Meta has like $100 payment limit, so you can't really necessarily use it as well for product seeding alone. But they're entering that space and displacing a lot of these other companies that were the largest in the industry, right? And were able to charge those huge monthly yearly fees because they kind of had the monopoly. And that's the biggest thing I see changing and where things evolving to is more management solutions. Right now, everyone can really access creators and find creators and do that in an effective way. But how do you effectively manage them? How do you get the right types of content, the right type of collaboration, and do that in an efficient manner that's also cost effective?

Sweet. So William, my other question is how do you guys kind of think about building product then with what you're saying, right? Obviously you want to cater to the creator. The platforms themselves are thinking about doing all the things maybe early movers were able to do, but they're starting to tap into now because they realize they've got to cater to their core creators. So how I guess, a, do you stay one step ahead and B, what are you able to provide to businesses who are looking to work with you guys versus going direct to a different platform database or something like that.

Totally. So a few things besides obviously the scale and the management automation that we discussed. One is we specialize in product seeding and that paying creators and product seeding is quite evolving rapidly. Absolutely not an absolute advocate of not paying people.

Right.

I think people deserve to be paid for their hard work, but there's a lot of people out there that are amazing creators that if you can find the right match with the right product, they're willing to do a promotion in exchange for just the product, right. It has to fit their aesthetic, it has to fit their desires. But there's exterior or external benefits besides the monetary compensation side, which are like, I'm sponsored by, or I'm an ambassador for a brand I love and I'm promoting a product I actually care about.

Right?

Like if you're a rock climber and all you do is rock climb, or like that's on your social profile and I give you free rock climbing shoes, right? You might not need to get paid even if you have a decent follower base and high engagement, because it's what you care about. You love the brand you're representing, right? So it's, first off, the correct matchmaking, second off, the product compensation model, which is what we focus on, we find it to be more authentic and trustworthy. Reason being is like everyone knows when you pay someone, especially celebrities like Kim Kardashian, stuff like that, which are a different spectrum, but you pay someone to do a promotion, a lot of people know, like, you might not care about this product, right? You're doing it for the money. When products, the compensation, it really becomes more authentic. It's like a real testimonial.

Right.

Brandside also obviously more cost effective to actually scale. If you pay for a million people, you're paying for this massive software. Things get pricey very rapidly. So that's one of the first big things is because we do product compensation only. It enables people to actually work with a lot of creators in a short time period. Second thing, and this is a big issue with the product seeding world, which is not. There's many other different ways you can do product seeding. We actually developed a system where we find influencers or creators who are willing to actually not only do something for a free product, but actually become a consumer of the brand that they collaborate with.

What I mean by that is they are actually required to go buy a client's products from their website, from some sort of place that's sold online before they participate in the campaign. Why do we do this? First, it creates extra intent. So again, not only are you doing something for product as your compensation, but you're actually pulling out your pocketbook and spending your own money to do this.

Right.

Second thing is handle shipping logistics really efficiently. Right, shipping out product, getting things lost.

Right.

If you're going through a normal e commerce channel, especially if it's through like a marketplace like Amazon, it's going to be pretty quick. You could get the product in a day, so you can turn around time frame pretty fast. Second thing that we do actually, just to complete how this process works is influencer buys a product once they successfully complete a social promotion, the brand then is responsible to reimburse the influencer for their expenses.

Right?

So they get it for free. But the biggest thing that solves, and this is one of the largest issues we faced when we were first doing this was influencers either stealing a product or creators, not following requirements or delaying quite rapidly. And when you're not paying someone, it's hard to have some sort of insurance, right? So this solved a lot of big issues because literally we were losing like 20% of the products we sent out. And sometimes depending on what strategy you do, you can lose more. So now we ensure that when we send a product to someone, they don't complete the post. If they don't do what they say they're going to do. There's some skin in the game and then they don't get reimbursed. And a lot of times the creators actually, when we first started this, we thought a lot of people were going to be upset, right, that they didn't do, even though they were the ones who didn't do what they say they.

Were going to do.

But in truth, it's like a lot of creators, this is their side gig, right? It's not necessarily a career path. Many are on that path. But sometimes they signed up for something they wanted a product, they loved the brand. But then life became busy, right? People have a job, people have families, and so they didn't complete the post in the time frame or they just kind of forgot they signed up for something. And if you make that, again, going back to that proper match, if you make the match proper, they aren't upset. They're like, hey, I would have paid my own money for this product anyway. Send me more collaboration opportunities. So those are two big valuable things that we have implemented.

The platform is that we can actually ensure you get collaborations, that it's cost effective because you are only compensating really people with product, everything is automated from A to Z. So literally a brand gets to sit back and monitor a campaign as it progresses. But they don't have to deal with shipping products, making sure people follow their requirements, reimbursing them. All of that is handled by the SAC influence platform and they can actually do it at scale. The platform literally can accomplish hundreds of thousands of promotions.

Yeah, no, what I like about that is like a brand, especially for brands that are starting out, they need momentum as well in order to be able to attract creators, because at a certain point the tables can flip and then they can have creators who previously weren't going to be interested or now interested because you have momentum, seeding allows you to scale faster and a byproduct of that is that you need volume in order to know what performs and what works. And if you're paying creators thousands of dollars for a post, it's going to be really expensive for you to get enough data points to know what works and what doesn't work. On the creator side, the same thing applies the creator who's starting out. They need momentum to build their brand, to build their portfolio, and be able to evolve from there. A lot of the pain points you mentioned I'm really familiar with and especially know. Let's talk about, let's save some time and money for a brand that is listening and they're going to start their seating process. I would always tell brands, you can manage it in house, sure, you can have a VA, et cetera, but you're going to have a ton of headaches, tons of stolen products, endlessly following up with people. So for the brands that are listening, what are some reasons why you wouldn't want to do it fully in house?

Yeah, I mean, first off, you mentioned a few of these things, is that you could hire a VA, you can do all this stuff, but it takes a full team to actually do something to an effective scale. That's the biggest, I would say. And then second is actually tracking proper conversions, getting people to follow requirements, understanding the effective tactics to do a promotion or get quality UGC.

Right.

As you know Ramon quite well. So those are kind of, I would say the reasons to use some sort of software or managed system or even hire an agency, potentially the ways to do it yourself, obviously, if you want to just get your foot wet and I tell people to do this is like, go test it out, right. You should have Instagram reach DMs and.

Then come back after. I know they will. Yeah.

Actually is even when you're outsourcing it to VAS, right, and it becomes quite a headache. And you can do it at a scale of maybe like a few handful a month, but you really want to. It depends on where you're trying to go with this. And especially with larger creators, you might not need 100 of them, right. You might only need a few to have an effective tactic. But now you're putting a lot of your eggs in one basket, especially as a small brand influencer, promotions can be hit or miss. And that's another big advantage I love about nano and micro collaborations is you diversify that risk.

Right.

A few of them might not work out, but if you're working with 100, as opposed to two, the odds that you actually have an effective tactic dramatically go up.

Right?

Yeah. It's about setting that expectation. Like brands need to know that it's just going to take, you're going to miss a bunch, but some are going to hit and it's going to make it worth it. And I think setting that expectation from the beginning is a major key, because otherwise you might be trying to stock down one creator out of five, when in reality all you need is volume in order to be successful, not obsessing over that one lost product. One question I have for you is how do you guys deal with multi platform? So it's funny because if you outsource it to an, it becomes a lot of work. And so if you're doing TikTok Instagram, you outsource it to an agency, an agency is going to have the same problems that you're having. It's just that you're not going to have to deal with the details of the problems, but it's likely not going to be as successful. You don't know what's going on behind the curtains and you're going to bring it back in, et cetera.

And a lot of the agencies use these softwares already anyway, so it's full circle. Yeah.

You're double up paying.

Exactly, yeah. So, so how do you deal with multiplatform? You guys work with TikTok, Instagram. Do you think brands should be doing both at the same time? How do you see that?

Absolutely. So actually, our platform right now is fully catered to Instagram, even though TikTok have very good things to say about TikTok promotions and an absolute advocate of it. Again, our platform is specialized at scale. TikTok is coming on live to our system as well as YouTube shorts, hopefully Q 120 24. But basically, we decided to focus specifically on Instagram just because, first off, it was the largest platform. And second, what we want to do is figure out a way to actually do this automation and do that again. At an economics of hundreds of thousands of promotions, what becomes difficult at that point is like making sure that people actually do what they say they're going to do, confirming actually the post fits a specific aesthetic, has the product in a proper way.

Right.

We need automation there. We've actually built out a bunch of different AI analysis tools to do that, because it's unfeasible to actually have humans be totally involved in every single confirmation. Difficulty is what we face is adding all these different platforms, right. Requires new API integration, new analysis, et cetera. But going back to that's what our platform does. But going back to just overall advice, what has been an amazing trend, and this fits in with the nano and micro world, with all the social platforms specifically Instagram and TikTok, Instagram reels specifically. But is the idea of follower base is kind of dying, right? What now matters is content, and you could have 100 followers and your post now on TikTok or Instagram Reels could go viral. Like, you can get millions of views.

So it adds to that kind of ideology of diversifying your risk across 100 people, because the ODs that a few of them actually really make a massive impact are very high. And that's where the social platforms are changing, because what they care about is the consumer or the user actually staying on the platform. It's like who cares if the person with a million followers has a million people see their post? It's like they'd rather have the amazing content by the person who has only 100 followers and not pop up in your feed because you're going to stay on the social platform. And that fits right into this evolution of working with these smaller creators and scaling that out.

yeah, one thing that I think is really interesting there, and Ramon, this is something we've seen as well. It's like when you're working with micro influencers, not every one of them is going to hit, but then when it does hit, it makes it all worth it. But you can't get those benefits without scale, right? Because if you only have three shots on goal and you miss all of them, you're going to be like oh my God, this was a total wasted. Why would I ever work with creators? But if you're able to get, I mean, we saw this Ramon with cast magic that we're working on. It's a SaaS product, but it's a similar principle, right? Like work with different creators, create content and look for the content to pop.

And I think we were working with five creators and literally the first four flopped and then the fifth one had a video that did like 6 million views and it just blew up. And we're like oh shit, thank God that one blew up because otherwise this would have looked really bad. So I guess the question is, how do you think about it for early brands, right? Because an early brand that's just getting off the ground, they may not be able to afford a platform and a whole massive campaign to be able to distribute to 100 different content creators. But like you said, it's really tough to do by yourself. Is there any middle ground? Would you say try it yourself with ten creators or try product seating to 20? Where would you draw the line in terms of, for a brand that's just starting up? How to test and validate this themselves? Or would you just say, don't even bother with it until you've got enough revenue to make it work with an agency or a platform?

I think that you can get an effective test doing it yourself right off the bat by reaching out to them or honestly using some of the social platforms, influencer software, because you're not paying a dime for them. You may have to pay a little more per creator, but the important thing when you're first also testing is finding the right person. Right, is like making sure that they align with the brand. They have high enough engagement. They actually kind of have some sort of aesthetic that speaks to what you're doing. Try to get the highest odds of success with a smaller group of people. And ten to 20, honestly can be a good test to just see if this is influencer marketing. By the way, I don't think works for every single brand.

You know what I mean? There are people who come to us who are like, I have a athlete's foot cream that definitely sells like millions of dollars on Amazon, but it's like no one really wants to go on social media and talk about how amazing this thing cured their athletes foot, right? And so there's certain niches that you might be able to find one or two weird creators who are willing to do that, but it becomes difficult, right? So it's another thing to actually think about when also creating a product because influencer marketing has become very established and one of the most effective ways to get the word out. So it's like when you create something, is your branding positive? Will people actually use this product and promote about it and talk about it? And you can do that with, like we recently worked with a bowel movement supplement brand that's actually performing really well. And it's kind of, people are talking about more like probiotics and being healthy.

Right.

Even though not many people, if you angled it in a different way, it might not be effective and not many people will take it up. But I do think testing out the waters yourself isn't a bad tactic, especially if a lot of brands just have zero budget in the beginning. But to really make it into a true effective thing that you do consistently, I'd recommend using either software similar to stack influence, like trend, or trying to. At least some people do effectively do it with VAs, but it just is lots of logistics to figure out for.

Sure there's something that resonates there with what you said, which is sometimes I would see a product that I would be like there's no way that any creator is going to want to promote this. And then creators were super amped about it. There was one like some really old classic ice cream cone brand, like, just to call the Waffle Cone. I'm like, this is trash. And then creators were going crazy about it and it actually really performed. So there's an audience for everything out there and there are fans for everything. And like you said, the product might not necessarily be an approach of a fan base virality, but it strikes another chord, which is the emotion chord. It's a pain point or something that somebody has gone through in their personal life that they can attach a story to it that makes it emotional.

And the conversion rate might be way higher than anything that's like going viral, getting a bunch of views, but it's not hitting the viewer. So when it comes to managing these creators who are telling essentially, like relaying these stories, because some of them can say the story of your brand, even you yourself as a brand can. It exposes you to new audiences that you previously didn't know were available. So if we look at the creative direction management process, there's two ends of the spectrum. One is like handholding. I'm going to give you scripts, I'm going to tell you, here's all our documentation, our pain points. And then the other one is like, let it roll. These are creators, they'll figure it out.

Whatever hits, hits, they should be the creative ones. So what advice do you have to brands between either end of those spectrums? Is it an in between or is it you being either one of those?

It's a great question. I would say it's an in between. So we prefer to give most creative control to the creator or the influencer. You can't underestimate the creativity that people can come up with that you would never think possible. And you're dealing with people who know they're also audience.

Right?

So at the end of the day, an authentic testimonial is what sells. You give someone a script that might not resonate and be very authentic. You let someone kind of give their actual truthful opinion on something. First off, that's actually really valuable to you as a brand, especially when you're first starting out to get just product feedback, but it ends up, we just find it being much more effective. However, that said, and this is where the middle ground comes in. Like giving some guardrails to how people kind of should portray the product or suggestions.

Right?

As far as. And some guidelines of, like, you should disclose this as abiding by FTC guidelines, you might certain things of, like if it's a very specific medical product, there might be restrictions on what someone can say or can't say, and those things a creator might not be aware of.

Right.

So you want to kind of direct those guidelines as well. But some people will just appreciate you saying, like, this is the most effective way to use this product, right. And this is how it can be portrayed in the best light. But give your authentic testimonial about this and be creative. And I think that is the most effective way to kind of, you guide people. You have a brief, but don't force them to do everything that you think is the best effective way because sometimes you don't know.

Right. And I think there's so much power within the brief, and especially if the goals are outlined in the brief, a better brief doesn't necessarily mean more guidelines, more steps, et cetera, but showing what the goal is, the creator. Don't assume that the Creator know what your goal is going to be. And the goal isn't always necessarily going to be conversion. It might have been content, it might have been exploring a new audience, it might have been testing even something as crazy as testing traffic to a landing page that they've never tested before. It might be testing the market's reaction to a product that's still in beta that they haven't actually launched.

Absolutely.

And sometimes this communication is missed and then it's communicated post the campaign.

Yeah.

And then you get pissed. That is such a truthful fact, is like the cool thing about influencers in general and creators is you get a wide, there's different angles. You can slice the pie, right? You can do it for content, you can do it for awareness, you can do it to drive conversions. And each one of those things actually can have a different angle to it and guideline around it. And the creator might not know that, to your point. So giving them that direction of what your actual objective is is really important.

Ramon, I'm just thinking about how content can be so different. I think I DM'd. Ramon, this video I saw the other day on Instagram that Oatley did where they worked with this ping pong player who could slice the ball all the way around the table and they just lined up all these things of Oatley around this ping pong table and the guy hits a shot and you just see the ball and you're like watching it bounce around. But you obviously can't help but see the Oatley containers and I think it did like 20 million views or like something absurd. And I was like, wow, this is genius. Literally no one was even saying anything about the olive, just in the shot itself. And it just goes to show, it's like, I'm sure the creative brief wasn't like, oh, let me do it. But if you give it to the right creator, wait a minute, we can make this work.

But to that point, maybe it wasn't the highest converting thing, but you get 20 million eyeballs on any product. It's definitely going to help from an awareness point of view. But, yeah, it's just really interesting in our experience too, working with creators. Sometimes when you try to pigeonhole them in too much of a box and say, oh, you have to say it.

This way or you have to say.

It that way, it just comes off as either inauthentic or whatever. And it's better off just giving the creator freedom the guidelines that they absolutely need to follow. But let them surprise you.

I actually want to double click on that because I want to talk about attribution. But I also, William, having experience here. You have a conversation with a brand who's diving into it for the first time, and you ask them, what is your goal every single time. So I'll be like, sales. We just want sales.

And.

I would be talking with a brand, it's like, well, and I would actually dive into the overall business and they would tell me all the problems about the business. I'm like, I think you have a bigger problem than just getting an influencer to have your product hit. Like, maybe no one just wants to buy your toilet paper or something like that. So my question to you is, is that the right approach for a brand to start off? What should be the expectation and what should they be aiming for when they're first creating their campaigns?

Really?

Another really good question, and we get that all the time, is like most brands come to influencer marketing. Thinking of it exactly like, I'm running a Facebook ad and it's synonymous with performance marketing, right? Which it isn't always the case. Big issues, as you probably know, in the social media realm, is many of the social platforms want to mitigate traffic outside the platform, right? They're not allowing external traffic links. They're now creating their own storefronts that are integrated into the social platform itself, which is another conversation to have about kind of where things are moving of like social commerce, et cetera. But it's not always the case that it's going to be a perfect one person promotes and right away, in the next 20 minutes, you're going to drive ten sales and you're going to have five X ROI.

Right.

It can be a more long term performance marketing play. And I don't think that brands should give up on influencer marketing just because it didn't drive them sales instantaneously. There's levels, right? It's like some people, as you know, a trend of like a quality piece of UGC. You may run an ad and it may decrease your ad cost by Five X.

Right?

You just made your ROI with one piece of content, right. Even though you worked with like 30, 50 creators, 100 creators, that one piece of content may have paid for that entire campaign tenfold. You may find someone who you worked with or collaborated with who becomes an amazing affiliate for you, or an ambassador who is promoting in a long term fashion and is just an absolute advocate for your product.

Right?

And you might have not driven a single sale, hopefully you did, but from the promotions of these people. But you found that one individual who has transformed your business. So there's different ways that you can extract value from these collaborations. But absolutely, obviously ecommerce businesses are in the business to make money most of the time.

Yeah.

And the beauty of the nano and micro influencers is they can grow really fast. And so you might build a relationship early on and the algorithm is going to catch up to the creator. It's not a matter of it, but when, if they make good content, because it all stems from good content and the algorithm is going to catch that. Even with micro influencers, they have a tight audience, might see the product. Once I'm like, cool, oh, another micro influencer. I got to see the product from a second time. And that's when the conversion happened. When really this all started a few months ago with the first time that I got to see it.

So attribution is. I'm curious how you guys handle attribution. For me, it's almost like a lost battle in social because it's just so tough, even with the links you have to swipe up, et cetera.

Exactly.

Conversion might not happen there. Coupon codes work. But I'm curious on how you think about attribution.

We look at overall. So what we always advise brands is to make sure they understand their data. And usually when you're pursuing an influencer marketing campaign for the first time, especially to not just start another simultaneous new marketing initiative at the same time. So at least you have controlled experiment to know, okay, my sales every week are X on my website or Amazon et cetera. And now during this promotion, where did things end up? Right, so cumulative, kind of like Halo effects of the campaign. Because inevitably, as you like, if you do a certain type of promotion, you can't put a clickable link. The only way to do it is you have a story which dies off and you can have a link there. People links in bio, but some people don't go through that funnel.

Right?

Even if a brand's tagged in the post, many people will just get awareness of something, love it, go to Google and Google it that way.

Right?

And so pure attribution isn't necessarily there. And I don't think brands should always fixate on that and it's a hard battle for the influencer space to solve. But the brands that actually get and can understand kind of that halo effect of that promotion and how that affects overall their sales and their awareness are the ones who become these million dollar brands because they do it at an effective scale. TheY don't give up. When they ran a campaign and they didn't see the perfect attribution, they're like, this doesn't work for me.

Right?

Whereas their sales actually did Skyrocket and they're making more sales for the next six months than they ever did in the past twelve months.

That's so true, because it reminds me, we would have brands sometimes that would then end up getting acquired by Pepsi or Unilever. And every single time it was one of those brands getting acquired at that level, even if they weren't huge when they first started working with us, it's brands that weren't getting caught up in the small details. And it reminds me of this meme that's like the curve of the guy crying. And then unique links, codes, it's like blended, then it's like unique links, unique codes. We need attribution and then back to blend it. And I agree with you, it's like you should know your business from top of funnel, should know your metrics, and just log like, hey, this was the week where we got ten posts, this is the week where we got 20. And just look at everything from a zoomed out picture. Lane, I know you wanted to jump in.

Yeah.

The one thing I was going to say about the Halo effect is, I think another thing, brands kind of discount, especially when you get a piece of creative that Pops is like the creative will pop, you'll get all this awareness. And a lot of times other creators are following and looking for content that's popping to create more content around it, and then you've got people who are redupplicating, just redoing entire content pieces and all of that sort of stuff. So I know in our examples when we've had micro influencers sort of create creative that popped, all of a sudden we would see this trickle down effect of the people who are replicating that content. And then a lot of times hitting us up and being like, hey, I just created this great content for you. Do you want to work together? I'm like, you literally just reposted this content that this other guy did. But I guess it's great because, and you do see that halo effect. So I do think it is very real. It's tough to get direct attribution for, obviously, even when a lot of times with creators, you might be like, oh, enter this code or do this or do that.

But the reality is the way people buy, like Ramon, like you mentioned, sometimes they don't buy on the spot and sometimes they don't remember the code and sometimes they don't buy on mobile, sometimes they go to desktop. So it's not always like the conversion happening there. But I do think there is a very real halo effect to these creative campaigns and then also in the sign ups and conversion charts that you'll see they come in kind of waves.

Right.

It's not just like a surge that just immediately dies. It's like the sales and the conversion.

Yeah.

That's all just interesting stuff for brands to be aware of when they're working with creators, trying to attribute it.

Not to downplay attribution. Attribution is amazing, controlled data. And knowing I put a dollar and I made $5 back is beautiful. But I feel like Google and Facebook brands have become drunk off perfect attribution. If we think back to hundreds of years of brands promoting, right. It's like, I mean, less than that recently, but you look at TV ads, right, product placement, those things are still very effective ways to get brands out. You have zero attribution there and people still don't. The social side is way more accessible to small brands.

Like, you're not getting your product in the placement of the next Netflix TV show or the next movie that's coming out.

Right.

But you can get in the hands of a creator who could actually possibly have as much of a reach as that show did.

Right.

And so that's a beautiful thing that if you kind of shift your mentality to why are these brands actually giving, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to people to product place there or have a TV ad, right. With zero attribution it's like, because it works, you know what I mean?

Another thing that we see that's really interesting, and Ramon, maybe you have a little bit more data, but we're still early, so we're still parsing through it. But it's almost like when you get creative done by an organic creator, you're also buying into that trust that that creator has with their audience or even the people that are seeing it organically because they're like, oh, this must be recommended for me, or whatever. There's some algorithm matching versus if you're running a performance style ad of creative, even just on Facebook, you almost look like a people are like, immediately this is an ad. So that guard goes up from the buyer, and then it might turn to someone who's really more of a bottom of the funnel buyer. Like, I have this exact pain point and I need to solve it now, so I'm going to convert and buy it now from Facebook.

Right?

As opposed to someone who sees something more organically is like, oh, that is a good idea. I do want it. It's more of an organic, kind of trustworthy purchase. And I guess short info of what we sort of see in the data is sometimes the strongest conversion is like that organic word of mouth sort of conversion. So we've run even tests where we completely shut off our performance, like Facebook ads. And that allows us to see what our baseline is, an organic perspective. And we're like, wait a minute, we're actually doing pretty good from an organic perspective. And then it allows you to tweak up and refine.

But all these sort of creative campaigns, you obviously want to have attribution, but also understanding that they're different types of media, essentially, and different types of promotions that you're running is really important for.

Yeah. That trust element translates into conversion. The other end of the spectrum is like ad platforms over attributing conversions. You might get a bunch top of the funnel visitors, leads out to cart, whatever it is, but the conversion isn't as strong.

Or even the LTV of the customer.

That comes through that lead source is not going to be the same LTV as somebody who follows a creator that they really like, they trust and they follow. So there's a bunch of different data points to look at in order to.

Measure the really, really true.

Yeah. William, before we wrap up here, the other question that I wanted to get into was in terms of trends, right. Social is always evolving. There's different platforms, there's different styles of creative, and there's different micro influencers doing different stuff. But I'd love to get just some perspective from you in terms of on the ground what you see working now and maybe what you think styles of types of content will work in the future before everything changes again. You got the algorithm changing and creative styles changing. But what's hot right now and from an organic creative perspective and where do you see things kind of going and what have you seen performing for brands?

Cool.

Yeah. Well, first off, and this is a recent trend, I mean, this industry evolves quite rapidly, but video, absolutely. And you see that with the advent of TikTok in general and how much that blew up being a video centric platform and where Instagram quickly creating reels to replicate their success. You also see even Amazon just launched their own kind of competitor to TikTok. It's called the Inspire app that is integrating a lot of different UGC content, predominantly video. But video sells, right? Like someone speaking about your product still value to imagery, but video is absolutely where things are trending. And then also social is like, especially we're at a very much infancy in the US. Like China and Asia has already are light years ahead of kind of live shopping, social commerce.

QVC was really all we had in the US and we still do. And there's going to be billions of dollars made in that industry. And that's really where I see kind of the next evolution to influencers in general is like things melding together, right? The social platforms integrate with the ecommerce platforms, going back to attribution, there's much more attribution there also, everyone becoming a creator is the bottom line, right? The most trustworthy people in your life are the ones that you actually get buying decisions from, right? It's like word of mouth marketing is the most powerful marketing that's ever existed. And now every single human being almost has a social platform, or at least the majority. And so that becoming kind of like everyone has a platform to promote on, everyone should be actually leveraging that and getting value out of that. Those are the two probably biggest trends I see things evolving into is like everything moving towards video, social commerce really becoming a larger thing, live commerce, at least in the US, becoming a larger avenue. And obviously AI helping with all of this. Not to throw more buzwords around, but aspects to AI, right? There's already these digital creators that have millions of followers and are actually doing product placement and selling for brands.

So it'll be interesting to see how just that integrates into the whole ecosystem as well.

Sweet. Well, William, want to thank you for coming on the show today. Before you run, why don't you shout out your socials or where our listeners can connect with you or learn more about stack influence.

Absolutely. So Stackinfluence.com Best place to find us all the socials we got at Stackinfluence across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, you name it. And then if you ever want to send me a message directly, it's just william@stackinfluence.com.

Sweet. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for both of you for having me enjoy the day.

Thank you.