What’s driving the next wave of influence in Fashion & Beauty marketing? 

Earned Media Value. 

It’s the metric brands can’t stop talking about, for good reason. 

Conor Begley (Chief Strategy Officer @ CreatorIQ) is here to break it all down. 

This week on the podcast, Paul sits down with Conor to explore the exact science behind EMV (Earned Media Value) & the strategies brands need to scale meaningful impact. 

By now, it’s clear the brands dominating the conversation – and their markets – know how to build authentic, long-term partnerships. (Spoiler: if your influencer marketing strategy isn’t prioritizing retention, you’re leaving value on the table.) 

They’re blending creativity, data & connection to increase their share of voice, and turn conversations into conversion with creators who get it. 

Tune it to learn how to: 

• Unlock the Power of Earned Media Value: Learn why EMV is more than a buzzword. Conor explains how it ties directly to market share shifts, helping brands like Gucci, Prime, and Rare Beauty capitalize on their share of the conversation.
  
  
• Retain Influencers, Not Just Recruit Them: Retention is everything. The brands crushing it are those nurturing relationships with their core creators. Conor shares tactical advice on building authentic, lasting partnerships that scale naturally over time.

 

• Use Gifting & Experiences to Create Buzz: Think aggressive gifting strategies, unforgettable events, and founder-driven relationship-building. These aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re must-haves for establishing brand loyalty and long-term Advocacy.

 

• Avoid Common Mistakes That Kill Momentum: Conor highlights pitfalls like focusing solely on campaign ROI instead of Lifetime Value, and why neglecting your core audience can tank even the strongest of strategies.

Don’t just measure the conversation. Own it. 

Rate & review Building Brand Advocacy:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Connect with Conor:

• On LinkedIn

 

 

Conor Begley [00:00:00]:

Paid content is generally not very effective in actually converting people. And so when you're thinking about sponsoring people, thinking about how does this influence their impact to cover you organically, and how does this influence the likelihood that everybody else talks about you, that's the much more important thing to measure when you're thinking about sponsoring someone.

Paul Archer [00:00:29]:

Have you ever wondered why some brands grow exponentially, building legions of passionate fans that live and die by their logos and some, well, don't. I do all the time, and that's probably because I'm a massive brand nerd. But I believe there's a secret sauce at the core of every remarkable brand. A formula that sparks the growth of passionate communities, of superfans, building a business and a reputation that will last for years to come. My name is Paul Archer and I'm a specialist in Brand Advocacy and word of mouth, having consulted for hundreds of brands on a topic. 

Verity Hurd [00:01:19]:

Hey, it's Verity here, your co-host of the Building Brand Advocacy podcast. In this podcast, we tap into the greatest marketing minds in the world. They share the exact tactics and strategies used to build the world's greatest brands, dropping actionable insights every brand builder can apply.

We've got some incredible guests coming up, sharing insights and tips that can truly shift the marketing landscape. If you want to be the first to hear, make sure you hit that follow button. The more people following the show, the bigger and better we can make it. So if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to follow and spread the word. Thanks again for listening. It really means a lot. I hope you enjoy this next episode. 

Paul Archer [00:01:41]:

It's time to learn and build brand advocacy.

Paul Archer [00:01:45]:

Welcome back to Building Brand Advocacy. I'm your host, Paul Archer, and I am joined by the incredible Conor Begley. Conor, how are you doing?

Conor Begley [00:01:52]:

I'm doing great. Paul, how are you doing?

Paul Archer [00:01:53]:

I'm doing all right. I'm doing all right. This is my last call of the week.

Conor Begley [00:01:57]:

I've got five more today, so I wish I was in your shoes.

Paul Archer [00:02:00]:

You can almost taste the beer.

Conor Begley [00:02:02]:

Almost. Almost.

Paul Archer [00:02:03]:

Almost. Well, this is a bit of a special episode when we're going to do a super deep dive into one particular topic and we have the absolute guru when it comes to it. So today's topic is all about earned media value and we're going to try and find everything you've ever possibly wanted to know about earned media value. And if Conor doesn't know, it's pretty much not worth knowing. Right. So.

Conor Begley [00:02:27]:

Definite. I've thought about it probably more than anyone in the world. That is probably correct.

Paul Archer [00:02:32]:

And that's what you need. Right? So I mean, so just to put some in context, like who are you or why are you talking about earned media value today?

Conor Begley [00:02:38]:

Yeah. So name's Conor. I co founded a company called Tribe Dynamics. Tribe Dynamics got acquired by Creator IQ a few years ago. And so now we're the largest kind of influencer marketing platform in the world. So, you know, we work with Coke, Pepsi, Nestle, Disney, Netflix, lvmh, Estee Lauder, et cetera. So our biggest categories are food and bev, beauty, fashion and entertainment. And you dabble in travel and some other categories that are similar.

But these are the categories that really kind of dominate social media and brand advertising within social media. And then in terms of emv, very early on in Tribe's existence, we started publishing data that showed how different brands were performing within the influencer landscape. So we would track and monitor all the influencers and then try to figure out which brands they were talking about. And we had to figure out, well, what kind of metric are we going to express this with? And the metric that we kind of latched onto was EMV or earned media value, which basically is you kind of assess each piece of content and say, well, if I had to spend advertising dollars, how much would I have to spend to get a similar amount of exposure? Right. That was the principle. Now it's evolved a lot since then, but that was, you know, so. So a similar framework. And yeah, and so we're definitely the largest in the world in terms of measuring that for sure.

Paul Archer [00:04:03]:

And just to get granular in it, you say it's evolved a bit, but what is it? How do you define it and how do you roughly measure it?

Conor Begley [00:04:11]:

Yeah, so the way that you define it. So I think maybe an important concept to get into is one of the things that people screw up about the influencer space is they assume that it's just going and paying Kim Kardashian to talk about you. And the reality is the vast majority of content created about any brand is going to be organic or editorial. Right. Or earned would be the term. And so. And so the problem is that when 90 plus percent of the content created about a brand has no affiliate link, no discount code, has no. There's no way to really track and understand what is the impact of Rihanna wearing a pair of Gucci slides in an Instagram photo.

Like, what is that worth? You gotta come up with some proxy for that. Cause you're never gonna be able to directly connect it to sales. And so that's kind of the goal behind it. And then in terms of just functionally how it works, what we've used as our North Star is market share, right? So how does this, all this content that's getting created, how is that connected to shifts or movements in kind of market share? Right. And what you find is that engagement with content. So likes, comments, shares, retweets, repins are the metric that are most highly correlated with market share movement. Right? 

And that should be obvious, right? Like if I put out a post and you know, nobody engages with it, clicks on it, interacts with it, it's probably not having a very big impact, right? But if a lot of people are liking commenting, sharing, interacting, whatever, probably is having an impact. And especially if my brand is featured in that, that's probably a good thing, right? And so anyway, so what we'll do is look at an individual post, let's say like an Instagram Post or a TikTok video, and say, okay, well you know, we think a like is worth, you know, 25 cents and a comment's worth a dollar.

And you know, these kinds of things. And that gives you a score for the asset. Those aren't the numbers, but that principle. And then ultimately you look at all the assets for a brand, you say, okay, across these 25,000 pieces of content, we think that, you know, Budweiser has had $10 million in coverage created. And so that's, that's the idea.

Paul Archer [00:06:19]:

And so how public are the rankings for this? So you, you guys put them on your website? I believe in that. Like, how do people tend to use this in a day-to-day operationally as a brand?

Conor Begley [00:06:29]:

Yes. So the rankings are on our website. We do leaderboards across a number of verticals. I don't know the ex. Exact number of verticals. Maybe 8, 9, 10, maybe maybe a little bit more. So that would be. We'll rank NFL teams, we'll rank food and food brands.

We'll rank alcoholic beverage, non alcoholic beverage. We'll rank beauty brands by category. Makeup, skincare, hair care. You know, we'll rank luxury fashion, non luxury fashion. A bunch of, you know, a bunch of different categories we rank and we'll just do the top 10. But then in terms of how people actually interact with it, and we're adding more and more data publicly over time. But in terms of how people interact with it, Right. We work directly with the brands.

Right. So the brands are using this to figure out how am I doing versus if I'm Nike, how am I doing versus Adidas or If I'm Gucci, how am I doing versus Prada? Or if I'm Coke, how am I doing versus Pepsi? What's my share of the market? And I think that ends up being the. That is the metric that we really push people towards is like, what is my share of the conversation? Because what you find is that the share of your. Of the conversation. So let's say as an example, right? Like Celsius, the energy drink company last year was getting more buzz than Coca Cola, right? So that's crazy, right? Its share of the conversation was greater than Coca Cola share of the conversation. And so what you'd expect in those circumstances, when your share of the conversation exceeds your actual share of the market, right, Your market share, we know with a fairly high degree of accuracy that you're actually going to gain market share the next year. Because what you find is there's like a time lag between all the buzz and the sales. It doesn't happen immediately.

So, like, I've heard about the sphere in Las Vegas 47 times in the last six months, but I haven't gone and actually spent any money there. But the next time I go to Las Vegas, I'm going to be more likely to do it. Same thing holds true. I'm a beauty. I've heard about rare beauty, which is Selena Gomez's line over and over and over and over and over again, you know, But I haven't gone to Sephora. But the next time I go to Sephora, I'm more likely to try it and maybe buy it. Right?

Paul Archer [00:08:42]:

Do you have an example of. Of a brand that you've seen this happening? So in one year they spiked and the next year you were able to track the value of that and actually put a dollar sign next to it when it comes to pure revenue, not just the value of it.

Conor Begley [00:08:55]:

Yeah, I mean, this. I mean, we've done a tonne of research on this, so we've done this at more of a market level. So we'd use like Nielsen's data or NPD's data. So they track all the retail sales data and have looked at this concept quite a bit. And what's funny is I, you know, we thought we had basically invented it, but this has been around for a very long time. So the term right was in the past you would do this for press coverage. So, hey, like, what's my share of voice would be the term, right, in like, magazines and tv. And then what you're looking for is what's referred to as excess share.

Voice Right. So if my market share is 10% but my share of voice is 20%, then I'm in excess. Right. I have more of the conversation than I should, basically. And so examples of this, we've done this in beauty extensively. If you were to look at, let's say Amazon versus like Walmart, Kohl's, Macy's, Target, et cetera, you know, Amazon in 2019 had 70% of the conversation and only 30% of the market share to. Had great excess in terms of, you know, excess share of voice. And so you saw is over the next four years their market share went from 30% up to about 40%.

So it's getting closer and closer to that level of conversation. And so you just see that again and again and again and again across categories. And so. So yeah, that would be another, another example. But it's, you know, Celsius would be one if you were to look at like Prime. Right, prime, the, the drink company. You know, they passed Gatorade and EMV in 2022 and just have. They went from zero revenue to 250 million in their first year to $1.2 billion in revenue in their second year.

There's just tonnes, tonnes of examples of it.

Paul Archer [00:10:33]:

Yeah, every single teenage boy drinking while KSI and.

Conor Begley [00:10:37]:

Exactly. Or Feastables. Right? Feastables, passing Hershey's, this kind of stuff.

Paul Archer [00:10:41]:

Yeah, completely. And they're all sort of the new way of doing things. And like, if you think about it, I mean, you said it's been around for a while. It seems to be becoming in my day to day earned media value kind of inferred, but this now seems to be the benchmar that almost and particularly Beauty in particular seem to use it. It's been growing and growing and now it's on the tip of the tongue for everyone that I'm speaking to. Is that the case? Is that just my word or is actually it's become a thing gradually over time and it's now, now surpassed share a voice when it comes to how PR is measured.

Conor Begley [00:11:12]:

Yeah, I mean, I think the thing to think about is, you know, how. How are people getting their information, right? How do people learn about things? How do I learn about a new product, new brand new, whatever? And I think that, you know, if you were to use like kind of put PR in the box of TV, print, etc. There's not a lot of people getting their information via that today. Right. Most people are getting their information from somewhere on the Internet and most of that being like, you know, YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or these other channels. Like, sure, there's some independent websites and such, but that's. That's the bulk of it. So ultimately, what we're measuring, you know, I think in terms of.

To your question, like, is it becoming more important? I think that you're seeing budgets shift in that direction quite dramatically. Consistently, but dramatically. And so, yeah, so it becomes more. The measurement of that becomes more and more important. Right. Like, If I'm putting $100 million into this or a billion dollars into this, I need to make sure it's working. And so a good way to actually think about that is if you were to look at the revenue of Nielsen. Right.

So Nielsen was really designed to measure tv. And what you found was that Nielsen's revenue was, I'm going to get the exact number wrong, but like 5 to 7% of the total spend of TV. Because if I'm spending, you know, $10 billion on TV, I'm going to be willing to spend $500 million making sure that it's actually executed correctly. Right. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, we get pegged to the percentage of spend, like, how much are people spending on this? Because they're not going to spend, you know, a million dollars on. With influencers. And $5 million on measurement doesn't make any sense. Right.

Paul Archer [00:12:55]:

What do you think that percentage is that they're looking at?

Conor Begley [00:12:57]:

Again, I think it's like low single digits. I think it's similar. I think it's probably somewhere between 3 to 10%, depending upon who it is. So if they spent a million dollars, they'd be spending 50,000 with us, 40,000 with us. And so now you're starting to see brands that are spending really, really large amounts of money, like shockingly large. And so that's why, like, you know, our biggest contract with an individual brand will be about $1 million. Right. Which honestly is probably far less than what they're spending.

Far less than 5%.

Paul Archer [00:13:30]:

Yeah, yeah. When you start to get those top ends of the giant brands and like, this is measuring just influencers, just creators, or is this anyone that's talking about a brand?

Conor Begley [00:13:40]:

So it'll be focused on influencers. Now, the question is how you define the word influencer. So influencer can be defined. In my mind, it can be individual. Right. That could be a Kim Kardashian or that could be somebody with 10,000 fans that's got a YouTube channel that's talking about, you know, travel destinations. Right. Those both qualify, but we also track you know, organisations.

So, like, if Walmart is talking about your brand, you know, they're a publisher, they have an audience, they're creating exposure. We would classify them as an influencer. You could track like Vogue magazine or Sports Illustrated or espn, you could track even the brands, right? So, like is, you know, if Nike is talking about Jimmy Choo, that's something that has value for Jimmy Choo, and we want to keep track of it. Now, what you'll find is that 90% of the people are individuals. So, like, 90% of what we'll track will be individuals, 10% will be organisations, roughly. And so it is going to be. The vast majority are going to be either the YouTube blogger to the Kim Kardashian. But yeah, we do track the full spectrum.

Paul Archer [00:14:50]:

Do you have any idea how big that is? Like, what percentage of someone's customer base will fall into someone you track or how many of them there are in the world?

Conor Begley [00:14:58]:

Yeah, I mean, I think the people overestimate how many there are that matter. So, like, what you'll find is, sure, you know, we can track a lot of people, but it comes down to about half a million that matter across all categories. Definitely sub a million. And so because again, it's like anything, right, where, like, especially in entertainment, people just tend to concentrate. They tend to concentrate around the best musicians, they tend to concentrate around the best athletes. Right. They tend to concentrate around the best, you know, publishers, Right. TV shows and this kind of stuff.

And so, you know, sure, there is a 400th player in the NBA, that's probably okay, but nobody really gives a or knows who he is. Right? And so, like, you know, it's not that it doesn't matter, but it. It doesn't really matter. Right. And so similar you find in the influencer space. Sure, there's a lot of people out there. I mean, there's like, you know, depending upon how you categorise it, like a billion creators, right? Because every individual, like, I'm a creator and you're a creator. Like, we all publish content online, but it tends to concentrate.

There is a very small number of people that, like, even if you were to look at Beauty, like, even in beauty, there are 3,000 people that generate half of all the exposure in the category. And so even within that, sure, there's 100,000 influencers in beauty that matter, but there's 3,000 that generate half of it.

Paul Archer [00:16:29]:

And there's probably then 500,000 that wish they were the 100,000.

Conor Begley [00:16:33]:

Exactly. Right. And what's funny about that is you would assume. Okay, so there's 3,000 people. Well, that must be all the people that have got the Kardashians of the world. It's like. No, it's not like out of that 3,000, 2,000 of them have under 100,000 fans. But what happens is that content gets a lot of exposure and they create a load of it, right? So they, like, you know, when you're creating five posts a day on makeup, even if You've only got 75,000 fans, but you're a makeup artist, that's, you know, gets, you know, a lot of engagement.

Like, you know, you're going to be one of the top. The top people. So it's not necessarily all just big guys either.

Paul Archer [00:17:12]:

Awesome. And so thinking tactically, now we're looking at the teams. If you're a marketer who's doing it, what is it that most people get wrong about? How do they engage with earned media value?

Conor Begley [00:17:22]:

Yeah. So I think the thing they screw up the most is they focus on. So, like, hey, I ran this campaign and it generated a million dollars in EMV and I spent $100,000 on it. So this was a good campaign, Right. What they screw up about that is when you look at what actually predicts success, Right. And I'll define as share of conversation, right? Share voice. So I want that number to go up because I know if that goes up that my market share is likely to follow. Right? So we're defining that as success.

If I want that number to go up, the most predictive metric for growth is actually retention of influencers. Right? So it is. And again, let's go back to this as like a form of pr. So let's say that, you know, I went out old school pr, I got Sports Illustrated to cover my new up and coming brand, and they wrote about me three times this year. Well, just because they wrote about me this year doesn't mean I don't want them to write about me next year. In fact, not only do I want them to write about me next year, but I want them to write five times about me next year, not three times. And that is the same process that you see with influencers. So your job organizationally or as a brand is, yes, I want to go out and I want to recruit.

Right. I want to get Glamour magazine to write an article about me or Vogue or whoever it is, or a Variety. Right. If you're an entertainment. But then I want them to keep writing about me. And in fact, I want that to go up, not down. So if you're to look at like one of the relationships I always shows, like Lindsey Vonn and Gucci, you know, she went from like one post about them in 2019 where she was just wearing the Gucci slides in the press, to then, and Lindsey's like the Olympic skier. She's got a couple million fans on Instagram, right? So went from one post in 2019 to seven to roughly 30 to roughly 60 posts, right? So, you know, so Gucci's now getting 60 pieces of coverage from somebody that's got 2 million fans.

And if you look at how that relationship evolved, it started with her just organically wearing the product to. Then they actually started inviting her to different events. They started dressing her, right? And then eventually they actually released a collection with her. Right. A collaboration with her. And so, you know, that process, as a company of thinking about one, not only how do I get people in, but two, how do I grow those relationships over time ultimately ends up being far and away the most predictive measure for growth, right? Growth being share voice. And so again, where people really screw this up is they measure things in isolation. So I ran this initiative, it generated X and I put in Y.

And so that worked. And it's like, well, actually that's largely irrelevant. What you really want to think about is, okay, going back to the Lindsey Vonn example, okay, Lindsay talked about us organically, so now I'm going to integrate her into our initiative, right? We're going to invite her to an event and we're going to address her. How does that change the lifetime value of Lindsay for me as an organisation? So now that I've invested in her and I've worked with her, oh, wow. Her likelihood to talk about me organically just went up by 20% in the future, right? 

And everybody else goes, oh, if I talk about Gucci, maybe I too will get this kind of opportunity, right? And so you have this idea of retention and ltv, and then you also have this idea of kind of externalities, right? Or second order effects, which is like, how when I interact with this person, how does this affect everyone else? Right? And that goes both directions. So it's like, hey, I had this influencer and they, they've never talked about me. Like, so let's say you're Lindsay and this is before she ever partnered with them, right? She's just wearing Gucci and there's like some Olympic skier teammate who's like, never talked about Gucci, but they've got a bigger audience than Lindsay and they go and they sponsor this athlete well, how does Lindsey's relationship with Gucci change? She goes, what the Gucci, I like you. I talk about you all the time.

Why are you sponsoring Tim? Tim doesn't give a about you. He's never talked about you. And so then her likelihood to talk about the brand goes down by 20 or 30%. And so you can have negative externalities or negative second order effects that affect the likelihood that other people are going to talk about you, which is ultimately the goal. And so I don't know if that makes sense, but that's far and away the biggest mistake. And people still don't understand it. Mostly.

Paul Archer [00:21:52]:

Well, the whole thing we were saying is, you know, you can't pay someone to pretend to like your brand and expect to get an authentic channel. We buy from people we trust. And so you should be tapping into those people that can talk in a.

Conor Begley [00:22:03]:

Trusted way and that I didn't even get into like whether or not actually works. Like, and it actually works a lot better to your point. Right. Like if somebody's actively, if Lindsay's talking about Gucci and then they bring her to a show. Right. All the fans of Lindsay go, oh, like she like Gucci. Now look what's happening. Right.

It's a much more authentic partnership.

Paul Archer [00:22:19]:

Yeah. Because we can see it, we can sniff it out when someone's just faking it and they genuine or if they genuinely like. We just know what it's like as humans. But in the outdoor space they've been doing this. In the action sports space they've been doing those kind of partnerships, long term brand ambassador partnerships with brands long before the Internet. And it's quite interesting that it's been rediscovered again now, particularly in the fashion and beauty areas where it's like, oh, I've got to have a long term relationship. But you know, Nike were sponsoring people, I mean take away like the Jordan type partnerships, but with every single athlete is all about who they're going to work with next year. And, and sports have done this.

So it's, it's come, it's coming full circle, isn't it?

Conor Begley [00:22:55]:

Totally, yeah. 100. I mean, I think, you know, I think the, what's the phrase? Like history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Right. Like I think in a lot of ways people make this space out to be, you know, some mystical new thing. And it's like, no, no, no, no. Like you've got consumers that are trying to learn about things. They have certain avenues to learn about things.

In the past those avenues were read a magazine, watch tv, whatever. And now what's happened is because the cost to publish content has dropped so dramatically. Right. It's so much cheaper to publish, you know, a video today than it was 25 years ago or 30 years ago. You've just got way more people doing it. And from a consumer perspective, I'd rather learn from somebody that looks like me, that I trust, I've gotten to know over time than I would from a faceless, you know, magazine. Right. Like there's just, it's just, there's just a higher level of efficacy.

It's just more likely to be accurate. And so, and so functionally, if you really want to get influencers down to what they are, they're basically just a magazine, right. Well, how would you interact with a magazine? Well, it's like you'd pitch the editor, you'd send your product pre release, you'd invite them to cool events and experiences so they're more likely to write about your brand. You might run some advertising with them because, you know, turns out that magazines tend to favour the people who advertise with them the most. Right. Like, and so even though they're not supposed to.

Paul Archer [00:24:20]:

And so if you're thinking about like baking this into your strategy and you're trying to like come up with a strategy, try to increase earned media value, but a cost effective way, like, what would be your tips?

Conor Begley [00:24:31]:

Yeah. So again, it depends on the category you're in. I'm going to define this as you are in a category that people like to talk about. Right. Because that's what we focus on. So that's going to be food and Bev, beauty, fashion, entertainment, travel, et cetera. So like, this doesn't work if you're deodorant or if you're Brinks Trucks or if you're just that people don't talk about. Right.

But let's assume you're something that people want to talk about. Well, functionally the approach should again look a lot like pr, which is like, okay, if I wanted somebody to talk about my up and coming, you know, fashion brand, what would I do? Well, one, I try to build relationships with the people that talk about this. So I got and reach out to the editor at Vogue or the editor at whatever and then try to build those relationships. Two, I'd try to get product into their hands. And if I get product into their hands brands before it's released in stores, then it gives them the opportunity to be like, hey, I got early access to this thing. Let me tell you my opinion on it. Right. So one is relationships.

So let's build relationships with the community, those people. And two, you can actually short circuit that. Right. Like I could hire the person who ran influencers at another fashion company and they bring those relationships with them. Two, I want to get my product into their hands. So aggressive gifting strategies is really important. So how do I get my product into the hands? Three, I think really cool events and experiences are ways to build rapport and to get them to try it in real life. And Jen, you know, it's great to build stuff over zoom, but just hanging out in person is a totally different thing.

And so those events and experiences in person are really good. And then finally, if you've done all of that, then I would consider actually paying people. Right. Because ultimately the paid content is generally not very effective in actually converting people. But what it does do, again, like, you know, we were talking to, I won't say who it was, but like one of the larger consumer organisations in the world, like top 10 in the world. And like, yeah, we used to track how much dollars had we spent with this magazine and how much editorial coverage had we gotten out of it. Right. And if that ratio wasn't right, we'd cut them as an advertiser.

Because the reality was the ads were not the point. Like, the ads were fine. What the point was was how do I get editorial coverage? And I know if I'm the largest advertiser there, I'm going to get better editorial coverage. And so when you're thinking about sponsoring people, thinking about how does this influence their impact to cover you organically and how does this influence the likelihood that everybody else talks about you? That's the much more important thing to measure when you're thinking about sponsoring someone. And so, yeah, so those are the things. Team to build relationships, gifting. Because people aren't going to go buy your products, you got to get it in their hands, events to get like, you know, interactions and relationships. And then finally is payment.

But payment with the mindset of how does this result in editorial coverage?

Paul Archer [00:27:25]:

What percentage of a marketing budget do you reckon should be spent on gifting?

Conor Begley [00:27:29]:

I don't have a number. I don't have a number. It depends a lot. But again, what I would say that people screw up is like the cost to go buy something. Let's say I wanted to go buy 24 pack of beer from an upcoming company, that's going to cost me $40, but it only costs the beer company 15. And so that leverage in terms of the actual price, the Retail price and the cost of goods being so different makes it so that I could give them $500 in product, but only cost me $100 or $200. And so that value exchange is quite, quite, quite a big deal. And so, and I will say it is the number one activity that our brands do, so product gifting is the number one thing.

Conor Begley [00:28:16]:

So, yeah, sounds huge.

Paul Archer [00:28:19]:

And so on top of that, I mean, that sounds like a really good, solid marketing strategy. Are there any, any cheeky hacks? If I'm a. If I'm a marketing exec and my CMO tells me that I need to increase my emv, but they've given me no budget or those sort of resources, are there any, any areas that you would recommend that they double down on to make sure that they move that metric more? Because obviously there's all the things they could be doing. But if they know that that's the metric, where do you think that they can have an outsize impact?

Conor Begley [00:28:45]:

Again, I would. It depends on if you're a big brand or a small brand, right? So if you're a big brand, the big mistake that people make is that retention mistake, which I said, which is like, okay, like, I am like, this happened with. I'm sure they won't mind it with gymshark, right? So gymshark was like, had built a really strong core community around gym influencers. And then they said, hey, you know what? To expand, we really need to go get a bunch of new people. So we're going to go after NFL players and this and that other thing. And then what happened was their numbers dropped, right? They tanked. They weren't good. And what you found, what I showed them was if you were to look at these 4,000 people, which are mostly gym and fitness influencers, they generate 80% of the exposure for you, right? And in a lot of ways, the way that you treat that group of people will influence whether or not new people want to come and talk about you anyways, right? Because, oh, I talk about gymshark, and if I do, I get free product and events and payment and all this kind of stuff.

And so I said, you know, you really just need to refocus in on your core, right? Like, that's where you need to kind of focus. And so they refocused on the core and the numbers started exploding again. Right? And so as a big brand, the mistake, like, if I were to say, to your point, I've got limited resources, I'm not getting extra budget, how do I spend that most Efficiently, I would say just drill in on the core hardcore. Like, who are the people that are already talking about me and how do I have really strong relationships with those people and then let the new people come to me naturally. Right. And then if I'm a smaller brand, I think the really leaning in as like a founder and leaning in with product is far and away the best thing that you can do. Right? Just going out, pounding the pavement, taking the meetings, doing the calls, getting product into people's hands. And it takes time, but it's very defensible.

Right, because you own those relationships. Like, we see that for us, you know, we've built relationships with all of our big publishing partners. So whether that's, you know, you know, business of fashion or womenswear daily or CEW or whatever, like, you know, all these groups that publish our data, Wall Street Journal, whatever. These are relationships we built over a decade. Right. But there are relationships and we own them and they trust us. That's an asset that's very valuable to the business. And so I think really leaning it as a founder and really leaning in with gifting and experiences would be where I would spend my dollars.

Paul Archer [00:31:15]:

We've had quite a lot of founders on this pod, and the one thing that seems to unite all of them is that they've done that. So pre 10 million, the founder has almost sold every single item, or at least sold every single customer. And that customer has then bought 10 more and told 10 friends. And that becomes the point. And then all the other stuff that adds the things that they spend their money on is, like, negligible compared to that. And then they reach a sort of inflection point, and then scale happens, and the founders necessarily have to be involved, but they're still the ones who are. They're on the beating heart of it. And there's so many brands that just never get that far because the founders just can't be bothered, wants to spend it all on ads.

Conor Begley [00:31:50]:

It's hard work, but it's very, very powerful and it builds over time.

Paul Archer [00:31:57]:

Do you buy into that yourself? I mean, in a B2B perspective as well? I'm always interested in the kind of the parallels of B2B and B2C.

Conor Begley [00:32:04]:

Totally. I assumed you were talking about B2B founders. Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, that's. Yeah. No, it's possibly even more powerful in B2B because it's like there's such a small number of relationships, right. In consumer, it's like there's, you know, you're selling to millions of customers or tens of thousands? Yeah, thousand percent. I think the idea of, like, I hadn't really understood it in a lot of ways.

You don't really. It's almost impossible to understand it when you're like 22 years old or 25 years old, because you just haven't existed long enough to have those kinds of relationships. But when you build business relationships over the course of a decade or longer, it's very high leverage because it's like there's a level of trust that exists when, like, you know, that just is very, very powerful. Right. And ultimately, if you do it really right, you end up building what is commonly referred to as a community, which most people honestly don't understand because it's, like, actually hard to do and it takes tens of thousands of conversations over many, many years to actually build it. But, yeah, I think that we've gotten to that point and it's pretty cool.

Paul Archer [00:33:16]:

First of all, a. How do you define that? And what do you mean by we? Is it we? Is it you? Like, what does that look like in the world of Conor?

Conor Begley [00:33:23]:

So in the case of Tribe and frankly, creator iq, to a certain extent, it's me, right? And in terms of how that manifests, right, so we put on last year, last year being like, you know, 15 months ago or so, you know, we put on an event and we had like 40 speakers and we had 700 people attend and we were targeting 300. And this year it was 1200 people and 50 speakers and three stages and whatever. And, you know, of the people that were speaking, I invited probably 80 to 90% of them, 85% of them, right? And it was 80% of the market and 80% of the sponsorship dollars came through me or more, you know, and so, like. And that's not to say it's not like anybody else is doing a. The wrong thing. It's just that being really concentrated and having me really focus on that had some really powerful impacts. Right. And so.

And I think that, you know, I've seen it where there are a lot of organisations that just don't have that. And. And the thing is, it's not like it's not easy to replicate because it's built, you know, again, over tens of thousands of meetings over many, many years. And so. So, yeah, and you see people do that, right? Like, a good example of it would be, I mean, Gymshark certainly does that. If you were to look at, like, I remember, drunk elephants, someone named Tiffany, who was the founder and CEO, she would spend two to four hours a day, every single day on Instagram, like DMing with consumers and like, interacting with the comments and like, just. Just irrationally plugged into building these relationships. And so I do.

You do see a disproportionate amount of the time with founders that are successful.

Paul Archer [00:35:05]:

Yeah. And it's amazing. Social media has given them a voice for the first time they never would have had previously. It was always a closed book. They had had to go to shows and meet people and have stands, and that's a lot more manual. It takes a lot longer to reach that sort of inflection point. So finally, to close things off, where's it heading? What's happening with earned media value, anything that's changed? And then also, where do you see things heading in this sort of state of creator and social comment?

Conor Begley [00:35:29]:

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's going to be more of the same. Right. Like, I think the rules of the game have largely been figured out. You know, there's small changes that are occurring and small movements that are occurring, you know, around, like, social commerce and some of these other things. But, like, you know, the thing that I think about is for the last. So you'll see that. I don't know if you can see it. That magazine right over here.

Right, that right there, you know, that was like the first big article. It says the year of the Influencer and was published by Beauty, Inc. And like that. I think it was like 2016 or something. And I think every single year since then, like, I've seen, like, it's either the year you'll see the year of the Influencer. You'll see, like, this is the year the influencer bubble bursts. Right. And like.

And so, like, I just saw a tweet about it. I was like, God, I thought we were done with this. We're eight, nine, ten years into this. I think it's kind of well established what it is. And the reality is that until there's a better source of information, it's going to kind of continue in the way that it does. Right. There might be a new social network that pops up, but I think people largely overrate that. Like, there's been one social network that's been created in the last decade, and that was TikTok, and that was also, like, seven years ago.

There's been a meaningful social network created in seven years or something like that. And so. And frankly, they were musically before that. So it's like, I don't even know if you can count that. So. Yeah. So I think it's gonna be more of the same. I actually don't expect it to change a lot.

I expect it to be consistent and similar. Now, I don't know, all the AI is pretty wild. We'll see what happens there. But yeah, I expect consistency. I don't expect change.

Paul Archer [00:37:07]:

Amazing. If anything, it becomes more important to find those authentic voices in a world of AI generated content.

Conor Begley [00:37:13]:

Exactly right. I think the artificial content is quite overrated now. It speeds things up, right? It makes it easier to edit, do videos, do photos. Like everything becomes a lot faster, which is really co. But I think people like connecting with people for a reason, so.

Paul Archer [00:37:28]:

Sounds amazing. Well, look, Conor, really appreciate you making the time. That's everything you ever needed to know about earned media value. Where can people find you?

Conor Begley [00:37:36]:

LinkedIn's probably the best place. So, Conor, C O N O R B E G L E Y. Yeah, I'd go there. That's the best one.

Paul Archer [00:37:43]:

Amazing. Thank you very much.

Conor Begley [00:37:44]:

Awesome. Thanks, Paul.

Paul Archer [00:37:47]:

That was another episode of Building Brand Advertising, the world's top brand building podcast. To find out more about Building Brand Advocacy and how this podcast is part of a bigger plan for our Brand Building cookbook, Then make sure to search for Building Brand Advocacy in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else that podcasts are fine. And make sure that you click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. Thanks to Juul for sponsoring. To find out more, go to ww.duel.tech. that's D U E L Tech. And on behalf of the team here at Building Brand Advocacy, thanks for listening.