Keith Bendes [00:00:00]:
The people with the following are the ones who build the culture and set the stage for the brand and the tone for the brand. They are the upper funnel of it. The CGC content is not going to, in my opinion, build and set the tone of the brand and build that culture. It's kind of the mid, lower funnel that once it's understood, once the group is being assembled and the culture is being set, they join and they fuel the flame. So I still think influential voices are so valuable and I'm not sure how you win without them if you don't have, you know, the big dollars that Poppy had to pay all these creators or you do and you still want to go deeper to your. I think that's one of the biggest trends we're seeing, is go deeper.
Paul Archer [00:00:46]:
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.
Paul Archer [00:01:24]:
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.
Verity Hurd [00:01:36]:
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 [00:01:59]:
It's time to learn and build brand advocacy.
Paul Archer [00:02:03]:
Hello. Hello. Welcome back to Building Brand Advocacy. I'm your host, Paul Archer, and I'm very, very excited to be joined by Keith Bendes from Linqia. He's the VP of strategy over there and an absolute guru on all things creators, influencers, media, and baking it all into it. And we're going to go deep into a whole bunch of things around there with the intention of learning as much as possible so that we can take it away and apply it across our own craft. Keith, welcome. How you doing?
Keith Bendes [00:02:30]:
I'm good. Thank you for having me. Excited to dive into this. I've been a fan of the pod, so glad to be on now.
Paul Archer [00:02:35]:
Well, this is it. We're a fan of yours as well. So we're recording this on the Monday morning after the super bowl as well. So for me that's not so much of a big thing. Cause I'm on the other side of the pond at the moment. But for Keith, this is, this is dedication and all the utmost respect for that. But it does mean that we've got some very current things we can talk about as well. And also we can flow into more of those evergreen content as well.
So I want to sort of start off by like, tell us a little bit of a. Bit of a quick buy of you. Who are you? What, what's Linqia? What's the kind of work you do to set us all up?
Keith Bendes [00:03:07]:
Keith Bendes. I've come from the brand side. I was at Unilever for a long time. Unilever actually had a ventures group at the time. Now I feel like a lot of these groups do, but that was unique, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago. I have a weird background. I study finance, economics, did some investment banking work. So was.
Was helping them a bit and then went to one of their prospective portfolio companies that they were assessing. Was there for about five years and everything was moving into Influencer. The number of brands who would ask about it, the amount of requests to map the space and how much investment should be put in it. And the writing was on the wall. So I joined Linqia back in 2019 and it's definitely. The space has exploded in the last six years. So I run strategy. It means I spend a lot of my time with brands trying to plan out Influencer and how it fits into their broader strategy.
I also spend a lot of time on, on educating the industry and thought leadership and speaking at conferences and events and podcasts, et cetera. So the space is. Is very different than it was a half decade or a decade ago. And that's good, that's good for amazing.
Paul Archer [00:04:08]:
What does that kind of look like when you go and work with a brand and also give me a few examples of some of your favourite brands.
Keith Bendes [00:04:14]:
You like to work with. So going in with a brand, there's, there's kind of two types of strategy is how I look at it. One is creator fit into the broader marketing plan and that's the highest order of strategy you could think of. And you know, five years ago I think most brands and agencies were like, yeah, sure, let's test this, you know, let's just see if it does anything. Now it's a significant spend and focus area for brands. So it is part of the broader strategy. So that's one is kind of broad brand strategy. Then you have more creative strategy which is literally what do I do with these influencers, what types of influencers, what is the message they're putting out there, et cetera.
So those are the two broad types of strategy. I like working on challenging categories. Weirdly I love financial services, I love healthcare and pharmaceutical. Even auto is interesting. So I would say some of the favourite brands are the ones where your constraints are the highest and that's where creativity has to shine most.
Paul Archer [00:05:06]:
I'm fascinated by that because most of the work that I end up doing is with your beauty and your fashion brands. And you've got these creators whose job it is to create content and sell products. They've kind of gone down an avenue where they've made an entire career from this. And then you also have entire departments who've been doing it for like five plus years. And the maturity and sophistication of where they're operating at now is very, very different. But like how does it work for an unsexy industry? Like if you're going in like auto. Auto is interesting because of the sheer like price of the product, like getting product in people's hands, like how does it work for that versus how does that work in healthcare with all that regulation? That sounds tough, it's challenging but so.
Keith Bendes [00:05:45]:
First of all I'd say, you know where I work at Linqia, it's one of the largest influencer agencies in the world. But we are a third party agency, an external agency are partnering with brands. To your point, your beauty and your fashion. A lot of them have built monster teams internally because this is the core of their business now. So they're more going to use, you know, tech tools, SaaS tools and do it themselves in house. So we don't even deal predominantly in those categories. We are mostly dealing with the ones who don't have those full in house teams, which is oftentimes your lower price CPG or these challenging categories. What I would say is the more challenging the category typically the more the need is for someone, an external party, to build trust with a consumer group.
You can look at, you know, even CPG categories like vitamins. You consume a vitamin and you don't know if it's working. Let's be honest. You have no freaking idea. If that thing is doing anything. That means it's a trust based category. Now you look at investing in finances, you look at taking medications. It's.
These are very trust based categories. And so people are increasingly turning to voices on social media to get that trust. So it's weird. I think a lot of brands who play in some of these unsexy categories or the low cost categories think, I'm not beauty, I'm not fashion. Should I be doing influencer marketing? I would argue you need influencer marketing way more than they do. They could sell a piece of, you know, jewellery or a lipstick off of a display ad. Are you going to sell, you know, financial services or pharmaceutical medications off of a display ad? Probably not. You need much richer content that builds trust.
So if anything, those are the groups who need it the most.
Paul Archer [00:07:26]:
Is there like a different channel? Because I know there's been quite a few sort of success stories around supplements and podcasters and the sort of like the Huberman effect and people referred to that. So like that's like a really long term, long form channel. Like does, does the form of the channel affect the trust when you're trying to sell something like that?
Keith Bendes [00:07:46]:
It does, yes. But you have a podcast. I have a podcast. We know that our short form cut downs probably get many, many more views than our form podcast itself. So I think yes, there are, you know, long form plays different roles than short forms. TikTok plays different role than Instagram, but I would argue it's kind of surround sound that helps you the most. But I mean, just to throw out some stats here, if you look at finance category, TikTok released a whole report on finance category. They said it's a 373 increase in financial content.
Over the last year, 70% of TikTok users have indicated that financial topics are important to them. More than 80% are taking action based on financial advice. On TikTok, 60% of US investors under the age of 35 use social media as a source of investment information. And that's just finance. Then you look at pharmaceuticals. And one in five Americans trust health influencers more than medical professionals. So the data is all there that people are turning to social for advice. Now we don't have to get into why that partially has to do with the healthcare industry and the system that we have in this country failing a lot of people and financial services just being, you know, the doubts that are coming to the large corporations.
But regardless of the reason, we're going to social media, that is where we're getting our information and then we're trusting the people who are becoming experts on those platforms. So I'd say ignore it and your own risk.
Paul Archer [00:09:05]:
I mean, I think I own the health one. But the fact is that what the percentage there of how many people are giving their financial advice off TikTok, that's maybe somewhat worrying but also it does sort of show the evolution of the platform. And actually there probably is some great content on there, but there must be also some atrocious content on there as well. Like how do you, how do you kind of modify that trust, that trust barrier?
Keith Bendes [00:09:28]:
And I think that's a bit on the individual. Like you have to do a, you have to be a bit more researched than maybe in, in years past, you know, a lot of people who just read the Times every morning or popped onto CNN or Fox in the morning, you know, they, they trusted those. Although I, I'd tell you to go do that today and tell me, you know, how, how strong the content is you're getting on these platforms. But you, you have to do more self research for sure. But again I think you build trust through the actual. It's more of a paradoxical relationship between the creator and the audience. And so I think as they build trust, the people know who to trust. I go back to, I studied finance in school, I worked in investment banking.
I do my own investments today. So I would consider myself a bit more savvy of a financial investor. I 100% get most of my financial information and recommendations off TikTok 100% now I can vet a little bit who is giving me this information. Can I trust them? But I find the information is way better there than me turning on Mad Money on the tv which frankly I used to do all the time. Right. So I'd argue this no different in terms of skewing public perception and what used to be just one channel or one source versus many now. But there's no question there is more onus on the individual to actually validate who is the person delivering that information.
Paul Archer [00:10:47]:
So we're talking about high quality, well researched creators who are specifically targeting the type of person like you versus someone who's shilling whatever the latest crypto meme coin that's kind of come out here. This is, this is a category and how do you work with brands to advise them how to work with someone around the trust? Because I think that selection piece that brands go through of choosing who they want to be an ambassador for them who they want to represent them in those side by sides. When it comes to something like finance, when it comes to doing that on social media and regulation, everything like that. Like what. What's your advice that you go in to tell them what the principles they should operate from?
Keith Bendes [00:11:22]:
We do an activity that's called narrative mapping a lot with our partners. And so narrow mapping would say if you put all of your core reasons to believe or brand messages on your columns, make a little grid and just list them all, it could be 3, it could be 10, it could be 100. And then you put your core audience segments on the rows. And again, be specific. Don't give me Jack and Jill like the creative agencies are mapping in your, in your briefing meetings, like, give me real audience segments.
The question we often ask is, now you have matching cells in each of these. How many times do you actually have content from that point of view of that person delivering that core message? If you want people to believe that your product is really easy to use or it's really cost efficient, whatever it is, and you are targeting, let's say, Hispanic parents, where is the content from a Hispanic parent talking about kind of the value of that product or service. So the authenticity to me is as much about the representation on screen being the same as the person you're delivering the content to and the core message being how they think about that core message.
You know, I was at Unilever for many years and Dove, everybody knows Dove products. How an African American woman uses shampoo and hair care products is insanely different than how a white or Hispanic or Asian person uses these products. And so one approach is, hey, just put them all in an ad and kind of make it about, you know, luxurious feel. The other one is to say, let the African American woman talk in the way she would talk to her friend, you know, sitting in a room. And that might be so different than, you know, this general advertisement, but that is what's going to work well. So in terms of trust, it's more about let the people who represent the audiences you're trying to reach really do what they know is going to be authentic and effective with their own core audience.
Paul Archer [00:13:12]:
And how does that then play in with a kind of a paid and a media strategy? So you're looking at someone who, they're an influencer because of their audience. Right? They're influential to a bunch of people that can do it. But then there's also, they may be talking about the trust side. Someone else is talking about how ease of use or whatever you want to have multiple different case points that probably targeting the same person. Are you sort of anticipating that they're going to hear about this narrative through their own channels? Maybe through one, and then you're going to boost the other narratives that you need that person to get the eyes on. Like, like what? How does this fit into the wider strategy?
Keith Bendes [00:13:47]:
Number one, you have to design for that wider strategy. So what is your actual media strategy and how does this fit into it? And are you thinking about that? In the beginning we always say design for paid or design with the end in mind. That has to be part of the process up front. What I would say is if you're a creator or an influencer, we know how this game works these days. You're going to reach a percentage of your audience in the organic post and you might reach, you know, a number of people who don't follow you. But in media, we have the ability to bring that content to a much, much wider audience. Now when we do that, there's the question of what is the best version of that content to reach people who have no idea who you are inherently because they don't follow you. So actually we're optimising content when we put it into paid, we're not just straight boosting, we're making the better for an audience that wouldn't follow you.
And then what is the role you play from a content perspective to influence that audience? So oftentimes you might have a medical professional in garb intentionally because when you do the amplification that signifies expertise. And so what are the visual signals that this creator, this influencer, is going to have on screen that makes them immediately more authentic or relevant to an audience that doesn't inherently know who they are because they don't follow them. But we do typically say the value in media is oftentimes same or significantly more than the organic value you're getting out of it. So for most brands it's make sure you have the usage rights to do this in paid media, make sure you are doing it in paid media, and make sure you're not just blindly boosting the content, that you're optimising the content for the intention of the media.
Paul Archer [00:15:26]:
This isn't anything new, but it's the same thing that has to be told time and time again. Like you do a campaign, you do some work, you do an activation, you do a pop up, you, you sponsor someone. Like the same thing's been happening for decades and decades. And then what the brand does afterwards is what matters as much if not more, you know, are you taking you turning into ads? Are you, are you activating those people to be an ambassador for you and doing speaking tours, all of the different compounding things that come from it. But now like that sort of shift in influencer marketing now becoming so big. I mean it's one of, if not the largest budget budget the marketers have right now. You might actually have some, some more up to date stats than I do on that for last year. But like it's now such a big part of it.
Is this the bigger. In most advice that you're going to be given for every kind of brand, whether it's the sexy fashion beauty or the less sexy ones, it is like the core cornerstone of every single activation, every single campaign going to be an influencer or a creator partnership and then all the other things are bits that come off the side of it.
Keith Bendes [00:16:28]:
I think we're on a path to that. I think we still have some time before it happens. I mean, you'd be surprised. I think Influencer is one of the fastest growing channels, but it's still fairly small in the marketing pie when you look at tv, when you look at display, when you look at olv. So it's still pretty small as a channel. And frankly Social is obviously a nice chunk of budgets today, but still even social, you know, obviously influencers part of Social, but total Social is still way smaller than it should be for most brands. Again, that's changing. And I think 10, 15, 20 years from now, Social will be the juggernaut of most brands.
But you're still having a lot of brands, especially the largest advertisers in the world who are relying, in my opinion, overly heavily on kind of traditional channels as the bull worth of their investment. So I still think the opportunity of growth is humongous, even though it's been a good growth story to date. Because the paradox brands are dealing with or the challenge they're dealing with today is this. I need more content than I've ever needed in my entire life before. And that's going to be really challenging to get through my traditional production means. So how do I get that content quickly, effectively and have it feel very relatable? Authentic Social first because we're seeing that that's the content that works well, even if it's not on Social, that social first style of content. And the only real way they know how to do that is through creators. Otherwise you're going to spend your entire content budget in the first month of the year in order to actually Sustain it.
It is creators, which I don't know if we need to get into this, but that's the whole difference between kind of creator generated content, which is low following creators who don't necessarily post and who give it to you as a brand versus true influencers who have reach, have an audience, have actual influence organically. And you're seeing that being separated and segmented on the brand side because they have heavy creator needs and also heavy influencer needs. But they're different, they're not necessarily the same thing.
Paul Archer [00:18:32]:
And can you give us an example of how that's done? Really well.
Keith Bendes [00:18:35]:
So influencer content, I'd say is you have a following, you have an audience. I'd argue let them cook, you know, as a brand, let them do what they know is going to work really well. You as a brand also have content needs that you need to satisfy. Back to that narrative map we were talking about. I need, you know, this type of person to hone in on this core message that is really more cgc where you could direct it a little bit more. It's more about for your paid approach and your organic approach, your website, your PDP pages, your paid social, you're paid ov, et cetera.
Paul Archer [00:19:08]:
So that'd be UGC as well. Other people call it ugc.
Keith Bendes [00:19:11]:
Exactly. A lot of people call.
Paul Archer [00:19:13]:
That makes total sense. So that's like that kind of like lo fi type areas. And do you think that that has been utilised enough by brands? Do they realise that actually? I mean from the kind of experiments and for the campaigns and the projects that I've worked on, like pretty much universally when brands start to create an amazing flow of UGC or CGC and then they're utilising that within their media buy always, it starts to become their most powerfully their top performing posts within a very short period of time. And then you've got a. You've also got all the different ones as well. So it's not just that same image with a white background that's following you back. Like, you didn't buy these shoes, you still didn't buy these shoes. This is what they look like with the dress, this is what they look like with a hat.
Like, this is what they look sometimes a different shape, like. And that's that thing that really builds up that trust and that understanding of it. But I still don't think that it's as well used. And you do see obviously those massive influencer partnerships being amplified. There's a huge part of it, but not as much on the. On the lo fi kind of creator side.
Keith Bendes [00:20:17]:
Correct. It's still in its early stages. I think most brands, again, if you look at its growth and you look at the number of brands who are trying it, that those numbers look really good. But in terms, if you zoom out and you say, well, how much money is really going to this and how much attention is really going to this in the broader scheme of marketing, it's very, very small. So CGC was a newer concept a couple years ago, maybe 18 months to 24 months ago. So great growth because it's such a low base. You could grow very high on a low base. But I agree with you, it's still in such an infancy stage right now and I don't know how every brand isn't using that as their primary content mechanism.
Paul Archer [00:20:53]:
And barely PDPs. That's also like people talk about it, it's not actually happening anywhere near as much like a live deployment of it. Because if you just imagine conversion rate of having a real person, you have. Everyone has reviews. Right. We got there. That kind of happened in the teens. Like we got past that review.
And there's also some, some genuine UGC on those reviews, which does help with conversion. But this kind of CGC opportunity is hugely missed because if you increase it, increase your conversion rate by a few percentage points, which you can with a really good gallery of those kind of things, like, it's just going to increase your revenue like massively from where you're going. And same thing for your media buy as well. If you can optimise it by a few percentage points, that can be worth hundreds of millions for some of the larger brands and yet still not really being done.
Keith Bendes [00:21:36]:
Yeah, What I typically say to a brand is just look at your own user behaviour when you book a hotel or when you go on Yelp to find food. I skip every professional photograph on both of those occasions. CPG hasn't really caught up with that fact as much, you know. And I think to your point, if you go to PDP pages five, 10 years from now, it's just going to be all UGC, CGC videos. And so that we could get an actual understanding of how this stuff looks in real life, works in real life, installs, you know, in real life versus your perfect path, beautiful photography.
Paul Archer [00:22:10]:
What I think is there's also this desire from us as consumers for that authentic narrative as well. Not just for the kind of. Because that's like we're really quite far down the funnel when we're talking about the usage of this, but I think the authentic nature of that cgc, further up, just a trusted person who looks and smells a bit like me is telling me I should buy it. So maybe I should buy it. Which does sit quite different to your influencer content, which is, you know, much more of like a broadcast side of things.
And we're starting to see a lot of brands that are actually creator led, creator founders sort of like pulling out there and launching their own products or at least get very, very close. And we talked about the healthcare and the podcast. Do you think that, you know, that's all well and good for a brand that's starting from scratch? And you know, I can't imagine why anyone would ever start a brand without some sort of influencer to at the helm to try and make that happen in today's day and age.
But like, do you see how can brands take advantage of this who don't have that luxury and how can they do deeper collaborations with individuals within influencers, with creators, with athletes to leverage an already existing brand? Maybe that's a small one or maybe it's a mega brand as well.
Keith Bendes [00:23:18]:
Well, first of all, so if you think about, we just talked about cgc, I also see some brands going the other direction, which is questioning, do I need to work with influential voices, with followings? Why don't I just do all cgc right? If algorithms are diminishing, organic reach, et cetera, I think that's a disaster too. I mean, you look at the biggest brands in the world, some of them were on stage at the super bowl yesterday, the poppies who featured all creators in their ads, they had three mega creators in that ad. The people with the following are the ones who build the culture and set the stage for the brand and the tone for the brand. They are the upper funnel of it.
The CGC content is not going to, in my opinion, build and set the tone of the brand and build that culture. It's kind of a mid, lower funnel that once it's understood, once the group is being assembled and the culture is being set, they join and they fuel the flame. So I still think influential voices are so valuable and I'm not sure how you, you win without them if you don't have, you know, the big dollars that Poppy had to pay all these creators or you do and you still want to go deeper. To your point, I think that's one of the biggest trends we're seeing, is go deeper.
These could be ambassador relationships, these could be even product partnerships. We've seen really interesting collabs where Cheez its featured a gamer on their box from a packaging perspective and then had a limited number of boxes that he hand signed. And were they trying to sell millions of of cases of that product? No. But the cultural relevance of that collaboration and what it did for their brand is worth so many more times a social post where that guy could have just talked about loving Cheez Its same thing with product innovations. You look at Nestle with Alex Cooper and Unwell Hydration, we're going to see a tonne of that moving forward where there's product collabs between creator and brand and some of that is real innovation. That's a whole new brand. But you look at McDonald's and their Cardi B meals and their BTS meals, they did nothing. They just picked four items on the menu and called it the Cardi b meal and then just made it so that every restaurant, if somebody said it knew what the four products were that got bundled together.
So you could do it in a creative way that has no innovation or you could have real deep product packaging. Etc innovation.
Paul Archer [00:25:30]:
Talk people through the the Alice Cooper Partnership for anyone who's not familiar.
Paul Archer [00:25:35]:
Hey, it's me again. This podcast is sponsored by Dual, which is my company. Actually. Dual is the leading brand advocacy platform used by the top retail consumer brands including Unilever, Charlotte Tilbury, Elemis loop and about 50 more to manage, measure and scale their advocacy, member, affiliate, creator and brand ambassador operations. The platform offers unparalleled scale for complex brand brands by automating 9 out of 10 of the standard advocacy management activities and allowing them to focus on arming their advocates. With the right tools to tell the brand story and drive social commerce, they can grow faster for less. We only work with 15% or so of the brands we speak to, but we try and add value in many other ways, this podcast being one of them. So if you are a brand that's interested in this, maybe a large consumer retail brand, Ideally you're doing 20, $30 million dollars is a minimum and you're pretty advanced on social and you need to know what the next stage is, then please get in touch.
Email me paul.tech that is p a u l@d u e l.t e c H or Google Duel Dot Tech.
Paul Archer [00:26:42]:
So.
Keith Bendes [00:26:43]:
Nestle is starting a new brand with Alex Cooper called Unwell Hydration. So this will be under the Nestle portfolio, but it's an entirely new brand called Unwell Hydration. Could you argue Alex Cooper could have done this on her own without Nestle absolutely. Every single creator there could start a brand tomorrow. And there's a lot of companies that have popped up to make that not only easy, but quality product. You know, three, four years ago they were starting brands and some of them were terrible. Obviously we saw what happened with Mr. Beast and his burger chain.
But now enough innovation has happened in that space where you could do it quickly and effectively at good product. So there's a podcast I listened to. One of the guys said, what do you think is harder? Amassing a following of hundreds of millions of people who wait on your every single post or making a decent tasting chocolate bar? It's the former. And so his point was, if you were a brand, these creators are either going to be your most valuable partners or your biggest competitors in the decades to come. I think it's so true. Every creator could start a brand tomorrow. Alex probably said, you know what, I'm going to make less than if I did this myself. But I don't have to deal with logistics and manufacturing and shipping and retail partnerships and slotting and all of that stuff.
I could just focus on product and branding. I'll take that deal any day of the week as a creator. So as brands maybe put that on the table for these creators versus letting them start competitive products.
Paul Archer [00:28:10]:
So that's really interesting because I've never thought about it like that. I've always thought about it. Oh, founder, brand, product. But actually you're saying brand products that could be aligned to different people is actually a way forward for these larger brands that don't necessarily have the ability to take on a later co founder like some people do in different brands.
Keith Bendes [00:28:31]:
And Alex Cooper is one of the biggest names in the world. But you could see a small challenger brand in any product category. I would say, hey, find a way this year from a manufacturing logistics perspective to have a rotating product and every three to six months do a creator partnership, see if it pops. If it doesn't, do a different one in the six months and just have like a line in the manufacturing that's rotating. Could be cereal, it could be watches, could be anything, right? But do a little customization, do creator partnerships and you're going to find one. First of all, all of them will help from a, from a culture and a marketing perspective just like the Cheez its one. But some of them will actually take off and become valuable, profitable product lines for you.
Paul Archer [00:29:12]:
Who have you seen do that? Well, with regards to someone who's maybe up and coming, that weren't big when they started doing that, but they managed to make bets because I think there's a bit of a trend now where brands are like trying to spot the next, the next Alex Earl or something and they'd be like, oh we got a partnership with them first like and then some sort of long term relationship. Have you seen that work?
Keith Bendes [00:29:35]:
I've seen a lot of trend based products come up. If you think about the serial category, they chased a few of the big social trends. So I think it's been more trend than people and it's starting to turn toward people trend being like the TikTok made me buy type of trends. A lot of brands will then quickly hop in that and launch a product that is of that nature. You've seen a lot of limited release ones that are more about marketing stunts than long term product collabs. Obviously like the mustard thing that Kraft Heinz did. There's been a lot of those which are really, really smart. They hop on it quickly.
They have a limited number of items that they manufacture. I think we're just starting to enter the era of real product innovation and actual releases that are, that are for scale kind of like the Alex Cooper but on, on a much more micro level look at Elf. Elf cosmetics is a really good example where some of the things they've done with the liquid death marketing campaign. They did a Chipotle one a few years ago where it was Chipotle colours in a palette. But again these weren't long term releases. These were very short marketing stunts but they took off. They sell out every single time. So I think we're just going to see more and more of that.
Paul Archer [00:30:48]:
That's just, just good marketing. I think that's the kind of thing it's really interesting. It used to be all right, someone else is going to do the campaign. Used to be you'd get a very expensive creative agencies to do these things and then you would then who would come to you and with some perfect ad spot that you would put the perfect time and then it's then evolved and suddenly it's decentralised. Everyone else is doing it but now it's kind of moving back in again where you have a little bit of creative control but you're utilising the creators, the influencers, the kols as a means for your creativity and then product then adds this other addition of more creativity in there. It's not just about having a pretty advert, it's about a whole, whole campaign packaged up at once.
Keith Bendes [00:31:28]:
Exactly. It's the Duncan D'Amelio kind of, I feel like they started this. D'Amelio had organic love for Duncan. They made a drink that was specifically hers. You could order it off the menu. But like everything that might not be a skew or a product that lasts eternally for the brand. You might just run through these things in 6 month or 12 month rings. But to have something that is a combination of high sales impact and high marketing impact historically was very rare, very rare.
To be able to now do things that have both in immediacy, massive cultural like impact and awareness and selling out of that product, no matter how much you produce of it in a short ring, that, that's magic. That's pretty, it's pretty insane.
Paul Archer [00:32:10]:
That is. And like the ability to attribute it, it's one of the biggest problems. Everyone's oh, how much are you worth? Like you're those TV spots, you said it's still spending the most money on tv. Is that actually driving their sales? Like actually within this, it's just like, okay, you think you're so great, you can actually sell a bunch of chocolate bars, Let me make a little custom chocolate bar with your name on it and we'll see how many you sell and you get whatever the cut is off back of it. It does make for a more of a performance led partnership which is actually what brands want to do. They don't want to have to take all the risk for something good. And many of them do fall flat.
Keith Bendes [00:32:40]:
In its face 100%. The other version of that though is the media thing you were mentioning before. So if I do a partnership, let's say you're a creator and I pay you a certain amount to reach your audience and create content. The media kind of future future proofs that investment. So let's say you post and let's just say it flops. It doesn't really hit with your audience and I've paid you all this money and you did this one or two, three and the audience didn't really resonate or respond to it really well. I still have the usage rights to that content to bring it into a paid format. And I have post production knowledge where I could create 80 different ads from your 30, 60 second video.
You know, I could do sixes, I could start it with something differently, like I could do a lot of things with post. So what we're doing as a company is, is maximising the value in paid even after the organic period ends. And so you could make TV spots out of influencer content by just stitching it together and then stretching it to be Widescreen or doing different animations to make it widescreen. You could do OLV ads, you could do digital out of home ads, you could do display ads, you could do everything. And when you test this content, we've done so many split cell tests. When you test influencer content against brand content, I really don't know if I've ever seen brand content win. What's interesting is when you test them together from a frequenc perspective. So maybe my frequency is 6 for you as a consumer and I hit you with the brand content first and then I hit you with four different influencer ads and end with brand.
That combo actually does incredibly well too. So it's more about. It's not either or all the time. Sometimes people say, well then why does anyone do professional production if influencer always outperforms? Because that sets the tone for the brand and then the influencers the translation for the relatable of what that means in everyday life. Life. So group them together. But I, I don't think brands ever really understand this until we show them a CTV spot with influencer content of. No, no, no.
You're just thinking this 9 by 16 TikTok. Just take four of those, stitch them, stretch them like we can give you an entire TV spot that you would think would be professionally produced just as an afterthought on the influencer content. That's huge.
Paul Archer [00:34:55]:
I mean like that idea of it. You know, we've always been told since we did marketing or business in high school that there's a marketing mix and it's all about a mix. And still to this day it turns out, yeah, it is. There's no one thing that's going to get you. It's going to be all of those things. You've got to just be up to date. And actually media is a great way of getting leverage, but it's better when you're using more modern content because people don't want that shiny produced actor which, you know, because I think, I think it's this desire that we all have now is for authenticity and like we want something to be real and just by the definition an actor is lying because of their job. You know, and a lot of, don't get me wrong, like the vast majority of influencer marketing is a bit crap.
You know, it go, you know, particularly the long tail people are going through a marketplace where they can search a database to find people who I can pay to pretend to like my brand that they've never heard of for the right rate. Like that's how it's done badly. But when it's done well, that authenticity of passion, people know it, they can sniff it out. Or even if it's a CGC or even UGC that's been repurposed on it, it's that realness that we. That we all kind of crave. I think in particular with, you know, trust. Edelman's trust barometer, which is plummeting, continues to plummet. There's this sort of something in there with people sniffing that out.
Paul Archer [00:36:13]:
And I think that's one of the main reasons why this has become such a powerful channel and form of content.
Keith Bendes [00:36:17]:
I think it's funny that even TV commercials I watch now, you know, when McDonald's released some of their new sauces, that was one where they leave, leave the icons on the screen, they frame it in a phone, they leave the, like, TikTok style likes and comments and shares and saves, because they want you in the first one to three seconds to know this is someone on social who is talking about this. This is real, right? This is. This is true passion and love. You could trust it because it's in a phone and it was said by somebody on TikTok kind of thing and it's. And you're seeing more and more of that even in tv. How do I make it intentionally look like it's social content? From just people who love this brand.
Paul Archer [00:36:55]:
And this product and actually there's. There's some real brand recognition because actually people love social. People love Instagram, they used to love Facebook, now only auntie loves Facebook. But. And people love. Love TikTok now and because it's got this dopamine thing, right? So you see the logo. Oh, cool. I can watch some funny stuff or whatever that your content niche that the algorithm has found that you.
You like, even though you hate the fact that you like it, right? So it's this amazing sort of, like, association that you get when your brain gets fired up just by seeing that form of content, that logo, those sort of symbolisms that takes you on a different direction.
Keith Bendes [00:37:30]:
Social content is no longer a social construct and the brands who understand that are realising this content should go everywhere. That raw, relatable, authentic content should be everywhere. Just because it's social first doesn't mean it's only for social.
Paul Archer [00:37:46]:
What happens if it goes. What happens if TikTok gets banned? What's your. What's your thoughts on that?
Keith Bendes [00:37:50]:
Oh, my God. I've been wrong in every prediction of this journey. So I feel like I'm hesitant to give you another prediction. I don't think it's going anywhere is my honest prediction. I think it's here to stay. My personal prediction is there's going to be a quote unquote deal. It's going to be a little bit of a fake deal just to save face and keep it going. But let's say, let's play our game like let's say it goes away.
I just think the traffic's gonna move to reels and shorts. I do now. I went on both the day, the day TikTok went dark and spent a decent amount of time on both because I was very curious. And I will say, oh my God, the algorithm of TikTok is so damn good, so good, so much better than the other ones. But they're good enough where I think they're gonna just eat all the traffic. So meta and YouTube will win big. Snap will win too. But I don't, I don't think people are just gonna stop, stop consuming short form video.
Paul Archer [00:38:41]:
Yeah, I would back that last thing. Yeah, I think it might go. I'm like the only one that I know, by the way, who has this Binyamin. That'd be fine. I actually don't think any of the brands I work with or speak to are ready. There's no plan B. So there's this kind of like, it's like hoping that it's not going to get banned and then, yes, it will all move to reels and shorts. I totally back that.
But I don't think there's a coherent strategy to what happens when it doesn't, which I don't know if you. Do you advise any brands on what to do if it does go south.
Keith Bendes [00:39:12]:
So we have a whole plan in terms of like literally what do you do from a contracting perspective with creators, from a media perspective. And a lot of that is cross posting if they're already contracted, obviously pushing all media to the other platforms having out clauses if it goes, if it bans before content is produced. So I think there's legally and contractually, what do you do to protect yourself and then how do you gear up for it in terms of content strategy? And are you doing anything completely different on these other platforms? I personally believe a lot of the platforms are way more similar from a short form perspective than people think.
The whole idea that like, oh no, you have to create like four TikTok, it's such a different experience than reels and that's such a different experience than shorts, I think that's a massive load of crap. Like I think you could be cross posting everything right now and having massive success. I don't think the user behaviour is so incredibly different. So you know, pre reels and pre shorts. Of course, like YouTube, long form is totally different, story is an infeed is totally different.
But short form, I don't believe that TikTok needed such a different strategy and short form video than other short form platforms.
Paul Archer [00:40:16]:
But even so, as you said earlier, I mean like this, this, this podcast, this, this YouTube video is probably going to get more hits chopped up into lots of different pieces and then put onto those platforms than it is on the original form that it was actually produced. And so, but again, another great example of what you're saying of actually it's all about reusing and blending into different areas there. How about like the affiliate side of things? Because I mean TikTok shots just been an amazing channel in terms of turning it on in a way that meta never managed at all. I'd be curious to know what your experience has been in some of the less sexy brands like beauty. Right? Okay. These up and coming TikTok only brands do phenomenal jobs. Live shopping. They're able to just build that authentic narrative through TikTok through founders doing lives.
We've had a bunch of them on the podcast and I do think that's a fantastic area, but that's kind of niche, I think in many ways relative to the grand scheme of marketing budgets that are out there. Like how are you seeing that working for some of the larger organisations or some of the less sexy organisations?
Keith Bendes [00:41:14]:
Obviously product dependent. Right? If you're buying a three to five dollar grocery product, you have to ask yourself, will anyone really buy this, you know, as an affiliate purchase? And would any creator even want to take a commission based structure because they'll make no money. So obviously first step is like, is my product something people would actually buy on social directly? Because that's the only way the creator is going to make money if they accept an affiliate deal. My biggest advice this, don't muddy the water. If you want to do affiliate, go try to do affiliate and set something up and build a process and procedure and turn on the tap and see how many pennies are dripping out of that tap. And for a lot of brands it will be less than they imagined. But listen, if you could automate the process, why would you not do it and let those pennies keep trickling in? It's just different than an influencer or CGC strategy. So brands who are like, hey, all of our influencers why don't we just give them an affiliate link and like let them try it, right? Because now you're anchoring to something completely different in incentive, in everything, right? And you're going to set yourself up to fail to do it that way.
So if you want to do, if you want to influence end consumers through leading voices, have that be a strategy. If you want to generate content that you've basically designed for owned and paid, go execute that strategy. If you want to just drive as many sales as possible, go execute an affiliate strategy. I would 100% try to do an affiliate strategy if I was any brand on the planet. But I would do it in a way that actually lets me know, is this scalable with very low effort when I turn that tap on. Because keep in mind a lot of brands who ask me for affiliate today, once you tell them you have no control over the posting cadence structure and you have no review over the content itself, they're like, what do you mean I have to review every piece of content? Well then affiliate is not for you. So I just think you have to be very clear of what these things are and make conscious decisions about each. Because affiliate is about lowering all external costs.
Because you're trying to do this on conversion, so your own resources are a cost. I'm sorry to tell you, as a brand, but when you assign people, that is cost. So just think about how to set it up most efficiently to test if that can really drive revenue.
Paul Archer [00:43:20]:
I mean, thinking about that. But most of these brands do affiliates anyway and they can't control it. So it's going out through various different media publishers and they're getting links and they're writing old school blogs, remember those? And you know, they're following those links for selling, you know, this is the top 10, you know, running shoes this fall. And you know, the number one just happens to be the one that's got the highest commission on the affiliate link, weirdly. So how that works. So this stuff, they do it already, they can't control it. Some of the fashion brands have, you know, the, the, the LTKs, the shop mys, things like that, where they can't control that, but then they need to control if it's their affiliate link. This is where I'm really puzzled about why there is this kind of perception that they are in control of what people say about them on the Internet, that it's already happening.
You may as well lean into it and monetize it and track it.
Keith Bendes [00:44:05]:
A lot of it comes down to, you know, very Large corporations, legal teams and their comfortability, knowing payment will be issued in some form to this person and everything that the FTC and everyone is doing around content, like am I comfortable knowing I may have paid that person through affiliate commissions or fixed fees? Obviously fixed is a different world that really does have a lot of requirements associated with it it. But with affiliates, some are just very conservative and they don't. They need control over what content is being said. To your point though, a lot of the smaller brands, challenger brands, beauty, fashion, they understand inherently like this is just how the game works and you need to do this in order to have success and to scale. So I think a lot of brands will get there with affiliate. I just still think most brands are going to think it does more for them in revenue that it actually does. Because social and influencers still not an immediate attribution channel for the vast majority of categories.
Paul Archer [00:44:58]:
It seems that there's this opportunity with kind of creator affiliates different to B2B affiliates of publishers and their individuals. And so there's a different strategy that you'll have for it. But what are your thoughts on influencer campaigns also utilising attribution methods? So affiliate link or use my code PAUL2020 whatever it is for that discount, get a free 10 discount code, whatever the type is, we've seen it a million times. Do you think that if you're looking because obviously there'll be the difference between the CGC side and more of the influencer side, do you think that you should not try and attribute because actually you're trying to build brand and reputation and content, or do you think it's always worth having a little bit of an attribution channel as well?
Keith Bendes [00:45:39]:
I don't think you should attribute in links is my answer to that. So I think you should build in measurement practises to understand impact on ROI for all influencer content, all CGC content. And that could happen through MMM models, that could happen through sales of studies. There's a lot of ways that could happen. I obviously think from a media perspective you should be buying mid lower funnel media using creator content and see how efficient that is compared to your brand content. Do I think you should be giving Influential Voices affiliate links to use if the goal of the campaign is not to drive lower funnel sales? Sales? Absolutely not. Because if I gave that link to that influencer and I told them my goal is lower funnel sales, the entire content would be about driving that. If I told them it's not about that, it's about equity and brand Then the entire content should be about that.
And anytime you just throw something in that the content's not about, you've just doomed the whole thing to fail. So I post this meme that is if you watch the Beckham documentary, I don't know if you did great documentary, but the meme of. Of him and her in the room where she's talking about the car and he says, what is it really? But it's overlaid as what's your goal of this campaign? And she says, awareness. He goes, really, what is it? She says, awareness. He goes, really, what is it? And she says sales. And he says, thank you. Like that. It's the honest analysis of what is a brand are you trying to do.
And if you truly are just trying to drive sales, then let us go drive sales for you. Let us find creators who are going to speak to lower funnel things that get people to buy. And if you want to drive equity, let us drive equity. If you want to measure everything in mmm regardless, just so you could see impact on roas, I very much believe in that. But let's not pretend that upper funnel content is going to drive good lower funnel performance. It won't because that wasn't the intention of the content. Especially on platforms that don't have embedded purchasing capability. TikTok Shop is one thing.
You could literally buy it right there. But what are you going to go to the bio of the person or click on the copy and click the link? Like, come on, let's be realistic. So. So I think there are ways to measure full funnel performance in every campaign without it being about a creator pushing product or including links in their content.
Paul Archer [00:47:48]:
I think that comes back to the. What I'm hearing here is this is again still part of the mix. The same thing is actually, if you want, I think the level of sophistication now and the way that people work with creators, they work with advocates, they work with affiliates, they work with mega influencers and the macro scar they do with the Net nanis. You don't just do one anymore. You have to be doing that full pyramid from the tiny, the small number of people at the top to the large number of advocates that are in the nano nano kind of category. And actually the majority of those are your affiliate kind of channels. They're not going to be your dream content creators, but you fewer in your cgc. That's cool too.
And you've got some that you really want to be creating content, that's cool too. But don't mix, muddle it up you know, you need to be doing it all at once as part of one singular strategy around building the brand. Do you agree with that?
Keith Bendes [00:48:37]:
Oh, hey man. We have a visual that is a pyramid of influence. We show where the bottom of the pyramid is affiliate, then it's gifting and pr, then it's cgc, then it's influencer, then it's ambassador and celebrity. Like that pyramid. I totally agree. You should be doing all at once. Everything in life comes down to what is my goal, how much time do I have to achieve my goal and what is my budget to achieve my goal. And when you know those three things, you could then make the difficult decision to say, you know what, what? We do not have the money for paid influencer, so given this goal, here's what we should do.
Or you know what we don't have the money to do. Four of them. Here are the two that are going to matter based on the time we have to activate the goal. Right. A lot of people go, why do you organically build an audience and a culture and a community? That takes a lot of time. Most brands, they have to hit a campaign window and drive significant growth. They don't have a year or two to hope they've done effective culture building job. Like everything is about how much time you have.
So we actually launched something called creator intelligence a couple weeks ago, which is this ranking system of creators that you could wait as a brand. So in our platform you could say, you know, there's view through rate, there's impressions, there's roas, there's quality of content, there's ease of partnership. I could weight these things differently for my brand of what matters to me. And then it will reset the rankings of how creators perform based on what is most important to my brand. No two brands are alike. Everyone needs to be realistic about their goals and you can achieve them very well if you design for that outcome. When you try to do it all with every creator, with every campaign, those are the ones you're saying are the, the cringe partnerships and the long tail of Influencer.
Paul Archer [00:50:11]:
Yeah, exactly. And it's so, so easy to do well. And that's the other thing is like brands are like, well, who can we, like who can we get to do this? We've only, you know, they've got a million customers and it's just like, well, how many of those guys are creating content online? Oh, it's like probably one in four, one in three in many cases. Like, like, why have you not tapped into those? They already are authentic. Fans of the fat of the brand, which means that the content that they create is going to be authentic and real and trusted and also converts really well, doesn't it? Because it's real and people want to buy from people who are actual customers. It's just like. It's some basic stuff, but I do think that's starting to come out in the wash a bit now. People are aware that the level of sophistication of what true advocacy is, you know, how you engaging with your customers and your fans and actually utilising that, rather than a kind of a paid for, like, hey, use this product.
Like it's not going to. It's just not the right way for it. What else do you see? What do brands get wrong about building brand advocacy?
Keith Bendes [00:51:06]:
I think it's almost weird for me to. I like, think about of who is getting it right and what are they doing to get it right. I think our job as brands is to build a culture and a community worth joining, like to build campaigns and to build products and to build stories that people want to join. Right. If you could say, hey, I'll fly you to the super bowl tomorrow and you could create super bowl content or Coachella, wherever. It's amazing how low their rate is after that for content, because you're bringing them to something awesome. There's micro versions of that for every brand. Like, what are you creating that people want to join and want to be a part of? What creators do better than anyone else is they design for earned.
That is why they're so good at what they do. If every brand thinks in that lens, design for earned, like, what is. What are people going to want to be a part of where they might even void their rate because they're so excited about the stuff we're doing, the causes we're supporting, the products we're releasing, the experiences we're activating that will authentically build culture. I think your question is, what are they doing wrong? They're just not making that effort. They're just thinking, I'll pay my way and buy my way into relevance. They're not actually thinking about how do I create something people would almost want to do for free because they're so excited about it.
Paul Archer [00:52:18]:
Amen to that. I mean, that sounds like the Marketing 101. There's these easy, cheap hacks that we can do to buy a big ad spot and TV and get the right agency to do a pretty advert. Or you can do the work and really understand your customers, speak to them, understand where they Live what they like, who they're into, who they follow, and build a remarkable experience that makes them want to remark upon it and literally tell everyone that they know about your brand. And that's like brand building 101.
Keith Bendes [00:52:46]:
And, you know, who knows that better than anyone? Influencers. Go ask them, go talk to them. You don't just have to call them when you're. When you want content. Like, they know their audience is better than anybody, ask them the question.
Paul Archer [00:52:57]:
Exactly. I mean, they're so good at it because they became influential because they built an audience. An audience is a community around that one individual, you know, and I think it's always, you know, that, that influencer term, often you would think, oh, it's a fashionista or whatever, but it's just as much, it's an athlete, it's just as much, it's a podcaster. It's just a month. All these different categories of people who are just creating content for people to consume. People who are authentic trusted nodes could be authentic trusted nodes telling your brand story. It's like, how do you, how do you tap into that? And. And yeah, so much.
So much space for this to go to. Keith, this has been amazing. Really enjoyed it. Let's definitely do a part two very soon, but in the meantime, where can people find you and learn more about you guys?
Keith Bendes [00:53:37]:
You can find me. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. That's my primary channel. So you can find me there. You can find Linqia. Linqia.com we're all over the country, the world educating can south byway. We're everywhere. So if you see Linqia people, hopefully we've become trusted voices as well in the influencer economy.
Paul Archer [00:53:56]:
Amazing. Thank you.
Keith Bendes [00:53:58]:
Thanks so much.
Paul Archer [00:54:01]:
That was another episode of Building Brand Advocacy, 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 Duel for sponsoring. To find out more, go to ww.duel tech. That's D U E L T E C H. And on behalf of the team here at Building Brand Advocacy, thanks for listening.
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