Today in Digital Marketing - How Popular Pays' SafeCollab Tool Protects Brands

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

Tod speaks with Corbett Drummey, co-founder of the influencer marketing platform Popular Pays about the clever new brand safety system they’ve built into their site. In this paid partnership, they chat about how to keep your brand safe, without missing out on the influencer marketing trend.If you want to check their platform out while you're listening, just go to PopularPays.com/podcast.📰 Get our free daily newsletter🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • Cancel.MORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🌟 Rate and Review Us🤝 Our Slack.UPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and Courses.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate producer: Steph Gunn.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Now that we are in the middle of the holiday buying season, marketers are finding ad prices high, click-throughs low, and tactics not as effective as they used to be. That's why many in our industry are turning to influencers to capture an authentic voice without breaking the bank. But the creator economy isn't without its risks. One big one being make sure you're partnering with someone that won't embarrass your brand, either by things they do for you or things they've said in the past. One influencer marketing platform has a solution in the form of a clever new brand safety system built into their site. The platform is Popular Pays. They've been on the show before. And in this paid partnership, we'll chat about how to keep your brand safe without missing out on the influencer marketing trend. If you want to check out their platform while you're listening, just go to popularpays.com slash podcast. Corbett Drummy is a co-founder of Popular Pays, and he joins me now.

Hi, Corbett. Hey, Todd. So before we get into the brand safety stuff, can we recap what Popular Pays is and how it works? Just kind of high level it for me. Absolutely. So Popular Pays is a platform where you can collaborate with creators and influencers. At a high level, it's where you can search and vet creators, work with them on projects and content, and then track how your work has gone with stats and analytics. The new feature we just released, one of the largest ones we released in a long time,

is under that bucket of vetting influencers, since we've seen that become an increasing focus of brands. So we released this tool called SafeCollab, which lets you analyze all content, including video, audio, etc., of a creator's posts even years back on networks like Instagram and TikTok. I want to get there in a second, but can we just kind of go over the broad stuff for a second here? Because I want to know sort of like the workflow. I've actually used this platform before.

We've used it for a campaign. And the workflow is actually kind of a nice, you've used AI in a nice way that sort of pulls out of the basics of what you're looking for in a brand briefing and sort of fills it all in. So just walk us through really briefly, like the process of from the point at which I as an advertiser have signed on until I get the assets from my influencer. What does that workflow look like? Yeah. So I would say it often starts with either a brief or with brands searching

through our network to find creators they want to partner with. But let's say that you have a campaign you're running for the holidays or for a New Year's campaign. You can put a brief out to our network of creators. And as you mentioned, it was one of the first areas we used AI where it really made a difference. You could put in a short description of the campaign you wanted to do and use AI to flesh out your brief to where we found that it increased the amount of, it decreased the time to complete for briefs from over a day to just like minutes. And it also really drastically bumped up the percent of brands launching briefs because it made it so much easier. But so I could put in something saying like, you know, I'm a fitness brand. I want to find influencers to promote, you know, healthy living in the new year, et cetera, et cetera,

and fill out a short blurb. It will flush that out into a brief, ask you a few questions about like what types of creators you're looking for, things like that. And you can launch this brief out to our network. There's a community of well over 150,000 opted-in creators. And the unique thing is here, the six figures of 100,000 plus creators that we have in the network are totally opted-in where we've got first-party data from them, from all the networks, so they're not scraped. They're people who are, we have a rating system, so they're very reliable. And we have tools for the analysis and vetting part. But once you put that brief out there, creators can apply to work with you, and you can select the folks you want to partner with. In the platform itself, there's also workflow for

payments, contracts, content review, shipping products, and there's integrations for that. There's a whole host of things for the actual collaboration part, which is the meats of the software and workflow that we provide. And then at the end, after you collaborate with creators, you can see stats ranging from if they did post how it did, or for example, you could boost the assets with paid spend and see analytics from that as well. Gotcha. And we did a much sort of deeper dive into popular pays a few weeks ago. Just go back in your podcast feed if you want to see that. All right. So this new brand safety system, you know, one of the issues, of course, is if you're hiring at scale, let's say you want to do, I don't know, 20 fashion influence or something.

On the one hand, you can use Popular Pays to onboard them. But going through all of their past previous TikToks to find, have they been political? Have they been, you know, troublesome from a brand safety point of view can take a lot of time. You folks have built something fairly new, new since the last time we spoke. Tell me about this new brand safety system. Yeah, it's honestly, it's honestly amazing. And I say that both, you know, I'm, yes, I'm biased, but it's probably the first thing I've seen where I would trust AI by itself way more than humans. And normally we're used to AI making like content that's a little messy or, you know, it's hallucinating things.

And here it's just so sensitive, but also smart with context that it will surface things that, you know, when I ran my own account through it, it surfaced posts I had totally forgotten about, but it knows the context of things. So it says like, oh, we've detected things, whether it's a swear word or alcohol in the shot or whatever, but it knows the context. So it can say, this is probably not a big brand risk because of the casual context, ton text, et cetera. But it's remarkable how sensitive it is for things where we started off building this because we saw our brand spending four to six hours per creator on vetting. And they were asking us for help. And we thought, hey, with all these AI tools,

they're so good at recognizing things. Maybe we can use that to scale the analysis of a creator's account. And it honestly hit home way more than I thought it would. It's pretty fantastic. It really is impressive. You know, you and I were kicking the tires of it a week or two ago, and we turned it loose on my account, on the Today in Digital account. And it did flag some stuff from me. It did say that I think it flagged it in the scams category. But to your point, it was smart enough to say, and it said this in prose,

like in sort of paragraph form, like a brief, like an assistant would if they came back after a few days of working on it. And it said, you know, the scam flag is here because he talks about and reports on scams. He's not actually running a scam. Like, I was impressed that it had that level of, I don't know, awareness. Yeah, awareness. Like it knows slang, like it caught the abbreviations AF, which I won't say how to say on this board,

but like it's, you know, it said, it also can catch things like audio in a real, not in video. So it's not just the captions. And that's the stuff that I just don't think humans could ever like capture or crawl through that much content for all these creators and do it. So it's really the, one of the primary examples of like AI taking the lead in a human reviewing the work. Um, I think a lot of our work will shift

towards that over the years, but this is the first one where if I had to pick one or the other, the best is both, but one or the other, um, this will catch things way better. Um, but like you said, one of the things we were most surprised about is how sensitive it is. And so, you know, you can filter for things that are just high severity because it will catch things way better. But like you said, one of the things we were most surprised about is how sensitive it is. And so, you know, you can filter for things that are just high severity because it will catch everything. But that's the point.

Like we live in times of, you know, it feels like high stakes for brands and they can, that's often a feedback where they're hesitant to scale their collaborations as they, you know, become a bigger company or with more people. And this way, it's not just like, oh, you know, was there a cigarette in a video a year ago?

But it's also like, you know, is this person, if they're going to a bunch of political protests or whatever, it's not, it's also about brand fit and just seeing like, maybe that's a good thing for you. Maybe that's a bad thing. Like it's not as prescriptive as saying, hey, here's the highlights. We analyzed like hundreds of hours of videos for you. Here's the highlights. You can make the decision. We're just highlighting

anything that might be notable. And then you can kind of filter down by severity too. So you filter by severity. Can you filter by topic? What about if you are a brand that sells vodka? You don't really care if people are talking about alcohol. In fact, you kind of want that, right? Yeah. You know, it's funny. Of course, the number one feed, number one issue on my account was the alcohol flag. Is that right? But it was the pandemic. It was the trying times.

But, you know, it was funny when I filtered by severity, only like two popped up. And it was the ones where the drink was so prominent. It was saying, you know, this is taking like center stage in the shot. It wasn't just a drink in the background. And so I- Oh, it can see visual. it can base it on the visual perspective as well. It's so cool. So like when I filtered my account by severity, the 120 something went down to two

and it was because it was, it said it was the center of the shot and it had the brand name clearly and it wasn't trying to, it was, uh, it didn't say that like, it can also detect if it's aggressive or not. Like I've seen where someone's taking a shot, it was, it didn't say that, like it can also detect if it's aggressive or not. Like I've seen where someone's taking a shot, it might suggest overconsumption. But you make a good point. Like maybe I'm an alcohol brand and I want to see that because I want to see who they're working with

on a day-to-day basis, like on a competitive basis. So perhaps I care more about that. But maybe I'm a brand who's like pretty relaxed. I really don't need to see, I don't care about the drinking shots. I might care about things ranging from like, hate speech to, you know, dangerous stunts or whatever. And so I want the other flags, a few things that we so this is only out in beta recently, you got one of the, you know, earliest sneak peeks of it. We have some amazing beta partners, some some large brands we work with. But one thing we've learned is

brands also have the ability to add custom flags and features. So that's something I'm excited to say will be a part of next year's, you know, our early roadmap for next year. So that brands can say like, hey, there's custom things that I care about. And so as an enterprise customer, I want to be able to track those as well.

Are you just sort of scraping the content or is this coming from like a reliable connection to the API? Great question. So number one is, you know, all the creators in our network, we are getting that direct access.

So just via API, we're getting that first party data from, you know, Instagram or TikTok. But we found that a lot of people want to scan anyone. And so we're making it possible in the very near term to actually by the time it comes out, it might be out, but we're making it possible for you to analyze anyone even if they're out of network. And the benefit is that if they're in network,

we can not only see like reels and TikToks, but we can see stories and disappearing content. And so it can analyze a full breadth. So you'll get a much more robust report if they're in the Popular Pays Network, but you can still put in like, you know, a random account, like a celebrity. And he's not like,

we have some celebrities on platform, but someone off platform, you can still get a report on that. It just won't be quite as detailed as if they were signed up. Did you say that you can also track stories, like the kind that disappear after 24 hours? Yeah, how cool is that? So when someone signs up to Popular Pays, we're constantly looking.

So stories are often part of the deliverable. And so we're looking at those. And as a part of it, we know, we're, um, kind of indexing the more data on like what people are, are posting about, et cetera. But, um, you know, stories are ephemeral. And so if they're, if we're not set to get them to the public, we wouldn't be able to analyze, you can put them to your close friends and we won't see it, et cetera. But, uh, if you set it to public, then we'd be able to see it and we analyze it before it goes down, you know, so we, we index it before it goes down. And so, um, and that's for, uh, we've been able to do that. So reaching back years, we can

still index anyone who's been on the network. Um, so anyone on network, you could look back quite far. Um, and then anyone, um, who signs up, we can start indexing it once they sign up. It is worth noting, by the way, we're definitely very conscious about like allowing, um, as a part of our roadmap creators to get this insights, they can continue to like, you know, see how they're presenting to brands and also adjust their online portfolio. Like maybe I, as a creator wants to, you know, earmark something and say, Hey, you know, actually I noticed that I don't think it jives with where I want my feed to be. I'm going to delete it and please like reanalyze it. So we'll make that

possible so that people can, can, you know, make sure they're represented the way they want to be and have like transparency into how brands see them. But I honestly think as a prediction, this is built for brands, but I honestly think a lot of creators will use it and they'll want to know how, like, it was fun just to see my old stuff and like what popped up, like some really, like some things popped up almost from humorous occasions. Like the AI was like, hey, I know this is, this is meant to be humorous,

but still worth flagging it. And those were really, like I didn't, I didn't have tech, I texted them to some friends and family members just saying like, look what it caught.

Do you remember this? Blah, blah, blah. So it was almost like a little fun sharing moment too. So for creators, I think it'll be interesting. Yeah, very much so. And, you know,

maybe political campaigns down the road will hire you folks to vet candidates. I mean, if, you know, that level of stuff. Fun fact, I can't talk about who, but we did have a major sports team say, hey, you know, the main people being drafted each year are kind of vetted by the public, but the long tail are not.

Can we use this tool to help analyze their social feeds to see if there's anything like problematic in there? Um, but again, I think it's like, there'll be access like those, anyone could do it to themselves too. So there's kind of going to be equal access there. Um, and it's only things that are public of course. And this is just all part of the popular pays platform, right? This is not like, this isn't like a separate system with its own login, with its own pricing scheme and so on? It's all part of the Popular Pays platform. It is like an additional layer you can subscribe to, but you can purchase one-off reports if you're not subscribed to Popular Pays or don't have the subscription to SafeClub. But you make a really good point. We have talked about,

should we make it a standalone SaaS app just for dedicated for this, because there's been a lot of interest in that. Uh, but for now, um, this is available. Anyone can sign up and, um, for a SAS fee, uh, get access to the platform, or you can purchase like one-off reports. It just depends on how much scale. And so it's very early. Um, we only launched this a few weeks ago. Um, and, uh, right now we've been working with these design partners and early beta brands, but we're scaling it out. And I think we're the, I'm guessing, I think we're the only people in the market that can do audio, video stories for people in network, you know, just multimedia in general across multiple networks like Instagram and TikTok. But we are expanding to other networks soon too, like YouTube's on the roadmap, stuff like that.

And one more thing I should mention is it also does a cursory Google search to make sure there's no just like headlines about the person. And that's really important because the initial customer feedback that launched this, you could have detected it on some networks, some networks not. Like maybe I posted something to Instagram, not to Twitter or whatever, but the articles you could easily spot from a mile away with a small Google search. And so we made that part of the brand analysis report is that you can get a summary of, you know, if there's any negative news coverage. So it ran it for like you and I, when we put our accounts in there and there wasn't anything, but I have run it for creators before where it said, Hey, you know, this creator was involved in, you know, XYZ scandal or things like that. And it summarizes

it in this nice little like, like you said, it's like an intern writing analysis. And yeah, so it can do a cursory Google search, like a background check. And one of the coolest things is, I think we're the only people that do this, but you can toggle people on for live tracking. So it'll also analyze new posts coming out. Yeah, it's important to capture all of that stuff. I mean, you know, we talked about stories, but I would argue that probably some of the more, I don't know, problematic content is put on stories because they know it'll disappear after 24 hours.

But if you're indexing it from the point at which someone comes into the platform, and even better still, if a brand is trying to hire someone who has already been on your platform, you've already got that content historical, which is hard to get for the ephemeral kind of content. Entry level, like a brand, a small business wants to get involved in this. How much? We'll talk about the influencers cost in a moment, but platform fees for popular

pay is at kind of the early stage. What are we looking at? So Popular Pays, the platform itself, there's a few tiers here. It's built so you can sign up and use it on a self-serve basis. You can also use it as a scaling mid-market brand or startup. And then we have enterprise. Enterprise is probably the, it's mostly campaigns in the sense that, you know, someone might sign up and say, I want, you know, 50 TikTok videos for, you know, 30 grand or something. And so there's like a definite result and a quote, and that's run like a campaign with a lot of support. But we have a fully self-serve SaaS solution. So, you know, for a few hundred bucks a month, you can try it and then scale it. And then we also

have a tier in the middle for like scaling brands where it's about $1,000 a month on average, depending on how many campaigns you're running, things like that. And it comes with a optional service layer. So we can also request our help for things like sourcing creators,

running campaigns, stuff like that. But in general, it's, you know, along the normal SaaS pricing, but we know we've had some, we have some ways where people can like test it out and try it around for free. But there's that I think the self-serve tier is really helpful for people. On the other side, SafeCollab, it's still very early days, but you we have some packages, we can buy like one off reports. And that there's also a subscription where, you know, you can have access to the reports that have already been run across the network. And then you can run new ones and also do live tracking. But we're really trying to still learn from our customers. And so we're trying to talk with people, understand their usage, give them a quote there. But long term, you can definitely see this being something where anyone could sign up, purchase a report, and it already is self-serve.

We just want to talk with people before they use it to learn more about how they're using it, honestly, since it's so new. And so those are the platform fees. What does it cost to hire an influencer? And I know that the answer is it depends, but give me a couple ballparks. So what's also interesting about this is that over the years, it's gone up. Inflation has hit this industry too. I would say as a really rough ballpark, um, it's a couple hundred dollars for static images and a couple thousand for videos. Um, one caveat would be, it definitely depends if the person's posting or just creating content. And then, um, if they're posting, it depends how big the account is and what network they're

posting on. So one, a few examples there would be, you know, a few years ago, TikTok was really cheap to produce content on. It's gotten more and more expensive just as it grew in popularity and, you know, with just kind of overall inflation over the years on creators' prices. But yeah, let's say you wanted just to produce a bunch of static images. You could hire a creator and get them for a couple hundred bucks each per image. But then if you're asking them to post it, if they're just, you know, normal micro macro or micro or small creator, they might just double that price because they're charging, you know, another couple hundred dollars or more for a post, depending on the networks they're on, et cetera. So yeah, it really, one, one cool thing is that on our platform, you can see like average rates for creators. But, but the cool thing is if on our platform, you can see like average rates for creators.

But the cool thing is if you're using it self-serve, whether you're on a self-serve one or the pro tier with still on a subscription, you can just put out a brief and creators will apply with their price and you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down and you see our transaction fees on that. So you can basically put out a brief,

creators will apply. You can say, yep, this looks good to me or not. And you can also put out a brief, creators will apply, you can say, yep, this looks good to me or not. And you can also offer suggested pricing or a fixed bid. So I could say I'm only paying, you know, $500 for this per creator, or you can suggest a price, but they can still apply with something else. So there's a lot of flexibility, you can also use it to negotiate. So if creators are applying, you can counter offer them, whether it's like adding more deliverables or offering a different price. And this is all functionality

that's built into the platform. So you don't have to like, you can keep it all organized in there. And since legal contract payments and all the negotiation stuff is built in, it's honestly really smooth. And it's used by a lot of brands. Like it's not something

where you need to go off platform to get it done and then come back on the platform. You don't need to like revert to, you know, email and spreadsheets. The platform is really full featured for you. I have to say one of my favorite parts of the platform when we were using it for our own campaign and reviewing the people because we put out a brief and then other people would, you know, the influencers and creators would sort of come onto the platform and pitch and say, you know, I'd love to be part of this, is that in addition to, and this is on the main screen, a very quick glance, in addition to seeing the number of followers, you also get their engagement rate of their channel. And that's so important when you're hiring an influencer, isn't it? Yeah. When they apply, you'll see like a preview of their content, their stats,

like engagement rate and following. And you can see things like, yeah, how many average views are they getting? Not just how many followers they have. But what's also really valued by our customers is people will apply and they'll give you a little pitch. Like they can say, you can ask them questions as qualifying questions in the brief saying, Hey, what are you going to do if you are promoting my, my products? And then they can say, they can tell your idea, like I'm going to do X, Y, and Z, and you can have those qualifying questions. That honestly whittles it down to people that are pretty qualified.

I would say also in general, though, like the platform is definitely geared towards B2C products. With B2B products such as yours, a strategy, you know, I mentioned to you and we've looked at, and I'd recommend it to other B2B companies, is hire some creators to

make content and then use that content as the basis for an ad unit that you're boosting. Because with the networks themselves, you can boost and target your B2B customers or you can target much more accurately and attach tracking links and signups, etc. So if you're a, you know, a Shopify company advertising everyone influencers are great. It's kind of a shotgun blast towards your target market. But if you have like a B2B company or niche solution, you can still work with creators for content, but then you can use that content as an ad unit and boost it to your exact target market with tracking and conversion, like better built into that ad unit. You guys are adding stuff so fast and so many new features. I feel if we were to do this in a month from now, this we would have even like three hours worth of stuff to talk about.

No, that was one of the benefits of like two over two years ago, Popular Pays was acquired by Lightrix, the makers of Facetune, PhotoLeap, VideoLeap. And that was a big part of it is, you know, you need a lot of resources to not only survive, but to compete effectively and do well in a crowded market. And we knew we needed to both move the core product forward or things like our AI safety tool is amazing and stuff like that, but also expanding into other areas. Like we released LTX Studio, a really breakthrough AI video platform that can work in concert with these other tools.

Like you can use LTX Studio to generate a quick prototype of content that you might want a creator to shoot. And so you can, as a marketer, you can use these tools to brief people or to pitch ideas. So basically we combine forces with Lightrix and the acquisition has given us a lot of resources to keep developing the product.

So we're now shipping a lot of things across the company really quickly. And that speed has been great, especially across like the AI work we've been doing. I should say we're going to be doing a tour of LTX Studios and this new Safe Collab feature on video. So stay tuned for that on our YouTube channel, which is just called Today in Digital.

Corbett, thank you so much for this. Absolutely. It was great talking with you, Todd. Thanks for having us on. Corbett Drummy is co-founder of Popular Pays. You can try Popular Pays right now by going to popularpays.com slash podcast. And while you're there, take advantage of their 20% discount just for listeners of this show. I'm Todd Mathen. Thank you for listening.

See you on Tuesday.