The Influencer Trap: How Low-Quality Creators Are Wrecking Your DTC Brand With Brad Hoos

Brad Hoos is the CEO of The Outloud Group, a global influencer marketing agency. Brad and his team have worked with hundreds of eight- and nine-figure brands, including Athletic Greens, NerdWallet, and SimpliSafe. As a former management consultant and business builder, he has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Forbes.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:26] Brad Hoos shares the problems with influencer marketing and how to rectify them
[9:10] How to select high-performing influencers
[11:28] The difference between brand voice and advocacy
[18:10] What is the “one rat study” phenomenon in influencer marketing?
[23:37] Performance metrics for influencer marketing campaigns
[34:31] Niche targeting and sales strategies
[40:13] AI’s potential in the influencer marketing space
[47:38] Brad’s perspective on AR and VR in influencer marketing
[51:10] The influencer spending threshold and case studies of successful campaigns
[59:30] Brad talks about working with celebrity influencers
[1:08:36] How having two older sisters shaped Brad’s outlook

In this episode…

When working with influencers, brands either select a single influencer to create content on one platform or choose creators who advocate for any brand without consistent loyalty. This can compromise brand integrity and consumer trust, leading companies to believe influencer marketing isn’t worth the investment. How can you capitalize on influencers who will promote and advocate for your brand?

Influencer marketing specialist Brad Hoos maintains that low-quality influencers ruin a brand’s reputation, especially when targeting consumers on social media. He says to identify creators who have invested in their audience’s interests to establish a loyal following. These influencers understand how to create content that adds value and positions your products as top performers in the market. You can also select creators by evaluating their CPA and performance metrics in specific categories.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris sits down with Brad Hoos, the CEO of The Outloud Group, to discuss influencer marketing strategies to promote your brand. Brad explains the difference between brand advocacy and voice, how to expand into new markets using adjacent targeting, and AI’s role in the influencer marketing space.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"The secret sauce of influencer is the trust that exists between creators and their audience."
"Value equals benefits minus cost. So you're paying less, but are you really getting value?"
"Historical performance is the best predictor of future performance in influencer marketing."
"AI is going to help creators pour gasoline on the fire in terms of what they can do."
"To me, the do-say ratio is about respecting the people you interact with, and most importantly, sometimes it's about respecting yourself."

Action Steps

Analyze an influencer's historical performance before partnering to ensure credibility and trustworthiness: Reliable data on past campaigns can predict effectiveness and align with brands seeking authentic representation.
Embrace the concept of brand adjacencies in your influencer marketing to reach broader, untapped audiences: By targeting related but unconventional sectors, brands open themselves to new markets.
Invest in established creators with proven engagement and trust among their audience, even at higher costs: High CPM can signal a devout following, often translating into better campaign results as shown through campaign data.
Leverage AI and technology to test and refine influencer marketing strategies dynamically: AI can offer a scalable way to identify successful content approaches, hone messaging, and predict audience reactions.
Maintain a high do-say ratio in commitments both to self and professional entities to foster trust and reliability: Consistently fulfilling promises reinforces self-trust and builds a reputation for reliability in professional relationships.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00

Music. Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is Brad Hoos. Brad is the CEO of The Outloud Group, which is a leading influencer marketing agency. As a proven marketing innovator. Brad and his team at Outloud have worked with hundreds of eight and nine figure brands, including Athletic Greens, Policy Genius, SimpliSafe Fiverr, Chomps, Whirlpool, Keeps, Acorns, NerdWallet, DJI, and many more I'd probably run out of I kept trying to go with that. A former management consultant and active business builder, Bradley, has been featured for his work in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Cheddar, Forbes and Fox News, somebody that I've worked with now for years that I'm excited to finally have on the podcast. Brad, welcome to the show.

Brad Hoos 1:07

Well, it's great to be here. Really appreciate you having me. Wow, that introduction makes me sound way fancier than I really am, but I'm great. I'm really glad to be here.

William Harris 1:15

Yeah. So today, we're going to be talking about the influencer trap, how low quality creators are, wrecking your D2C brand, and a lot more about influencer marketing. He's gonna level us up here. But before I do that, I wanted to go back a little bit in time to who introduced us first. And I was thinking about this, and you messaged me, and we're just kind of like, I'm pretty sure we agreed it was Tracey Wallace, way back when she was the head of content at Bigcommerce. So Tracey, thank you very much for making this intro.

Brad Hoos 1:43

Yeah, Tracey rocks, definitely a super connector. So really appreciate her. I totally agree.

William Harris 1:48

Um, we're gonna announce the sponsor, and then we'll dig into the good stuff here. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we felt 13 of our customers get acquired with one that sold for nearly 800,000,001 that I powed. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com, onto the good stuff. Again, the influencer trap, how low quality creators are wrecking your D2C brand. What's the problem right now with influencer marketing, and why low quality influencers are kind of ruining things.

Brad Hoos 2:26

It's really interesting. It's a really in depth question here. So what's the problem with influencer marketing, right? So I think the biggest, the biggest issue that I see starting hit the industry is creators willing to advocate for almost any brand that's that's out there, and generally, the creators are willing to advocate for most any brand out there. Generally are not the creators that brands are having advocate for them on a second or a third or a fourth time. But you know, a lot of brands will look at creator A and B and say, Hey, creator a has similar demographics to creator B, and their price is way lower. So therefore, by, you know, putting my money towards creator a, I'm actually getting a deal, right. It's like, well, you're paying less. We can agree on that piece, but you know, value equals benefits minus cost. And unfortunately, I think, you know, the those the same creators who are willing to, you know, show for anything our audience might like, their content might be funny or entertaining, but this doesn't necessarily mean that there's trust there. And the ultimate, the secret sauce of influencer is a trust that exists between creators and their audience. So it really comes down to, like, you know, difference between value and cost a lot of times. And I feel like it's easy to get sucked into a pretty metric that looks good on a spreadsheet, which is a lower cost, you know, per view or per 1000 views now, but that doesn't translate into results, and we're seeing that happen, you know, more so than I'd like these days.

William Harris 4:09

Yeah, I think it was something that you had said on LinkedIn that I liked, which talked about how you're not as much concerned about AI. We'll talk about that a little bit later, because I have some thoughts and things that I want to ask you about there. But you talked about how you're more concerned with creators saying, Yes, almost every brand deal, including competing products. And so it's like, to your point, it's like, well, there's that even erodes the trust of the Creator more and more. So people who are watching their stuff, they're like, Okay, well, you said this about this one. This about the completely, you know, opposite competitor, and this about the opposite competitor. And so it's like, do you actually have a point of view on this at all, or is this just you collecting money?

Brad Hoos 4:46

Right, exactly? And I mean, look, consumers are smart. They recognize that. And if you're advocating for one brand today and another the next, like it just it. Just. It erodes any sort of credibility that you would have had for future partners, and it also just stops the effectiveness of that campaign. And look, most creators get this, like most creators don't want to do that. Most, most brands have the expectation of creators not doing it, but you know, they're there, and this is the minority of creators that are doing this, I want to be be clear, but it's, it's increasing, you know, in terms of the number of people who are willing to just take a deal, to grab, grab the bag, and in the near term, and it's like, Ah, you can do that. I'm not that's everyone can make their own choice. But that's short term thinking. You know that that's eating the influencer industry a little bit these days.

William Harris 5:42

Yeah, that reminds me of grabbing the bag I think I saw recently. You know, this happens in the crypto space a lot, where people get rugged, right, where it's like, you get into something people, people pull the rug up from under you. And, you know, the coins gone, and I saw the hot tub girl launched a crypto coin, or something like that. And, you know, it was like, I don't even remember, hours or something later, it was, it was gone, like all the liquidity that people put into it was gone, and rug pulled out from under them. And to your point, it's like, we do see, let's just say people, in general, right now trying to say, How's, how can I make a quick buck? How can I, can I just go and take this, this deal, without thinking about whether or not it has any benefit to their own brand or the brand that they're representing in that situation. So what's the solution? We've talked a little bit about the problem here. What? What are, what do we need to do? To do better?

Brad Hoos 6:33

Yeah, well, I think, I think, you know, there's, there's multiple answers to that, right? So from a creator side, I think it's trying to look at, you know, and it's easy to say when you're not the person trying to pay your your rent and try to make ends ends meet any any given month. So I recognize that, hey, you know, it sounds good in theory, but in practice, it can be hard for creators when this is their this is their income. But I think it's trying to take a look at the long term and really just ask the question like, hey, is this going to add value to my audience? And if the answer is no, even if you're going to make, you know, a few $1,000 on it, the right move is to not take that partnership, if it's if it's a product that you feel good about and you think adds value to the life of your audience, then by all means, you know, take the partnership. Get Paid. We want creators to get paid and be really successful. So I think I just giving it a little extra pause and a little extra thought, and being extra discerning, from a creator perspective, makes makes a ton of sense. And from a from a brand perspective, you know, I think the solution is to really work to identify creators who have invested in their audience and who are discerning and who have been effective with brands in the in the past, and by the way, who are going to cost more, right? Nine times out of nine times out of 10. And be willing to engage with creators who are really going to move the needle, because they care about their endorsement, right? They care. It means something when they say, Hey, I'm proud that this video is sponsored by Brand X, brand y, brand Z, and you could, you can see that in the results, right? I mean, we can get into this later, I'm sure. But like, you know, we have all sorts of data on the creators who've been effective, but in the short version, it's Hey, who are the creators where their audience really cares what they have to say, because they're very careful about what they say to their their audience doesn't mean stylistically, their reserves or like their style could be anything, but they need to, you know, really care about what their audience how their audience is going to get value from, from from what they're sharing, from a brand perspective.

William Harris 8:57

So how do you find those people? How do you find somebody that actually cares. You know, you're looking beyond engagement metrics. You're looking beyond, you know, is this just like a manual process? Like, what does this look like?

Brad Hoos 9:10

Yeah. So, I mean, look, we're an influencer agency, so we go, we go really deep into data, and I'll talk about that in a second. But if you're, if you're, you know, trying to be as small and smart, to me, as scrappy and efficient as humanly possible. The the cheat code is look for creators who have brands that have renewed with them a number of times, right? Because that's, that's a pretty solid proxy that this creator is moving the needle and the audience has, they have the trust of their audience, and that's, that's a massive start, you know, for for us as an influencer agency, I mean, we've been around for a very long time, or 17 years in the space, and we have a tremendous amount of data. And so we go really deep on the. In terms of being able to identify who are the creators that have historical track record of drafting, directing traffic to a website and driving conversions. And for creators, we we can see how they've done historically with a number of brands. So we have the data that shows, oh, this creator has consistently been in the 85th and the 90th percentile of all creators for for brands in the past. And we don't get that from an API. We don't know from like, from an Instagram or Facebook or meta or Tiktok or YouTube. No, we get that information just from working with brands over time and having that data. So we don't, you know, we use that data. We leverage that data in a very sophisticated way. But that gives us a massive advantage when we're trying to identify, you know, creators should be a good fit. So, big believer that, you know, historical performance is the best predictor of future performance. And so we can see that from, from a from a data perspective, when trying to identify those creators who will be, who will be best for a brand,

William Harris 11:09

yeah, something you talked about before when we chatted is the difference between brand voice versus brand advocacy. And I saw you said on on LinkedIn, creators are great brand advocates and crap the extensions of brand voice like I think this feels intuitive, but break this down for me to make sure that I understand

Brad Hoos 11:28

it well. It is intuitive when you pause to think about it. But I tell you what, when, if you're, if you're a brand, and you, you spent 30 hours a week for the last two years working to figure out your brand. And you know the Pentameter with which you speak matters. You know the verbiage. You know what phrases you can use. Like you can't say free, you know, but you can say no cost, or whatever, whatever the case may may be. Hey, it is so hard to transition from brand voice to brand advocate, because it's like, oh, what like, Are there any constraints? Someone asked that, like, your intuition is going to be immediately to go and to start sharing all the brand voice stuff. But the reality is, you need to throw all that shit out the window, right? So you're successful when the Creator can talk in whatever way they want. So my favorite analogy on this is like, hey, the way I engage with my sisters and my mother like my family from growing up is very different than the way I engage with my wife's family now. And maybe I shouldn't say very different, but it's different, right? It's like we just have different norms and approaches. And if, if I were to behave in the exact same way, you know, at the dinner table of both books, it would just kind of be a little bit off. And so, even if you're trying to be light touch, when a brand is telling a creator, like, Hey, here's here's what we really need you to do, from a brand voice perspective, it it just feels off to the audience. And like, you know, I don't know the exact stats, maybe you do. Maybe you know these William, but it's like a 6% of communication is non verbal, whatever the exact you know percentage is. So it's like, you creator, can even say all the right things, but if they're not really being like truly themselves, people notice it, and you're going to be less effective. So yeah, I mean, look, you'll always be a creator. Will be, you know, a second rate brand voice, right? That just inherently if you're trying to copy and build off of that. But, I mean, they're awesome in terms of being able to be themselves, and they have an audience who kit in a world of ad blockers where we hate to be sold. Creators have an audience who really, really wants their recommendation, so let them do the recommendation in a way that they feel fits to their audience. And you're going to see good results from that, but it's just tough to give that mentality, you know, because you spend so much time building up the brand voice,

William Harris 14:06

we see a difference, right? Like, I'm thinking about even the way that I speak right now. So I grew up in Ohio. Now I live in Minnesota. When I lived in Ohio, the way that I would speak is, you know, I'm from Canton, Ohio, I would just say Canton. We didn't say Canton. We didn't pronounce the T, right? If I go back, though, but in Minnesota, we would say Canton, Ohio, right? That's how we speak. If I go back to see my brothers or something back in Ohio, and I start calling it Canton, they're gonna be like, What is wrong with you, right? Like, who are you? You're not actually my brother. If I start saying, you know, what's that all about, you know, and start having a little bit of Minnesota accent comes out, and they actually do hear it. They feel like I have a Minnesota accent now. But the funny part about that is being yourself to your point. It's like, if you give too many restrictions to that Ambassador, if you would the influencer, if it even just slightly sounds off, they pronounce their o a little bit too long. All of a sudden their audience, who's used to them, behaving, acting, speaking a certain way, is completely thrown off, and they can't even focus on your product as much as they're focusing on what's wrong with this, that smells fishy, that's not normal. Something's different here, and I think that's a good reminder that we need to give them that free space. The other thing that I like about this is, I'm thinking about I've got the air pod pros on right, and it looks like you've got something like that on as well. If it's not those exact ones. By allowing the influencers to share the way that they would use the product, or the way that they would speak about the product, you can learn so much the AirPod pros being an example. I don't know if this is how it happened. Maybe they already thought this from the very time that they created it, but they just launched with these being able to be hearing aids and and maybe that was their plan all along, right? But, like, maybe also, there's a part of me that thinks that people were just like, oh, yeah, I use them as, like, you know, these hearing aids for people, or whatever. It's like, oh, you know, my grandma uses it as hearing aids. And so it's like, at some point in time, they go, hey, you know what? We actually should just make this official. What do we need to do that make those officially count as hearing aids, or whatever that might be. So you can learn about the product. You can learn about how people are speaking about it, using it, it's a better way overall. Yeah, no, I love that.

Brad Hoos 16:17

I mean, that's that's fascinating. I wasn't familiar with that the example, but it makes all the sense in the in the world, like creators are awesome, like beta testers for for brands, because it's like, you can see something, right? And it's like, Oh yeah, that makes sense. But creators have something a higher bar to clear, which is, they need to actually understand it well enough to explain it to their audience. So I love it when a brand has a new product as well. I'm sort of building off what you're saying here, right? It's like you're talking about, like a new use case for an existing product, but also like, hey, when you are rolling out a new product and you're not sure how it's gonna land, or whatever, I mean running an influencer campaign out of the out of the gates before you really step on the gas. In figuring out, like, how you should go to market can be so amazing, because these are very smart, creative people who have an audience that are going to have to come up with their own way for how to connect with your with your brand. So it's interesting. Like I when I'm working with brands at launch, I love to be like, hey, like, do influencer first small scale, right? Like, whatever it is, maybe it's like, you know, 50 100k with, with influencers. And then, you know, revisit, really build out how you want to advocate for the new product at, at launch, do that, and then influencers can then come back in and really help to put a lot of you know, scale, scale to the to the launch. But man, they can be so good in terms of being able to identify how you want to go, to go to market, and really differentiate yourself with it, with a

William Harris 17:57

product. I love that idea. Something else you mentioned to me that I liked was the idea the difference between the portfolio view versus a one rat study. What do you mean by portfolio view versus a one rat study?

Brad Hoos 18:10

Yeah, very, very eloquent term here that I that I use, but yeah, basically a one rat study is something that's that happens all too, too often, an influencer, right? Where someone will work with one influencer and then say, oh, Instagram didn't work for us, or influencer didn't work for us, but folks are quick to test out one Creator. But the reality is, I mean some info. I mean, we have so much data, and I think that's something that's something that's really unique about us. We have all this great historical data, but at the end of the day, like there's still a massive test and learn approach to this. And what we've seen repeatedly is, if you run with 10 influencers, you're probably going to have two or three that do fantastic two or three that are that are pretty much duds, and the rest is going to be somewhere in the in the middle. And the whole, the whole idea, is like, Look, if you ran with one creator, you did a one rat study, and it's one of the two or three great performing ones. That's awesome. But guess what? Like now you've set the bar and set the expectation way too high in terms of what you should be able to get from that. And you're gonna, like, budget and plan in ways that are just not, you know, not indicative of what's gonna happen over over time. And then, of course, like, on the downside, it's obvious, like, well, this didn't work. We're not gonna keep doing it's like, well, you just thrown out an entire strong, either brand or acquisition channel, on the basis of a single creator who could have just had a piece of content that you know didn't do well for for reasons have nothing to do with you. So it's really important an influencer to make sure you're running with enough creators to really have a true test to understand, you know, if where the. Channels performing with you and learn and evolve it. So yeah, I think the one rat study is a little bit of a crass term, but hopefully is it memorable to people, because you don't want to just test with one influencer that's that's a bad approach.

William Harris 20:15

We see this in advertising all the time as well, where you know you're creating new creatives, and it could take 910, or more to beat whatever your current best performer is, but you're not going to unlock that better performance if you just test one or two or three, or if you do like you said, Maybe you got lucky, but you will see people all the time thinking about like, well, what's this little lever that I have to pull? I got to pull this lever. I gotta do this and it's like the reality is, if you're working with a really good advertising team, your campaigns are structured and set up exceptionally well. Whatever levers are gonna get pooled within the ads accounts after that point in time, it's very small incremental gains. If you're gonna make anything that's a little bit more sizable change, is going to come from unlocking some type of new creative that is significantly different or better performing than what you have now. You have more opportunity there, but it's going to take some testing. And I do see brands, you know, fatigue on this, where it's like, well, we tested this, we tested this, and it's like, okay, so two ideas like, I mean, you got to go a lot deeper into testing than than, than just two or three different things, so probably similar to the influencer side.

Brad Hoos 21:25

Yeah, it's very similar. And one of the things that I would recommend to anyone who owns a brand budget, when I say brand, I'm not trying to distinguish between brand and performance, and just saying, hey, hey, I budget for your brand is to make sure you're baking in test budgets throughout the year, right? So we do that with our with our brands within the influencer world, like maybe we have a podcast program that's that scaled and an Instagram program that scaled, but so that's great, and we're always going to be optimizing and growing and scaling those, those where it's where it's efficient to do so. But I mean, influencer world is changing all the time, right? I mean, you know, just hello clubhouse, goodbye clubhouse, right? I mean, we've all seen, you know, the vines of the world, but you know, things are, are changing. And it's like, what is, what even is Instagram? You know, you have reels, you have stories, you have static posts and carousels and videos and organic and paid and this is all just one platform. So point being is that we always recommend, you know, we're with our brand partners, like, hey, set aside every quarter of 50k to be testing a new approach within the influencer world. Like, I'm not going to sit here, you know, we record this, you know, on the on the cusp of a new year, like, I'm not going to tell you what you should be testing out in q4 right now. I'm not that arrogant to know what's going to make the most sense to do in q4 like, we can plot out, you know, q1 and maybe q2 right now, to say, here's what we should be doing for the test. But it's really important if you're a brand trying to grow and you want to be able to move quickly, to actually plan in advance, to be able to move quickly. And I think those lessons apply, probably outside of influencer as well. Like, know, you're going to have an innovation budget, whatever you decide to call it, but you got to keep pushing the envelope. You got to keep trying and testing new things.

William Harris 23:14

Yeah, yeah, I love that, and totally agree. Let's get into some of the data we talked about using the right data and analytical approach to identify creators. What, what kind of data should we be looking at when we are looking at this? I One of the things you talked to me before was CPM versus performance, and you gave me a nerd alert, which I like, because I'm a nerd. So,

Brad Hoos 23:37

yeah, yeah. All right, let's, let's dive into this. Let me. Let's tell me. I mean, for those of you watching video, I mean, you're gonna pull up, pull up a slide here, so you can even you can, you can see, here's, here's what we do from from a from looking at historical data perspective. So we again, like I mentioned a little bit earlier here in our conversation. So we've been doing this for 15 years, so we have performance data from all the different creators that we've worked with across all the different brands. And so we mentioned it, you know, the air pods a little bit earlier. So I'm obviously going to be willing to pay more, from a CPA perspective, for someone to buy a pair of Air air pods versus an ink pen, right? So we really can't say a any given CPA is good or bad, right? Like, hey, a $5 CPA sounds good on the surface, until you realize you're selling, you know, $1 ink pens. And it's actually you're you're losing money. Everyone will sell so, but what? So we don't look at things from a CPA perspective when we're able to predict the future, but what we do look at is for all the creators that we've run in the past, for for air pods and full disclosure, we did not work with Apple, but like I can see then, for all the brands we have worked with right which. Creator was the top performing creator from from a performance perspective, that's 100 percentile from a CPA perspective, and the worst performing Creator would be the zero percentile from a CPA perspective. And then, you know, on the screen here, you can see all these different colors will each each color represents different brand. And so we might have run five campaigns with a creator for a single brand, so you can see five dots in the same color. And so we have historical data that says, Oh, wow, look at this creator here. Like, mostly they're in, like, the 70th to 90th percentile in terms of how they perform from a CPA perspective. And so this gives us a tremendous, you know, degree of confidence that that creator is going to, you know, do do well here in the future for a brand, provided that, you know, we're talking about the same verticals, and the you know characteristics of the audience we're trying to target are very similar. So, you know, what we like to say is, hey, we're not going to look at bullshit engagement metrics. You know, likes, shares, comments, there's nothing wrong with looking at those, those those data points, but we're looking at as well, how is this creator done in terms of driving traffic to a website and driving sales. And what we find is whether you're trying to do a brand campaign or a performance campaign like that really matters, because their effectiveness in terms of driving traffic and sales, is really just a proxy for trust, and trust is, at the end of the day, that is the secret sauce of influencer. It's what the audience, you know, believes, from that perspective, believes about what the Creator is telling them when that's when that's high, people will, yes, buy products, and it will also change their perspectives on the brand and the industry is so forth.

William Harris 26:47

Yeah, I love seeing a chart like this, because on the ad side, we look at things similarly, where you've got your leading and legging metrics right, and that's the thing that we've talked about for, you know, generations, but, but the CPA being the Holy Grail, that's ultimately what you want. You're just like, Hey, did it actually do from a business stance, what we needed it to do? You can't always bank off of that. You have to use some of the other metrics to understand if what you're doing as well, especially, and I'd say on the ad side, where this comes into play, a lot more would be if we're running campaigns for something that's a much higher AOV product. So the lag from them actually making a purchase from the time that they start seeing the ads can be a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, right? Some of these higher AOV products, and so you have to turn on the ads and run them for potentially four weeks before you know if they're effective or not. And so you one of the things you're going to be looking at is these leading metrics, and CPM being one of them. And what's interesting is sometimes CPM is positively correlated with your CPA, and so you can or inversely, I should say, you can end up having a higher CPM but a lower CPA, and it ends up being better. So it's not always perfect, but at least within that account, you can start to understand and to your point, I think that it gives you that opportunity of saying, is this one likely to lead toward it if you've got a CPM that is too high, where the only way that it would make financial sense is you have to have a conversion rate of 50% on this in order for you to hit the CPA that you need for this product of a pen, this is not the right influencer for you. There's no amount of pens that they could sell because you're not going to get a 50% conversion rate. So let's not

Brad Hoos 28:22

even go there. You Yeah, exactly No. You're spot on. And forgive me, because I sort of did all the setup with that in terms of talking about the importance of historical data, but, but the So, what that you know, that I know we're really talking about today, is the fact that, like, CPM is not correlated, sure, with success from from an acquisition perspective. So, you know, I'm sharing this slide here. You know, for those on video, you mean, you can see, this is 1000s of data points, and this is all happens to be on YouTube. We could have done this on other platforms back probably should, should do that. It'd be fascinating to see as well. I'm very confident I'll show you the same result where, again, I share the methodology of like, hey, what's a creator performance percentile? You know, short, short version is best performer for a creator 100 percentile. Excuse me, best, you know, performing creator from a for a brand is 100 percentile. Mid is 50 percentile. And worse would be zero percentile. And you can see that you know on the y axis is CPM. And so if you thought that you know CPM was a good indicator, you should see that, you know, the lower you are on the graph, the much higher creator you know performance would be in terms of having creators drive sales. But that's not that's not true at all. It's, in fact, the correlation is crazy. It's basically exactly flat. Technically, it goes up a tiny, tiny bit, which means the more you're paying from a CPM perspective, the better the creator is likely to perform. And the reason for this is that creators are decentralized media companies, and so. If you're a creator, census graph is YouTube will stick with that, and you you do two videos a week, so you're doing eight videos a month. Well, a lot of creators will decide, I don't want all those videos to be sponsored. I'm willing to do three sponsored videos a month, because, again, they're trying to look out for your audience, so I think so they have three sponsored videos a month. Well, what happens when there's four brands that want to work with them? Well, they're going to raise their price, right? And so, and then. And then, guess what? Those four brands and someone new on it still work with them, right? Well, they're going to keep raising their price until it's not effective in general. And so a higher CPM, in a lot of ways, should give you more confidence that this creator is someone that's that's effective, which is a little counter intuitive. And you have to be careful, because certainly there's, you know, going to be folks who are going to price themselves too high relative to performance, but in general, yeah, when you're paying for for CPM, you're you're not, you know, you're generally, when you're paying higher, you're generally getting more more quality. But what we discovered here is that, hey, there's actually no correlation between, you know, performance and CPM. And that's where, like, hey, we, we did a whole bunch of analysis to say, okay, cool. CPM is not right. So what does actually give you positive correlation between value that you can have confidence in? And again, what we have, what we've seen, broken down here and this, this gets, you know, I have two degrees in engineering, so I'll try not to, you know, go too much into my Yeah, I'm a recovering engineer, so I'll try not to go too deep into this. But, but basically what we saw is that historical performance is absolutely, you know, correlated with with using creators who are strong from a CPA perspective or from a performance perspective. So on the on this, this top, you know, histogram, here you can see there's very little variance, meaning, like the highest the highest bar is in close to zero. Saying, most traders, when you say that, you look at the historical data to predict the future, they're pretty close to what the history says they would, right. And so what what we predict and what actually happens is pretty good. And then it's sort of a bell curve, and it goes it goes out, and it's pretty rare to have it be really far from the mean, which means it's pretty rare to have the Creator not perform as as projected for brand. Whereas if we look at this bottom histogram, you can see it's, it's lower and it's much wider. When you're looking at, you know, CPM, ability to predict a CPA, and and this, you start to get a lot of variation associated, yeah. So a lot of, like, in depth analysis here, trying not to go, you know, totally like, get that glaze over, over eyes. But, I mean, the topic is very important. It's like, hey, what metrics should you be looking at to try to identify creators who are strong fit? And basically this is disproven, CPM as the end all be all, and showing that creators historical performance to other brands is a much stronger driver of in terms of predicting success.

William Harris 33:23

And again, it makes sense, because it's, you know, evaluating them on how well they did at driving the actual end goal that a customer wanted. And so, to your point, you know, historical performance predicts this a lot better. I love seeing the visual difference between these two. That's, that's very interesting.

Brad Hoos 33:41

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's fun, it's fun. And like, it can't get over so overwhelming for for folks at times. But you know, at the at the end of the day, like we're we, thankfully have evolved from an industry, from saying, Yeah, this creator looks and feels right for your brand. It's like, no, it's, that's, that's just not enough these days, like you've got to be able to go go deeper in terms of identifying creators who would be good for your brand. Yeah,

William Harris 34:09

I want to talk a couple of examples here, because there's some examples that you've shared out online that I really appreciated, that are fun. One was, and I think you shared this on on LinkedIn. You told a story about selling health products to car enthusiasts, and at first I read that, I'm like, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So I gotta know, like, what's going on in the back of your mind? You're like, I've got this good idea.

Brad Hoos 34:31

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's funny. So yeah, we work. We work a lot of brands. I think this one happened to be, you know, AG, one and one of the like, you think even about any health care brand, it's really fascinating, right? Like you immediately think about the people who are really deep into into health, and that's cool, and that's works, you know, or like technology or your TVs. You think about, I gotta go to tech channels. And. Nothing wrong with that. What's interesting is people who, when you're working with influencers in a very specific vertical, that audience generally knows those topics very well. They've researched them extremely well themselves. And this would just be like another data point, and a valid data point, don't get me wrong, but it's just another data point, and what, where we like to play is in adjacencies, right, where the audience is interested in something, but they're not going to go and do a deep analysis. And if, if the Creator, they know, like and trust, makes the recommendation, like, Oh shoot. I've been wanting to do that for a while. So in this case, you think about health, right and wellness. Well, the auto community, you know, in in general, like, hey, they're they're out, they're busy, maybe they're working a full time job, and when they're home, they're working on their cars, which, you know, takes a lot of time, in addition to, you know, being, in this case, mostly male. So you know, in addition to being, being dads, whatever the case may may be. And so what's cool is, like this, this group would be the first one to say, like, Yeah, I'm not as healthy as I could or or should be for all these reasons. But sort of they know that they have a problem, so to speak. And what you know this is where we were able to lead with data saying, hey, you know, strategic thinking is like, hey, we think this could be, you know, great opportunity. But then the data says and and these are the creators within that vertical, who's, you know, who've performed really, really well. And so we basically, you know, moved away from saying, hey, let's start with health and wellness, to saying, let's look to people who know they aren't the healthiest and are always looking for solutions to sort of improve their health, but they're not the ones who are, you know, waking up in the morning and thinking about how they can be healthier. It's just like they know that they could be, could be better. So I think you're thinking a little bit differently. Can be really powerful. And we saw this with athletic greens and like they didn't got out, you know, start out saying, Hey, we should be in the automotive segment. And they that's not what you're going to see in their branding, on their homepage, or anything like that. But it's very effective for for them, you know, because there's a subset of folks who know they have an area they could be better, and then bringing in the data and analytics and execution to be able to make that come to light. Love

William Harris 37:27

Love the idea of adjacent season. It reminds me of something I didn't even remember until just now that we were talking about this. Maybe ran this back in 2018 there's a beauty product that we were working with, and beauty device and targeting females. And I want to say it was like it was definitely younger. It was like 18 to 35 is who performed the best for them. And, you know, expanded that out to all the different ranges of things and everything. But one of the hypotheses we had when we wanted to scale a little bit more was, well, who are we not targeting everybody who is already interested in this? Was back when interest targeting was definitely a much bigger thing on Facebook than it is now. Everybody was targeting if you're doing if you're in the beauty space, you everybody was targeting the same people, because they're all targeting people have an interest in these beauty things and whatever. And so we said, what if we go for people who are interested in bicycles? It was literally that ridiculous. And it was just like, what's the biggest thing? And we did, like an analysis to see, like, what's the overlap between the two audiences? There was very, very little overlap. And so part of us was like, are they actually going to want this device at all? Or, you know, this is dumb, but we ran it and performing exceptionally well. And part of that, I think, was just the idea of we were reaching a group of people that weren't normally being reached with these ads because of the way that a lot of the algorithms were working and the way people were running ads intentionally then. But to your point, it's like, well, what are the adjacencies? Just because they're not currently browsing products like this, so Facebook doesn't know they might be interested in products like this, doesn't mean that they aren't interested in products like this. So how can we make sure that we're showing them something that also might be of interest and benefit to them? And it, like I said, it worked very, very well.

Brad Hoos 39:10

Yeah, that's That's so good. That's so good. It is fascinating. I grew up with two older sisters, and so one of my sisters, I remember, you know, quoting Coco Chanel, and I was like, you know, you know, you have to do one thing to make yourself feel beautiful, you know, before, before you go out of the house. And so that that makes so much sense. You talk about, like, riding, riding bikes. Like, yeah, they're not gonna, they're not necessarily gonna be interested in, like, going all out. They're not gonna consume, right, you know, beauty content. But that doesn't mean that they don't, you know, they don't. They don't care just, you know, don't care about how they look and how they feel in any way, shape or form. So how can you appeal to that audience where, like, less is more and one thing is the right number of things to prepare that's that's really good thinking. It makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I love that. I want

William Harris 39:57

to shift into AI then a little bit so earlier you. Said that you're like, I'm not as concerned about AI as much as I'm concerned about these other things. But AI is an interesting thing that's at least challenging and involving a lot of spaces right now. What are your thoughts about AI within the influencer marketing circles? Yeah,

Brad Hoos 40:13

it is a fascinating topic. I mean, short short answer is, I think AI is going to help creators, just to pour gasoline on the fire in terms of, like, what they can do and how they can be, you know, creative and, you know, find ways to interact with their with their audience. I mean, there's, there's plenty of talk about, you know, AI generated creators who obviously not real people and personas. And look, that's going to happen. I think that's kind of like a bit of a novelty. And there's nothing wrong with with folks doing that, in my opinion, as long as they're, they're transparent about it. But I just think, like it's again, going back to maybe, you know, being a dead horse trust is a secret sauce in influencer marketing, so it's just tough to trust something that's that's not a human being. It's just, you know, an AI created, you know, image pixels on a screen. So I see, you know, I see AI helping the influencer industry in terms of being able to, you know, better, match creators, getting rid of our own biases. Like, you know, we have media planning teams here. One of the reasons we love data we shouldn't talk about is so that work. People aren't just like, Oh, I like this creator or that creator. I don't really like their style, right? And like, people aren't maybe getting a state it or have a conscious thought, but it enters into our own brains from bias perspective. And I so having our data helps that, and I think that's where AI is going to be helpful as well, in that you're not limited to what you can see, what William or Bradley can have seen or known, but there's a much broader universe and be able to tap into it. I think that is opportunity to be a massive net net positive there, in terms of be able to identify those, those creators and interact with them, to be able to figure out what they really want, and figure out where the real brand fit it is. I mean, this isn't something that we've done to date, but you mean, you can see where there's an AI that's, you know, having a 10 minute conversation with a creator to try to figure out the exact right angle between the brand and the content of what the creator wants, right and so there's, there's ways that you can, I think, use AI to continue to dial things in, but where I've seen it be successful to date is, you Know, creator identification and then streamlining the processes from an agency perspective. But then also, you know, love what it can do in terms of, just continue to do more from a creative perspective. But you got to, you got to have the chops first, you got to have the prompt strategic thinking, and then, you know, you got to have the audience for it to really matter. We interviewed.

William Harris 43:00

I believe it was just last week I got to think about because it hasn't gone live yet, but it will be live by the time this one goes live. I think was last week then that this would have gone live. Jimmy Slagle, and he actually took us through, he does a lot of stuff at the AI space, but he took us through generating an AI version of yourself that could then be used to create, you know, 100 different videos of you saying whatever you want, where it's like, okay, actually holding the product in the video, creating it into, like, your own avatar of this. And then from then on, it's like, you can give it whatever script you want, and it's going to use you. And it's, it's getting fascinatingly good, right? Like, you can still tell a little bit, but a lot of people are starting to struggle to tell the difference. But to your point, I think that that's going to be, I think there's going to be a boom of this, right? Because it's going to be a new, novel thing that will allow us to, I mean, you could say it 15 different ways, right? You're just like, great, I can as the creator. I could record myself doing this once, but then I can have 15 different versions of me doing this, and now it's, you know, which one of my versions ends up doing well, because maybe, again, we talked about trial and error, maybe I created one and that one wasn't the one that was going to be do well. But rather than me creating 15 manually, I can create 15 of myself, different ideas of me talking about this product, and one of those 15 ends up being the one that does exceptionally well for them. So it'll accelerate that. But I think, to your point, there will be, there will be this initial wave where that does well, and then there's almost like a a follow up, plummet of trust, to your point, because it's like it will become potentially less trustworthy. It will just feel different, or even people just acknowledging that it was fake, right? It's like, yeah, this was not the real person.

Brad Hoos 44:49

Well, here I would actually might take the other side of that, that coin. So, so, so here's, here's what I would say. It's like, if that creator really truly like. Makes that product and believes in that product. That's the key point here, in terms of keeping trust, because if they do, then who cares? If you're testing out 15 really cool different ways to communicate that, right? That's just like, what's working like, to me, the decision that really is going to matter for the audience over time happens before in this, in this example, before, like, you're applying all that the AI, because if the Creator really does, you know, love the product, and now they're just, like, presenting in a slightly different, different way, but it's still like, you know, this is the power of AI, right? If it's still them in their own excitement and they believe in the underlying message, then, like, I think that could be a net positive for for brands being able to, you know, continue to test, test things out, and try to try to figure it out. And then, you know, we're doing this for some brands now where, like, we might run paid ads on on YouTube to try to figure out the right verticals that even are, like, the most effective. And then once we know the verticals, we can take the approach of, I get working the right right creators. So anyways, point is, like it could just be a way and identify what works from a general perspective, and go in with more programmatic testing in terms of creator approaches. So it'll be interesting. Because ultimately, like the audience may may disagree, you know, with my with my take, and they might be able to pick up on those nuanced differences. I don't know. And you know, certain creators will not be okay with you testing out 10 versions of their creative which isn't actually theirs. So it's going to be interesting. What about

William Harris 46:41

XR, ar, Mr. VR, whichever direction we want to go with that, but where I want to go with this is, there's a there's a company that I actually invested in called allegory. XR, will Yin, Michael Maloney, they're kind of running this, and hopefully I'm not sharing anything that I'm not allowed to share. But Will was just showing this even yesterday. One of the things that they're doing is, you've seen things like character.ai where people can create these AI characters, where they're doing this on a much, much more robust scale, and it is in VR. And so it's like, you can FaceTime this character if you want. And like, it's, you're talking to them. You've got your apple vision Pro on. You're actually in the room communicating with them. You know this, this AI character, if you would scrap the AI portion of this, though, where do you think is, are you seeing much trend in, let's just say, like VR influencer world, where it's like you're in that realm of people being in three dimensional space with them?

Brad Hoos 47:38

Well, this does get really interesting, because I think the gaming community is certainly at the forefront of this movement. And, you know, they often are, yeah, no, no doubt about it. And so a lot of folks will create, you know, avatars of themselves, or we've seen, you know, plenty of folks where, like, you know, they have an anime avatar or whatever, and you can now live stream with being it done, like in character. And I do see some real while it's easy to to see some of the challenges. And I think, you know, Twitter X is obviously, you know, front and center, and Reddit, where, if you, if you're an anonymous user, it's easy to be like trolling, right? And, you know, to just try to stir up a bunch of crap, right? With, you know, totally fires and daggers and whatever. But the other side of that coin is folks who may may not be as comfortable putting themselves out there and not wanting their face to be seen because they're uncomfortable with it. There's like it creates a very safe space for people to engage as as well, and that, I mean, we've engaged with some brands who are, you know, building out easier ways to be able to, you know, create, you know, live streaming and VOD content where the creator is. It's not their actual, you know, face or body and like they can, you can do a lot of cool things. And so I do think there's, there's an opportunity to, you know, express yourself in a, in a in a way, without having, like, you know, the repercussions or the judgment of of you being out there. So it allows you to, sort of like, be singular in terms of how you're you're seen in some ways. And I think that that can be positive for folks. And like, you know, gaming can be a very social community as a part of that. So I do think that I, you know, continuing to see AR be. Broadly, like you said, we could use a lot of different terms there, but I think that's going to continue to find a place, and it was going to be a growing community. I think it's not going to be taking off like, you know, some of us thought maybe the metaverse would a few years, a few years ago, but it's not going to immediately turn the page and go mainstream, but I think there's a great opportunity here, and there's going to be some really strong communities that are going to continue to be developed, particularly looking at it through the lens of influencer, yeah,

William Harris 50:30

yeah, it's fun, and I'm excited about it. It's obviously something that I invested in, because I enjoy the space. I'm curious too about something else that you said on LinkedIn, if we could shift gears into smaller businesses, because we've talked a lot about how you want to go after some of these bigger influencers who are let's just say they've already raised their rates, because they are effective. But something you talked about was, you said, obviously high growth brands spending six to seven figures a month on influencers. It makes sense for them, but for them, but for some of the smaller brands, you're telling them that don't even do it, where's the threshold? Why? Why tell them not to do it? Like, who should start to think about doing it?

Brad Hoos 51:10

Yeah, no, it's it's really interesting. So with influencer marketing, you know, when we think about the right time to do it, it's sort of like when you're ready to stop selling product and start building a brand, is a great time. And this isn't to say that influencer marketing is a branding exercise. It's not. But influencer starts to get you into like the zeitgeist, and starts to evolve you into really creating a brand. And so part of the opportunity to do that presents itself from a tactical perspective, once you've really addressed the low hanging fruit, which generally is paid search and paid social then, of course, like doing as much as you can for organic search, recognizing that there's sort of like initial amount of SEO you want to do. But then it's always like, that's like, the 80% but then it's always, you know, another 20% that you can you can go after. It's not a, you know, one, one time thing. But anyways, point is, once you've optimized your paid search and your paid social, like, that's really the time that you can put money into influencer, because you're really going to start to see some of the benefits from that. So you're going to see your search is going to start performing better, your paid social is going to start performing better because of the halo effect of running influencers and having them, you know, really be able to advocate for you. But you know, I don't like to say and there are some exceptions, right, like, if you're in a land grab. So for instance, the fun, fun little conversation here, right? Like, when Viagra went off patent, right? And there was a number of other products, like, at the same time, telemedicine was becoming more normal as well. Suddenly you have a land grab where it's like, okay, how can you get out there, Roman versus keeps versus him, or who, whomever to try to get those clients, and it's we've seen similar things in terms of fan duel versus Draft Kings, or ancestry versus 23andme whomever like, some of those cases where it is a land grab and it really you need to step on the gas, then you should be Using influencers from day one and big, but most cases, yes, do the do the fundamentals first in terms of, you know, paid social and paid search, have those in a good spot, and then move to influencer marketing when the time is right? Yeah, there's a little comment maybe,

William Harris 53:38

well, no, but I like the way that you approach that. Let's talk about some other case studies then of influencer campaigns being done well. So we've talked about some of the problems, we've talked about some of the solutions. Let's talk about some of the examples. Then you've worked with a lot of really great brands. I don't know if you want to talk about talked about AG, one a little bit already. I don't know if there's another part of that that you want to do. That that you wanted to tell otherwise we could talk about, I know, Fiverr and chomps we talked about would be a couple of good ones.

Brad Hoos 54:09

Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, eight ag one, you know, very well respected brand. I think they, they've done a great job. They have one, one product, very simple. And they're, they're, they're really serious about, like, trust and credibility with their product, and so they've done just a fantastic job of aligning with really credible people, and that's from an economic perspective you think about like Andrew Huberman, who's, you know, very, you know, works as a professor at Stanford, as well as being an influencer, but then also, just from a practical perspective, like, you know, someone like Joe Rogan, who has just a ton of credibility with amongst his his audience. Think it's just understanding what you're trying to accomplish, you know, holistically and yes, you need. Look at, you know, the sales, and you want it, you need to be a profitable business. But think about like, Hey, what is, what is your biggest challenge that you need to solve, and how can influencers help you solve that? And so I think that's one thing that AG one has done, you know, a really good, good job with. And Fiverr is an interesting brand.

William Harris 55:22

Before we they're one of the ones that I feel like. I am sure this was a thing, but I wasn't aware of it. They really dominated podcast influencer like, at least from what I saw, there was just all these podcasts in every good, legitimate podcast. I felt like that I was watching was talking about ag one, and it's like, you know, it was like, the diary of CEO. It's like, all of these, like, there were just some really great podcasts. They're like, Oh yeah, you know, drink this. And I don't know if they if you did or not. I think he did. I'm drawing a blank, but there are a lot of these really great podcasts. We're talking about it, and I hadn't seen a lot of people doing it as well as ag one did. Do you think that that's a really good game plan for just about any brand, or is that just a game plan that works for certain types of products?

Brad Hoos 56:04

I think having a strategic angle and working it is, is going to be effective for most any brand. And it's just really understanding with clarity what that what that angle is. And like, look, there's, there's some really practical constraints you need to think about too, like AG, one is a subscription based product. So if you're if you're selling something, that's the same price point as as ag one, but it's a one time purchase, it's a very different ball game, right? So subscription services do fantastic typically, with creators, because, you know, the recurring revenue, obviously, but like, the best performing creators are going to continue to work with the brand. And so it becomes part of, like, you're part of that tribe when you're working, you know, we're continuing to use that product. And by the way, you continue to see the Creator use the product, maybe in slightly different ways than than you do, and that just creates more momentum, and like you desire to kind of tweak how you're using it. So I do think either something about the, AG, one product, where it's one product, or it's a subscription, you know, product, a premium product that helps to create a better version of yourself, which is what we all really want, of is a lot of things that, you know, came together, where their influencer approach, and I certainly include podcasts in that has been, you know, very, very effective in tapping into, like, the people who are at the, you know, the leading edge of health and wellness. Because we're all talking about health and wellness, right? Like, what is it that you're drinking? Like, literally, today, I was texting my cousin about, like, trying to get him some, some, AG, 81 you know, totally unrelated to, you know, my work with with them, and it's like, we want to help other people, right? So when it's only, when it's a health and wellness product, I think that really does matter. So I look, I do think there are some unique characteristics that may that, you know, set up, AG, one, to be so successful with these types of influencer partnerships. But I think, like, the core thinking applies to most any brand that's that's out there, and you just have to kind of think about things a little bit like, like we were doing, you were talking about, you know, the beauty and the bikes. Actually sounds like a fun movie, you know, beauty and the bikes. But, yeah, but, but, yeah, yeah. There's just like, you gotta find it a little bit angle. And really, you know, think, think about it a bit, rather than just going out there and trying to try to work with creators who are reaching out to you, or that you know, or your kids know, or your neighbor says, is great, whatever the case may be. Well,

William Harris 58:45

I like the word you used for it, which was adjacencies, and I think that's like a really good way of thinking. It's like, what are the things that are just slightly outside of the realm of what you're currently the obvious stuff, right? It's like, what's adjacent to it? What about you work with some of the biggest influencers I know, Mark Rober, Cletus, McFarland, you work with some really big influencers, and I think that's a lot of fun. They're almost, let's just say, celebrity status, to the point where it's like, I don't remember who was out there on the streets. They're like, do you know this person? You know this person? It's like, a lot of times you were like, Oh, I know who that is. It's a celebrity, or that's the influencer. And it's like, you ask them about the celebrity, I don't know if I remember that, who that is, and so, like, there's celebrity status people now, what's it like working with them?

Brad Hoos 59:30

Yeah, it's funny. Like, along those, those lines will like, I think it was like, it was like, 2018, or something. It's like, YouTube famous is just famous now. And I was like a good, that was a good. It was a good line that I appreciated. That was like a very la comment. But I mean, working with creators is really interesting, because fundamentally, they're creators, right? And so, so, like, they know how to come up with ideas. This and connect, connect dots in unique ways. Some of them are extremely business minded, and others are not, in any way, shape or form, you know, business minded, and so like the way you work with them, you know, varies quite a bit. Obviously, you know, there's, there's a ton that have managers or agents. We actually have our own separate talent arm as as well. You know, we allowed talent we represent about 35 creators, certainly the ones that you mentioned earlier. That number is about to grow quite a bit. But I think one of the things that we know about, you know, creators, at the other day, they're just, they're just people, you know, they're, they're just people. They're trying to figure things out. Like, like, like, yeah, like, you and me. And the way that we can best support them is generally, like, just make sure we know what are they trying to accomplish, right? Like, and and make sure we're there to, like, really lead them and share what our expertise is, but all all through the lens of like, well, what, what does good look like to you and the creator? But honestly, working with creators is a lot of fun. Most of them just work their ass off, and they work non non stop and to just be able to be available to them. And sometimes, like, you can just be a port in the storm. We it's one of the things that we things that we like to say at Outloud as we That's our goal is to be a port in the storm. And it's like, how they just need to they need to vent. They need an idea, whatever the case may be, like you kind of need to be there to support them psychologically. Because I will say, and maybe I'm on a little tangent here will but I think one of the things that people don't recognize is just the amount of pressure that's on these creators and and like that that can really impact their their mental health. Because you think about it, you know, you and me, we have a good day at work or a bad day at work. It's not being beamed out to the entire internet like it is a creator once, like, oh, this, this post did awesome. You're on top of the world, and then the next one really underperformed, and you just are questioning everything, like, if you have any skills or abilities or relevance. So that's true on a micro and then on a macro, like, what? What's the, what's the amount of time that a creator is usually, you know, front and center. Think of them like, you know, pro athletes. You know, you're really at your peak for what, maybe 3345, years, if you're like most. And then, how do you handle the downside of your career as a creator when you're getting, you know, 85% of the views that you were before, 70% you still might be crushing it and making money. But man, that can be taxing on creators, and so you have to really be aware of everything that they're dealing with and how they're approaching things is as well. And I will say that's that's definitely an art, and it's really about like, building the relationships so you can have the honest conversation. It's like, listen, I know we are getting 25k last year, and those same brands are not back this year because it's not being as effective now, right? And to that, that's tough, because you're sort of like saying that you're worth less now, and when you're in any profession, you put so much into it. I'm sure you can relate to this, like you tie so much of your self identity into your into your work, and that's dangerous. And I think it's that's on steroids for creators. So it's, it's awesome working with creators, but you really have to know and understand them, I think, to to to have the best long term partnerships, because it's, it's hard, it's hard for creators. Yeah,

William Harris 1:03:51

that said, Any fun stories? Or is there anybody that you're like, This is the most interesting one that I've worked with. It's like, their character and who you see on screen is exactly them, or it's like they're completely not what I expected, like anything that you can share.

Brad Hoos 1:04:06

Oh my gosh. So one of the creators we represent is a guy by the name of Lindybeige, and He's based in England, and he his name is Lloyd, right? And Nicholas Lloyd, but he just goes by Lloyd, and he doesn't have a cell phone, and he says it's, imagine, imagine you had a fun that's taken away from not exactly knowing the moment in precise location that someone's gonna pick you up and meet you at the airport, right? And like, he's the most fascinating guy ever because he thinks so differently. And he's, he's, you know, he'd be the first one to say, you know, he's always pushing up against the latest of latest deadlines to be able to get something out. And it's because he cares so much and he wants to do his entire video in one shot, like not many creators do that any anymore. Sure, but like, the uniqueness of someone that's a ballroom, you know, dance instructor, but a historian and wants to go into painstaking detail about things, and he's one of the ones that, at times, can cause, you know, headaches for us, but it's all like headaches out of love, where? Because he, you know, he's working with a VPN. He's like, Well, how is this working? Well, what, what does that mean by that, you know, what? If I lose that password, you know, he asked, like, really hard questions. And because of that, his audience, really, you know, trust him. But he's, he just goes in such, you know, long rambling rants, which I love about him. So he's probably, like, the most unique creator that I get the opportunity to work with on an ongoing, uh, basis. And, yeah, the just think that the world of him,

William Harris 1:05:50

that's fun. How do you work with somebody that doesn't have a cell phone? How are you she's like, I mean, is he check email, maybe, or whatever? It's like, I'm fixing you. Trying to be like, Hey, we've got this gig for you, sending the carrier pigeon over to him.

Brad Hoos 1:06:01

Yeah, it doesn't work as well when he's traveling. I'll say that. But yeah, it's, it's email, and then just know, like, I think knowing the space, like, we know how to work with with with Lloyd, and we know how to set expectations with brands as well about, like, how it's all gonna gonna play out. And that's the thing. It's like, yeah, we talk about this data, and the data really matters. But also, like, I can tell a brand, listen, this creator is awesome. Their audience really trusts them. They just, I can't tell you that they're actually going to go live this month. They will go live. They're going to do it. But like, they're just very bad at sticking to a timeline. So if we can be flexible, you're going to be happy with the results. But I can't, because you have a strict budget, and you know, it needs to go live this month like this is not the creator for you. So it's, it's being able to also, you know, share the softer elements of running a campaign that's, that's so fun, but yeah, another creator, I just have to give a shout for this guy, better than Matt character. So he's, he has that character channel and demolition Ranch, which is a massive gun channel, and he, he, you know, just, he's a veterinarian, you know, Family Guy, like the least political guy ever, definitely not like a rah rah Second Amendment rights guy, or anything like that. And when you go out with him, like he gets stopped all the time, it's kind of that part's like kind of fun. But what the best part is like he's 100% the same off camera as he is on camera. And so that, to me, is like what the creators that I tend to appreciate the most are the ones that there's that's just who they are. They're just being 100% themselves. Whereas there's plenty of creators that can be successful, like being characters, you know, or different versions of themselves, whatever the case may be. But you know, I personally just love working with creators who are the same on camera as off, because sometimes you have this like, you know, cool, easygoing, you know, creators on, you know, on camera, but then they can be very different, you know, off off camera. But, yeah, that's, that's awesome. You know, one of the many, many good creators, you know, is the same on and off camera. Well, it's

William Harris 1:08:16

fun getting to know the creators. I want to shift in, getting to know you and who is Brad, who's, I think it's always fun to get the personal side of the people that are on here as well. I understand that you are the youngest of three two older sisters, and that that has shaped a lot of who you are in what ways has that shaped you?

Brad Hoos 1:08:36

Yeah, well, first, my sisters, you know, taught me that life isn't always fair. They could get me with their nails, you know, couldn't do anything. They're four and eight years older than me. So I could beat me up for a while, and then I got bigger and stronger, but then I wasn't allowed to do anything, you know, back back to them. And I learned that at a very young age that, you know, from my father. You know, life isn't always fair. So you could kind of get me for years. I could never get back to them, but no, and then all seriousness, like my sisters have been like, it helped me shape so many of my tastes and like round out, like the the Alpha maleness that can, that can afflict so many of us, you know, I think about like the high school hockey, you know, locker room and you know, how, how different it was being around sisters, because then, you know, they don't care about any of that stuff, but they, you know, taught me, taught me a lot about, you know, how to do a better job of listening, how to do better job of caring about different interests and making sure you're really thinking things, you know, through and trying to, you know, tap different, different approaches and things, and then, yeah, taste in music, and then writing, you know, like one of the cool things about having an older sister, I remember I thought I was, you know, doing just fine writing. And then I happened to, like, read or. Report that my sister did. And I was like, like, seemed like magic. And I was like, Oh, I sure you can write like this, you know, like I never even it, just like, opened my my eyes open. But no, I definitely having two older siblings and two other sisters. Was, was like, super helpful in terms of just allowing me to be a much more well rounded human. And to this day, like, you know, it's just great. Like, they really always looked out for me. And like, just knowing, I mean, for all of us as humans, we need that personal attachment. And like, knowing you're loved is huge. And I was very fortunate. You have two awesome parents, but then also two older sisters to do that. And I think, like, you know, every kid, every kid needs to be loved and deserves to be loved, and to have that, you know, in spades was something that, even to this day, like I'm just so, so grateful and appreciative for and trying to pay, you know, as much back to now being a dad, to pay as much back as humanly possible. So I love that you

William Harris 1:11:01

shared, that you were able to learn a lot of like those relationship skills, from having your sisters too, right, like listening and how to change up your message and stuff like that. The oldest of three boys and so I learned absolutely none of that as a kid. We jokingly would even say that it's like, you know, for Christmas, it got to the point where it's like we wouldn't even give each other gifts anymore. It was just like, hey, here's $20 kind of thing. And then it shifted from that, and it was more like, Hey, here's the shirt you bought me. Just by the way, it's like we just spent our own money on ourselves. It was just very, very different relationship skills that I've had to learn as an adult. Instead,

Brad Hoos 1:11:36

I can appreciate that. Yeah, I can, yeah, just like some things, I don't even you didn't realize that you're learning it, but then I see, like some my buddies and like you said, you can't do that. You can't say that. No, you got to be able to, like, listen for a minute. Or think about, think about, why? Why? Why? It's not okay to eat that, you know, eat that food. I don't know. I'm blanking on good examples, but, man, I'm very fortunate for that that it means I didn't get beat up much, you know, once I got to a certain age. That was good. Yeah.

William Harris 1:12:17

Something else that you said that I really appreciated is that you grew up. Your dad was in the Navy, and so you have like this do say ratio, that you kind of live by. What is the do say ratio?

Brad Hoos 1:12:28

Yeah, I gotta give a shout out to my good friend Chase Jake Siegel on this. He actually had a I think he says say do ratio. But I'm a big believer in the do say ratio. So basically, a higher number is better. So look basically like, yeah, what I was taught is to do what you say, you do when you'll say you'll do it. And what I've learned is that that's not common. And people like, you know, a lot of folks become really comfortable if I say, like, oh yeah, I'll get that to you on Tuesday with, you know, on Wednesday, saying, Oh, I'm gonna get that to you tomorrow. And I was like, Well, wait a second, like, you said you do it on Tuesday, like you gave me your word, right? And so look, life happens, but I think you've got to make sure you're communicating when that happens. And like that needs to be the exception, not the norm. And so to me, like the do say ratio is like, Hey, are you respecting the people that you're interacting with, and most importantly, sometimes it's, are you respecting yourself? Like, hey, I'm gonna go to the gym four times this week. What you said you would do it? Do you actually do it? Right? And most of us, if we pause, myself included, like, we know what we really need. But are you willing to have that conversation with yourself, and the music's off and no one's around to say, Hey, this is what I'm going to commit to. This is what I'm going to commit to myself, that I'm going to do and like, you gotta, you got to put the oxygen mask on yourself sometimes first, that's and so,

William Harris 1:13:57

yeah, yeah. Actually reminds me. I think it was, don't quote me, I think it was Jordan Peterson, that I heard that from something along the lines of a lot of times, the reason why people are frustrated or stressed out is because they don't actually trust themselves, because they've failed themselves over and over and over and over again, where it's like, they've said, I'm going to do this, and they don't follow through with it. And so it's like, how do we start those little micro things? And one of the ideas that I think it was him who gave was, like, make your bed in the morning. It's very, very simple. It's not that hard. Just do something small that you could say. It's like, I said I was gonna make my bed, and I made my bed. It took five minutes, right? And then it's like, you can build upon that. And it's like all those little wins will allow you to start trusting yourself, which is a really important thing.

Brad Hoos 1:14:44

It is. It's so important. And, I mean, it's no accident. The military teaches you to do that, by the way, right to you have to make your bed in the morning, and you actually get the benefit of it that night. I don't know anyone who prefers getting into a messy bed versus a made a made bed, right? And so at the end of the day, ah, that's a much better feeling when you're opening up the sheets and getting into a bed, versus an unkept bed. And so you start to see this, like, oh, I put in the work, and I get the reward as well. And it's, it's great. And you know, the most meaningful things, you know, there's years of separation between putting in the in the work and reaping the rewards, right? And so it's hardest when you have to trust the process and continue to put in in the work and continue to get get better without seeing those those results as as well. And so, yeah, I think I don't, I don't remember who this was from. I want to say, What am I Eric Thomas, but I'm not, I'm not sure. And it was like, don't be a goal grinder. You know? It was like, don't, don't want to work out until you lose 10 pounds. Want to work out and like to work out every day because it keep making you better. And I was like, that's, that's really interesting, because I do believe in setting goals, but also, like, you know, what's more powerful than goals is habits, right? And habits start to become who you who you are. And so when that's what you do, like, that's who you are, like, that's tough to now, you're talking about changing self identity, which is much harder. So like, for me, like, I go to, I go to the gym, you know, every every morning, and I think that's, like, so important, and it's like, just part of who I am. And now, like, that's my favorite time of the of the day, because it's like, clear mind. Usually listen to a podcast. You know, my mind can wander in 15 different different ways, but it's like, you know, something that it was hard at first, because now it's like, Oh, I I don't want to, I don't want to miss that. It's like, my favorite time of the day. And I think that's pretty, pretty powerful. So

William Harris 1:16:50

there were three other things I wanted to chat about, and but we're out of time, so I want to get it, layer it down to one the three other things were, your two year old daughter landing a client on a ski lift at Vail, college football Michigan State, which, you know, I'm from Ohio, so we'll skip all of that. But the one that I really want to get into is your two year old daughter and jumping around.

Brad Hoos 1:17:15

Yeah, so I'm sure I'm not unique in having a young toddler who likes to have that little mini trampoline and jump on it all the time. And so, like, I don't remember who it was, but my wife or I started saying, jump, everybody, jump, everybody jump. And so that she started to love it and wanted to repeat it. So then we played the song for her. And then, speaking of college football, shout out to Wisconsin Badgers. And, you know, jump jump around House of Pain. So next thing you know, we put in, you know, she we started to play the clean version of that for a two year old, and she was all excited. And she would say, new jump song. She played the new jump song. And then that evolved into crisscross jump. And so now my daughter, it's not unusual for her to request crisscross being played as a two year old, which is awesome. And so, yeah, Spotify end of year. Song that was played the most in our household was indeed jump everybody. So yeah, my two year olds, you know, just really impacting and elevating our taste of music in our in our house, for sure,

William Harris 1:18:26

taking me back on all of those songs, Chris Costa, make you wanna jump, jump, as long as she's not starting to wear her pants backwards, or, I guess at two, that's almost the default anyways. And it's like, you gotta see if I can get her to start wearing it forwards. You

Brad Hoos 1:18:39

know, what she did do? She picked up in that song, they say, believe that. I don't know how she's the first time she heard it. She said, Believe that. And so she feels they believe that around all the time. So it's funny, the things that you get get picked up on. So, yeah, you better believe that. Will.

William Harris 1:18:55

Brad, it's been absolutely amazing talking to you, learning from you, learning about you, if people wanted to work with you or follow you, what's the best way for them to stay in touch?

Brad Hoos 1:19:07

Yeah, I think probably the best, the best thing is just your website, outloudgroup.com certainly you're welcome to, you know, follow me, connect with me on on LinkedIn as as well. Always happy to have conversations around strategy. You know, told plenty of folks, hey, I don't think you're ready for an agency yet. We might tell that to you. So if you're not sure that's that's okay, feel free to reach out. Always, always happy to chat and help people to to grow and get that arrow going up into the up into the right. Yeah.

William Harris 1:19:38

Well, thank you again for sharing your time, knowledge and wisdom with us here today.

Brad Hoos 1:19:43

Yeah, thanks for having me. Had a great time. Appreciate it.

William Harris 1:19:46

And thank you everyone for tuning in. Have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:19:50

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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