Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
Justin Rezvani, recently named on the 2017 Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List for Marketing & Advertising, founded his first company, theAmplify, four years ago, when he was just 25 years old. theAmplify creates influencer marketing campaigns for premium brands across social media and is now a multi-million dollar operation. Last year, Rezvani sold his start-up to You & Mr. Jones, a brandtech group launched by David Jones, former CEO of Havas – one of the world’s largest global advertising and communications groups. This acquisition put theAmplify on the map, enabling the company to work with some of the world’s largest brands, Rezvani explains.
The 29-year-old mobile expert is excited about the future of influencer marketing that is powered by artificial intelligence. At the close of 2016, theAmplify and chatbot developer Automat, a fellow You & Mr. Jones company, invented the world’s first influencer chatbot, which debuted in a campaign for make-up brand CoverGirl. This tech innovation made it possible for audiences to have conversations with a chatbot version of social media star Kalani Hilliker. The chatbot mimics her conversational style but makes it clear that the conversation is not actually happening with a real person.
We spoke to Justin about his start in influencer marketing (it doesn’t hurt to have grown up in Los Angeles with a few celebrity friends) and the way in which his company’s algorithm changed the influencer marketing space. Justin is scheduled to speak at the SEMPL Conference this coming November, where he plans to emphasize that technology is designed to help people and not to threaten them.
We hardly heard anything about influencer marketing when you launched theAmplify four years ago. When did you recognise its potential?
Justin Rezvani: The year I started my company was the year Instagram was taken over by Facebook. But the catalyst was that some of my friends in Los Angeles were influencers themselves. When you grow up in LA, it’s no surprise that some of the people you went to high school with end up becoming celebrities. Specifically, two of them were asking me how to engage with their fans and customers on Instagram. They were already working with brands but found it a total pain in the neck, especially with all the contracts and other arrangements [they had to deal with]. So, my business started as an app to make it easier for an influencer to talk to a brand and to create content.
To put it simply, how does the app work?
Justin Rezvani: The app is essentially a briefing platform. The concept is to be able to brief a specific creator about a project, to develop a dialogue with that creator within a messaging ecosystem – we use Slack for that – and to manage a conversation with that influencer. In turn, the influencer can submit content – photos and videos – through that particular application.
Last year theAmplify was bought by You & Mr. Jones, a brandtech group. What changed as a result of the acquisition?
Justin Rezvani: Everything changed. We became a much bigger organisation. It did a lot to raise our profile as an organisation considering there had only been about 8 to 10 acquisitions in the entire influencer marketing space. There are a couple hundred companies that do this, so it brought the validity of who we were into that space. We’re now becoming the core partner of some of the world’s largest brands, including Unilever, Coty, Taco Bell and Ford Motor. These companies trust us with their end-to-end influencer marketing.
With how many influencers do you work?
Justin Rezvani: We’ve worked with about 5000 content creators over the past four years but our search database enables us to search over 700.000 accounts.
How many followers do you need before you’re defined as an influencer?
Justin Rezvani: To be invited on our platform, our minimum threshold is typically about 25.000. That being said, there are some content creators whose content is incredible and in those cases, we go down to about 10.000. Some of the highest reach people we have are at the 20 to 30 million follower range.
What social networks does your platform include?
Justin Rezvani: We focus a majority of our energy on Instagram, followed by Facebook and Snapchat. Over the next few months, we’re also extending our platform on Pinterest.
How do you guarantee that the content that influencers post in the name of a particular brand is credible and authentic?
Justin Rezvani: That is the whole X-factor about our platform. The tool and technology helps brands approve contact with an influencer. Moreover, it also briefs creators on the most intimate device of their lives, which is their mobile phone. A lot of the topics we’re discussing will be the focus of my keynote at SEMPL – like technology versus people and how technology helps content creation faster than any person ever could.
How do you prevent false numbers of followers generated by bots or bought followers?
Justin Rezvani: Our algorithm was developed around the concept of creating a true viewability measurement within an influencer marketing community. Our tool follows a specific user account, scans the number of followers and verifies whether that influencer and that audience have an activity on the platform. We check their profiles in terms of active users and then measure only those active users that see a piece of content when an influencer posts it. So, fake and/or inactive followers are not even considered as actual accounts. A few years ago, we became the first algorithm and the first platform to navigate the Instagram spam problem.
Where do you see the opportunities in influencer marketing over the next several years?
Justin Rezvani: I think the biggest opportunity is the deepening of relationships and engagements with brands and influencers themselves. The concept of posting one-off experiences is not as effective as deepening the level of engagement that can occur. It’s about depth versus breadth, so the question becomes: For how long can you create a relationship with someone, develop a campaign with them and deepen the experience over all?
This coming November we’ll be welcoming you in Slovenia. What are you going to reveal to the audience at the SEMPL conference?
Justin Rezvani: The key thing [I’m going to talk about] is how technology enables the creation of content in a more effective way, so that humans can focus on what they’re good at – which is the briefing, the creative solution, the perfection of content. A lot of messages will be around the concept of how technology enables us to be more efficient in everything we do and in not wasting our time on mundane tasks.