Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to us about the different industry segments that you work with and give us some examples of the brands that you work with. Let’s take some use cases of how that particular brand in a particular industry segment works. Give us a feel for the numbers. What kind of reach are we talking about? What kind of messages are the brands trying to convey through them?

Ted Murphy: It’s pretty broad in its range. For example, we have Mercedes Benz, which is obviously a high-end luxury brand. The types of influencers that they tend to engage with would be a smaller group of influencers with larger audiences. On the other hand, CPG companies tend to engage more influencers that may have a lower follower or audience count.

Part of that has to do with the experience and what the brand is looking to do. If I’m dealing with a $100,000 luxury car and I want that influencer to be able to test drive that car and experience it, I cannot afford to do that with hundreds of thousands of people. If I have someone who wants to experience a box of cereal, that’s something that you can easily scale. There’s different types of use cases depending on what type of brand it is.

Then you go over to the entertainment space. A lot of that is hits-driven. We’re trying to drive tune-in or to drive people to go watch a movie. You see a lot of utilization there where it’s based a lot on status updates. They’re trying to generate a very large amount of awareness in a very short period of time because if you’re dealing with a movie, it’s all about that opening weekend.

Sramana Mitra: Do you work mostly with consumer brands?

Ted Murphy: The majority of our business is focused on B2C. We do have some B2B customers who are more on the content side of the business. We tend to produce content that may live on their own site rather than engaging influencers.

Sramana Mitra: Talk bout the business model that brands are following to engage these influencers.

Ted Murphy: A lot of that is based on a cost-per-post model where they’re paying that creator a certain fee to create a blog post or make a video, or do a series of those things. Often, it’s based on the perceived followers or traffic that that individual may have. What we are starting to see is more of a shift towards engagement and traffic that has been delivered or even sales. It depends on what type of client you’re dealing with. You’re not expecting somebody who just did a test drive and some blog post on a luxury car to necessarily convert people. It’s much harder to measure than something where you’re driving somebody to buy a product online.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA
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