Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Corbett Drummey, CEO of Popular Pays (Part 1)

This discussion explores the evolution of influencer marketing and how brands are working with content creators to gain credibility and leverage.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Popular Pays.

Corbett Drummey: I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Popular Pays. We started in Chicago and did a stint out in YCombinator and then moved back afterwards. Popular Pays is a software for collaborating with content creators and influencers.

Customers use us usually for three main things, which is to source influencers, collaborate with them to create content, and to have transparent data and analytics on the backend. We have an optional service component. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on that a bit and take us through some use cases. Take some real customers and real influencers. Tell us how are people using your technology.

Corbett Drummey: I’ll walk you through a couple of pain points. There’re a ton of brands online that are doing all this work manually. For example, they might be using Instagram direct messages to try to contact influencers. They might work with them through email and spreadsheets. Maybe they’re just using inferior tools that can do one part of it. They can search for influencers, but they can’t help them with the other parts like reviewing their Instagram stories and approving them at scale or handling payments and contracts.

Often, customers come to us for help with the scale and efficiency of their programs. We’ve seen some consumer companies that are using up to 600 or more influencers but are working with them over email and spreadsheet.

We come to them and say, “We have an operating system for content creation. You can use this to scale your work.” They’re super enthusiastic about it. Another use case is, many brands just want to scale their content creation whether it’s for social media or for, maybe, paid work on Facebook.

As a quick note, I can give you a couple of brand name examples. As a quick example, we work with Method. They use us to find content creators who make beautiful assets that they can use across their social media feeds as well as on billboards.

There are also brands that want to use Popular Pays to trade assets through their advertising. It could be a carousel ad on Facebook or a boosted Instagram story. We have brands like Samsung who use Popular Pays to source content creators from all over the world from Norway to Texas.

They can get local content and generate content from dozens of creators in places where they couldn’t normally execute. They can do it at a very low cost and put money behind the best content and boost it to a wider audience. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Corbett Drummey, CEO of Popular Pays
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