Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Corbett Drummey, CEO of Popular Pays (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: To be perfectly honest with you, I flatly turn down all of these requests.

Corbett Drummey: One of the cool things about Popular Pays is that although a brand can use our search tool and find an influencer, we also have an app where creators can view all the open gigs, and they can raise their hand. I’ll give a quick example.

Let’s say, I’m browsing through these gigs. I can browse and apply for the ones that I think I fit in. Oftentimes, that model of hand-raising leads to some of the best collaboration. One of the unique things we have is when a creator is applying, you can ask them questions. They’ll give a creative pitch.

We counsel brands even if a brand is subscribing on a self-service basis. We offer a free creative brief. We give some advice on their brands. That’s a common mistake; brands are overly prescriptive. You want to enable that creative freedom.

Sramana Mitra: How much of your business is B2B or B2C?

Corbett Drummey: It’s mostly B2B. We’re now selling into businesses.

Sramana Mitra: My question is are the brands coming to you mostly B2B or B2C. I think the answer is B2C, right?

Corbett Drummey: Mostly it’s B2C. The brands that do really well on our platform are consumer product companies. Especially if you have a physical product, it works really well.

Any kind of consumer goods does really great because the content is so visual. You can show it off. We do some B2B as well. Those tend to be more targeted. I bet people reach out to you with some B2B requests. We see that a lot too.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of adoption are you seeing in the market of your kind of technology?

Corbett Drummey: We’ve been doing this now a little over five years now. When we first started, it was really tough. People didn’t even understand why they would want to work with creators or influencers. We had a hard time even having brands just give free products.

A change happened after that. In 2015, a lot of brands came online with the idea of getting traction out of just giving influencers free products. Then people started getting really comfortable with the idea of paying good creators for their work. It has really transformed over the last five years.

If you think about modern brands, content is their oxygen where you have to always have something to post about on social media. It went from a time where you can post once or twice a week on Facebook, to now having Instagram stories with multiple short videos a day. It has transformed.

We’ve seen adoption come full circle where almost everyone needs this software. It’s really been remarkable. When we started, no one really felt they needed it. Now almost every brand has a need for scaling content creation. A lot of them are already working with influencers or creators. They see so much value immediately.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Corbett Drummey, CEO of Popular Pays
1 2 3