Most creators aren't as influential as they think

Most creators have an audience. Far fewer have influence.

In this episode, Aneesh Lal, also known as The Jerry Maguire of LinkedIn, the Founder of The Wishly Group, joins me to unpack what actually drives trust, attention, and buying behavior in the creator economy.

From why some creators convert while others don't, to the difference between being relatable versus aspirational, we explore the hidden dynamics behind audience growth, brand partnerships, dark social, and influence itself. We also get into why vanity metrics matter more than most marketers admit, what brands consistently get wrong about creators, and why attention alone isn't enough to change behavior.

Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction

(01:06) Meet Aneesh Lal and why he’s the Jerry Maguire of LinkedIn

(02:33) Brands are rushing the funnel

(04:46) The dream creator campaign

(06:12) The deals worth rejecting

(07:47) Pay gaps in creator marketing

(11:13) Does the label matter?

(15:13) Engagement doesn't equal sales

(17:13) Why creators need video

(18:18) Where creators should expand

(19:18) Everyone cares about followers

(24:43) The dark social problem

(27:57) Why expertise matters

(30:03) Losing connection with audiences

(32:53)  To the creators who want to start partnering with brands 

(34:11) Depth over short-form skills

Resources:

Hear more from me in the Stop the Scroll Newsletter: https://briannadoe.substack.com/

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianna-doe/ 

Aneesh’’s LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/aneeshlal 

The Wishly Group  LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/thewishlygroup 

The Wishly Group Website: https://www.wishlygroup.ca/ 

Transcript

Aneesh Lal (00:00):

I think that the number of people, the number and quality of engagements will go down over time is because people just can't connect with you anymore. They'll say stuff like, "Great job. I'm so happy for you. Wow, you made it. Nice car." They'll still do that kind of stuff. But if you look at the quality of connection, the number of DMs you get asking questions, I think you'll see that the more cosmetic it becomes, the audience you're currently with, you're losing connection with them.

Brianna Doe (00:30):

All right. Hello, I'm Brianna Doe and this is Stop the Scroll. So let's get into the content that makes us stop, click, and care. All right. I legitimately don't even know how to introduce this person because Aneesh is hands down one of my favorite people. For those who don't know who he is, he is the Jerry Maguire of LinkedIn and I'll allow him to explain that. But he's also a good friend. He's my agent. He's my pseudo therapist and we work together on all things campaign strategy. So I'm so excited to chat with you today. Thanks for joining me.

Aneesh Lal (01:00):

Thanks for having me. I can't believe I made it to the show.That's fantastic.

Brianna Doe (01:04):

So you are the founder of Wishly Group. Can you tell me what you do and why you're the Jerry Maguire?

Aneesh Lal (01:10):

Yeah. So we essentially have earned our creators $10 million in brand deals. So we're the agents for 50 B2B creators. And when you take a look at everything we're doing right now, we're running 170 brand activations per month with over 160 brands throughout the year. They rotate in throughout. And our job is just to make sure our creators get paid fairly. They get some good work out there and we crush some campaigns for our brand partners.

Brianna Doe (01:38):

I love it. And what makes you to Jerry Maguire? Where did that come from?

Aneesh Lal (01:42):

Where'd that come from? The real story? Yeah. The real story is I lost a bet to Alana and Tamika from HubSpot at Inbound. This is a real story. I was with Morgan Ingram. Shout out Morgan. We're all just sitting around and there's all these jokes. People were walking by. At that time, people had started calling me Jerry Maguire, Jerry Maguire. And the person who first came up with it was John Barrows. He mentioned it somewhere and then other people started calling me that. And then Alana and Tamika were like, "If 10 people call you that at this conference, you have to change your LinkedIn title on the spot."

Brianna Doe (02:22):

Oh, wow.

Aneesh Lal (02:22):

And one thing led to another, 10 people did do that and I changed my title to the Jerry Maguire of LinkedIn and it led to a lot of really good things, but that's how it happened.

Brianna Doe (02:32):

I love it. Okay. So diving into your work then, what do you think is something brands consistently get wrong about what they're buying when they partner with a creator?

Aneesh Lal (02:42):

Yeah, I think the brands come in with this intention of let the creator cook. They know their audience is best. And what we see a lot, especially you and me in the creative strategy space, brands tend to get overly prescriptive and brands who are truly coming in from a transactional standpoint will be like, "We only have a one-off post we can do. " And they try to fit too much in that message. What ends up happening is you're rushing through awareness all the way down to conversion in on touchpoint with an audience member more so than you got to do this in the long run, you got to get the frequency in, you got to warm people up, you got to make people feel before they buy. But in these instances, people just feel like what the hell just happened. And a lot of times we're seeing brands trying to get, they get that wrong right from the get- go.

(03:36):

So it requires a lot of education upfront from us.

Brianna Doe (03:39):

Do you think there's like an element of fear baked into that too, like fear of failing as a marketer or the person partnering with the creator?

Aneesh Lal (03:47):

I don't know why it's happening because marketing 101 is frequency and education. It's just before you can get people to buy, especially higher ACV B2B subscriptions, you kind of need to get people to understand what you solve for, what you stand for, why you're there. And when you rush that experience, it makes me think twice about your strategy. And it does come from probably a place of fear trying to catch up to everybody. Our VCs just told us to do this, or we're going for a Series A, or my marketing, my finance person needs to see all these results. I got to protect my job in this era of layoffs. There might be a lot of things moving that, but our job is to protect the creator and the brand from doing a shitty campaign.

Brianna Doe (04:33):

Okay. So you wake up tomorrow, the world is perfect. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, there are rainbows everywhere. A brand comes to you and says, "We have endless budget. Craft a campaign for us." What do you think is the ideal structure for a partnership?

Aneesh Lal (04:50):

Oh, I like this question. Dream situation? Yeah.

(04:55):

We're coming up with edutainment, thought leadership level content at the beginning. We're layering it across different channels. I like the idea of having a longer form concept that people can get more of, whether it's something like this, a live sit down, a YouTube video, maybe something to read or go through. But I like it when the activations are connected for the three month engagement that we usually pilot on versus three micro campaigns that we're going to run. I like that the thought leadership piece can get a huge groundswell of people coming in, talking about it, engaging with it. We run thought leadership ads to all the titles and the relevant people you want to get to. And then the next couple of activations that we do move people down the funnel. That would be my dream situation.

Brianna Doe (05:45):

Would you still recommend a three-month pilot for this dream situation or would you push for longer?

Aneesh Lal (05:51):

I think realistically three months is we got to be fair to both sides. In three months, we should be able to show the client, the brand, some form of results, some form of, "Here's how many people are talking about you. " If it takes six months to do that, sometimes people might argue that's too long to move the needle.

Brianna Doe (06:11):

Yeah, that's fair. Is there a deal you've turned down that you think most agents would've taken?

Aneesh Lal (06:16):

Every day. Every day. Every day. We actually track this. So I have turned down almost four or five million in deals. We've brought in 10 million for our creators, but we've turned down almost half as much and because some of these deals are just overly transactional. We've had brands come in saying, "Hey, we'll pay for this contract. We'll do that. We'll do that. " I'm like, "Your approach is extremely prescriptive." I had one brand come tell me that they're going to sign up 25 people for four or five grand each, but they only wanted to recruit white people. I said, "This company is now on my blacklist. We're never going to work with them anymore. It's because I was asked to recruit a certain type of person. It's just not okay." So we definitely have our values in check. We want to make sure that brands aren't being transactional, let alone racist, but it all comes down to making sure that the creator has passion for what the problem is being solved for, that they've used the tool at the very least and they accept that they know how it works.

(07:23):

And sometimes those things don't add up no matter what the money is. You're just taking money for a future problem at that point.

Brianna Doe (07:31):

That makes sense. I'm curious since you brought up that example with the blacklisting, I don't know if you know this, but you are a person of color as am I.

Aneesh Lal (07:40):

I

Brianna Doe (07:41):

Know. Crazy, right?

Aneesh Lal (07:43):

What?

Brianna Doe (07:44):

I know. It's a huge shock. And you also represent a really diverse roster, not just across race, but gender, job, career experience. It's incredibly diverse. I think it's incredible, honestly. Was that intentional? How do you curate your roster?

Aneesh Lal (08:04):

A hundred percent intentional. We do it by design. I'm a big believer that diverse perspectives is what unlocks innovation. And when I had to find the common ground between everybody and you being on Wishly Yourself, I hope you can see everyone that's there, that's present, that's engaging in the Slack channels. We come from a place of abundance and support. The number of times Wishly Talent has taken inbound leads and said, "Hey, I don't like this, but somebody else might, or let's share this, let's do that. " It's just incredible to see. So that's the value set I look for regardless of your race, gender, whatever, but I do like to see different identities represented in bigger deals. I want to make sure women are getting paid the same as men are for the same type of job, same type of activation. So you know what's hilarious when brands reach out to all these creators in their outreach and they have different ranges and things like that for budgets and they don't realize when you reach out to sales and marketing on LinkedIn, I'm going to get at least 80% of those.

(09:11):

And I see the way individuals are reached out to and then it all comes to me anyways when I get introduced to the ... And I'm like, wait a minute, some of these numbers aren't adding up. Why was this person offered something and this person was offered something completely different and they're a very similar size creator? It's very interesting to see.

Brianna Doe (09:30):

It is. I think even being more on the brand side, on the marketing side, I noticed that with clients too. And I've been really upfront with clients. If there is obvious pay disparity, one, I'm not going to honor it. We're going to offer the same rates dependent on all the criteria that you track. But I will say one of my favorite things about working in this space is that I can be negotiating with a creator and just email them and be like, "By the way, you're charging way too little. I'm actually going to pitch you at X, Y, Z." And not to mess with the client. Actually, the client usually appreciates it, but because you want creators to not just feel okay about the deal, but feel like they're supported. I think that's a piece that's missing a lot.

Aneesh Lal (10:11):

Yeah. We had a chat just today with a brand. I was just giving them some ... I'd heard different creators speaking about them in a negative way and they were saying so- and-so is coming across very predatory. They're not fair with their offers. Actually, the last offer was insulting. So when I start hearing from multiple groups who don't talk to each other, that a brand is being predatory or insulting or something like that, I actually called this brand and said, "Hey, can we just have a quick heart to heart? I'm just letting you know how you're coming across right now." And they were so appreciative of the feedback. They're like, "Dude, we were just negotiating or our leadership told us this is the max we can do. " I'm like, "Cool." There's different ways to phrase things. There's different ways to communicate those things. You can't just assume somebody said, "Oh, I charge 5,000 for a post," and then you come in for, "I have 500 bucks for you.

(11:00):

" That's insulting to a lot of people. So it's important for folks like us to keep brands in check, but also creators in check.

Brianna Doe (11:09):

Yeah, agreed. Okay. Switching gears a little bit, I noticed you used the term creator. What do you think about the term influencer?

Aneesh Lal (11:15):

I personally don't really care the difference. I really don't. I think you can be a creator with influence. You can be an influencer that doesn't create ... I mean, at the end of the day, in our world, people know who you're talking about. I try not to get too lost in the semantics. I've just gotten used to saying the word creator because my creators call themselves creators. I think creators themselves hate calling themselves influencers. I'm a behind the scenes operator. For me, it's tomato tomato, but I think I actually have seen creators cringe to where it's being called an influencer.

Brianna Doe (11:51):

Oh, all the time.

Aneesh Lal (11:52):

Yeah.

Brianna Doe (11:52):

A litle bit too often if you ask me, but it's not a big deal. What do you think is the difference between a creator who has influence and a creator who has an audience or do you think there's a difference?

Aneesh Lal (12:06):

I think you need to have an audience to have influence over. It'd be tough for me to be like, if I have a hundred followers, I'm like, I have influence. Now, it depends who the followers are. Fair enough. If they're the Fortune 100 CEO, it's different story.

Brianna Doe (12:20):

You have an audience.

Aneesh Lal (12:21):

Different story. I have influence over a high degree of people. But generally speaking, all followers considered equal, you do need to have a community that you're speaking to to demonstrate your influence. If you don't have an audience and you have influences to one end, to what end are do you have influence? No one's buying anything. No one's changing their behavior. You're not inspiring anybody. You think you have influence. I think influence needs to lead to some sort of shift in behavior.

Brianna Doe (12:48):

Okay. That actually makes me think of something interesting. I'm in the beginning stages of working on this for a newsletter. I'm curious what you think. There can be two creators with the exact same audience size, maybe they even talk about similar content, same channels, and one has the ability to convert their audience, whether it's a sponsored ad or something else. The other one doesn't. What do you think the difference is there?

Aneesh Lal (13:13):

There could be a lot of things there. It just depends how the messaging has been done, what formats were mediums, how long the expert or creator has been talking about certain topic. If it's month six chances of that newsletter converting or higher than somebody who dropped it in month one. But if both of the creators are the same and it's the same period of time and same everything, but one audience is converting better than another, that means the match that audience has to the sponsor is much more valid. The ICP may not be who you think it is for the creator who's not converted.

Brianna Doe (13:50):

Well, there was this TikTok creator and for the life of me, I can't remember her name, but she ... I didn't see her posts, but I saw people talking about it. She has something like a million followers between TikTok and Instagram people of her content. She has really high engagement and she launched some kind of product cut no purchase. I mean, literally maybe the hundred purchases and she shut the whole thing down. I just think it's so interesting. Even when it's not sponsored, how do you think you actually build an audience that converts?

Aneesh Lal (14:21):

Well, it depends who that ... If you know the audience details like title, wealth, where they live, zip codes. Are they consuming your content on Wednesday at 12:00 PM all the time? The chances are they're not working. If your peak periods of consumption are during times when people should be having a job and then you release something where it's like $150 or whatever for a product, good luck. Right. Good luck. Why do you think LinkedIn peaks before and after work? Unless your job is like us where you live on LinkedIn and you create on LinkedIn, 99% of LinkedIn people are before and after work, maybe their lunch break, right? That's why the channels that you build for the details that you learn about your audience, all that matters before you can go out and pitch them something.

Brianna Doe (15:12):

I think you make a great point. Who are you actually building for and are you building something that ... Are you building something for an audience that can convert? And I think a lot of people conflate just high engagement with high conversions. Okay, well, I automatically have influence because I have all these followers, but-

Aneesh Lal (15:29):

One piece of advice I have to creators who are trying to sell things if you don't know who your audience is and you asked, I'm always like, how have you asked? There's surveys, there's lead magnets that lead to surveys. You must survey your audience to understand who they are beyond the analytics of whatever platform you're on. And if you've put out content that's asking people to fill out a one minute easy, like, how much money do you make? Where do you live? What kind of job do you have? What's your title? If you cannot get that level of information after depositing content for years and then you want to go sell them something, do not complain when your sales are shit.

Brianna Doe (16:13):

That's a really good point.

Aneesh Lal (16:14):

The litmus test is like, can I even get information for free while delivering value with a lead magnet or whatever. And if people aren't even converting on your lead magnet, if people aren't even giving you real information, you are so far away from making a monetary transaction taking place.

Brianna Doe (16:36):

Do you think launching a newsletter is also a good gauge?

Aneesh Lal (16:39):

Is that

Brianna Doe (16:39):

Free too?

Aneesh Lal (16:40):

A hundred percent it is. If I have 100,000 followers and then I put out a newsletter saying, "Hey, I'm going to go deeper on this. You've all engaged with my content and typically short form, text, image, even video short form." So unless it's a YouTube thing where some people just like to read, I always tell people YouTube's like your newsletter but on video. It's just longer form content. But if nobody's signing up for your newsletter, no one's going to buy anything from you. Very few people are going to buy

Brianna Doe (17:11):

Something. Yeah, that's a really good point. What do you think about creators who maybe spread themselves too thin with channels? Because I know you mentioned earlier the dream partnership structure is multi-channel. Do you advise your creators on this? I know you tell me to do video all the time.

Aneesh Lal (17:26):

I think video as a format is something every creator needs to master in 2026. And I know a lot of people don't like to hear that, but I do believe in order for you to future proof yourself, the way we all consume knowledge is through video for the most part, right? I'm not saying to replace written with video. I'm saying you need to master both and then you speak to both two sets of audiences that way. Once you see that your engagement rates are plateauing, your follow accounts just don't seem to be increasing anymore because the algorithm said, okay, this is your max for now. Unless you're really experimenting and trying different things, it's hard to grow on some of these platforms. I would start investing some time in building up other platforms as well. But if you've got a deep trajectory going, I wouldn't change that too much.

Brianna Doe (18:17):

Okay. Is there a channel recommendation you would make? If a creator came to you and said, "I'm just on LinkedIn, should I go to YouTube next or Instagram?"

Aneesh Lal (18:26):

I would do Instagram first and we'll take the short form cuts from your long form and then put it on YouTube shorts and Instagram. The good news then is when you are putting out your Instagram content and you run a ManyChat integration, shout out ManyChat, love that whole team ManyChat's the best $20. Any creator can spend on Instagram. I don't care what kind of creator you are. If you're giving something to then lead to a different thing or you want to find a way to get people's emails or whatever, Instagram, ManyChat's the best thing you can do. Now you have somewhere to send all those people who subscribe to your short form content, you can push them to long form content through ManyChat.

Brianna Doe (19:07):

ManyChat is a game changer. Since I

Aneesh Lal (19:10):

Implemented it for

Brianna Doe (19:11):

Instagram, my newsletter conversion rate, it is just skyrocketing.

Aneesh Lal (19:16):

Best $20 creator can spend.

Brianna Doe (19:18):

What do you think is something about this space that people talk about all the time that you think is mostly bullshit or all bullshit?

Aneesh Lal (19:24):

Oh my God. I think when people say they don't care about vanity metrics, they'll fucking lie. Yeah,

Brianna Doe (19:35):

They're always

Aneesh Lal (19:35):

Lying. I also think brands who say, "We don't evaluate on this. " I'm like, "Yeah, you are.

Brianna Doe (19:39):

" Yeah,

Aneesh Lal (19:39):

You do.

Brianna Doe (19:40):

Yeah.

Aneesh Lal (19:40):

Everybody cares about impressions. Everybody cares about followers. It's the first point of entry before you check the rest out. If you're buying a home and you're looking outside of the home, it's like, okay, well, you should never look at the outside of a home. If every home was just renovated on the inside and it's like, okay, cool, the outside doesn't matter. People care about what things look like on the outside. It's why we buy brands with logos on them. People do care about vanity more than they like to admit and it is the litmus test of who you roll with, right? How many impressions this person get? Oh, I want to get that too. Then from there, yes, engagement conversion, all that matters. But I think vanity metrics matter a lot more than people pretend like they don't.

Brianna Doe (20:24):

I would agree. I would also, this might be a spicy take, but I think the term vanity metric is also very lazy. So there are two types of people that I see talking about vanity metrics. One, it's the post on LinkedIn or any channel. They're like, "I know this is a vanity metric, but I hit 100,000 followers, but I don't care about it because it's a vanity metric." But I do just want to shout it out because the numbers aren't what matter to me. It's the connection, but congrats to me on 100K. It's like, okay, well, I think you just proved yourself wrong within the parameters of this post.

Aneesh Lal (20:56):

It's just funny because that one post is like four likes.

Brianna Doe (21:01):

Right. It's always the least engaged with because we all see through you. So there's that. Then there are people that just say in terms of brand partnerships, I don't know why brands only look at vanity metrics. They don't matter. What matters is the quality of the depth of the connection. Yes, the quality of the engagement does matter. I agree with everything you just said though. It is something that we use to kind of, be it right, wrong or indifferent, to gauge or measure who we want to roll with. And I actually did this, I did an article on this, I think I called it like you might not care about follower accounts, but your brain does. And I had done a bunch of research on how this stems back from the caveman days. You were evaluated by your ability to, as a caveman, bring food to your tribe or take care of your tribe or how many animals you could kill and drag back to camp.

(21:48):

And that has since transformed into these visible metrics that we can now measure. All I can see is your follower account. I can't see if you're brilliant or anything else. I just think I don't know why people diss them so much.

Aneesh Lal (22:01):

I get it because it's social proof. If a hundred thousand people click subscribe or follow, that means something in the grand scheme of things, it means something. And if I'm a brand trying to reach a certain group of people, well, guess what? You know the benefit of somebody who has a lot of followers is they're hitting multiple people in your buying committee from a B2B place. I don't want always the 10,000 person creator who speaks to just product marketing.That is important, but guess what? There is almost no software out there with just product marketing's buying it. That needs to go through a series of people who have accepted that you want to buy this thing and approve it. I like the fact that we work with bigger creators because we hit the buying committee so much faster than anyone else can.

Brianna Doe (22:53):

I know earlier I said you're like my pseudotherapist. I think this did just become a therapy session for me. Well, because I talk to clients about this all the time too, right? Well, they'll say something like, "We don't care about follower accounts or we've heard that we should only work with smaller creators because it's a more niche audience." And my question is always to them, "Well, what are we actually optimizing for? " Because the goal of the campaign should actually inform who it is that you're working with, not just rejecting somebody because they have 50,000 more followers than this other creator. And I think that's a unique problem to B2B.

Aneesh Lal (23:28):

I agree. I agree. The B2B place, I'm not saying it's one or the other. You need both. Yeah.

(23:33):

You need the specialist approach and you need the wider approach as well. You need both because the way people buy serious levels of tech stack at mid-market and above especially, they want to defend themselves. They want to protect themselves when they make that decision. So I was like, "Oh, I just heard about ... Let's take HubSpot. Let's say you're looking for a new CRM. You're coming into the mix or maybe you're on HubSpot now and you heard of this brand new CRM that no one's heard of, but it's a disruptor. You love to demo or whatever. The first thing you do is you go into your Slack or your Discord or Teams or whatever and you're like, has anyone heard of Insert CRM?" Yes. And if nobody in that buying committee says, "Oh yeah, I've heard of them," the chances of that demo taking place or that sales cycle speeding up have drastically been reduced.

(24:25):

Our job on the influencer side is to reverse engineer those dark social dialogues. We have to create the conversation nodes across multiple people that will say, "Oh yes, I have heard of CRM, whatever. Let's go get the demo. Let's take a serious look at this thing."

Brianna Doe (24:44):

How do you communicate with brands who want to be able to have direct attribution to every influencer? Knowing what you just said about the kind of reverse engineering dark social, how do you measure with them?

Aneesh Lal (24:56):

I first asked them how they buy. They usually acknowledge dark social elements to it And then I ask them, how would that brand have attributed the sale to you? And they can't answer that question. So now we're on the same page. I have to have them admit the actual human experience before they just go into like, "Well, my CFO said this. " But then I'm like, "Here's what we can tell you. We can show you how many people within your ICP have engaged with the content. It's manual, but we can show it to you. We can show you how many people have come in from this company who are now matching into your pipeline report 30 to 60 days later. It's manual, but it's doable. You have UTM links and site traffic visits, all that fun stuff as well, but that's where you have to combine the mix of those things.

(25:52):

The UTM clicks mixed with actuals, raw data that you get from LinkedIn that luckily gives you title and company names and you match the title and company names to ICP overlap and then pipeline reports 30 to 60 days after you run an influencer campaign. Which companies that engage with all these influencers are now in our opportunity section of our pipeline report. That is one way to get something direct. Okay, they didn't come from nowhere. They must have seen something and now they're here. So it was an influenced element.

Brianna Doe (26:28):

And that is why he's my agent, folks.

Aneesh Lal (26:31):

Facts.

Brianna Doe (26:32):

One of many reasons. Okay, that makes sense to me. I think to taking my creator hat off and putting the marketer hat on. Yeah. I asked something similar. If you can tell me that the reason you bought the last five things that you purchased is because of a specific ... You can tell me everything about the Facebook ad you saw or you bought it straight from the site, you never heard anybody talk about it. Okay. I don't believe you, but I can work with that. But you're right, most people will attribute it on some level to Dark Social. I think Dark Social just scares people for the same reasons we were talking about earlier because you can't ... What's my CFO going to say? What's my CMO going to say? But it's the same thing with an ad really.

Aneesh Lal (27:10):

Yeah. But where did the CFO buy their procurement software from? And did they just buy? Did they just select ... They clicked one ad one time to drop 50K for the year? What kind of CFO are you?

Brianna Doe (27:25):

Questionable

Aneesh Lal (27:26):

One. Zero chance that that CFO runs their life without getting some sort of peer-to-peer validation and the choices. And the moment you go to somebody else, the moment whether it's through Slack, phone call, conference, dinner, some homie tells you, this is how I do it at my company, that is all dark social. And our job is to influence those social conversations.

Brianna Doe (27:49):

So you mentioned something earlier about how you Wishly specifically works with bigger creators. I don't actually know the answer to this question. How many of your creators are practitioners and how many are full-time creators or even like a general ...

Aneesh Lal (28:03):

None are full-time creators.

Brianna Doe (28:05):

Okay.

Aneesh Lal (28:06):

Every single one of our creators by design are at the very least consultants in their space. They have active client bases. They must have active client bases as consultants in order for us to be working with them or they're fractionals or they're full-time. They have to be practicing the craft they're speaking about.

Brianna Doe (28:26):

And you said by design, so that is

Aneesh Lal (28:28):

Intentional creator. That's 100% of a bare minimum rule of ours.

Brianna Doe (28:32):

Why is that?

Aneesh Lal (28:34):

I feel that I call wishly talent relational talent. So you've got figurehead talent like Gary V and all these really famous people. I don't know how attainable being a Gary V is today. I really don't. I think he's a great role model and people want to go on the path that they pay, but how many people can say, I'm going to be like Gary V in a year or two? Who knows? It's a bit of a lottery play now. But when you look at someone like an Alfred Samba or a Morgan Ingram, well, here's what we call relational creators or influencers. They are one or two steps away. If I just follow what Morgan taught me, if I just follow what Elfrey just did, I'm closer to becoming them so I'm more likely to listen to that person.

Brianna Doe (29:20):

Interesting. And

Aneesh Lal (29:21):

That's a bit of a social dynamic element I've learned from people. Yes, there's the big figurehead people and they're always going to do great things, but the reason why your everyday Instagram or TikTok account, like the person you're following there has so much influence over you, they're living a life that you're living maybe one or two steps away. And the bigger some creators get, the less relational they get. They just become aspirational and there's a very big difference. I think a zone of connection and a zone of relevance to somebody is how close to approximately like, "Oh, if I just tweak this and this, I can become Breonna Doe." Maybe. And I think as long as you're in that one or two steps proximity, Your degree of influence is actually very strong on that audience.

Brianna Doe (30:04):

As a creator, how do I know if I'm getting too close to being aspirational?

Aneesh Lal (30:08):

I think the quality of engagements go down. I think that the number and quality of engagements will go down over time is because people just can't connect with you anymore. They'll say stuff like, "Great job. I'm so happy for you. Wow, you made it. Nice car." They'll still do that kind of stuff. But if you look at the quality of connection, the number of DMs you get asking questions, I think you'll see that the more cosmetic it becomes, it means that the audience you're currently with, you're losing connection with them.

Brianna Doe (30:45):

Do you think you can get it back, get that connection back?

Aneesh Lal (30:49):

I think so. I think that's where the vulnerability comes up. I think you start talking about, for me, almost overnight, in 18 months we went from desperate agency, please sign whatever. We started this, what, August 2024?

Brianna Doe (31:08):

2024. Yeah.

Aneesh Lal (31:09):

We have six people.

Brianna Doe (31:10):

2024?

Aneesh Lal (31:11):

Yeah. We're not even two yet. Oh,

Brianna Doe (31:13):

Wow.

Aneesh Lal (31:13):

And now we're a multi-seven figure agency. So when you take a look overnight, even if I was posting content in this time, my core audience before, they might see too much of a change in me if I was posting content. The real thing you got to do is remind people the human part behind you is like, "Hey folks, it actually it sounds great to have multi seven figure this and money that and blah blah blah all that. But I work 23 hours a day. I've missed all my nephew's birthdays. I'm on 50 flights in the first six months. I don't get to spend as much time with my wife." And you know these things, but we've talked about

Brianna Doe (31:51):

Them.

Aneesh Lal (31:51):

But the more you want to, you got to keep sharing those types of things as you elevate to remind people that you're still a work in progress.

Brianna Doe (32:02):

That's a really good point. I made a face at 50 flights in the first six months because I know this about you and I actually saw a comment on LinkedIn the other day. I don't know if you saw this. I forget who posted it, but there was a picture of you when we were at the LinkedIn headquarters and somebody commented and said, Aneesh is the most well-traveled person I've ever met. Have you seen that comment yet?

Aneesh Lal (32:21):

I did. And here's the better part. I have no idea who that is. But this person knows this person. It's

Brianna Doe (32:28):

Because you're in every picture everybody's ever taken

Aneesh Lal (32:31):

And every's in different- Different times though. Different

Brianna Doe (32:33):

Cities, different countries. Yeah. It was really

Aneesh Lal (32:35):

Funny. My bank froze me out of my account because they thought I was in different times zone. They thought it was a cyber attack.

Brianna Doe (32:42):

I forgot about that. But no, I think that's great advice. You're right. Being relational over aspirational, if you start to lose that connection, you start to become just unattainable and not in a good way. Yeah. Okay. In the last couple minutes, if there was one thing you could tell creators who want to start partnering with brands or just want to build those relationships, what would you tell them? And for brands that want to work with creators, what would you tell them?

Aneesh Lal (33:05):

So on the creator front first, don't wait till you have the money to unlock the experience. So I talk to so many creators who are very good at what they do saying, "I'm not going to do a free post for Anthropic." I'm like, "Anthropic has got so many options at this point that you kind of need to show that you know what you're talking about when it comes to Anthropic. Shout out Anthropic. We love working with you, but you kind of need to demonstrate for some of these brands who have options that everybody wants to work for, you kind of need to demonstrate first before you ask. So give before you ask on the creator front. On the brand front, definitely run your due diligence on the depth of knowledge that a creator has to solve the problem you solve for. A lot of times brands will come in and I've seen them sign up with certain creators, not ours, certain creators saying, wow, this person's so good on video and if they just get the hook right, we'll get all these impressions.

(34:05):

It starts there, but what are you going to do in month two or month three of that partnership? Depth of knowledge for subject matter expertise really matters because you're able to talk about problems in a different way to different audiences and you're also able to really go further down in a community-led strategy versus somebody who's really good on ... I'm really good at short form. I got my 30 to 60 seconds done and then I just say the same shit over and over again. Audiences will fatigue off that. So if you are choosing who your ambassadors are brands, you need to choose people who have depth of knowledge versus just they might be good at short form video.

Brianna Doe (34:49):

I love it. Okay. Couple rapid fire questions. One movie you think everybody should see.

Aneesh Lal (34:55):

Lord of the Rings, you know that.

Brianna Doe (34:56):

Which one though?

Aneesh Lal (34:58):

Oh shit. I'm a big fan of the two Towers.

Brianna Doe (35:02):

What? That's your favorite one?

Aneesh Lal (35:05):

So good. The

Brianna Doe (35:06):

Helm's deep out. That's wild. That's the one I've watched the least. Now relatively speaking, I mean, I've seen it hundreds of times, but it is the one I've watched the least. That's so interesting.

Aneesh Lal (35:16):

We're really good for you when the Elves show up and reinforcements arrive and all the races are together. It's amazing.

Brianna Doe (35:21):

That was cool. That was pretty dope. I got stuck on the tree beard scenes that took 97 hours. Granted, I always watch the extended edition, but it just felt like the movie just ... I mean, come on. They talk slow, they move slow. Fair

Aneesh Lal (35:33):

Point.

Brianna Doe (35:34):

I was like, "You're losing me. " Okay, but I respect it. That's a true fan. That's a true fan. All right. One TV show you think everybody should watch.

Aneesh Lal (35:40):

TV show?

Brianna Doe (35:42):

You're like the making of Lord of the Rings.

Aneesh Lal (35:44):

Duh. Lord of the Rings on Prime. Rings of Power on Prime. No, no. I think my favorite TV show, there's so many of them. I'm a big comedy guy, so I love The Office and Friends, but the one that I just can't stop I think is going to be timeless is Big Bang Theory. I love when people challenge the status quo, like smart is the new sexy. I love that. Because growing up, all the smart kids got bullied or made fun of and now I'm like, yo, he ended up with the most gorgeous person on the plane. Wow. Look good for him. I actually like The Underdog, Smart as the New Sexy. Kind of like even Lord of the Rings, right? The Hobbit is the hero. Never expect it. I love those things.

Brianna Doe (36:30):

Okay. I got to watch this. I've only seen young Sheldon. All right. Final question. Where can people find you, get in touch, learn more about Wishly?

Aneesh Lal (36:37):

Yeah. I'd say hit me up on LinkedIn. I hope that's a given by now. If you need any advice on anything brand related for how to work with creators, I'm your guy. If anyone wants to hang out at Cannes Lion, let me know. I feel like this episode will air after that, but all good. It's all good. We'll

Brianna Doe (36:54):

Push it forward. It'll come up

Aneesh Lal (36:55):

Before. Next year.

Brianna Doe (36:56):

Next year. All right. Well, thank you so much. This was so much fun as usual. And if you enjoy this episode, hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and for more on what's shaping the definition and demand around the content we consume, sign up for the Stop the Scroll newsletter. Link is in the show notes and I'll see you in the feed.