AI Meets Influencer Marketing with Linqia

In this episode of Curve Ahead, host Brian Wiles chats with Daniel Schotland, COO of Linqia, to discuss how AI is transforming influencer marketing. Daniel shares Linqia’s approach to optimizing campaigns with data and analytics, the evolution of the influencer space, and how brands can use creative strategies to stay ahead.

Key Takeaways:
✅ Using AI to find the perfect influencer-brand match
✅ Evolving trends in influencer marketing from blogs to TikTok
✅ Measuring ROI and optimizing for campaign success
✅ Integrating influencers into retail media and shopper marketing

🎧 Tune in for actionable insights on leveraging influencers to build impactful campaigns

Transcript

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Welcome back to Curve Ahead, the podcast where we uncover the stories, insights and strategies behind today's most exciting companies. I'm your host, Brian Wiles, the founder of Audeze. Today we're diving into dynamic world of influencer marketing with the COO of Linkia, Daniel. In today's episode, Daniel shares his fascinating journey from ad tech to becoming a leader influencer marketing and offers insights on how the industry has transformed from the days of blogging today's powerhouse platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. One of the great insights that we'll learn is how Linkia is leveraging AI to match the perfect influencer to the brand's vision. If you've ever wondered how to create an impactful influencer strategy that aligns with your goals, this episode is packed with actionable insights just for you. Let's jump in. Daniel, welcome to the show. Hey, Daniel, welcome to the podcast. Do you mind introducing yourself? Hey, Brian. Absolutely. Daniel Shotland, COO of Lynkia. We're an influencer marketing company based out in San Francisco. Can we talk about your background a little bit? I know that you've been with Lynkia for about seven years. They were founded a few years before you had joined. But what led you to become the COO of Lynkia? You know, my background out of high school business at UC Berkeley, went to consulting kind of early days and, you know, had an opportunity to really deep dive into challenges that many businesses faced and come up to speed really quickly. Found that my calling was really trying to figure out, you know, different challenges and solutions to those challenges and really develop plans to execute well against them, get stuff done, make stuff happen, figure things out kind of mindset. And that's kind of been me since day one. And, you know, it was a long time ago. Found myself in ad tech kind of serendipitously after doing a stent in kind of more email marketing and from the ad tech journey. When I left, I was with a company called Tubemogul and were acquired by Adobe. It was a really great run. I actually wanted to do something even more entrepreneurial. I was the chief client officer there and managed to find this company, Lynkia. It's part of my journey and trying to evaluate do I want to start my own thing or do something different, join another company. Found this company as part of my exploration and fell in love with what they were doing. This was like you said seven years ago, influencer marketing seemed like it was going to be a thing, but it Wasn't really clear how it was going to get there. Felt like it was an awesome opportunity to join a company and really help them think through, go to market and be part of the journey in making influencer marketing and creators really a central strategy for large enterprise brands. And I've been really proud to be here over the seven years and we've done a lot and we've got a lot more to do. Seven years influencer marketing seems like an eternity for that space. How has it evolved over the time you've been there and how have you adapted to evolve with the different platforms and the different challenges you face from dealing with influencers? It does feel like an eternity in some ways, but it also feels like it's gone by, you know, in a few seconds. When I first joined Linkia, influencer marketing was all about bloggers. This was before, I mean, Instagram existed, but this is before Instagram was the mainstay for influencer marketing. And it was really kind of a. It was about bloggers and finding bloggers to represent your. And that was a very, very different style of influencer. In fact, LinkedIn was founded on the belief, and we still believe this very strongly. How can we leverage influencers to drive material business impact for brands? And so were more of a cost per click influencer marketing network, if you will, very focused on kind of the blog community. And we are not that today. We've evolved greatly back from those early days. We're kind of the mainstay of influencer marketing, working with major enterprise brands, working with influencers and creators from nano all the way up to mega and celebrity and absolutely everything in between. And it's all about helping brands partner with the right influencers to still drive, measure and optimize that material business impact. Blogs still exist, but very few programs or strategies revolve around blogs. It's really all about Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and making sure that we're developing strategies that align the brand with the right target audience. Back that up with content creation that is going to not just fuel organic activation on the influencer social channels, but really help the brand to seed and leverage that content for all of their digital marketing and advertising kind of exploits, from connected TV to digital out of home to display to online video, with creator content really at the center to drive massive performance and efficiency for these brands. So, you know, very kind of long evolution from the blog days to where we are now, but it's been a fun and exciting ride. I couldn't imagine working influencer marketing in the blog space. It isn't necessarily something that had even come to my mind as requiring influencer marketing. But I guess it kind of makes sense right now. It's kind of like the, I feel like the hot buttons are other than all this short form video are podcasts and newsletters. Newsletters for some reason have just been huge in the acquisition of newsletters have. Been mega dollars actually started my early kind of entry into marketing out of Deloitte in email marketing. So newsletters and everything. Email was a big, big part of it. Email is one of those channels where despite all of the evolution and different ways that you can use different marketing tactics and channels to reach, to engage them, to acquire them, to motivate them, to inspire them to purchase email marketing. You know, I'm still very much a believer that it works and what you said seems to hold true. So that, that still is very much the case. I think what we see with influencers today is, you know, influencers used to be about shiny content, shiny like insta perfect creator influencer. And that's evolved greatly. Influencer marketing means so many different things to different brands from influencers who really are partnered with a brand in a long term kind of perspective to as an ambassador if you will. And sometimes there are many, many ambassadors if you look like Victoria Secrets has done and many others in really helping to build this groundswell of you know, of content and of interest in kind of the brand to still large celeb kind of creators and mega, you know, mega creators who are creating content specific to that brand within an activation or maybe showing up at an event kind of that experiential or being part of a podcast and connecting that audience with the brand as part of their personality and kind of what they do and that notoriety that they might have to content creators who create content and don't even post on their organic channels. It's not about organic, it's about leveraging their expertise and creating really awesome content for to use in their owned and operated channels and really to use in their marketing and advertising initiatives. So there's really a lot that has gone on and I think one of the challenges for brands is how do you pull that together cohesively into a strategy that makes sense where it's not just about tactic, tactic. And by the way, influencer marketing still is one of the marketing kind of activities, a big one on behalf of these brands, but many other Things happen. How do you do it all in a really coordinated way? And I think for large enterprise brands that's increasingly difficult for them to do and that's why a partner like Linkia exists. We really helped to bring the calm to the chaos of influencer marketing. That's, that's a bit of our tagline to help develop that cohesive strategy. How do you want to leverage creators across the entire spectrum, upper funnel to lower funnel? How does influencer play a role in support and augment what you're doing across your other digital channels? And how do you measure the real impact and optimize and get better each time you go out, each time you work with a creator? That was a lot to unpack. Right. So do you, when working with brands, are you helping consult with them to try to understand, okay, here's your influencer budget or your overall marketing budget. I think that you should use this X amount towards influencers and based off of your desired roi, here's kind of the mix of influencers that I would go with who are going to deliver an authentic feeling post on your behalf or series of posts on your behalf. I think it starts off with what do you want to achieve? What are the goals that you have? And typically, you know, influencer marketing back in the day, you know, six, seven years ago or even longer, we've been around since 2012, was very episodic. It was about a particular activation. We have a new product launch. Great, let's work with influencers. We've got a new brand initiative. Great work with influencers. And that was it. Brands worked with very different partners and many agencies in the mix and it was very disjointed. Today when you take a look at these larger brands, they're really looking for kind of an influencer agency of record, kind of a one stop shop to really help understand what is it the brand is going to accomplish over the course of this year? What do they need to achieve? Is it about customer acquisitions, about conversion? Is about product launches? And usually it's about all of those things. And so how does influencer play a role in each and every one of those? And so it starts off with what does the brand want to achieve? What is the applicable budget for Influencer relative to these other channels? And then from there we create an entire annual plan by customer target and segment by initiative. What types of influencers do we want to use? Are there particular campaigns we're running? Is there evergreen content that influencers are creating? Is there a suite of ambassadors that we want to use so you have that more consistent drumbeat in market. How do we bring experiential into the mix? Where is there an opportunity for influencers to show. Show up? We did some really awesome work with Danone at Coachella for, you know, for a big activation there. And so how do we bring all that together in a cohesive strategy? And so that's how we. We kind of start. And then from there it's really finding the right set of influencers for each one of those kind of line items, if you will, making sure that we have them on board and they're the right ones to partner. And we could get into the technology that we have to be able to do that. But it's. It's art and science kind of making that happen efficiently and effectively and productively for. For the brands. But that's kind of how it starts. And then we take it through to activation, through to reporting, analysis. And the big thing is improvement. It feels like so much of what you see influencer marketing is chasing trends and then rinsing and repeating. And I think for consumers, for those of us who follow social, it gets a little stale after a while. You gotta find what's new. You gotta push the envelope. It's still a creative channel. So how do we leverage these influencers to push the boundaries in a brand safe and appropriate way? And having the right creative strategy is a big piece of that. And making sure we're understanding true impact all the way down to. For what many brands look at is kind of MTA or mmm like actual media mix modeling and kind of MTA results to actual ROAs or ROI on their influencer investment so that we can look at the content, we can look at the creators, we can look at the strategy, and we can get better and not just rinse and repeat. What is your. I know this is going to be a controversial question, but what is your favorite trend right now that's kind of making its rounds? It's a good question. You know, it's funny, with influencer marketing, I feel like sometimes I'm a bit like a chef. You meet chefs from top restaurants and they cook all day long and you ask them what their favorite restaurant is, and they're like, yeah, I don't really have one. At the end of the day, I just go home and I cook myself food and that's. I spend my entire day kind of in the industry. I feel a little bit the same way about social and influencer. I wouldn't say there's A particular trend that, you know, I'm enamored by. But, but I do know that there are always new trends popping up. And that's one of fun parts about, you know, about being in this world is seeing new things crop up. And I gotta say, as much as I think Lynkia is on the cutting edge, we are. We've got a great Gen Z kind of employee base which helps us really stay kind of cutting edge. I've got kids, I've got three of them and they're a little bit younger and you know, they're doing the trendspotting for a lot of the work that we end up doing and they're maybe a month or two ahead of whatever you see, kind of mainstream social. So it's been really fun kind of seeing that transition from my kids direct to applicability for brands to, you know, to take their stake within a particular trend. Yeah, no, that's super cool. I think my favorite trend right now that, I mean being a golfer, it has to be the Bryson DeChambeau challenge that everybody's kind of emulating to the point where I know that most of like the big golf simulators actually have that shot available now on a simulator. So that's awesome. It's crazy like how quickly that caught on because it's only happened for a couple of weeks and I don't know how many other accounts have tried to emulate that and do it specifically for their brand. But yeah, it's crazy to just kind of see how other golfers are like, yeah, I totally want to try this. And I've seen it like spun off for other things too. It's super fun. Yeah, that is super fun. Two quick things just around that. One is the ability to find a trend and then capitalize on it quickly. That's not easy to do, but it's something that as a brand like you want to be cutting edge and be able to do that when you can. So awesome to hear and see that. Two, not that there aren't millions of people who invest in enjoy golf, but I think this is one of the other awesome things about Influencer is for every niche and micro niche, there are millions of people globally who are into it and there are content creators who create content who address those audiences in any way that any brand is going to want to be connected to and with. So that's one of the cool things about it is kind of micro segmented as it can get. There really is massive reach to really any type of audience for any brand. So it's kind of a universal strategy for really getting in front of the right customer base. Yeah, it's crazy how quickly brands or how quickly trends kind of find themselves being a trend. Right. I don't think that Bryson DeChambeau tried to started that for it to become something that other people are trying to do also. So how do you, at Linkia, you know, as you're identifying these trends, how do you, are you going to your brands and saying, hey, this is the next thing that's going to be hot. It's right up your alley. You know, I know that you're working with X, Y and Z. I think we need to capitalize this. Are these things that you're working with those brands to help kind of facilitate them being involved with these trends? Yeah, so it happens in a couple ways. Usually it goes back to what we talked about before, which is what are the goals and objectives that the brand has for the year for this particular piece of, you know, this particular time? Maybe it's, you know, Q1 about to come up. And so how do we think through, based upon that, what are the right set of activations to drive the resonance with a particular audience or inspire them to purchase or whatever those goals are? And then from there it's okay, how do we incorporate the right trend into that mix creatively to drive that resonance? And so it's. Some of it is kind of tops down, bottoms up. What does the brand want to achieve? And then how do we then identify the right trend? And we have a great creat strategy team, a technology that we use called Resonate that analyzes every post, every image, every video from millions of creators to understand what's popping, why is it popping? What is the audience that, you know, that this trend is resonating with so that we're able to draw and inform really kind of the creative strategy around inactivation. So that's generally the way it's done. There are times though, where we look out and we go and this trend is popping. What's the rate brand for us to work with? How do we bring this to a brand? They haven't seen it yet. How do we bring it to them and do something smart? And we literally just did this for Colgate with, you know, with a kind of a bachelorette moment in capitalizing on an immediate cultural trend, bringing that to light and in an activation. Very cool. So you had mentioned your analytics. How do you use, you know, the data from the analytics to help drive whatever the brand is looking to do as well as help the influencer as well kind of grow their audience. As you know, you have these tools available to you based off of what they're doing. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, it does. So think about it like this. Not surprisingly, we use AI and so we have this kind of funnel of all of these influencers. We're not a network per se, so it's not a closed network of creators. We've taken the kind of the approach of trying to find the greatest set of qualified creators. Due to partnerships we have with all the platforms, we're able to get a ton of data in on every post, every image, every video, every caption. We analyze all of that across millions of creators and we're able to understand affinities they have towards particular brands, what sentiment they have around particular topics, what is the aesthetic of the content that they create. List goes on and on. But with that we're able to then say, okay, strategically we want to accomplish X. And here's a trend we've identified. What is the right set of creators who are already active in that trend, who have the right affinity for that particular brand, who reach the right audience and have the right content aesthetic to kind of meet the needs of the particular activation or what the brand is kind of looking to do, or content that they may be using kind off social or in their own social brand handles to drive role impact. And so that's how we do it. AI as a mainstay of what we do, when we work with creators, we develop a brief. So this helps them, helps informed by the data analysis we have. It helps inform the way that they create their content to align with the needs of the brand and to align with what we know statistically is going to perform the best. AI though, is interesting. So I think one of the things that comes up frequently is like, hey, if AI can create great content, what's going to happen with influencers? And by the way, you have AI based influencers, right? Like our real influencers just going the way of the dodo. Are they here to stay? What's kind of happening? So that's something that comes up pretty frequently in the industry. And you know what's interesting, I think, at least from my perspective, you know, listen, AI can do a lot of things. It doesn't do them all well and it doesn't do them all in a way because it lacks some of the emotive, at least in my mind. I'm not Kind of, you know, an AI doctorate in any way, but it lacks kind of that the genesis of emotion that exists in humans. And so it doesn't quite translate nearly as well. It doesn't mean it doesn't have a role. But for that reason alone, I think influencers as actual humans creating content, connecting with their audiences and working with brands is never going away. I think AI has a role to help them do their jobs better, has a role in helping take the assets they produce, enabling a brand to transport them, import them to all these different channels and formats to get maximum value from it. But the human touch is still very much needed in my mind. Yeah, I think you make a great point there. The other thing that I think that you could have touched on and didn't really is that using AI for analytics to help drive an understanding of the content that you're producing, whether it's impactful or how it can be changed to make more of an impact. I think that's the other big thing that AI can do quite well, that us as people would take us so much longer to be like, okay, well, I've written this script six times, right? You know, they all kind of suck. Whereas AI can analyze things in that niche, in that trend, have a better understanding of how you should approach those topics to be more impactful on delivering your message. Yeah, completely agreed. And you know, that dovetails nicely with, you know, we spoke a little bit about it. Just the technology that we have, which is AI based, it pretty much follows that exact same kind of strategy or discipline where it is, you know, if you had to sort through millions of influencers posts, eyeball, right. What is the right content aesthetic was affinity they have for its particular brands. Boy, it would take you a really long time just to find a single influencer. But using AI, we're able to analyze all this in fractions of a millisecond to surface based upon a set of criteria. Who are the right matching influencers? What are the right posts that kind of align directly to it? And so it's a great use case. There is one other thing I'll mention which I think is kind of interesting, and it relates to AI to some extent or to a large extent at least. One of the funny things about Influencer is if you look at influencer and you look at their content, oftentimes when they work with brands, there's a particular brand concept that the brand is looking for them to do, and it doesn't always align with the type and style of content. That they normally create for their audiences. We call that kind of the content to feed match. And sometimes the content that they create doesn't match the feed where all of their great performing content is. And it seems really obvious, like you should try and avoid that if you can. But the way influencer marketing, you know, generally has worked, it happens quite frequently. And so that's one of the things AI can really help with, is for a particular creative concept, identify specific influencers based upon the feed that they have, where the best performing content of their feed aligns with directly the creative concept, or flip it around, find an influencer who meets the right audience, has the right aesthetic, is brand safe, and all of that good stuff. But the creative concept really should come from them and what drives performance on their feed, not from what you, the brand want them to do or think they should do to drive impact. This is an area that's really hard to do when humans are doing it. But it's a great thing that AI can do and help kind of surface the content to feed match or score so that you have that correct alignment and the greatest likelihood of driving role impact. How does that conversation go with the brand saying, hey look, we found this influencer match for you, but I think you need to give them the creative liberty to drive the message. Like how does those conversations go? Yeah, it's been, it's been a big evolution from brands having to control literally every aspect of every small detail from a, you know, kind of creator content lens to giving more flexibility where there is a set of guidelines, do's and don'ts you have to adhere to. But what we tend to, it's not every brand. When you look at highly regulated industries, pharma, financial services, alcohol, you know, you need to be a little bit more exacting there for, for kind of legal and compliance reasons. But even then, you know, you can still shape the conversation versus having to dictate it. Exactly. Having a set of guardrails for the creators to align with, but giving them the flexibility to create the content that is going to drive the best performance with their particular audience. And we're seeing from brands that they're looking for this because they see when they dictate too much, that kind of content to feedback score is low and the content just doesn't perform nearly as well. And so when you're able to look at data A versus B, high content to feed match, low content to feed match, one clearly performs a lot better. And at the end of the day. If brands are investing money in this, they want it to perform well, they want it to drive the highest ROI they can, and they're willing to give up some of that as long as the content is still brand safe and adheres to the primary objectives and guidelines that they have. It's an ongoing conversation. That said, I get that. I think that makes sense. So I think my next question kind of dovetails nicely into what we've been talking about. So, as COO of Linkia, how do you balance the need of technology, technological innovation with maintaining the human touch and influencer relationships? Yeah, so my background prior to Linqia was email marketing or more kind of formal ad tech, where software, really technology was used for 100% of either the buy and ad tech or the activation when it comes to email marketing. Influencer, you know, you can use technology, you need it to scale influencer and to drive real impact, but at the end of the day, it's a person or many of them having to actually do something, create content, do it at the right time, show up at this particular event, you kind of name it and that's where things can go off the rails because these are actual human beings who are doing it. And you know, humans are great, but you know, we all have, you know, we all have, we all challenges at times. And so that human touch, it definitely is a blend of art and science in creating the right brand partnerships first and foremost. Again, technologies in AI is a huge piece of it. But knowing that this influencer is going to work well for this brand, knowing that each of them have the right temperament to successfully develop a partnership there is really critical and important. And that's a human thing. AI can't necessarily figure that out for you. The activation of IT influencers, in terms of getting feedb right, they generally create content or create an outline first. There's round of feedback on all that from all of the constituents, invested parties between Linkia and the brands and agencies that we work with. And then the content. Similarly, there's a review process being able to translate, you know, feedback to an influencer to creator for them to then make changes to what is their ip like this is their baby, the content they just spent a bunch of time creating. You know, like you can't do that with AI either. You gotta, you know, you need finesse to kind of get the very best out of them in kind of translating that feedback from a brand or brand objective to that influencer to get the best Result out of the content human touch is still no matter what that last mile of influencer marketing critical. So you had mentioned you work with all levels of influencers. Do you find that there are specific levels like say like a micro influencer needs a little bit more coaching because they're maybe newer to being considered an influencer, whereas like a celebrity based influencer. Right. They kind of come in and they can knock it out fairly easily without a ton of feedback or they're more understanding of the feedback. Yeah, it's interesting. You might think that there is that kind of correlation. What we find is, and not to completely bifurcate it, but we find is no matter what size of influencer you are, if you haven't been doing it for very long, you're going to need a lot of help. And so looking at sponsored content percentage, for example, if someone has zero sponsored content, gosh, it's going to be really tough to work with them because they're going to need a lot of help if they've done like you actually want to find influencers, you want to find up and comers but you want to find influencers ideally as a brand who have done a little bit beforehand because someone else has gone, you know, kind of put in those hard yards to get them to a position to be able to be really successful in their content creation. No matter what size, if they've done it for a bit, then you're generally in good standing. And you know, every influencer is a little bit different. It doesn't necessarily have to do with size. There is some correlation, you know, fewer followers you have, you probably haven't been doing it quite as long. But there are real, you know, niches that exist of creators who might have 50,000, they've been doing it now for a couple years. They're not growing as quickly as they might want to be, but they create amazing content, they've got a very highly engaged audience and so they're worth using. When you're looking for more of a, you know, micro creator or many micro creators, for example, that groundswell of support when you look at the high end with kind of celeb, not digital first kind of mega creators, but actual celebrities, it's really a mixed bag. Sometimes you need to provide a lot of help and support because content creation isn't their kind of first and forem, whatever they are. Maybe they're a TV anchor, maybe they're an actor, who knows or actress. And so you might need to actually provide more help in those situations, to kind of get the right output from them than you would for someone who is more of a digitally native, actual influencer or creators. You know, not that isn't universally true, but we tend to see a little bit more of that on the upper kind of celeb end. More kind of production support is, is needed. That makes sense. Right? Because if you think about someone who's digital native, when it comes content, they've probably started relatively scrappy, probably with a cell phone and a ring light, like, no different than a lot of people kind of start out. And then as they've gained notoriety, their equipment can become more complex. They can hire videographers, they can hire editors, but like, they started doing it all themselves. Whereas someone who may have done something else previously has always kind of had that stuff done for them. And they may not necessarily be as familiar with having to, you know, stand in front of an iPhone and make content. That's exactly right. It's not their primary craft versus those who are, you know, have built a massive following as a creator of this type of content. They've honed that craft over, you know, sometimes years, sometimes months, you know, depending upon how quickly people grow. Right. Talk about a trend that came out of nowhere. These things, they stay still, they're real, they still happen. And, but, you know, but it's a very different, it's a very different way of approaching it than when you look at us. Yeah, I, I get that. Well, Daniel, it's been a great conversation. I really appreciate your time this afternoon. So usually at the end of my podcast, I give my guests 90 seconds to plug anything that they're passionate about. So this could be Lynkia, this could be a charity, this could be anything. So without further ado, the floor is yours. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate that. It will be LinkedIn related only because this is something that over the course of the last probably six months have been just increasingly passionate about. And that is, if you look at brands have two big opportunities in front of them. Many, many. But two that we see. One is continuing to leverage influencer marketing in a way to really drive impact across all of their marketing. And you see massive investment there. And, you know, brands are spending, you know, seven, eight figures on it as it needs to be done. Right. But as they should. The second one is, for many brands, especially those are CPG related, is retail media. I mean, retail media has just massively kind of blown up and you have this you know, for every retailer there, and it, you know, it's fragmented, but for every retailer, you have a retail media network. How do you marry the two together? And this is something that we've been working very hard on. Influencer marketing is one of those things that tends to be very bespoke. It's difficult to do for. For retail marketing type, shopper, style initiative. It feels like just in the last few months we've cracked the code on how to do it, how to leverage creators to create content at scale for retail media initiatives, whether that's at kind of the Albertsons Media Collective or it's Walmart Connect or it's Roundel, you name it. Being able to leverage creators, the right creators that are native to that particular retailer, to the right brands based upon category and style and type of product and audience that they're looking to reach to create that content. And to me, it feels like this beautiful marriage that no one, or maybe no one's. It's not that no one's thinking about it, they're starting to think about it, but it feels great that we've been a little bit ahead of the curve there and so excited to be able to kind of take this to market and, you know, trying to work with many retailers to help them really accelerate investment from the brands, the manufacturers they work with and super size, kind of their impact and the performance of their retail media networks, leveraging specific creators to that retail establishment and the suppliers or manufacturers, brands that they work with. Awesome. Yeah, it's cool stuff. Very cool stuff. Well, Daniel, I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Brian. Great to be here.