WHALAR - Gaz Alushi, President, Measurement and Analytics. Quantifying the marketing effect of the creator economy; lessons from Meta, Pinterest & Snap; how brands should work with creators.

So, how do influencers really contribute to marketing campaigns?  How do you measure that impact and compare with other forms of media? Enter the perfect person to get under the skin of these issues…. Gaz Alushi, President of Measurement and Analytics at Whalar, one of the leading agencies in the creators space. Gaz is formerly of Meta, Pinterest and Snap and his work has shown evidence of a 2.4x ROI from creators campaigns. We we had a great conversation, incorporating 

• How the creator economy works & how to measure success
• The importance of the elephant path
• The benefit of a consumer insight grounding 
• Lesson from establishing measurement at Facebook, Pinterest and Snap 
• How to evaluate ROI
• How brands should work with creators
• The importance of creating benchmarks and establishing the metrics that really matter
• And something you may not know about American vs European wine.

All episodes available at https://www.insightplatforms.com/podcasts/

Suggestions, thoughts etc to futureviewpod@gmail.com

Chapters

• 0:30 Guest intro
• 4:16 The benefit of a grounding in 'traditional' insights
• 9:05 Introducing measurement at Facebook & the importance of the elephant path
• 15:00 Managing brand safety in influencer marketing
• 20:47 How Whalar helps creators
• 29:29 The importance of benchmarks & finding the metrics that matter
• 42:24 Moving influencer marketing out of the experimental budget line
• 45:44 Quickfire round

Transcript

Gaz Alushi: 0:08

so, when we're scoping out the creative strategy, when we're scoping out the creators we want to partner with, we're also scoping out the learning agenda and measurement framework that we're building for the particular brand, and the same question always comes up how are you going to be evaluated by your leadership? And we will always get the same answer. Oh well, we need to measure ROI. Great, how do you currently measure?

Henry Piney: 0:31

So do influencers really work? Well, they seem to be a huge part of marketing campaigns, so surely they do something, but how do you measure them and compare them with other forms of media? Enter the perfect person to get under the skin of these issues Garza Lushi, president of Measurement and Analytics at Whaler, one of the leading agencies in the creative space. Garz is formerly of Meta, pinterest and Snap, and we had a great conversation incorporating how influencers or creators work, how you measure them, lessons from consumer insight, grounding and then on to measurement at Facebook, pinterest and Snap, evaluating ROI, how brands should work with creators and the importance of creating benchmarks for this huge part of the marketing economy. You'll also have the chance to learn a little bit about American wine.

Henry Piney: 1:14

So on to the interview. So, gus, firstly, thanks so much for joining today. It's taken us a while to organize, mainly my fault, but really, really nice to see you again. Great to see you again. Thank you for having me. Not at all. Now we've got lots of things I'd like to get into. You have told me you're going to persuade me that influencers actually achieve something for companies, but before we get onto that and I can see you nodding and I know you're probably going to be controversial. I'd like to know just a little bit of a secret about you, something that most people wouldn't know just through an online search or something similar.

Gaz Alushi: 1:51

I think I mean, I'm a fairly boring person, but I think the one thing that you wouldn't know about me is I actually took classes when I lived in San Francisco to become a sommelier, so I am like a very, very low level somm. It's my party trick where people are amazed that I can tell them which is the white wine, which is the red wine. It's really fantastic.

Henry Piney: 2:13

But yeah and so do you keep that up as well? I mean, do you remain something of a wine buff?

Gaz Alushi: 2:19

I mean, do I enjoy having wine Absolutely. So I do maintain my studies through that regard and so explain to me why there's so little American wine in Europe.

Henry Piney: 2:31

This has always mystified me. American wine is amazing, particularly Oregon Pinots. Those are some of my favorites, but it's so difficult to get in Europe.

Gaz Alushi: 2:39

I think a big part of the reason for that is the US focuses on mass production, so they tend to blend their wine, so each year tastes the same as the previous year. It's very rare to find a vineyard in California or in Washington or in Oregon where they're like nope, this is the lot of grapes we have and this is what we're pressing, and so therefore, the 2016 is going to taste different than the 2019. Like, if you go to Bordeaux, it's actually illegal for them to start blending different grapes from different vintages and different juices. They have to use what they grew that year. So it's actually a very interesting commercialization difference that you have between the two, and also taxes and tariffs play a role into that as well.

Henry Piney: 3:25

Yeah, all that type of thing. Yeah, that's and tariffs play a role into that as well. Yeah, all that type of thing yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't know that. I mean, it doesn't surprise me, though, that the French industry and the broader European industry is pretty tightly regulated the things you learn doing this podcast.

Henry Piney: 3:38

But we should probably jump on to the main topic of conversation, which is you and your career, what you're doing with Whaler, the influencer and creator economy. But could we just start at the beginning? I mean, you've had an amazing career and we probably don't have time to go through all of it, but if we looked at it in terms of the three chunks sorry, very inelegant phrase I'm kind of using there, but you've got. You started off in the more traditional insights world. Then you went on to you know, some of these big social media platforms, so Facebook, snapchat, pinterest and then onto your current role at Whaler. So, if we go back to the beginning, more traditional insights world, as I would describe it. So how did you get into that and what are the big things you learned on the way?

Gaz Alushi: 4:20

What's funny is I've always called myself a nerd, no-transcript, like I don't care about the statistics of a coin. Suddenly I'm in graduate school and it's statistics about human behavior. It's about understanding why people react a certain way to certain stimuli or certain traumas, or and suddenly became very interesting and I realized that was the part of it I enjoyed the most. So instead of finishing to get my PhD in clinical psychology, I just segued into market research and suddenly you could measure how people are reacting to different brands, how they're reacting to advertising, how they're reacting to marketing. And so the first chunk of my career, to your point, it was such a great education in learning how marketers and brand directors really approached growing their business and, more importantly, how people reacted to stimuli.

Gaz Alushi: 5:44

Why do some people have an aversion to certain types of ads and other people seem to love it, and I think you're seeing that now. Why do some people love the rough, unfinished quality of vertical formats versus the historical, cinematic, horizontal format of a finished film? And so really learning the way media worked, really learning the way people bought products IRI, for example, when I was there I mean you start learning oh no, that report can't get ready. When you can get it done. It needs to get ready in time for the quarterly earnings. That report can't be ready in time for you know when you when the data is going to be available. You need to find a workaround to make sure that you can report to the CEO what's happening. So that was really the first part of their career, helping me understand just the basics of how brands were built and how the entire system just operated.

Henry Piney: 6:45

Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, I had a similar journey in some ways as well, where I wouldn't have seen myself as being particularly mathematically oriented or statistically oriented. But when you're working in something that's of interest to you, then it starts to come to life, absolutely. Yeah, I warned you I might digress. I wish the education system would actually do a better job of that around numbers, you know, with kids trying to unlock how it's relevant to them.

Gaz Alushi: 7:13

It's so, so funny. You say that, henry Like there are memes that go around on TikTok and Instagram, especially about the US education system where it's like, as adults, no one's prepared. How it's tax season in the US, so how do you prepare taxes? How do you file them? Like, what do you mean exemptions, what do you mean write offs? And they make jokes about like, why in grade school did we learn how to play a recorder and learn how to square dance? I would much rather have learned how to maintain finances and understand how to file taxes.

Henry Piney: 7:49

Yeah, precisely. I'm mystified why that isn't taught more broadly even just some of the basic economic principles in a relevant way. But again, we could go down that rabbit hole for probably another 45 minutes On to phase two or two. So these big social media platforms, so why did you switch out of the consumer insight agency world and into that space, and how was that different?

Gaz Alushi: 8:15

So it is the wildest reason in the world and by wild I mean very boring and surprising to people is it was 2011. I was watching CNBC and they were doing a deep dive on Facebook and I, like many people at the time, really thought these social media platforms were like run out of garages, like it was a couple of programmers, some geeks building things, and they were doing an interview with Sheryl Sandberg and some geeks building things and they were doing an interview with Sheryl Sandberg and she was going through the business format. And then I did a deep dive on Sheryl, finding out she built the ads platform at Google and then she came to Facebook and started building the same thing and realizing it's actually this massive infrastructure. My first question was like so how do they measure that? And by circumstance, there was an opening for a measurement lead in the New York office. I applied and then, in March of 2012, I started and it was the best thing that ever happened to me in my career, quite honestly, because it was just at the right time where there was really no understanding of what was going on in social media.

Gaz Alushi: 9:23

I mean, at the time I started I always make the joke there were no ads in the feed. Everything was right-hand side, and so many people don't even understand this day what I mean by right-hand side. It was social media, was desktop. You had the ads on the right-hand side of the screen that were just these teeny tiny ads that had maybe a thumbnail image and some copy on it.

Gaz Alushi: 9:45

But what was interesting about it is you worked with people who are so much smarter than you and the mantra was like wouldn't it be cool if I promise you you're talking about a bunch of engineers who were really thinking like wouldn't it be really cool if we can understand, if people bought the merchandise they saw advertised online in a brick and mortar store? Suddenly we have the data logic solution, which is now Oracle Data Cloud that was built out. Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we can then understand what people bought and then target them with ads because we know it's relevant? So like why would we give dog food ads to people who've never bought pet food? Why would we give diaper ads to people who've never bought childcare products? So suddenly you can make the ads much more relevant to the consumers, and that was just so, so fascinating to me and like being part of building.

Henry Piney: 10:42

Yeah, I guess that that's really interesting. So it was that it was really kind of, to begin with, more engineer led, was it, as in? This would be a really cool thing to do. We think we could do it. We've got an idea as to how we do this, rather than someone on a sales team, for instance, going I need to. You know, can you connect these data dots? I need to do this. It was that way around.

Gaz Alushi: 11:03

It's so funny. The man who hired me, brad Smallwood, who's become one of my mentors in my career, I'll never forget he always, whenever you did onboarding at Facebook, he would do a one-on-one with anyone, didn't matter how senior or junior they were. If you were on the measurement team, he would sit with you and he would say if we listened to sales, we would have the best surveys on the planet, but we wouldn't have a conversion pixel, we wouldn't have offline sales lift, we wouldn't have attribution modeling right. Like engineers think about like hey, what if we did this? And sales thinks about I got this specific ask. So I need to answer this specific ask and one of the things that was really really transformative for me when I was at Facebook, I spent about six years.

Gaz Alushi: 11:52

There was when you went to headquarters there would be signs on the grass that said please walk through the grass, keep on the grass, tread on the grass. And Mark had this mentality of identifying elephant paths. And so, for those who don't know that, that means like if you're seeing a beautifully manicured lawn and you see a dirt path where people walk through it, that means the developers put the sidewalks in the wrong place. People have found a new path to go down sidewalks in the wrong place. People have found a new path to go down and so they wanted to encourage people walk on the grass, because that means we put the sidewalk in the wrong place. And when you listen to only the business side of things, it's no, you have to walk on the sidewalk. When you listen to the engineers, it's like why is there grass here? We should put a sidewalk here and put grass where the sidewalk was before, and so that was a really interesting way of looking at things.

Henry Piney: 12:49

Yeah, and then I'm gonna jump ahead because I can now see the connection and I was gonna get into a little later, but it, I'd imagine, in terms of the creator economy, that's exactly what's happening. I mean. So creators are not walking on the preconceived paths in the least. They're trampling across the grass and the forests and they're taking content and they're working with it, and in an untrammeled, very creative kind of way. Is that a fair analogy?

Gaz Alushi: 13:20

It's absolutely fair and you have to think about it. I think a lot of credit comes from lockdown during the pandemic, when the creator economy really really came to light as a viable vehicle for marketers. But if you think about it, it was brewing for a few years prior to that, because you had GDPR, ccpa, apple's ATT framework, cookie deprecation through Chrome. Gaid is probably going to go away through Google following suit with Apple suit, and so my three years at Snap. It was amazing getting that understanding of like get into the data infrastructure, what are the signals, what can we do from fidelity, from an identity graph component, and that's all still important.

Gaz Alushi: 14:02

But while that was happening, this new burgeoning movement with creators was coming about, and so suddenly you had the magic coming back to creativity, where it stopped being about the well, what about pixels? And can we tag this? And how about A-B testing? Or you can let somebody who can actually listen to the community they've built just create really amazing content that delights people. And, oh yeah, it provides utility too, because suddenly they taught a recipe, they taught um a laundry hack, they taught a beauty hack, that suddenly hundreds of thousands, then hundreds of millions of people are proliferating through their own vehicles as well. So creators have really become that elephant path that I think a lot of marketers need but didn't know they wanted.

Henry Piney: 14:55

And so how's that working? Now I know we'll get back onto the measurement side and exactly what you're doing with Wayla, but how's that working in terms of how receptive are brands to working with creators and kind of giving them the headroom to do what they want? I mean, historically, you know I've worked with big film studios and other cpg brands, that type of thing, and you know they've been very, very nervous in some ways around letting letting their audiences and their consumers interact and create themselves.

Gaz Alushi: 15:33

Brand safety is a very, very real concern, but I think people often get confused about what brand safety means because, as with all things, context is key, and so I say this from the standpoint of what might fly on Twitter, or X, as it's now called, might not fly on Snapchat, and what flies on Snapchat might not fly on Instagram and what flies on Instagram. You know what I mean. So, like, the context of the content that you're seeing really matters, and so what we're seeing with brands when it comes to creators is really that trust component. But this is something brands have really had to grapple with for the past 30 years, when direct marketing started coming into play, with email marketing, when banner ads started coming out and digital marketing, when social media came out I mean, I started at Facebook in 2012. The number one ask from every brand that worked at Facebook was can we disable the comments on our ads? They were so used to this monodirectional component of advertising. It's like no, no, we tell you what you want. It was a very real shock to the system for a lot of marketers and they really wanted to try to control Coming into the creator economy.

Gaz Alushi: 16:44

You're seeing that same anxiety manifest right when it's a no, no, we want to control what the creator is saying, then you've lost the reason for working with the creator, right? Because the creator, it's not just the content they produce, it's the community they've created around themselves. They understand their communities better than any of us ever will. So if they're saying, hey, I'm partnering with this clothing brand, or I'm partnering with this retailer, or I'm partnering with this clothing brand, or I'm partnering with this retailer, or I'm partnering with this snack food, you're partnering with them for a reason, which is their community trusts them implicitly. And it goes two ways, right. If they suddenly start speaking in brand copy, their community stops trusting them. It suddenly turns into oh, what is this? Is this a commercial Like? I don't want to see this.

Gaz Alushi: 17:40

If it comes out authentically, those communities are thrilled that their creator is getting paid to promote something, because it's not just about the authenticity, it's about the accountability, and so brand safety goes hand in hand with the creator economy. These creators have zero interest in lying to their communities. They have zero interest in advertising to their communities. What they do have interest is bringing utility to their communities, and so brands it's really been an education component to get them on board with just give the headspace to the creator. And that's one of the ways Whaler, for example, we say liberating the creator voice. We liberate the creative voice by breathing the creator saying this is what the brand wants to make sure you communicate, but do that with your own style, do it with your own brand of magic.

Henry Piney: 18:29

Yeah, that's really interesting. I can see how it makes sense in that you could see the temptation as a creator that you know whoever it is. Let's pick up any big CPG brand. They've given you the brand copy. You start spouting that out, but then you're going to lose your community Right, and I'd imagine you've got to the point around comments. I mean you've got an immediate feedback loop. I mean they'll let you know if they think you're just spouting crap.

Gaz Alushi: 18:53

basically, and what's funny is also you have to give credit to the creators. They know their communities and you can't just look at the explicit content which comments are absolutely valid. But they can immediately tell because they have their own insights that they look at right. They know which posts get the longest views, they know which posts get the most shares, they know which posts get the most likes. So they can immediately tell within three hours oh, this isn't it, this post didn't jive, or know what you're asking me to do. My community is not going to like this and they have a brand they need to protect. So they're going to be very candid in saying no, no, no, no, no, Like we're not going to like this and they have a brand they need to protect. So they're going to be very candid and saying no, no, no, no, no, Like we're not going to do that type of content or we're not going to do those types of stories or reels or TikToks or whatever the case might be. And so that immediate feedback loop is very, very valuable for brands.

Henry Piney: 19:49

Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? I mean, given that both you and I I'll never describe you as long in the tooth, guys, but maybe I am.

Gaz Alushi: 19:57

I'm middle-aged, I own it.

Henry Piney: 19:58

But it's so interesting to see the way this has evolved, from surveys and some retail data kind of being the only thing Right now. It's not to say that surveys and retail data aren't important, but you've now got so many sources and you're trying to work out where to place the most credence, and one source is good at this, but another source is good at this, and so it makes it such a fascinating space to work in. I should probably jump on to Wayla, though, because could you just explain simple term what does Wayla do?

Gaz Alushi: 20:31

We work as a full funnel solution for creators to connect them with brands that matter to their communities. So I always position Whaler as focused on the creator versus focused on the brand, and that's how we add value to the brand as well as to the creator. So what we do is we find opportunities for creators to really earn what they're worth and finding the right brand partnerships to add utility to their communities, to help them grow, to help them continue being creative and to help them continue adding value to the overall creator economy. And this manifests through, obviously, brand deals, but also alpha beta opportunities with different platforms, different learnings in terms of like here's best practices, here's trends, here's insights, here's what's hot, here's what's not, and so by building that full funnel service for creators, we're able to build that full funnel service for brands as well. Here are the right creators that work for you, here's a different way of thinking about creative strategy and here's the way you actually measure so that your CFO knows this was worth the investment or not.

Henry Piney: 21:38

And how does it work in terms of the mechanics of it? I mean, is it more focused on individual creators who've got a certain following and then you'll work with them on a very personalized basis, by which I mean Wayla, or is it more of a marketplace type of solution?

Gaz Alushi: 21:53

So we actually think about it from a community standpoint first. So these creators again, they're leaders of their respective communities. So, instead of just looking at a creator and the number of followers they have, what we do is we work with our first party data, but also third party providers like Tubular and Tagger, where we're like okay, what are overlapping communities that these brands might not have considered? And one of my favorite examples that we had done last year was a beauty brand was coming out with a product that you could work out in and you didn't have to worry about messing up your foundation or your skincare routine. And we found that there was actually a huge community on TikTok of women in blue collar jobs who would actually trade tips in terms of like oh, here's a moisturizer that you can use, or here's the best SPF that you don't need to reapply every 30 minutes. And suddenly we were able to come up with these communities that the brand had never considered before.

Gaz Alushi: 22:57

The brand was considering trainers and fitness influencers, and you know the same stereotypical ones that you would consider and had never considered construction workers, service workers. You know municipal workers that never crossed their mind to consider that. And so we start with the community and then we identify the creators within those communities. That would give us the widest audience possible, and what we always recommend is we recommend finding a few large creators to make sure that you have that influence in terms of large scope. Then we look for mid-sized creators that have those communities that are built and then we recommend micro-creators that are really just beginning and so there's an opportunity to get in with these communities from the start and have these function really from an ambassador standpoint.

Henry Piney: 23:47

I see. And so if, for instance, I'm a micro-creator, what happens? Do I sign up to the platform and say I'd like you to represent me? Here's some information, Not necessarily.

Gaz Alushi: 23:58

Not necessarily. We have some that sign up and we can work with any creator on the planet, and so we will seek them out. So, through our tooling and through our integrations, we will identify and say like hey, we have this really great brand deal. We would like to talk to you, and one of the differentiators we have at Whaler is and this is something we talked to brands about creator content. They're doing work. They should be paid for their work. So oftentimes we'll have brands saying like oh, we'll give them free product. Yeah, you will, you're also going to pay them. Oftentimes, we'll have brands saying like oh, we'll give them free product. Yeah, you will, you're also going to pay them.

Gaz Alushi: 24:37

They're doing work for your brand. They should be paid for the work they do.

Henry Piney: 24:41

And I'll get onto the measurement piece in a second. But then how does Wayla get paid? What's the business model for you guys?

Gaz Alushi: 24:49

We charge a fee, right. So, as opposed to taking any type of rev share model, we charge a fee to the brand and we charge a small fee to the creator for bridging the connection, but that fee it's earned. I'll say it that way we make sure all the negotiating is done, we make sure all the contracts are signed, we make sure all the production is done, we make sure all the editing is conducted, we make sure the strategy ideation content calendars are done, we make sure all analytics production is done, we make sure all the editing is conducted, we make sure the strategy ideation content calendars are done, we make sure all analytics and measurement is done and we ensure that all payments are processed through. So we really function as that full service to make sure it's a seamless experience for the brand and a seamless experience for the creator.

Henry Piney: 25:30

And then the fee is based on the relative size of the campaign, or something similar to that.

Gaz Alushi: 25:34

Yeah, we have different and it's funny I almost said yes, but we will do different models based on what makes sense for the activation that's happening. So if it's a small activation, we'll do a percentage-based fee. If it's a really large activation, we'll look at the workflows that need to happen, because there might be more reporting that needs to happen than not, or there might need to be more sourcing that needs to happen than not. So we're really flexible in terms of how we work with different brands.

Henry Piney: 26:04

Okay, I see. And then how does the measurement piece play in? Because I'd imagine, if you've got big brands are working with Whaler and they're accessing creators, you say very top tier, mid tier and maybe kind of like the up and comers, if I'm going to call them that, but I assume they need some evidence that what they're doing works. So, which I imagine is also your department guys. So how'd you go about doing that then?

Gaz Alushi: 26:30

So we built a full funnel measurement stack that really no one else has done within the creator economy. So I love seeing there's a lot of TikToks going around saying Gen Z has destroyed the marketing funnel. It's not about awareness, consideration and conversion anymore. And then they talk about awareness consideration. Conversion, like human cognition, has not changed all that much in the past several thousand years. You still need to get in front of the right person, which is reaching the right person. You still need to make them aware of what they're doing. You need to have them consider your product and then you need to have them really actually pull the product from shelf or hit um checkout. You need to get them to convert and what we're seeing is a lot of people using a thesaurus, which I'm glad thesaurus, the sources have come back into fashion. But and it's, it's about discovery, it's about yes, it's about aware.

Henry Piney: 27:26

I see that in that sense you mean they're just coming up with some euphemisms for the same concept.

Gaz Alushi: 27:30

Yeah, the funnel hasn't gotten and, as such, you need to understand where the creators are coming in. So there are some creators that are really great at conversion. People will buy the content. So, like jeffree star is a really great example, huge creator, huge influencer he broke snapchat when he launched his new makeup kit a couple of years ago. Don't get me wrong. The platforms are thrilled when they break because it just shows just how many people are coming to the platform to use it for the content. But there are some that are really great at generating awareness, and so we work with different solutions across the funnel so that when you're doing a creator campaign, you can measure awareness.

Gaz Alushi: 28:17

We do brand list studies through Element Human. It's incredibly valuable for us to understand what's the awareness, what's the consideration. We work with NetBase to understand social chatter, essentially so social listening, understanding. Are people talking about it? Has this generated buzz? And then we work with any of the platform's conversion pixels. So if you have a Metapixel, if you have a TikTok tag, if you have a Snapchat tag, we can work with those to do conversion lift.

Gaz Alushi: 28:48

Or we can work with Nielsen to do sales lift through their predictive ROI tool or through their market lift tool and ultimately, we can feed our data into MMM, because one of the things that we've done is we did a media mix model that showed that Whaler creator campaigns were a 2.4x ROI across personal care campaigns from 2021 to 2022. Personal care campaigns from 2020 uh, 2021 to 2023, or, sorry, 2021 to 2022, and it drove the highest roi of any other channel measured tv search print, other social creator content drove the highest and we know that they're driving impact, but you can't know that unless you measure it. You have to include it in the MMM, you have to include it in the brand list.

Henry Piney: 29:38

And by working with those types of companies. I'm maybe answering my own question here, but I assume you're then trying to create an apples to apples comparison so you can compare with other types of media. Because, let's face it, marketing teams, buyers don't want to be trying to reconcile lots of different strands of data and trying to calibrate them against each other.

Gaz Alushi: 30:00

Bingo. I always say my stakeholder is the CFO at whatever brand we work at. Right they have two questions how much should we spend and how much should we make? They're going to want to know what this campaign cost make. They're going to want to know what this campaign cost and they're going to want to know what this campaign brought in. Now, there's always proxy metrics, right, like.

Gaz Alushi: 30:20

Sometimes conversion lift isn't always possible. Sometimes MMM takes a long time. For anyone who's done any type of econometric modeling, it's not an overnight thing. But I always say the same thing, which is, creators are media, and the biggest opportunity that we have with brands is really around the education space. Because one of the top questions we'll get is oh, we only look at EMV, earned media value when it comes to creator content.

Gaz Alushi: 30:49

And I always say that's cute, you're going to actually measure Lyft as well, like, we'll give you your EMV. That's fine. There is no marketer on the planet who is able to take EMV and then compare it to their TV budgets, compare it to their social budgets, compare it to their out-of-home budgets, compare it to their shopper budgets. That's a really, really huge component, and so by creating this measurement stack, we've been able to say you can measure the creator economy the same way you would measure any other media channel. And by ensuring that we can do measurement, we have to have a few things from the client right, so it has to be what are your business KPIs? When you go and present this internally, what are the questions you're going to get for success? And I promise you, your CFO is not going to ask you what's the EMV. Your CFO is going to say what was the cost per install, what was the effective CPM, what was the lift, what was the actual ROI?

Henry Piney: 31:56

And Gaz, can I pick your brain a little bit on this, in that this has kind of come up in some other conversations. If you just look at lift as an example, how do you account for the fact that in some cases, well certainly an individual piece of creative may struggle to generate lift because it's an individual piece of creative, but then generate lift because it's an individual piece of creative, but then a common sense approach would tell us that of course it's doing something right. Just maybe the tools aren't calibrated in quite the right manner in order to show what it's doing right, because, as we know, I mean lift can be difficult to achieve, depending on what type of lift you're looking at and the nature of the brand or the product. So how do you deal with that type?

Gaz Alushi: 32:38

of issue. So I look at it more from the standpoint of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Right? If you look at it from a siloed perspective of just a single piece of creator content, you're going to miss out on the holistic picture. You're going to miss out on the holistic picture and this is one of the reasons why, you know, we did the MMM analysis, which was to show there's a contributing factor to the other media that are doing Like. There is no platform where it's just creator content. There's always going to be advertising, there's going to be personal content, there's going to be news content, there's going to be market events.

Gaz Alushi: 33:15

You look at what's happening in the world. I think there's 13 humanitarian crises happening on the planet right now and that feeds into it has a deleterious effect on any marketing activity that a brand would be doing, rightfully so right. These are things that matter and things that are important, and so I always say you should never just focus on what's this one piece of content doing. You should be focusing on the holistic activation. So if you're working with it's not uncommon to work with 30, 40, maybe even 100 creators over a six-month to a 12-month period of time for a brand. You should be looking at this over a time series standpoint to see how has brand lift increased? How has it ebbed and flowed? What holistic impact is driving consideration? What holistic impact is driving intent? Because if you just look at it as a micro component, you're going to miss out by looking at the trees from the forest.

Henry Piney: 34:13

So in effect maybe it's an old school phrase more of a brand tracking type of approach.

Gaz Alushi: 34:18

Yeah, and I think it's really important. The way we really try to identify is we'll look at individual pieces of content, at what we call metrics that matter. How many people are we reaching? What's the reach rate over time? What's the engagement rate? What's the re-engagement rate over time? What's the view rate? What's the completion rate and those factors when we compare to benchmarks, we're able to optimize individual pieces of content in as close to real time as possible. Real time is, I will always say, is impossible, especially in a post-identifier world. I think Apple has seen to it that no one can do real time anymore. But when you look at it from that standpoint, you have to look at holistic effectiveness and understanding. This is what the campaign did. You will always have a few bits of creator content that just did amazingly well versus everything else, and that's great. We're always excited when that happens. But by and large, these pieces of content are feeding off each other to give a greater impact holistically for the brands.

Henry Piney: 35:23

Yeah, and so how do you go about advising a brand then? Like in that case, if we looked at the two sides of it within the measurement space? And let me make up, if I had an example of kind of more of a I guess an upper funnel kind of brand focused advertiser, say, like a car firm, for instance, where there's a very long purchase cycle, it's hardly kind of a throwaway to the purchase. So you do, you sit down with them and you'll go okay, what are the goals of the campaign we're going to? This is the mix that we're suggesting within from Wayla's perspective. These are what the creators that can do, that we can provide, that can support those goals, and then you'll look at the measurement suite that you have against that and apply that to an individual campaign. Is that a fair summary?

Gaz Alushi: 36:10

It is. We will not commit to measurement unless measurement is part of the upfront process. So when we're scoping out the creative strategy, when we're scoping out the creators we want to partner with, we're also scoping out the learning agenda and measurement framework that we're building for the particular brand. And the same question always comes up how are you going to be evaluated by your leadership? And we will always get the same answer oh well, we need to measure ROI. Great, how do you currently measure? And so you're a really great example of a car firm that's, you know, a 24 to 48 month purchase cycle. Like you're not getting that before we campaign. So, okay, all right, what proxy metrics do you use for that? Do you want to show an increase in awareness? Do you have a reach threshold? Do you want net, new potential consumers, new audience? What are the proxy metrics to get there? Because we want to measure ourselves the same way you're measuring everything else. So oftentimes we'll take our measurement stack that we've built and we'll say we're happy to put it to the side and use how you measure. So what are your solutions? We'll happily partner with your partners and use those solutions to measure how we're operating as well, and use those solutions to measure how we're operating as well.

Gaz Alushi: 37:36

And the beautiful thing in the creator economy is creator content lives on the social media platforms, and the social media platforms have built a ton of integrations with third-party providers. I know I built a lot of them, so I know what solutions exist, and so it becomes actually quite easy to do it. The challenge becomes reminding marketers it's not a silver bullet, right? Just because you did a creator activation doesn't mean ROI of 10x, because if you're a car firm and you're doing a four-week activation, you are not selling a single car. A four-week activation you are not selling a single car, but you may have generated a ton of awareness and a ton of buzz around a specific model or a specific deal or a specific activation that you have in mind. So we make sure we're aligned on those KPIs well ahead so that at the end of the campaign there's no wrench or surprise that says, oh so how many cars did we sell? Well, none, sorry to surprise you.

Henry Piney: 38:34

Yeah, yeah. And it makes a ton of sense Also in the fact that I'd imagine that brands and some of their teams, they might see creative campaigns as a magic bullet and I'm not saying that they can't be magic, but maybe they're not a bullet in the sense that, as you say, they're going to contribute.

Gaz Alushi: 38:52

I go back to our MMM. The fact that creators should have a 2.4x ROI is huge in this industry, in this market, in this economy. That is a huge outsized impact that creators are having. And what we also found is basically that creators only made up 0.7% of the media mix, but had 2.6% of the media contribution, so that's a 3X impact that they're having. So creators they should be increasing their investment in creators, if nothing, just by tripling it, which would still be a rounding error for a lot of these marketers, if we're being candid, right, and so we know they're having an impact, but we need to measure it the way you're measuring everything else, and we need to be honest with ourselves in terms of this MMM was done over two years. You've got to put some skin in the game in building enduring partnerships with creators and not just treating them as like some bolt-on PR tactic after you've already built a media strategy, because creators are media.

Henry Piney: 39:56

Because that was going to lead into my next question is that how do the creators see this at the moment? I mean, do they get the need for measurement? I mean, imagine it's going to really help their business. In inverted commas, would you say that the creators as a whole understand the importance of this?

Gaz Alushi: 40:13

they do and we have um a talent division. Our president, uh, victoria beijan she talks often about the talent that we represent. Her team will often use results and benchmarks to be able to show in negotiations of like hey, hey, creators actually drive value for business, so this is why they're worth what they're asking for in terms of partnering with your brand. So creators really do understand and there is a hunger and appetite for being able to show this is the value we're providing and it's something that we're working in our product infrastructure to surface in a much smoother way for creators that they can show their value to brands without it being a heavy lift for them.

Henry Piney: 40:59

I see, and are some of them requesting, for instance, to have certain types of measurement added on to their campaigns?

Gaz Alushi: 41:05

They're not requesting certain types of measurement because remember, these are creators, so think of them as small business. They oftentimes don't know what's available, and we have a creator academy that we've launched where we help them understand. These are the solutions, but for them it's really more about understanding metrics that matter, as opposed to like. I am not going to bore a creator with what gets me excited, and what gets me excited is talking about a logistic regression analysis and propensity scoring to understand how we can do a match test to understand Lyft. They don't care about that. I do, they don't.

Henry Piney: 41:44

Yeah, yeah. I'd be very surprised if they did, unless they're I don't know creators in the stats field, which is probably quite niche, I would imagine.

Gaz Alushi: 41:53

I mean talk about a niche community. They'd probably geek out on it with me.

Henry Piney: 41:56

Yeah, I'm sure they would do. And then, how developed is this? I mean, is the industry kind of coming together to create benchmarks and that type of thing? I'm not asking you necessarily to talk about weightless competitors, but everybody likes those kind of really quite easy comparisons that they don't have to wait two years for. I got this number versus this number. Is that all developing?

Gaz Alushi: 42:22

It's developing and what we're seeing is, in a very positive way, different trade bodies trying to attack this head on. So the ANA, for example. In 2022, they released their metrics guidelines for creative content and I was very, very happy to see that what they were doing is they were going through and being very pragmatic, and they partnered with some of the top advertisers in the world and some of the top agencies in the world and they were looking at metrics that mattered. They were like we need to talk about reach, we need to talk about impressions, we need to talk about frequency, we need to talk about conversions. These are the metrics that matter, and so a lot of these black box metrics.

Gaz Alushi: 43:02

I mentioned EMD before it was nowhere to be found because you're not measuring anything else by that litmus test and I always point to the Procter Gamble phenomenon. Mark Pritchard has done a lot of great work for that company, because whatever new platform or new movement or new touchpoint that has emerged, he's always the voice of reason saying okay, but how can we tie that back to what we're doing? He is not keen on oh, so a new measure? No, how are we tying that back to our holistic activities? And so he tends to be the one clarion voice of the industry of like, yeah, that's cute, but we want to measure reach, we want to measure consideration, we want to measure actual sales, lift and ROI.

Henry Piney: 43:54

Is that where it goes next? Do you think, say I don't know, three to five years time? I mean? How do you hope that measurement within the influencer space has evolved?

Gaz Alushi: 44:03

My aspiration and my ideal is that creator content becomes a line item on media plans, which means we will be fully Apple to Apple comparison to every other media touchpoint that exists. So, as opposed to being this like PR thing or this bright shiny off on the side, it's going to be OK, we're doing our plan for the next year. What's our creator plan and how does that tie into our holistic brand strategy?

Henry Piney: 44:33

And so at the moment you'd say it's still what in the UK parlance they call it like below the line spend. It's still kind of related to like PR, exactly, not necessarily like an afterthought, but it's not part of the big, you know, above the line campaign, as we'd say it's what social media was 10 years ago.

Gaz Alushi: 44:52

Honestly, it's what social media was 10 years ago. Honestly, it's what social media was 10 years ago. Like you would be stuck in these test and learn buckets where it's like oh, we have an innovation bucket, so we'll spend a couple of bucks with you. And the next of you know someone's pet cat and it's what does this have to do with your brand? A floor cleaner, like what is like this? This makes no sense. But the actual media leaders, the actual brand leaders, weren't paying attention. And that's my aspiration is getting creator economy to the same place where. No, we're planning for this three years out, the same way we plan for everything else.

Henry Piney: 45:36

Because I'm conscious of time, because we haven't got that much time left and you probably have to get on to your next meeting. So, if it's all right, I might just do a quick far round. So if you could be CEO of any company aside from Whaler, because I believe that job is taken, which company would? You be CEO of any company aside from Whaler because I believe that job is taken which company would you be CEO of Honestly Netflix, and why Netflix?

Gaz Alushi: 46:02

Talk about a company that has achieved scale and is continuing to disrupt. It has fully disrupted the entertainment industry. It has fully disrupted the streaming industry. It continuously disrupts. And what I find fascinating is, even when all of the other studios woke up and started pulling their catalogs like Disney pulled all their movies they were like we should launch our own platform. Netflix stepped up and produced its own content. That does amazingly well, I think Netflix, because they have a unique opportunity to help an industry redefine how they approach the market.

Henry Piney: 46:38

Yeah, it's a really interesting subject, isn't it? I mean, so much of it's about distribution and access to eyeballs and the attention economy actually, because you can see the impact of I don't know something like Suits economy actually, because you know you can see the impact of I don't know something like suits, whereby you know, fine, it was well known, it had done okay, and then you put it on netflix and you know, maybe there was the megan markle effect too, but but yeah, I think did you know surprisingly well, or maybe not surprisingly for them anyway. So, apart from netflix, because you've already given that answer, what's the secret to work-life answer? What's the secret to work-life balance?

Gaz Alushi: 47:12

I think the secret to work-life balance is perfect is the enemy of progress. If you focus on making sure things are done, this is good, we can move on to the next task. You're then not struggling to develop more hours in a day, and I think part of that also comes down to no one is going to care more about you than you. So if you need to prioritize something in your life, prioritize that thing in your life. If your career is your priority, be unapologetic about that. Put yourself into your career completely. If your career is not your priority, that's fine too. Just make sure that what you do is the best you could possibly do and focus on yourself.

Gaz Alushi: 47:57

I always say the same thing to my teams is I don't care when you do something, just get it done right. Like, I think, that mentality of being in the office nine to five every day and that's when you need to be accountable it's 2024. I think the pandemic taught us that that's an irrelevant mentality at this point what do you know now that you wish you'd known, say 10 years ago?

Gaz Alushi: 48:23

I think what I wish I'd know now is, instead of saying what you can't do, talk about what you can do. So it comes from a place of yes, and one of the skills that I'm really proud that I've developed is I'll never say no. I'll say like totally hear you, here's what we can do, and oftentimes, nine out of ten times, it solves the problem. You look like a hero and you didn't have to say no. And this is what I try to instill to my teams all the time, because in analytics it's a binary state you can do something or you can't do something. And with all the regulation and with all the protocols and all the policies and everything that's in place, it's a lot of no. But if you go to an internal partner, an external partner, and say, totally, here, that's what you want to do, here's what we can provide you, it solves the problem. And so coming from a place of yes will save a lot of head and heartache for you.

Henry Piney: 49:28

I mean again, I think it's great advice. When you do that, do you then also point out the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed solution? So you're saying here is, here's how we can help you. It'll give you this, this and this.

Gaz Alushi: 49:39

I can't get you to this part because of whatever right, and I mean 100 of the time, my entire career in the tech space, so the past 15 years. No, you can't get user level data. That's always like, oh, you can't get it. So I've just learned here's what we can get you. And if the follow up is like, well, we really want the can't get you that, and you know you can't get that, and here's the reason why Okay, but if you can get us this, why okay, but if you can get us this, then that's fine gotcha.

Henry Piney: 50:09

Uh, final question what's your favorite or most impactful book or recent book could actually be a piece of media.

Gaz Alushi: 50:14

It doesn't have to be a book honestly like a book I reference surprisingly often what it came out in 2018, I believe bad blood by john carrey that chronicles the theranos um deb, so I'm not sure. Theranos the Elizabeth Holmes like she started that blood testing startup. That book like it is shocking Starting an entire company diluting investors, diluting your board, diluting your employees on a fake solution and getting away with it for so long. I point to it to be critical. Point out flaws, be the voice of truth, no matter how hard it is. That for me, is like just a very powerful book, because that was my takeaway from it is if it sounds like BS, it's BS and say it's BS.

Henry Piney: 51:08

Yeah, gotcha Guys, thank you so much. We're at time. It's been an absolute pleasure and hopefully we can do it again sometime soon.

Gaz Alushi: 51:15

Likewise Thank you so much. Had a lot of fun, thank you.

Henry Piney: 51:20

So there's the brilliant and compelling Ghazalushi. It was so interesting for me anyway I hope for you as well to get that perspective. From someone who's been through the early stages of a measurement and quantification journey with the likes of Facebook and Snap can now draw the analogies with the creator world. The parallels become increasingly clear when you think about it. When Garth describes those issues and how they relate into his experience. Thanks to him and the team at Wayla for setting this up, to Element Human for the initial connection, to Insight Platforms, for hosting, and to you for listening. See you next time.