The influencer marketing industry has spent the better part of a decade insisting it has grown up. Mathew Micheli, who helped build one of its larger nurseries, is now arguing that the real test is whether it can count.
Mr. Micheli is co-founder and co-chief executive of Viral Nation, a company that began with a single creator partnership and has since expanded into what it describes as a global influencer marketing operation. In a recent interview, he recalled the founding premise with the certainty of someone who has had time to be proved right: "We had this foresight where people would eventually start consuming more and more content on social."
That foresight, common enough now, was less obvious when pairing brands with Instagram personalities still carried a whiff of the experimental.
The company's pitch to marketers rests on scale — specifically, the kind of scale that most agencies find difficult to manage. "A lot of companies can work with five, ten creators," Mr. Micheli said, "but what happens when brands really want to scale and work with 50, 100,000 creators?" Viral Nation's answer involves proprietary technology and what Mr. Micheli calls "best-in-class humans powered by best-in-class technology," a formulation that suggests the humans have not yet been made redundant. (Give it time.)
Mr. Micheli is also eager to retire one of the industry's more durable criticisms: that influencer marketing cannot demonstrate return on investment. He points to studies showing its effectiveness against traditional paid media, though he did not specify which studies or whose money paid for them.
Inside the company, Mr. Micheli has cultivated what he calls a "founder mentality," encouraging employees to behave like entrepreneurs. As artificial intelligence tools proliferate, he says the company is exploring how they might augment every role — while maintaining that quality of work remains the priority.
It is the sort of thing founders say, right up until the technology gets good enough.
Original story published in Adweek: "Mathew Micheli, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Viral Nation"