Arda Genç of LIVAD on Live Streaming, Ad Blockers, and the Creator Economy

Jeanniey Walden: Welcome back. I am here with Arda from LIVAD, and we’re just about to dissect what is working and not working in the world of advertising. Are you ready for this conversation?

Arda Genç: Yes, I’m ready.

Jeanniey Walden: Me too. This is so exciting, because we were talking before camera about the state of advertising today and the challenges advertisers are having. You made such a great point: so many people are now paying for ad blockers. They’re not even seeing the ads companies are spending dollars on. Can you tell our audience more about that?

Arda Genç: So the attention is shifting. That’s the one thing. People are no longer paying attention to traditional ads. One-third of internet users are using ad block. A lot of YouTube users are subscribing to Premium for an ad-free experience, and most people are skipping ads as soon as they can. So advertisers are having difficulty reaching this audience in an attentive state and engaging them. They’re looking elsewhere for where to reach them, and one of those places is creator content.

Jeanniey Walden: Yes, absolutely. I don’t think I realized it was one-third of people now blocking ads. That is a crazy number, and it will probably only continue to get worse for brands. Creators have become the new form of brand trust.

Arda Genç: A lot of businesses that have relied on sponsored personas or sponsored profiles, and paid big dollars for them, are now at the same parallel as those investing in creators, embracing the creator economy and letting real people create an authentic view of their brands and build that audience.

Jeanniey Walden: So in this economy for creators, and I’m always talking about products that I love and looking on social media, I see great creators and great content, but it doesn’t scale. Is that one of the things holding back success for this economy?

Arda Genç: I think so. Traditionally, because these are seen as one-off deals, sponsorships, brands have only been able to work with the top 0.1% of creators, because they see it as very hard to scale. And these creators take on a lot of offers, so the share of voice for the brand is lower, and because they’re now perceived as an influencer rather than a more authentic smaller creator, it may carry less weight when they take on a sponsorship. So the next important step for the creator economy is to find ways for brands to work with creators, small or big, in a more scalable way, and to incentivize them to promote their brand.

Jeanniey Walden: Micro-influencers have become hot, both in B2B and B2C, and that blows my mind. Before, the larger the audience you had, like a Mr. Beast, the more powerful you were. But you make a really good point. A Mr. Beast sponsoring my product is not going to look as authentic as someone I don’t know who is, say, a jewelry maker who loves jewelry talking about a new product they saw, because it seems very authentic. But how do you scale if you’re that micro-influencer? How does a brand scale that great content so more people see it?

Arda Genç: On our side we focus on live streaming specifically, because live content is unedited, raw, and particularly authentic, and 64% of viewers say they purchase products recommended by streamers. So this is the area we focus on, and we make this inventory, these live creator reads, as easy and fast to buy as programmatic media. Instead of flat rates based on viewership metrics, we make it possible to buy these placements on a CPM, and using AI we detect when streamers mention the brand and assign them bonuses directly impacting their earnings. So we’re essentially incentivizing creators of all sizes at scale to mention the brand in authentic ways. And it’s self-selecting, because streamers and creators don’t want to mention brands they wouldn’t use or don’t like. So brands end up working with creators who actually use or would use their brand, and get brand mentions in authentic ways.

Jeanniey Walden: I’m a chief marketing officer, I’ve been one my whole career, and a business executive at ad agencies, on the agency side and the client side. When you talk about live streaming as a CMO, I get a little nervous. I start thinking about legal and compliance and brand, and what if somebody says the wrong thing. How do you make brands feel comfortable about streamers and the quality of content they’re producing?

Arda Genç: It’s a great question we get often, and it’s about mitigating the risk, because when the environment is live there is going to be some level of risk, and it’s about making it as small as possible, because when you completely get rid of the risk you also get rid of the effectiveness and authenticity. So what we do is we listen to the live streams and continuously transcribe the audio, understanding the frequency of risk at the channel and content-creator level. This is visible in our marketplace, so brands can see which streamers tend to use risky language and how often. When you look at this data, you see that some streamers are completely family-friendly and others have low risk, medium risk, high risk.

Jeanniey Walden: That’s really smart. But you can look at that with the context of their engagement as well, because sometimes there’s going to be a content creator that’s medium risk but has extremely high engagement, and their audience tends to purchase the product. So is it worth it?

Arda Genç: It’s a decision the brand should make. We surface the data.

Jeanniey Walden: Interesting. So if I’m a CMO or leading a brand or company, what are three things I should consider when I want to dip my toe into the water for streamers as creators?

Arda Genç: I think it’s important to make this a sustainable strategy. A lot of brands see this as a PR play, and I don’t recommend that, because it’s short-lived. To really win over this audience, brands need to be present consistently and build a longer-term strategy. Second, they need to think about measurement. When they see it as a PR play, sometimes they don’t measure it in the same serious way as other channels, but it is possible today with the technology available. They should think about not only viewership metrics but dive deeper. For example, we surface data like the number of paid subscribers of streamers, their chat engagement, their analytics, and we let advertisers act on this data at scale when deciding which streamers to work with based on their targets. So it’s important not to decide purely on vanity metrics like followers or even viewers, but to dive deeper on engagement, both before and after the campaign. And finally, understanding where their placements will be served and really doubling down on the creative, because a lot of brands try to plug and play their existing creatives from other platforms into live streaming, but it doesn’t really fit. The live streaming audience really doesn’t like interruptions, so it needs to be additive, more native, and it should not make viewers feel annoyed. If you slap a video on top of a live stream, that can be the case. So work with someone who understands this audience to make creative that will work particularly for live streaming.

Jeanniey Walden: That’s super interesting. So tell me, how did LIVAD come to life? Why and how? What was the vision behind it?

Arda Genç: I started LIVAD with my best friend from high school and another friend about five years ago. Way before we started the company, there was a revolution in web advertising, because before, it was done completely manually through handshake deals, can you put my banner on this website. Then someone saw an opportunity to automate this with bidding, so you don’t need to negotiate on each deal, which unlocks monetization for smaller websites and lets advertisers reach their target audience at scale. But we noticed that even though live streams were gaining a lot of traction when we started, and they still are, there wasn’t a way to scale live-stream campaigns programmatically. So we saw a similar trend: the attention is there, everything is done manually, only the top 0.1% of creators can monetize, and advertisers can’t tap into these smaller but attentive, engaged communities. So we saw a similar opportunity and decided to build it.

Jeanniey Walden: It’s awesome. I love what you’re doing, and I think it’s one of those innovative solutions we’re just talking about now, but 12 to 18 months from now is going to be one of the must-haves in any marketer’s toolkit. Thank you so much for being on Liftoff.

Arda Genç: Thank you so much for having me.

This conversation was recorded for Liftoff with Jeanniey Walden and lightly edited for readability.