Chris Detert of Influential on Influencer Marketing and the Creator Economy

Jeanniey Walden: Welcome back. We’re here with Chris Detert, and I can’t wait to have this conversation, because it’s about something we all care about: influence. He’s the co-founder of Influential and he’s the chief communications officer. We’re going to chat with him about what’s happening in the world today. Chris, welcome to Liftoff.

Chris Detert: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Jeanniey Walden: Absolutely. I’m excited because this is completely authentic. We didn’t do any practicing. You don’t even know what questions I’m going to ask you.

Chris Detert: I’m just winging it.

Jeanniey Walden: I could ask you things like, what do you think my favorite color is?

Chris Detert: I don’t know. Pink, maybe? Just a wild guess.

Jeanniey Walden: No. It’s purple. But, all right, so we’re talking about what’s going on in the world today. We’re here at the POSSIBLE event and we’re having so many conversations with thought leaders and experts from every realm of the spectrum, from signals with audience path and what they’re doing with their signals, all the way down to commerce media and loyalty and return on investment. We’re even talking about in-person events. Where do you think Influential plays in the spectrum of customer influence today?

Chris Detert: I would like to think we’re sort of the middle of the hub-and-spoke model. So much of what we do at Influential is based around creating impact and creating results, and a lot of that does happen IRL. My brother and I, my brother is our CEO, I’m our chief communications officer, we started the company 11, actually 12 years ago now. We wanted to create the ultimate platform to make impact and to cause results through influencer marketing. One of the interesting things we did is we teamed up with Christian Muche, who is the founder of POSSIBLE, right at the beginning, and we’re both investors and advisers. Our company, Influential, actually exited about a year and a half ago to Publicis, the world’s largest media company. And I’ve had two exits in my life, one was Influential and the other was POSSIBLE, and they happened in the same week, which is pretty crazy.

Jeanniey Walden: That’s crazy. Well, congratulations on the exit. You talked a lot about what you’re doing with Influential and being part of Publicis, a very large company trying to be relevant at every single step of the customer journey. Are you finding what you’re doing at Influential is a part of every other step of the Publicis family?

Chris Detert: Yes. At Publicis it’s the power of one, and I think we’re really centrally integrated into that. Our Tour and his team really had an intention to lead the creator economy, and they did it in a big way. They went out and bought us, which was a very splashy news piece, and then a year later they followed up and bought our biggest competitor, Captiv8. That was basically the one and two of our industry, so I would say Publicis is the place where influence happens.

Jeanniey Walden: Let’s talk about influence and the impact it has, because 12 years is a really long time to have any business, let alone a business built around influence and the creator economy. It must have changed and evolved over those years. What were some of the biggest changes you undertook?

Chris Detert: In the beginning, it was really about education. Being a nascent industry, something unproven, we had to go in and actually show, for probably the first couple of years, a lot of education, going into agencies and brands and explaining what influencer marketing is, what the value of it was, and how it could be useful to them. Once we got to that phase, we teamed up with IBM Watson in 2016 and created AI influencer marketing, which is now table stakes for the rest of the industry, but was very ahead of the curve at the time. It was super cool because we were, I think, a 30-person startup, and we had the then-CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, talking about us regularly on stage. We’d get calls like, hey, Ginni Rometty is talking about you on stage. And the reason she was, was because we were a very cool and practical application of AI at a very early time, like 2016. We really rode that wave for several years, and then by 2019 it was so commonplace that we weren’t even talking about it a lot. And then generative AI came around, I think 2022, and all of a sudden it’s such an interesting conversation again. It’s always been about innovation for us. Other things we’ve done: we created a full circle, full loop of attribution. We can track everything from a purchase in a store to foot traffic into a QSR, for example, or TV tune-in lift. When somebody sees a paid ad on social, did somebody then go, in an anonymized and consented way, did they tune in and actually watch something?

Jeanniey Walden: That’s so important. But let me go back to the AI conversation with IBM, because so many people talking about the creator economy and social influence always tend to stick to the consumer side. I’m a huge believer that, especially now, impact and creator economy on the B2B side of the house plays just as relevant a role. I think they probably always had influencers in B2B, but we just called them storytellers, maybe marketers. Some of our collective friends fall into those categories, like Ted Rubin and Brian Solis and everybody in that realm. I find it so fascinating that it was IBM that gave you the big first break. Do you see B2B influence rising right now?

Chris Detert: Absolutely. LinkedIn is definitely where it’s at for that, though it does go across all platforms. There’s so much you can do through LinkedIn as far as how you create excitement, and the POSSIBLE conference is a great example of that. They’ve honed in on it so well, and they gave everybody these templated cards to say, I’ll be at POSSIBLE. That’s a great example of B2B influence at work. Remember, there were some tickets given away, I don’t want to say how many, but we only got to about 2,300 people the first year, and fast forward three years later, in our fourth year, we have 7,200 people registered this year. The growth has been rapid, and I feel very fortunate to have played a big part in it. I’ve been in charge of the celebrity VIP relationships. Year one I had to reach out to LL Cool J and his team and get them to believe in coming to this never-heard-of festival. Then we ended up getting Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod. And then by a strange twist of fate, Elon Musk ended up here in year one, and after that it just started to roll.

Jeanniey Walden: I’ve been at different events with LL Cool J. He’s like the nicest guy on the planet.

Chris Detert: He asks you to call him Todd when you’re his friend.

Jeanniey Walden: So getting back to influence and creators, when you look at today’s funnel, it doesn’t really exist as a funnel anymore. We’re seeing more and more brands building literally off that sphere of influence, mainly because people trust them. They fall in love with people, not even necessarily celebrities, micro-influencers. You see people on TikTok, LinkedIn, wherever, that you just feel like you align with. They’re authentic, inspirational, relatable, that’s my mantra I use everywhere. Do you really see influencers being able to build brands from scratch into billion-dollar businesses?

Chris Detert: Absolutely. I think our company is living proof of that. There’s something about the relationship you have with influencers that’s so much more authentic, which we always use that word, but also just genuine. When you follow these people, your algorithm keeps sending you their messaging, especially if you interact with what they’re doing. I was talking to one of the biggest influencers in the world yesterday, and he was like, I can’t believe you haven’t heard of this guy. And I said, he’s just not in my algorithm. The algorithm is actually built around you, and it sort of helps shape your worldview. So I think it’s extremely important, and if brands are authentically integrated into these conversations and targeted at the right customers, the sky’s the limit for the potential of this.

Jeanniey Walden: Now, what happens if you’re an influencer and you get into an algorithm, but then you switch business models, or it’s the wrong algorithm? How do you get out?

Chris Detert: I can’t say I know definitively, and honestly, it’s a great mystery. One of the challenges of the social platforms is that the algorithms have changed without reason sometimes, so creators sometimes throw their hands up trying to figure it out. But the underlying thing is just being consistent, having a consistent message, and continuing to post and work through it. The algorithms will change and do as their makers intended, but all we can do is be consistent.

Jeanniey Walden: If you’re going to give advice to the CEOs, CMOs, and entrepreneurs who watch the show and listen to the podcast about hiring influencers, what three pieces of advice would you give them?

Chris Detert: I would say, first, trust influencers. Give them the ability to be the creator that they are. You have to understand that their audiences are their biggest fans, and they’ve built this over years, so they know their audience better than anybody. For you to go in and give them a script to read, it’s not going to come off as authentic, so you have to trust in them. Second, consistently utilize influencers. If you think you’re going to use them one time and that’s going to do it, it’s not, it’s like billboards, one and done doesn’t work.

Jeanniey Walden: Is it the same as brand campaigns, where you can’t just do it one spot, it should be surrounded by other content, or do influencers hold their own?

Chris Detert: It’s always stronger when you do that. A lot of times we do campaigns around a hero influencer and then surround them with lookalike influencers who have similar audiences or characteristics, and push that message out. And then another part of the secret sauce of influencer marketing is paid media. You can take a creator’s messaging and put paid media behind it and hit a very targeted audience. It’s a lot more controlled than if they just post natively. When they post natively you have a little bit of control, you do the research and see who their audience is, but with paid media you can go very targeted.

Jeanniey Walden: Great. This has been such a fantastic conversation. Last question: what’s a secret about POSSIBLE that everybody needs to know for next year?

Chris Detert: Get your tickets early. It’s just going to get bigger and better. I’m really excited, I’m actually on the main stage tomorrow interviewing Terry Crews and the Cadillac F1 team, two days before the Miami race. This is Cadillac F1’s first ever year, the first ever American auto manufacturer, and this is the first American race they’ll ever be doing. Very exciting time.

Jeanniey Walden: Exciting. We’ll definitely have to come check it out. Thank you so much.

Chris Detert: Thank you.

This conversation was recorded at POSSIBLE and lightly edited for readability.