Casey Lewis

One pattern I've noticed is that many brands make the same mistakes when trying to find the right influencer partners.  ​ They focus on the wrong metrics. They fail to do their due diligence They approach influencer relationships as transactional rather than collaborative. ​ These missteps can lead to wasted budget, misaligned content, and lackluster ROI.  ​ But the good news is, they're all avoidable. ​ Based on my experience, here are the top 5 mistakes brands make when searching for Instagram influencers - and what to do instead: 👇 

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New from me: The House Judiciary Committee has been intensifying an antitrust probe into the Global Alliance of Responsible Media and its members, which includes major advertisers, agencies, and platforms. The Committee alleges GARM's members have been colluding to defund conservative media. While the ad industry insiders I spoke to felt the allegations were without merit, they are concerned about the chilling effect the probe -- and its numerous document and interview requests -- could have on GARM's work around brand safety and online misinformation. Read more over at Business Insider #garm #brandsafety #advertising #gop https://lnkd.in/ePpYBcRa

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🎥 Three Content trends that are simultaneously true: 1 - There are more distribution channels for content than ever before 2 - There are more sources of funding for content than ever before 3 - There is more content than ever before Tubi has a massive library of content, is the most watched free streaming service in the US, and is now becoming a production company. Tubi is a free, ad-supported streaming platform with less prestige TV series and films than competitors like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime. However, they're a hidden giant in the AVOD space, with 78 Million monthly active users and 59% YoY growth in total viewing time. AND that's with Tubi only being available in the US, Australia, Mexico, and Canada. Tubi is now launching "Stubios," a production arm that will fund and greenlight new content. Tubi will fund productions submitted by creators and then continue the financing if it performs well. Issa Rae is deeply involved in the project as a mentor and ambassador. Issa Rae is one of the best examples of someone who started off with a "seemingly niche" YouTube web series (in 2011 with Awkward Black Girl) and is now a massively successful producer-actor-writer with her own production and management company, her Emmy/Golden Globe-winning HBO series Insecure, and many other creative projects. Tubi is hoping to find overlooked "creators" like Issa Rae that they can fund to create the next big thing. Pivoting to this "creator-first" strategy allows Tubi to throw their hat into the ring of "new media" and position themselves as another major option for people trying to get their content off the ground. One of the first creators funded by Tubi is "Lady London," a rapper-screenwriter who first gained traction after going viral on Twitter. This more 'non-traditional' path is becoming a bigger part of what young, diverse crowds ACTUALLY want to see vs. what a major studio exec decides to greenlight. It is truly the best time ever to be a creator, as technology has allowed a million flowers of content to bloom around the world at a lower cost than ever before. Your biggest decision as a creator now is finding the right production partner and right distribution channel. And that could be Tubi. https://lnkd.in/eESQXZeF #tubi #issarae #creatoreconomy #film #production #content #entertainment #streaming #tv

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Launching Bubba News has been a lot different than IJReview or Axios. When I was helping them get started, it felt like there was so much focus on growth or the business. With Bubba News, we’ve been exclusively focused on the editorial product and have yet to do any marketing whatsoever. Subsequently, we’ve seen really steady, purely organic growth from referrals. We’re still relatively small, but by focusing on our editorial quality, we’ve managed to attract and retain a list made up of Fortune 100 executives, the editors of major publications, agency founders, a slew of political and media consultants and operatives, and maybe most important to me personally, plenty of friends from back home or that I’ve made along the way. We’re about to get started with a real marketing push, so we will have to see how that goes, but this chart (last quarter growth) has given me lots of hope that we’re on to something. https://www.bubba.news/

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The Neighborhood Studios team spent the last few days thinking about our new idea pipeline and its output. Tons of thoughts on this after being in a venture studio for 2 years. Here are some summary stats... - 1,750 new (raw) ideas considered per year. - 110 of those are given a second glance. - 66 of those are seriously considered. - 10 of those become experiments...real products in the hands of customers. - 2 of those are spun-out into studio companies. What the studio team has been discussing over the past few days is that 66 number. That's the number of ideas that 3 people on the team can dig into every year. Venture studios can be perceived as a "startup factory"...an engine to launch startups. The reality is that venture studios are a machine to invalidate ideas. We invalidate many more ideas than we validate. We touch 1,750 ideas per year, seriously dive into 66 of them, build experiments for 10 of them and only launch 2 of them. All that work turns into 2 studio companies per year that have a way higher success rate than the average startup in the wild. Said another way...startups are hard. Talk with Tapan Patel Gabe Hart Whit Anderson IV Jonathan Brinson if you wanna talk about this. They are world class.

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There are handful of folks in our ecosystem that consistently speak the truth and say what needs to be said. My friend, Dave Morgan, is one of them. In his most recent MediaPost editorial, Dave describes the epidemic of "strategic partner deals" (or a more a more cleverly-named version, "SPO deals") that are all secret code words for non-transparent volume-based rebates. There's nothing inherently wrong when commercial entities choose to trade margin for volume, but with extremely rare exception, these arrangements are anything but. -- Would anyone be surprised to hear that it's the norm for tech platforms to take margin not from their own pockets, but from the pockets of their publisher-side clients? -- Is anyone questioning that agencies generally pocket the rebates rather than passing them to their clients? TRUSTX is periodically asked to engage with an agency in a volume-based "SPO deal." Notwithstanding that we've not yet been able to determine what actual "optimization" of the supply-path is involved, we have no issue agreeing to reduce our own SSP margin once a buyer hits certain spend volume minimums. If we were to agree to such a volume-based rebate, our company policy is to send checks with transparent transactional reporting to the agency and brand directly. Sending a separate volume-based rebate payment ensures every party can validate that TRUSTX is paying from our own margin and not taking a penny from our publishers. Curiously, no agency has ever taken us up on this offer.

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Should affiliate.ai build a forecasting product for affiliate marketing? Why has nobody built one before? We wont try and build one that is 100% accurate, we would build one that is 80% right (for now), but shaves the first 8 hours of the process of reforecasting

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New from the Startup Show: Couch.com might sound straightforward — a digital marketplace for couches, yet it addresses a nuanced and complex issue: the overwhelming process of buying a couch. Most buyers, unsure of where to begin, face a barrage of choices from materials to retailers without a clear path forward. The platform simplifies this by gathering user preferences and guiding them to the perfect couch through a refined, almost concierge-like service online. https://lnkd.in/eR5p2WzG

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From Ashley Carman's #podcast newsletter for Bloomberg: "Not long ago, making narrative podcast series was a good setup... a deal for an eight or 10 episode series during these glory days could come with a budget of $500,000. Not too shabby. But after the rough stretch in the podcast industry over the past year-and-a-half or so, during which both the biggest distributors and advertisers tightened their spending, such deals have almost entirely disappeared. Budgets for these types of shows are now typically going for half as much, in the range of $150,000 to $250,000." https://lnkd.in/gdy_-tY6

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Pretty Little Thing's YouTube channel has hit a remarkable milestone with over 100 million views since its launch. 🚀 We've had the pleasure of producing some engaging shows for the channel, including "Pretty Little Fling," a dating show hosted by influencer Indiyah Polack, and "Pretty Little Pickup," a comedy interview segment featuring GK Barry. 🎥 Embracing unique formats can be a game-changer for any brand. By developing original content, brands can create additional touchpoints for customers, showcase a more relatable side through long-form content, seamlessly integrate into influencer culture, and convert casual followers into dedicated fans, all while earning free press coverage. 🌟 What are your thoughts on this content strategy? From our perspective, it's not just an approach, but the way forward in today's digital landscape. 🌐 #ContentStrategy #DigitalMarketing #Branding #InfluencerCulture

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Welcome Nick Lamplough! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts from the communications and investor relations strategies angles on the topic! #communications #investorerelations #publicrelations #crisiscommunications #investors #shareholderactivism #shareholders #proxy #hostiletakeover #privateequity #mergers #mergersandacquisitions #corporatefinance

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On this week's episode of the Toolkits Show, a podcast making sense of the major themes, trends, and developments shaping the business of content: -- Marketers are all about Hollywood these days. Starbucks, AB InBev, LVMH, and Marriott International are among the blue-chip brands that are producing documentaries, original series, and films. Some of this may be #Barbie envy. But some of this may also just be a natural reaction to increasing levels of ad avoidance and the realization that they need to do better than simply sell to customers. -- Jae Goodman, CEO of Superconnector Studios and perhaps the (very young) grandfather of brand entertainment, joined the show to explain what’s happening and what’s different this time. We also talked about what product placement actually looks like in this context, and why Hollywood is equally enamored with marketers. -- Consumers don’t want to pay for online news. Or do they? We dove into Reuters’ latest news report, which found that 57% of people who don’t currently pay for news said they are unwilling to pay anything at all for access to it. But the math may not actually be mathing, as this may indicate there is a larger market for news than the headlines suggest – and this could be good news for publishers. Found wherever your podcasts are found! Spotify & Apple links in comments. https://lnkd.in/eDsgrrg2

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This. This just makes me take a long deep worried breath. It's been ~5 years since a similar story was published about the perverted uses of YouTube to exploit the innocence of children. That story caused quite an uproar in its time. I was the global media director for Coca-Cola. It was the first time we paused media spend around the world on YouTube as we reviewed our own policies and principles. It led to publishing the company’s first Responsible Media Principles (https://lnkd.in/e8vUMWXS). I was proud of the work and actions we took as a company with industry partners as a result. The examples here are equally troubling. The explanation offered falls plenty short. It’s another example of what goes wrong if we put too much trust into algorithms. How vanity metrics lead us astray. How Marketers must pay closer attention to how campaigns are executed on these platforms. How our traditional definitions of “safe” or “suitable” don’t necessarily work in these environments. How the good work by Robert Rakowitz #GARM is just as important – if not even more so – today, as it was then.

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AI-generated dreck posing as local news, aka pink slime journalism, is proliferating. The cost of making it is practically zero. The incentives for bad actors to create it range from money -- by delivering programmatic advertising and affiliate links to unwitting readers -- to political manipulation via misinformation and disinformation. And the platforms that distribute it don't care. John Biggs at The Media Copilot recently lamented this situation. "AI isn’t just stealing our jobs," he wrote. "It’s also going to steal the truth." It doesn't have to, though. Here are two things you can do to protect the truth: 1. Give your attention to real publications. Taproot Edmonton employs actual people who you can meet in real life. We live here and we care about this place. And we put our names on what we publish. You'll never be fooled by pink slime if you intentionally read and listen to work made by humans you know instead of just consuming the news-eque junk an algorithm may serve you. 2. Help real publications pay for those people. A $20/month subscription to ChatGPT can generate an awful lot of words; a full-time employee doing the work of finding stuff out and telling you about it costs considerably more. We don't put a paywall around Taproot's work because we don't want to live in a world where only those who pay get real journalism and the rest get pink slime. That means we have to fund ourselves by other means. If you have a business, you can now buy a business membership to Taproot. That lets you easily sign up all of your employees to receive Taproot's work, which in itself will help your organization better understand the community it serves. But you'll also be helping us continue to inform and connect the people who live in this place that we love. You can sign up for a business membership here: https://lnkd.in/gRWAm_Ay. And you can learn more about what this is and why we're offering it here: https://lnkd.in/gNc3yvAW If a business membership isn't right for you, you can become an individual member for $100 per year or $10 per month here: https://lnkd.in/g6yRVG77 As Mack Male said at Taproot Publishing Inc.'s event during Upper Bound with Katrina Ingram, AI helps our responsible local news outlet scale our ability to pay attention to our community. We're excited about the technology's potential to help us do the work. But humans report and write what you read. "While human-led AI is a boon, non-human-led AI is an existential threat," Biggs writes (https://lnkd.in/gDj55fEm). "We all need to be ready to fight it." I'm inviting you to join us in the fight. #yegmedia #edmonton #yeg #edmontonmedia #futureofmedia

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Today in Confusing Copywriting found in the wild 🤔 This gas station sign reads: “Spend quality time here to spend less on quality gas.” ⛽️ I had to read it 3 times to parse it. On its face, it’s an intact sentence. It’s technically correct. What throws me is that you expect parallel construction and it doesn’t deliver. Here’s what I mean: “Spend quality time here, get more quality time on the road.” “Quality time here means quality gas, for less.” I think both of those examples are weak but they’re better than the final copy on the sign. But that’s just a structure problem. Is anyone convinced that time spent pumping gas is quality time? And what does “quality gas” mean to me as a consumer? Will it protect my engine better? Give me better fuel economy? (Craig Fitzgerald has taught me the answer to these questions, which is that now all gas is quality gas so get the cheapest kind you can.) The price was also $0.20 higher than another gas station in the neighborhood I passed earlier today. Another sign read “Saving at Arco is the one thing you can bank on.” I was like, are they also…a bank?? No. Plus, no you can’t. See above. Is it just me? What’s your rewrite of this one?

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