TechBytes with Kam Zulawski, MD EMEA at CreatorIQ

Could you let us know your journey in Technology?

I have always been fascinated by technology and how it impacts the world we live in. When I was at Gartner, we talked about the Nexus of Forces, namely the convergence and mutual reinforcement of Social, Mobility, Cloud and Information patterns that drive new business scenarios. I knew that more and more businesses were moving away from On-premise to Cloud-based solutions, as well as adopting social. This started my journey into the social media and SaaS space, which, in turn, expanded into the wider Digital Marketing and Influencer Marketing arenas.

What is CreatorIQ? What inspired you to join CreatorIQ?

CreatorIQ is a premier SaaS platform that helps agencies, brands, and publishers manage private brand advocacy networks, work with creators, and execute influencer marketing campaigns at scale. Our technology powers the global programs that are shaping the future of influencer marketing. We believe that transparency and authenticity are both keys to the success of the industry. We have built technology for each part of the influencer marketing workflow – starting with discovery, campaign management, and reporting – to creator onboarding, authentication management, secure contract storage, content approval, automated payouts, and tax management. We mix the vast amounts of data with rich, AI-driven insights to deliver proprietary metrics for clients.

Creator IQ have a world-class product supported by an impressive executive team. We have experienced rapid growth in the last five years and in June of this year, we received $12m series B funding from Unilever, in partnership with TVC Capital. With this investment, EMEA was now a strategic growth area for the company. After meeting the team in LA, New York, Chicago and London who shared similar values to those I believe are important for an organization to stand out and be successful, I knew this was the company for me, where I could support in the mission of being the number one influencer marketing platform in the world.

How does CreatorIQ help enterprises? How is it different from other platforms?

CreatorIQ is the Salesforce of influencer marketing. CreatorIQ is built specifically for large Enterprise organizations and agencies looking to scale their influencer marketing programs but is also nimble enough for our most forward-thinking clients. We save our clients time moving away from manual cumbersome processes by offering an all-in-one suite, mitigate risk by helping them discover authentic influencers, help them build their very own influencer marketplace (private CRM), coupled with streamlining payments in over 160 countries and, lastly, being able to beautifully report on their efforts across an entire campaign, which helps them to articulate the ROI of their programs.

Our platform differentiates from other platforms in our ability to track any influencer in the world, the configurability of our reporting, and our dedication to building technology solutions that help marketers understand the true ROI of their influencer efforts. Our business is 100% technology-focused, and our deliberate approach of not working with talent via a marketplace ensures that our focus is on creating value for brands and not creators.

How do you deal with data privacy? How do you eliminate fraud risk?

Data protection and compliance with applicable data protection laws are of supreme importance to CreatorIQ. CreatorIQ adheres to all applicable EU and US privacy and data laws and regulations, including GDPR.

We leverage active audience scores, as well as engagement rate, audience location, and follower growth flags in our audience integrity methodology. CreatorIQ is a technology platform and, therefore, these features are enabled within the platform that enables our clients to perform these actions in-house.

Is it possible to integrate CreatorIQ with other platforms?

Yes, CreatorIQ has the most robust Enterprise API and part of the reason large enterprise businesses work with us. They use it to integrate with Top analytics platforms, data suites and visualization tools, as well as pull data via our RESTful API where they can build custom apps and workflows – all of which are secure and encrypted for data privacy.

How do you strategize your Sales and Marketing goals for the EMEA market? How is this different from those for North America and APAC regions?

Europe, just as one example, has 44 countries, most of which speak a different language and each country has a slightly different way of doing business. This is a big consideration when looking at marketing, for example, as the same content that resonates in the US or UK won’t be as effective in France or Germany. Localization is key for this; as we scale, we will have local language support in each of our target markets and create compelling repurposed content that reaches our target audience in those regions. Recruitment, as well as channel partnerships are also very important, ensuring we are hiring experienced people with high emotional intelligence that can adapt to all the different nuances of doing business in EMEA.  EMEA is typically 12-18 months behind the US when it comes to influencer marketing maturity, so the team needs to be very consultative in their approach, helping to educate the market as we scale.

How can CMOs extract the best outcomes from CreatorIQ platform/solutions? How do you train your customers?

Our reporting empowers some of the most forward-thinking CMOs to see how influencer as a channel can outperform other marketing channels. As Vasiliki Petrou, EVP and Group CEO of Unilever Prestige, puts it, “CreatorIQ empowers Unilever to set global measurement standards for the influencer marketing industry.”

We have hired a world-class training and enablement team, where training is offered via workshops, Learning management systems, online as well as offering 24/7 support. This has enabled our clients to get real-time value and be up and running on a full program within just a couple of weeks.

How can one measure campaign performance?

Our ability to aggregate data from every major social network with third-party as well as first-party data empowers our clients to get granular campaign performance data. CreatorIQ also offers a robust set of solutions for measuring the EMV (Social Media Value). CreatorIQ has a suite of tools to help find and define this formula in order to track performance of various influencer marketing programs over time.

The SMV (EMV) calculator is completely configurable for every client where organizations can leverage our industry-first benchmarked data to quantify value. We are helping our clients move beyond vanity metrics to bring influencer marketing to parity with Digital Marketing channels. This, in turn, reduces time and effort to fully tag and track a campaign at scale and with much more granularity. Lastly, we can then track conversion metrics and real, earned media value for true creator performance data.