Behind the Numbers: Reimagining the Creator Role — Engaging Communities Through Short-Form Video
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Hey gang, it's Friday, March 21st. Minda, Emi, Aisha and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an e-marketer video podcast made possible by Trax. I'm Marcus and today I am joined by three people for the conversation we have for you. We have with us our senior analyst covering social media based in New York. It's Minda Smiley. Hey Marcus, happy to be here. Hello there. We also have with us, with her in the studio, analyst on the media content team also living in New York. It's Emi Lederman.

Hi, thanks for having me. Of course, of course. And finally, we have joining us the co-founder of Kale, living in New York too. It's Isha Patel. Marke, it's great to see you. Yes, you too. Thank you all for being here. We start when we have an external guest on with the speed intro.

Let's get to know our guests a little better, mainly Isha because Emi and Minda have been on before you know them. So they'll answer the last question, the first three are just for Isha. Let's do it. 60 seconds on the clock, roughly. No one's keeping time, but we kind of are. Let's do it. Isha, you are based in New York, but where are you from? Originally from Southern California.

Very nice. What do you do in a sentence? I help people translate their social value into economic value. Very good. What's your morning drink? You're going to say black coffee. Oh, okay. Very nice. But right before COVID. Most people are Americano, which is insane. I have never had one in my entire life. I knew I liked you. Well played. You've never just had a regular coffee?

I've had black drip coffee. I've never had an Americano or an espresso shot. Oh my gosh. I can't even imagine. And you're so accomplished. I wasn't convinced in my brain. How is this possible? All right, final question. What has a friend recently influenced you to buy? This is a good question. It came from Emmy. Ooh, yeah.

Looking around my space, air dry clay was something that one of my friends told me about. Are you guys familiar with air dry clay? No. Absolutely not. Here, I made this from clay and it dries in 24 hours and you can paint it. So I have little knickknacks and mini fridge magnets. One of my friends got into it, experimented.

explained it to me and then I saw it all over TikTok. So it's been a really fun way to spend my Sundays making stuff with my hand and not be on my devices. Very cool. Victoria, who edits the show, she's going to love that. She took a whole class. She's been on that kiln. But this sounds way less expensive and time consuming. Emi, how about you?

I guess this is maybe a year ago now, but a lot of my friends were getting into Nuuly, which I know Minda's a fan of as well. Oh, yeah. But it is a, I think, Urban Outfitters Anthropologie-owned rental brand where you...

It's kind of like Rent the Runway, but another version of that where you get like six pieces a month. And I think that I talk about it so often because I need other people to justify the price for me as well and also get on it. It just makes me feel better. I mean, Nuuly is one of the most popular brands on Kale, so it's really, really cool to see. Yes.

very nice i actually just i just sent my months newly back and i'm getting a new one tomorrow it's so exciting to get it in the mail but it's it's a full-time job like choosing your items choosing your items going to pick up your items yeah yeah or dropping them off do you do newly yourself i don't but i'm gonna i'm gonna get on it for the spring months love it you're left out amanda what uh was a friend recently influenced you to buy

Oh, geez, that's a good question. Honestly, I don't even know if this is exactly what you're asking. Like, I mean, my mom is my friend, so I'm going to count my mom. She's top of the food chain. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it's true. Best friend. She often influences me to buy, like, different items at Trader Joe's. Like, she'll be like, oh, Trader Joe's has their, like, new spring line in of, like, you know, whatever, carrot jelly beans, and then I go and buy them. So I'm going to go with that. Nice. Moms, the most influential. Well, they should be. All right. Very good. There are three guests. Time for the fact test.

of the day. Who invented the piano? So, this is the dumb stuff that I kind of spend my life wondering about. According to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the first true piano was invented almost entirely by one man, Bartolomeo Cristofori, the Italian harps chord maker. He was born in 1655 in Padua, a Republic

Venice, inventing the first piano whilst living in Florence in 1709. He named it the Grava Chemballo col piano e forte, or harpsichord that plays soft and loud. The name refers to the piano's ability to change loudness according to the amount of pressure on the keys, a quality foreign to the harpsichord.

Christopher achieved that effect by replacing the plucking mechanism of the harpsichord with a hammer action capable of striking the strings with a greater or lesser force. There were some flavors of a piano before. You had the hammered dulcimer, the harpsichord, the clavichord. So there were a few versions of the piano, but he made the piano, invented the piano. Anyone play?

I have no musical... Oh, nice. Very nice. Except not in New York because I don't have space for a keyboard in my apartment. Yes, no one does. Although, talking about space for pianos, you should try to go... I went on a tour of the Steinway Piano Factory in Astoria. Yeah, it was remarkable. There are two factories in the world. One's in Astoria in New York and that services the Americas and there's one in Hamburg in Germany which services everywhere else. Yeah, and they walk you through...

whole factory and they show you the process from start to finish and it takes about a year, not for the tour, but for the... to make a Steinway it takes about a year. It's just remarkable. Do they have a gift store where you can buy piano? No! Unbelievable. But they do take you into the vault of piano. Oh cool. They have like the special pianos for people who can afford the special... Do they have a live Q&A with this guy you're talking about? The piano maker?

The inventor who was born in 1665. Yes! Still around. Perfect. Yeah. Anyway, today's real topic, engaging communities through short form video.

Alright folks, today we're going to be having a slightly different conversation about communities and creators and how the influencer space is being reimagined, so to speak. And as I mentioned, we're joined by Isha, who co-founded a company called Kale, who is reimagining all of these different things. So we'll start with the what and the why. Isha, what is Kale and why did you start it?

Kale is a mobile app that rewards everyday people like Emi, Minda for talking about their favorite brands on social media. So you can imagine Emi with her Nuuly taking a couple videos posting them on Instagram reels or TikTok and after 24 hours Kale rewards her. And for the brand Nuuly they're getting hundreds of pieces of content from the Emi's of the world who just love

love Nuuly and shop there authentically. Nuuly is not having to gift out $100 boxes every single month to get content like traditional influencer marketing.

and so this model is different because for folks who don't know emmy she might be an influencer i don't know we've only i've only known her for a short while um but what you're talking about is just is regular folks you know not folks who have billions of followers or millions of followers or hundreds of thousands of followers or maybe even like tens of thousands of followers you're talking about ordinary people correct exactly it's what people are craving today it's what we want to see on social media people are

So sick and tired of that shiny, big social media celebrity with gifted product talking about why this dress or this coffee mug is the most amazing thing in the world. So really going back to the roots of Minda, your mom, Emmy, your sister, my aunt recommending something to us and us going out and buying it. You're not going to have to do loads of homework. So really the concept of Kale is nothing new. It's going back to our roots of word of mouth marketing. Yeah.

Emi, when you're looking at this concept of giving the voice to the average everyday customer, what do you make of this and how this differs from the more traditional, so to speak, form of influencer marketing, of being influenced by a creator?

I think it's interesting because it really aligns with where a lot of social platforms are going and the ways in which consumers spend their time on these social platforms. So I think instead of just favoring influencers who have high follower counts and are really...

strong in the native feed and maybe have a lot of likes and comments on their posts, it's kind of moving towards favoring people who have stronger engagement and are really able to tap into kind of more niche communities. So when I think of Instagram, I barely ever post on it, but

I am so active in group chats with friends, sending things back and forth. So I think that kind of aligns with what Kale's seeing in that we want to go back to the friends and family recommendations and that part of social media and preserve that.

kind of those relationships versus just following a flashy influencer who may not be relatable. Yeah. And one thing I do want to jump in and say, because this is I think it's different, but kind of in the same vein of what we're talking about is and it is a little bit of a shameless plug, admittedly, but I just wrote a report last week about Reddit and Reddit's really becoming quite popular by several measures, more ad spend, more users, etc.,

But really what I'm getting at is a lot of why people like Reddit is because they feel like it is just like regular people sharing like, oh, this is why I love the coffee maker I bought last week. And like people feel like it's, you know, it's not really super algorithmically driven. It's not AI driven. There's not, you know, Reddit is not an influencer platform in any traditional sense. So I think, you know, kind of going back to Kayla, I think there is like sort of this push right now, I think for people, you know, people just want like real content.

So do you see, I think, Minda, you mentioned Reddit kind of being like the bright spot of the Internet where people still go to get actual recommendations and have like natural conversations with people. Do you see brands getting involved there as taking away from that? Or do you think there is a way for

them to exist, the two things to exist at once. - I think it's tricky. I mean, Reddit certainly still has its own kind of issues as well. It's not perfect, certainly. I think one being that Reddit has long been known as a platform that is very, its users are very at-averse. So that's a different thing. But yeah, to get to your question, yeah, I do think brands infiltrating it too much could

go badly or users won't be super receptive. But there is really, yeah, like there's certainly a big community of people on there that are talking about products, talking about brands, and Reddit certainly has noticed that and is trying to leverage that behavior.

and i think there's this idea of not taking yourself too seriously and just wanting to connect with people on reddit that it sounds like isha at kale that's that's kind of a common thread where you're not trying to build an audience or a following or a career as much as you're just trying to kind of talk about something you enjoy yeah we we really don't go after serving big influencers or social media celebrities we go after the everyday person who has

an iPhone or a smartphone and is naturally creating content through video about their day in the city or what they're buying at Trader Joe's. And those moments become the source of inspiration for their community to go check out those brands and products. And Minda, to what you were saying around just seeing real people, what we've been seeing a big shift from is

from quality of content to quantity of content. So especially on these fast moving platforms like TikTok, getting a ton of content to stay top of mind has been the transformative nature of leaning on your super fans because there's no way that you can go gift out a million influencers product and be top of mind. Maybe you can do that for a week, but what happens the rest of the month?

For Minda's full report on Reddit. Shameless. Head to eMarketer.com if you're a purposeful subscriber. Thank you, Marcus. Of course. Do we need to...

think of a different word for this trend to really kind of take off because we have the word creative, we have the word influencer, we have the word celebrity and it feels like we're talking about a different type of person here. So Isha, I mean, can we just use those terms and redefine them to mean kind of everyone from the person with, you know, a couple of followers all the way up to billions or do we need to eventually, do you think that the space, the industry that will come up with a new term?

When we first started Kale and I started setting up creator user research chats, the users would say, "Oh, you should go talk to someone else. I'm not a creator. I'm a lowercase c creator." So that's what we've stuck with. I'm sure the industry will evolve. And as we've evolved, we've been targeting the app and our platform to just everyday consumers. Okay.

Because you were telling me, we were chatting back and forth over email and you were saying that the word creator, the word influencer, a lot of the time doesn't have a positive connotation and that not everyone wants to be an influencer. I think the time has shifted from the wannabe beauty influencer in 2010 to 2025. People have realized it's a very lonely job.

You're alone and the pay is very unpredictable. You might get a really big brand deal this month and then be left dry for the next couple of months. And I think there was a time between 2015 and 2020 when everyone wanted that. And what we've noticed is just a slowdown of that over the last couple of years because it's just so hard to make

to make that a reality because the platforms are saturated. Yeah, I think like Digiday actually wrote an article recently. It was like they interviewed a creator who was like looking for a nine-to-five job and I was like, wow, everything comes full circle. Now they're like looking for just like a regular jobs. Yeah, and it feels like there's one side of the industry where it's the creator economy is moving towards entertainment and a lot of people want to set up creator upfront so that you can have

regularly scheduled content sponsored by brands and really have this scheduled, like more nine to five-esque role. But it seems like for the people that are just trying to be influencers,

that type of career isn't necessarily sustainable if you're just focused on building trust and product pushing. Because if you're constantly introducing a new brand to your followers, there's probably going to be a point where they're like, you just promoted this competitor two days ago. How likely is it that you're actually using this product as well? I think the fatigue is real.

I mean, when you're talking about something on your social feed, it's probably happening once or twice a month compared to the influencer because they have to make ends meet. They're posting about a couple different brands every single day. So their impressions are being diluted. So what we're really looking at and what we found brands to be shifting towards is engagement rate. It's that saves the shares, the comments that are really driving chatter and brand advocacy.

Yeah, I've seen some research that said engagement rates are the top qualifier for brands when looking for influencers. And then it's also audience metrics and figuring out if the audience that they're engaging with is actually people that they want to be their core consumer, people that they see converting. And I'm seeing a lot of also updates like with Instagram, for example, just rolled out the sponsored comment page.

feature um where creators can instead of creators posting a branded thing they can post a sponsored comment this is a little bit of an aside but would love to hear your your thoughts on that and if that's moving moving us more towards like kind of that authentic content or maybe doing the opposite i think when it comes to these different levers it's

I think leaning into that everyday person, I might not want to post video content, but I'm okay writing something and endorsing something because I've bought it five times in the last month. So I think the comments are an interesting way to further democratize the marketing budgets across people who are actually using the product. So I'm excited to see what happens with that rollout for Instagram.

We talked about creators, influencers. I went and I was trying to see who is a creator, how many people consider themselves creator. I found some 2023 research, so a little bit older than we would have liked, but from Mintel, showing 19% of social media users consider themselves either a creator or an influencer. That number goes up for younger people. For Gen Z, it's about 28%. And there's going to have varying degrees of obviously creators or influencers within that. But that means that

Even if you're looking at the younger people, three quarters of people don't consider themselves one. But that's the very audience which we're talking about. They're the audience to which people listen to every day and they're happy getting recommendations from, you don't need a huge following for that to be true. I also, Aisha, you mentioned something in a conversation we previously had where you were saying that

this can be a creative outlet and you were saying that it enables staying connected with different communities and topics and so it's not just reimagining what we call this new person but what

what they're doing and how they're engaging with that content, with that product is changing as well. It doesn't have to be you're just talking about this to promote it. It can be you're talking about this because you care about it, because you want to stay connected to the community. Yeah. So when we first started the research to build out Kale, we started talking to these recreational users on TikTok and Instagram. This was back in 2020. And we would call up these folks and

just say, "Hey, you're posting your day in the life of video or you really love coffee or you love yoga. Your entire page is full of it, but you don't do any sponsored deals or any brand deals. Why are you posting?" And the yogi would say, "Hey, I just really love my community. People ask me questions on where I get my yoga mat." And you see that trickle down into the comment section. And so that's when the spark really went off on there's everyday people because the smartphone has been democratized that are

creating content, whether we call them creators or photographers, we can debate that to no end, but they are generating content for the purpose of staying connected. They feel proud and a sense of purpose by having this community that they're seen as an expert for. Emi and or Minda, how have you both seen

Social content this the social content that consumers are looking at changing Over recent years or months and how will it change potentially? Yeah, I don't this it doesn't exactly answer your question, but it was something I was thinking apologies I was just thinking like kind of going back to this idea of like what is a creator? What is an influencer as we've been talking about? I think that it's

there is a lot of gray area, right? I mean, because our numbers show, you know, the creator economy, you know, influencer marketing spend is growing. We're seeing massive growth. You know, it is slowing a bit because the creator economy, you know, it's maturing. And so we're seeing growth slow a little bit, but there's a lot of growth there still. And so I think, but that being said, everything that we're talking about, you know, a lot of these trends, they are true. These are real things that people are seeing in the marketplace in terms of this fatigue and whatnot. So I think it kind of goes to show like,

someone with 300 followers who takes on a brand deal here and there through a platform like Kale, they might not consider themselves a creator, but maybe to a brand, that's part of their creator budget. So there's all these kind of weird nuances, I think,

happening constantly within the creator economy, whether we're debating the difference between an influencer and a creator or, you know, how brands kind of budget this stuff out, how people themselves view themselves, you know, if they do identify as a creator, if they think that's a good thing or a bad thing, like it's sort of this always changing, always evolving landscape, which I think is really, really interesting. And even to your current question, the one you actually just asked Marcus about, you know,

the social content itself, I mean, that's always evolving. And I think now even creators are having to address that in terms of like, as we're seeing more happen within DMs, within private messaging, creators are having to think about, okay, well, how do I get in those DMs? And in a way that, you know, people will want me to be in there. Minda, I think you're hitting the nail on its head. On one side of the marketplace, you have these users who create content for fun. They are not defining themselves as creators. On the other hand,

the space that we plan for selling our solution to brands, it comes from their creator marketing dollars. And so, I mean, back to your example, Emmy, the newly creator, or Emmy is a newly creator for the brand, but she doesn't consider herself because she has a full time job at eMarketer. And so as we think about the evolving landscape,

It's been really, really interesting to see a brand come to us and say, hey, instead of paying $20,000 for one TikTok video, can we give it to you guys? And you can start to reward our super fans and put our marketing dollars back into the pockets of our customers.

Going back to like just the nature of the content and in feed posts, this could 100% be just wishful thinking on my end. But I think that there is a lot more awareness now about like the detrimental effects of social media on mental health. So I think that having

seeing more of social media be kind of interest based and niche communities opposed to let's all engage with this like hot person that's posting on the static social feed, I think has become, and with the rise of the platforms favoring video, I think that supports that, the storytelling and kind of approach to communities and interests versus we're all consuming the same content.

You know, example, I just finished this season of The Traders. Not sure if anyone else watched it. But I just noticed that there was so much content in like private messages and just on my feet geared towards like predictions about The Traders. Now it's White Lotus. So it feels like it's a great opportunity for CTV as well because there's such a nice...

correlation between what we're watching on CTV and what we're consuming on social media. And I also think it's like kind of a wholesome, positive use of social media. Isha, final question from me.

When you're thinking about the rest of this year, the future, what are some of the most important, I should say, theme for you when you kind of put Kale to one side, you go out for a walk, you know, you're company in the space here, but you're going out for a walk and you're having these ideas about the wider space that you live in. What do you think's

most worth paying attention to? I think it's really interesting to start thinking about virality being redefined. Arguably, the iMessage space is the most influential space. The Instagram DMs is a very influential space. So what we're thinking a lot about at Kale is how does the message get out there about different brands and products? Obviously,

Obviously, we are seeing it very loud and clear with the video space, with the photo space. Emmy brought up the Instagram comment space.

The truth of the matter is brands don't do well in terms of selling because there are 101 brands popping into your feed. Influencers are considered brands, so that leaves the everyday person, whether that's their address book, which I think is a really powerful symbol of their influence and what communities they can get into or Reddit communities that they manage. It's going to be interesting to see where people are talking about topics and interests like Emi was saying.

that are near and dear to them yeah i kind of think about this similarly to to musicians you have some shows uh like is it the voice or x factor where there's a chance that someone's going to get noticed um and they go from being nobody to to the person of the moment but a lot of time that's kind of a flash in the pan and a lot of time you don't hear from them again um most musicians

it's sustainable, it's slow, it's steady, it's constant. And then they become somebody. But that's kind of how I look at this space is, you know, you're talking about virality being redefined. We were talking before and you were saying you can spend a ton of money, a ton of effort on this thing and it gets wiped past.

and it's gone versus constantly reminding people about your brand. And a lot of the time it takes a few reminders before someone pulls the trigger on on a purchase anyway. So that just being a more sustainable brand conversation. Yeah. In addition to brands measuring success on social via engagement rate, what we've seen is people are desperate to stay top of mind and it's quantity over quality. You can art

art direct and workshop an influencer video to perfection. And there's going to be so many people that land on it for half a second and move on. And so a lot of beauty brands, their measure of success is when a user is on beauty talk. I want to be the first three videos that people swipe through versus one that randomly gets a million views. The social media space has been

innovated upon and evolving, but something that we've been noticing is how easy it is to buy impressions. Brands are starting to notice and questioning what does it even mean to get a million impressions on a video if the quality of those impressions are not coming from an audience that is your target demographic? So engagement rate, the saves, the shares, those are the more meaningful actions that users are hitting on a piece of content that are indicating purchase intent and consideration to brands. Yeah.

Perfect. Well, unfortunately, that's where we have to leave the conversation. But thank you so much to my three guests for hanging out with me today. Thank you first to Isha. Thank you, Marcus. Of course, yeah. Thank you to Emmy. Thank you. Thank you to Minda. Thanks. And thanks to the A-Team, our editing crew. They made me call them that.

Victoria, John Lance and Danny, Stuart and his team, Sophie does our social media. Thanks to everyone for listening in to the Behind the Numbers show and email to videopodcasts, made possible by Trax. We'll be back on Monday, happiest of weekends.