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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
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Speaker 2 (00:02.956)
Welcome to this special Talk Commerce edition live from Shop Talk. Today we have Arthur Leopold. He is the co-founder of Agentio. As I almost also wanted to mispronounced it, I think I got it right. Arthur, sorry, go ahead and give us your day-to-day role and one of your passions.
Absolutely. My name is Arthur Leopold. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Agentio. We're an ad platform automating the buying of creator content, starting with YouTube integrations. I grew up a ski racer, so I adore skiing, love cooking, taken up a recent passion of fly fishing. So in New York, you try to get out of the city a little bit as much as you can. It's always nice to. Park? Not that I know of, though I'm sure people have tried.
Can you go fly fishing in Central?
Speaker 2 (00:48.47)
Yeah, I'm a native Montanan, so all those things should be in my repertoire, but I went skiing for the first time in 25 years in Colorado last year. And it actually went great, because the skis are so good now.
They are. They make turning a lot easier.
I enjoyed myself infinitely. anyways, let's talk a little bit about what you're doing for creators. We're at Shop Talk live, and I've had a lot of conversations with brands that are using creators in a very positive way. in our green room talks, you had some really great stats. tell us a little bit about Agentio and tell us how you got started. And then let's talk about what you're doing.
Yeah, absolutely. So prior to starting Agentio, I helped start Cameo, the celebrity video shout out app. So his first employee was president there and saw how technology can really bridge the gap between fans and their favorite people. And always saw this thousand X opportunity on the B2B side. And we saw so much friction in trying to connect brands with creators and through conversations with CMOs and folks at media agencies. We had this pretty unique insight that in order for there to be a real shift in the way that brands work with creators.
today, you need to actually shift working media dollars or paid digital ad spend to creators. And the only way that that would happen is if you automated and standardized the buying of creator content. So the current ways of working for many of the brands that you speak with, I'm sure every brand listening, is this archaic sort of back and forth, wild, wild west process of hand-to-hand combat to try to get a single creator integration or creator deal done. A lot of people are in the center
Speaker 1 (02:26.128)
device to create friction and because of that you can't properly scale creator programs. And if you look at overall digital ad spend there's $600 billion of it. If you look at creator ad spend or influencer ad spend, depending on what you read there's somewhere between 10 or 15 billion. So you have this really constrained pool of capital that's constrained by the inefficiencies of buying it. So we realize that because of large language models, because of my experience with Cameo and my co-founder who led Spotify's growth
Innovation Engineering org, working alongside the performance marketing teams, that we could build the first ad platform in the creator space. Meaning we could automate the buying of this content that for brands today is so incredibly effective and efficient, but tough to scale. We've started with YouTube as the first place for us to enable brands to buy 90 second podcasts like host integrations, right? When a podcaster says, here's why I love this brand, use code BRENT20.
We learned on YouTube that the majority of creators today are only selling through 20 to 30 percent of their inventory. And these are people with the strongest audiences of any social platform, highest attention rates, but they're not selling through their content. They're not able to work with the best brands in the world because of how hard it is today. So we knew if we automated the challenges that brands have in buying, whether that's matching or bidding or negotiating for the content,
brand safety then we could enable a brand to come in and whether they spend $50,000 a month or a million dollars a month on the platform, which many do, then they could do so without additional bandwidth needs on the
brand's end. So think of this as a DSP for creator content. It's as easy for brands to buy these creator integrations now as buying a Facebook ad or a Google ad. And our belief is that the future of advertising is creator-led. It's a creator sharing a brand story on that brand's behalf. It's not another display ad, not another skippable video ad.
Speaker 1 (04:33.198)
That's obviously seen and felt by most brands who start to work with creators. And we were really excited last week when Unilever came out, or maybe it two weeks ago. Unilever, who historically has been one of the most prolific marketers in the world, they came out and their CEO said that 50 % of their future spend is going to be towards influencers and creators. So it's so obvious where the puck is going. And now brands can actually truly embrace that and scale up their programs with ease.
That's amazing. I want to back up. In the very beginning, you had mentioned B2B. And I just want to make a clarification on that. When you say B2B creators, are you talking about creators in the B2B space? Or just clarify that part, because I don't necessarily always think of creators selling B2B.
Yeah, we work with brands and some creators speak about businesses and business content. Many creators, are lifestyle creators and chefs. We have many of the largest creators in the world from Linus Tech Tips and Joshua Weissman and Rhett and Link on the platform. So we are agnostic to the verticals. We need to ensure that the creators are going to drive the most efficiency and performance for brands. So whether it's a B2B creator or a lifestyle creator, we're agnostic.
to that. At end of the day, the creators drive outcomes for brands and that's what we enable.
And then you had mentioned about having friction. Tell me about, talk about that friction and how that really gets gummed up when the traditional model of getting a crater on board.
Speaker 1 (06:08.354)
Yeah, today, if you're a brand who historically hasn't worked with creators or maybe you've worked with a lot, if you wanted to expand or kick off your program, you would have to first figure out which creators to work with. And a lot of that today is driven by bias or some point solution platforms that help with discovery. But then you have to get in front of the creators and you're sending out a ton of emails and maybe direct messages on social platforms. And then you enter this game of
chicken with an agent or manager or creator where there's a high price thrown in front of the brand or the advertiser. The price doesn't make much sense, right? There's a high watermark that may have previously been met and the creator or their team believes that that could always be met. And then there's weeks and sometimes months of back and forth just to try to negotiate the right price and try to negotiate the terms of a contract.
That is incredibly inefficient and because of that, a brand can't scale their programs unless they have a huge in-house team or they ship dollars off to an agency and lose a lot of control that way.
One of the interesting things that I learned at Shop Talk this week was about the ability for low follower creators to create a lot of value for brands. What has your experience been for somebody with say a 10,000 followers compared to something with a million followers?
Yeah, we actually don't look at followers as a metric that points to success, at least on YouTube. think the subscriber count or follower count is sort of this age-old way of understanding someone's successful, but it's too easy for people to actually game the follower count. So we look at consistency in views and engagement. When we think about micro-creators though, micro-creators oftentimes can drive a lot of value for brands, and it's easier for brands
Speaker 1 (08:11.786)
to whitelist their content and actually put paid spend behind the content. you'll see, for instance, whether it's with TikTok shops or with Instagram partnership ads, the vast majority of creators who are doing those are creators with small followings. Where we see the most value is through consistency and people who've built their audiences over time. There's no better platform than YouTube for that exactly. So when you sit down to watch your favorite YouTuber for 20 minutes or 30 minutes, you're committed to
that person. You're not doom-scrolling on Instagram or TikTok and because of that we look for an average of views and a consistency in views and that means that they have an audience that's like constantly coming back. The audience cares about what that creator is suggesting and cares about why the creator loves a certain brand or product.
So now talk about how your marketplace or your solution will solve a lot of these problems. Like you just put the two together and you have some predefined pricing or tell us how the solution works.
Yeah, so we identify the creators that are great for a brand. Creators are directly connected to our platform, so we get all first party data. And we understand the creators through all their content, all the content they've ever produced. So that means if you are a very popular DTC glasses brand that we work with, we can find creators who have said, my contacts scratch my eyes, or I can't see when I drive at night anymore. So this deep semantic understanding of a creator is incredibly important for an authentic match. And then we bid on the creators
future inventory that they've listed on the platform. So there's no negotiation or back and forth. And what that means is that one of the most popular prolific app companies, delivery app companies, can spend a half a million dollars on a Agentio in 48 hours or 72 hours across 30, 40 of the best creators on YouTube. That would have taken an influencer team six plus months to try to negotiate. We've enabled so many great companies, whether it's Bombasox or Midfielder,
Speaker 1 (10:14.544)
jury or master class or athletic greens, Jones Road Beauty and so on to now buy this content as easily as they buy Facebook ads or Google ads because we eliminate all the friction. And then the brands, of course, at the end of the day, they care about the performance. Performance is tied to pricing. So oftentimes creators will have a price that actually sets too high of a bar for them to be performant on behalf of a brand. So it's really important to try to standardize pricing.
which we've done. So we take a brand's CPM that they need to hit, and we multiply that against the creator's historical views, and then the creator receives a bid for that price. The creator understands market rate. We have the most data in the world now on where these deals get done and what market rates are. So now creators can see the social validation of are they accepting at the right rate? Why is this brand a great potential fit for them? And how are they going to make an amazing piece of content on behalf of that brand?
And is the content, you've mentioned YouTube a few times, but is the content primarily video or is there all kinds of content that creators are doing?
Right now we are 100 % focused on YouTube. These are the long form creator integrations, usually 60 to 90 seconds.
In a video, so well integrated, it's not a dynamically inserted ad. We now, of course, have brands that are using this content as YouTube shorts content and putting spend behind it. And oftentimes brands will now license the ad integrations to use for YouTube ads. We've heard from many advertisers and even folks at the platforms that the biggest challenge many advertisers have today, especially on YouTube, is the content that they put in YouTube.
Speaker 1 (12:01.866)
paid ads. They'll take their TV spots, put that on YouTube. It's not native to YouTube, so it doesn't perform as well. We're building a Agentio to be multiplatform. We're starting with YouTube. It's the area that, you know, the best brands in the world are still trying to figure out, and we're really excited to help them solve this problem and shift billions of dollars from traditional digital ad spend to creators who are the best storytellers in the world.
And so you sign up a creator and you have all this history of what they've done and you give them a rank or you give them a pricing or a bid structure. And if they don't perform, do they just kind of drop off or how does that work?
Yeah, not every creator is going to perform. for us, we view it as an initial test with a brand, knowing that a subset of creators won't perform because we're testing. But we also have a high certainty and a predictability around which creators who will perform exceedingly well for a brand. And as the partnership and test progresses, then certain creators drop out. We fill the campaign with creators who are most semantically similar to the top performers. So the campaigns continue.
to get more efficient, which helps a brand really scale because then all of a sudden by month three, by month four of the test, they've really de-risked future test investments because they have this really solid base. So think of it as like your S &P 500 bucket and then maybe that's 60 % of your overall investments. Then maybe you have some ETFs across the tech space, that's 30%. And then you have 10 or 20 % that might be allocated towards other quote unquote test investments.
Let's say, right? So we think of creator campaigns as an investment. Brands are investing in the results that they're getting and the campaigns only get more efficient with time, which is very unique because typically on ad platforms or any platform, the more you spend, the less efficient you get. We see the exact inverse of that.
Speaker 2 (14:03.566)
So when you mentioned agency and losing control, I'm assuming that the creator has to meet some standards and are they doing a sort of an ad or a product demonstration inside of their longer form video when you said 60 to 90 seconds? They're doing this ad hoc live. You're not injecting something into the video, right?
They're integrating it within the content. And what's interesting is that the creators incentivize to make sure that there's high retention in the video, right? If the video has a lot of drop-off because the ad read or the integration.
was shipped in and it wasn't authentic and the creator's audience who's been with that creator for 10, 15 years says, that creator actually hates that company. We never talked about that company. Then people are going to drop off and that video is not going to perform as well. But these are the most creative people in the world, right? Like they have built their followings over 10 plus years and they make the best content in the world. So now our brand has the ultimate content machines working on their behalf with the creators being incentivized for longer
partnerships. So we love nothing more than when creators perform well and all of sudden they get six, twelve, even 24 month video deals with the brands because the brand's so excited about their performance and tapping into these net new audiences.
So we're at Shop Talk 2025. What are you excited to see here? What have you seen that it, I mean, I don't want to say blown your mind, but is there anything right now that you're seeing that's sort of really different than what's been happening in the last couple of years?
Speaker 1 (15:43.874)
Yeah, we...
I'm really interested in how the platforms are now enabling more commerce. whether that's a TikTok shop and the, obviously last year there was probably a lot of conversation around the Amazon roundups and a lot of different Amazon shops. Seems like that has shifted to TikTok and the TikTok shops are powered by creators. So you think about this future state where brands are actually driving their ad dollars towards more creators who can speak on behalf
of their products. That's exactly what's happening on TikTok today through to your earlier point, these micro influencers who have much smaller followings. But that's really exciting because it goes to show that you're traditional creative, you're Super Bowl type spots. Yes, there's a time and place for them, but that's not how most people consume content anymore. And that's probably why a company like Unilever said, shit, we actually need to shift.
our budgets, 50 % of our budgets to creators and influencers. So I think as Shop Talk progresses and over the course of the next few years, this trend's gonna only continue because how we consume content is only gonna shift more towards this natural, authentic, more native way of consumption than what traditional studios and ad agencies or creative firms are putting in front of us.
Yeah, I guess the final question or follow up on that is are people looking for that less polished experience when looking at a product now? They don't want to have that super overproduced video of something. Is that kind of like the authenticness in it? That's the draw to it, right?
Speaker 1 (17:31.118)
I think generally yes. There are certain brands, whether it's an Apple or an Airbnb or certain luxury brands that I don't think will ever benefit, or least given their current brand aura, will benefit from like...
a ton of UGC content. But for a lot of these disruptor brands and brands that are taking so much market share from your traditional advertisers or your traditional brands, they understand how their consumers are consuming content. They want to be where their consumers are. And they know that if they can create content how their consumers ingest it, then of course they're going to win. And that's clearly what's happening.
You think we're gonna see 9 by 16 TVs? Channels that broadcast 9 by 16, I should say.
We very well could. We saw an interesting stat about YouTube shorts recently. Something like 10 or 15 % of YouTube shorts are actually watched on TV. And now YouTube, traditional YouTube, about 40 % is watched on TV. So people are watching 9 by 16, just with large frames, on TV already today.
Speaker 2 (18:44.558)
Arthur, so we have a few minutes left here. As we close up the podcast, to get everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you'd like, what would you like to plug today?
I'm a-
I'm super excited about brands who are really leaning in with us, the best performance marketing teams in the world, who clearly understand where the future lies and how people want to connect with their favorite brands. And those who have had the opportunity to work with creators on YouTube and elsewhere. And it's inevitable that creators become the best storytellers for every brand in the world. And every creator has the opportunity to have liquidity driven to them to live off of their work through
Brands that you know are the best fit for that's that exact creator and that future states really exciting to me. I believe that everybody listening to your podcast is always trying to learn and is super forward-thinking and
They likely either have a great creator program or want to kick the creator program off, especially for brands looking to start on YouTube. It's a really hard place to do so. They certainly could come partner with us and we can help drive incredible results through this authentic content. You can shoot me an email, Arthur at Agentio.com. Check out Agentio.com, fill out our lead form, and our team will be in touch. Perfect.
Speaker 2 (19:53.558)
Yeah, tell us how we find you.
Speaker 2 (20:04.334)
Perfect. Arthur Leopold from Agentio, it's been such a great conversation. Thanks for being here.
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.