π§ In this episode of the Agency Side Podcast, host Justin Levinson sits down with James Nord, founder and CEO of Fohr, a leading influencer marketing agency, to unpack the ever-evolving world of the creator economy.
James shares his journey from Tumblr creator to agency founder, reflecting on the early days of influencer marketing and how the space has transformed over time. They talk about the power of in-person collaboration, building trust between brands and creators, and the importance of staying adaptable in a fast-paced industry.
The conversation also explores how social trends shape strategy, what makes partnerships successful, and why having personal passions outside of work helps fuel creativity and leadership.
Tune in for an honest, insightful look at the past, present, and future of influencer marketing.
[02:58] The Importance of In-Person Collaboration
[05:54] James Nord's Journey into Influencer Marketing
[09:06] The Evolution of James' Role as CEO
[12:14] The Entrepreneurial Spirit and Learning from Failure
[14:54] The Impact of Music on James' Career
[18:10] Understanding Trends in Influencer Marketing
[21:03] The Shift in Brand Communication
[23:57] Challenges in Influencer Marketing Today
[27:00] Success Stories and Innovative Campaigns
[29:49] Maintaining Relationships Between Brands and Creators
[32:48] Personal Insights and Hobbies of James Nord
Founder
James Nord is the founder and CEO of Fohr, a leading influencer marketing agency that helps brands build authentic partnerships with creators. Starting as a Tumblr creator, James was an early pioneer in the creator economy, turning his passion for storytelling into a thriving business at the intersection of technology, marketing, and culture. With over a decade of experience, he has been at the forefront of influencer marketingβs evolutionβfrom its scrappy beginnings to a data-driven industry shaping modern advertising. James is a vocal advocate for in-person collaboration, transparency between brands and creators, and building systems that prioritize trust and creativity. He also believes strongly in the power of personal passions to inspire better leadership.
Justin Levinson (00:00.923)β
Hello everybody, welcome to the Agency Side podcast. I'm your host, Justin Levinson, and I'm here today with James Nord, who is the founder of Four, which is a really exciting creative agency, and I'm excited to hear his story. James, so great to have you here today.
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James Nord (00:17.499)β
Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure.
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Justin Levinson (00:20.569)β
Yeah, so let's get into it just to give our viewers who might not already be familiar with your agency, what exactly you guys are doing over there.
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James Nord (00:30.35)β
Yeah, so, you know, we are a influencer marketing agency and technology platform. We were the first influencer marketing platform in the world when we launched 13 years ago or so, and have added services, you know, throughout that time we added services and built a pretty big agency business and have about 350,000 creators on the platform as well.
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Justin Levinson (00:58.769)β
Wow, that's amazing. And where are you based out of currently?
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James Nord (01:01.9)β
I'm in New York in the Lower East Side. Yeah.
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Justin Levinson (01:05.233)β
Cool. And do you guys have all like remote employees? Do you guys have a lot of people coming into office or how does that look?
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James Nord (01:12.686)β
We try and keep it in office. I just realized it was, I think yesterday was maybe the five year anniversary of closing the office down for COVID. even then I was like, from the very beginning, was like, we're never gonna be a remote first company. Like in-person is important to me. And I think important to like, we have a lot of younger people that work there, they moved to New York.
They don't move to New York to sit in their apartments with their roommates. They met on Craigslist that they maybe kind of hate. They're here to come. It's amazing how many people we get coming to interview for us being like, I'm leaving my job because it's remote. And I want to be at a place that has in-person. Now, I also think I would be like Marie Antoinette if I tried to go back to five days a week.
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Justin Levinson (01:49.538)β
You
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Justin Levinson (02:08.997)β
Yeah.
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James Nord (02:09.538)β
But we're currently three.
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Justin Levinson (02:12.453)β
That's great. Yeah, that sounds like the signature model there. Kind of give everybody a little bit of what they need. But yeah, there does seem to be a bit of an unfair advantage for having that sort of collaboration and people coming into office, knowing each other and being, know, sharing creative ideas together.
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James Nord (02:28.622)β
think so, yeah. You you talk to a lot of creative agencies and I don't know how you replicate the ability to sit in a room and kind of be wasting time, but trying to think through a creative idea. I think there's a different pacing that happens remote where it feels like once you fire up a Zoom, you're just kind of waiting for it to end.
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Justin Levinson (02:57.667)β
Yeah.
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James Nord (02:58.974)β
And it feels like something you're supposed to like wrap up, you know? And so I think that that is so important. And I think also like, you know, part of creativity is building enough trust with the people around you to say something stupid or that, you know? And again, I don't know how you build that remotely, you know?
And so yeah, it's always been like kind of a non-starter for us. So we've never had to think too much about it. But yeah, really it's always nice to have a nice full office. I say, I'm in here five days a week. So Monday and Friday, it's a little lonely in here, but rest of the week it's good.
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Justin Levinson (03:48.441)β
Yeah, man. Well, maybe you can tell us how you got into this particular space and your journey leading up to being a founder of 4.
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James Nord (03:57.006)β
Yeah, so it started with Tumblr. I had kind of started the Tumblr early. had built a following in 2008, 2009. I was one of the most followed people on Tumblr. And that was not saying much. The internet was a much smaller place back then. I was just walking around the city with my camera.
and taking photos. I wanted to try and shoot for brands. I'm from Georgia. I didn't know anyone in New York. I didn't know anyone in fashion, you know? And I started just sending off cold emails to CEOs of fashion companies saying like, hey, Prada CEO, you know, there's this whole conversation in fashion happening on the internet and you're not part of it. And, you know, at the time fashion company, Prada's website in 2011 was just an image that said Prada.
There was you couldn't buy there was no ecom. There was there was nothing and Until like I wish the story was that that worked and I got all these cool jobs that did not work. I ended up meeting someone at Tumblr who introduced me to the team at Oscar de la renta I shot for them And then I started shooting for all these brands and the the brands, you know, I wasn't that good of a photographer They wanted me to shoot because I was gonna be posting it on my tumblr as well
And I got sent on the first influencer trip ever, Puma sent a group of us to Dubai to shoot a yacht race. I remember I came home from that trip and I thought, you know, think a lot of brands are going to want to do more of this stuff, this work, right? And that we need, you know, some of my friends were making some money off of their blogs, but they were just running AdSense.
and like AdWords on it. And I thought the post should be the ad, but that, you know, we needed data and analytics to be able to turn it into a type of media. And so I found that we could pull data from the social platforms APIs. And so, you know, created a platform to help brands find influencers. They were called bloggers then. And once they found them to be able to verify their
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James Nord (06:23.872)β
stats. And so I quit my job and raised a little bit of money and launched that in late 2012.
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Justin Levinson (06:34.769)β
Wow, that's brilliant. it kind of, a warm lead kind of got you into the door there and also building up following of your own.
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James Nord (06:41.996)β
Yeah, well, my life, yeah, my life changed so much because of that one introduction. You know, I'd spent six months trying to get a foot into this industry and I met somebody that was super connected. sent one email, my life totally changed. And I thought, you know, there are so many talented people out there with a following that don't have that network. And
This is the thing the internet does so well, it removes that middle name. It can create a more egalitarian space. I thought that building technology to do this would open that up for a lot more people, which we've been fortunate to be able to do.
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Justin Levinson (07:25.681)β
Yeah, but now I imagine you're as a sort of the founder and running the ship, your role is probably a lot different now is a lot more delegation and you've got a full team. What is your the scope of your position look like now that you are where you are?
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James Nord (07:40.93)β
Yeah, so we're like 90 people and you know, the job becomes very much running the company, right? and you know, it's, it's obviously I think normal CEO stuff, you know, you're doing cheerleading for the company or you're, you're setting vision, you're, you know, you're managing and building the, the kind of leadership team and helping to coach and grow that next level of leader.
But it's funny you should mention it like last year, we were, had this, you know, this feeling we needed to rewrite the tech platform. It was built for 10 years ago, a different time, social was so different. And I felt like I was disconnected from our clients' problems because so much of my focus is running the company and helping to
run the kind of much larger accounts for our multi-billion dollar clients who had much different problems than most companies. And so we actually did this, we put up this landing page saying that you could hire me as your intern. And we made a couple like little ads about it, but we had like 200 companies apply to to.
hire me as an intern. And then I went and I did six internships for a full day, embedded myself in these companies, made sure they weren't customers of ours. And use that experience to, know, one, just, you know, I wanted to feel closer to the work and to be able to inform where products should go, what we needed to build, how we needed to change that platform. And so we just launched that.
last month, the revised version of platform, which many of those insights came out of that internship. And so I think some of what I do outside of the normal CEO stuff is just like, where's the biggest fire burning in the company? can I go like, because I don't own the client relationships and because I don't have all of our employees reporting into me.
James Nord (10:00.578)β
and don't have to manage all of them. In some ways, I have more flexibility than other people to jump into something that's burning or pursue an opportunity that is outside the scope of our normal kind of everyday what we are doing and enjoy that stuff. it's nice to be able to kind of do some of that as well.
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Justin Levinson (10:25.041)β
Is there something that like, you know, I guess how, are you prepared for that before? it sounds like you're at a Tumblr account, you had a camera, you're a creator. Um, how did you go from, you know, uh, from that to sort of being like a, you know, a delegator and a, and a, and a, did you sort of have that entrepreneurial entrepreneurial spirit early on or a mentor or anything that kind of helped, helped you get there?
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James Nord (10:45.154)β
Yeah.
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James Nord (10:48.588)β
I've had a lot of mentors and a lot of help, you know, I always wanted to run a business. Before this, I started a lot of things that did not work, that were much smaller. had a cycling apparel company, I had a tie company, I had a record label, had a photography magazine. I would do all these little things. Anytime I'd get like 10 or 15 grand saved up in my...
bank account, would go blow it on some stupid idea that would make no money. And so I'd been practicing failing for quite some time. then, you know, the first few years were really hard. We were so early. Nobody knew what this stuff was. Nobody knew what, I mean, the influencer didn't exist as a word, obviously. And so the growth was...
You know, it's just survival for so many years and the growth was pretty slow in those first years, which helped me like mature and grow up. mean, looking back, I'm really glad we didn't, you we weren't able to, go raise big rounds of financing because I think I wouldn't have suffered as much and I wouldn't have learned as much. And I actually think if, if we had been able to raise $10 million in the first year, that the company probably wouldn't exist anymore.
And so that struggle in those first years helped mature me quite a bit. And I think the reality of being an entrepreneur is that I think you have to have that fire to continue to try and find the next step, the next level. And what's so hard about this job is there's often not, there's nobody telling you what that next level is. There's nobody telling you when.
the things that you were doing, the way you're spending your week no longer makes sense for you and you have to try something else. I think that I try and have built a great group of advisors and mentors. We have a great board that helps me out. But it's funny, in the last couple of years, I find myself trying to remind myself to trust the instincts more.
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James Nord (13:13.26)β
that and and that like the the reason I started this business and I quit my job and I went you know like instincts drove you know drove a lot of my best decisions probably some of my worst ones as well but it's been helpful to to to be able to check those those you know what your instincts are telling you with a group of people who've who've done it before you know and
But yes, it's the constant struggle I feel like is that, you know, I race bikes here in New York and you can see in a bike race that like, if you're not constantly passing someone and constantly trying to move up, all of a sudden you're like in the back of the race. And so like trying to just stay where you are.
actually puts you in the back because the race, the whole time people are moving up. so I feel like that's so true in business as well, right? That like if you stop focusing maniacally on growing yourself and the business, that all of a sudden it starts slipping away like sand through your hands.
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James Nord (14:37.447)β
and it can be like too late to fix it.
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Justin Levinson (14:40.785)β
Yeah, I that metaphor definitely resonates with me. I guess I want to double click on the recording on the record company as well for a second. I know that might be another life, but just kind of curious what your connection to music is.
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James Nord (14:49.997)β
yeah.
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James Nord (14:54.446)β
So I love music. I love the guitars behind you. I've always just been deeply into music. I was on Tumblr many years ago and I heard this song by this kid, Nick Waterhouse. was like a 60s kind of like, he was making very like.
60s soul music almost, but like a little white kid in San Francisco. And he had this song, it was amazing. And I emailed him and I was like, do you have any other music? And he's like, no, I don't have any money to record anything, but I've got songs written. And I was like, well, I've you know, I've got, again, 10 or 15 grand, what's it gonna cost? He's like, I need like $8,000 to record this album. And I was like, great, you can have.
you can have this money. And we did a little album together. Of course, I almost instantly got fired from my job. so I was like, that money became a little bit more important. But he ended up, you know, pretty quickly getting signed to like an actual legitimate label and going on and being quite successful. He's made a bunch of music with Leon Bridges and he's kind of in that world. it was a good like, you know,
Speaking of instincts, I feel like I did a lot of things when I was younger that failed but were the right idea. Like Nick getting signed to a big label and me having found him and not found him, but I heard his music, I reached out to him, I said, let's just do it, let's make an album. I felt like that was validation that like, the execution was wrong. This was the wrong.
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Justin Levinson (16:44.997)β
Yeah.
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James Nord (16:47.608)β
gig for me. I definitely learned that like managing an artist wasn't something I wanted to do. But the instinct was right, you know? And I had a few other things like that of these little side projects that I did where I was like, yes, it technically failed, or I didn't have enough money or skill to do what I wanted. But then somebody else would do something very, very similar and it was successful. And I was like, okay, I was right. Like, it was a good idea.
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Justin Levinson (16:55.93)β
Yeah.
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James Nord (17:17.622)β
It was crappy execution. then when, when this idea about creating four came up and it, felt much bigger and it felt like, you know, I'd had four or five of those small little projects that I'd launched and, and, kind of walked away from it. That made me realize enough that like, this is a big, this is a big idea. This is, you know, this, like all those other things were just me, like,
getting the muscle memory for how do you even starting the LLC, just doing it, like putting it out into the world. So yeah, things like the record label were super helpful. I still have some of the little singles. just saw that actually those little singles, that little album we made is like incredibly rare and is selling for like hundreds of dollars on eBay, which is kind of fun.
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Justin Levinson (18:09.841)β
That is really cool. it's really cool that it is validating. You saw a talent you recognized that you invested in it, and it did succeed. mean, do you feel like that became analogous to when you're finding creators that you want to work with that you recognize their talent or brands that you feel are, you're going to be able to give them a great return on investment? Do you think that just sort of
that vision of seeing talent has sort of been a win for you.
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James Nord (18:42.254)β
Yeah, I mean, I think that for us, probably manifests less in like a specific talent because now the scale, the business, I think right now we're probably working with 1200 influencers or something across our clients' campaigns and I'm not as involved. But being able to, I think, sense where
where the world is going and where our brands need to go and how they need to show up. think that it's given a lot of confidence for us to say, you know, this is what, um, this is where things are going. This is where you, know, you need to be. mean, for, for a year, you know, our vision is for the last five years, our kind of vision statement has been that we say influencer marketing is going to be the dominant form of brand communication. So this is going to be like the dominant form of advertising.
Five years ago, like literally nobody agreed with that statement. Now, I wouldn't say everybody agrees, but like increasingly it's looking like we were right. I think that, again, that like having that track record over a decade, almost a decade and a half now of things where it's like, oh, we were right about that, we were right about that, we were right about that. It gives you that confidence to say like that little niggling voice, that thing that you are feeling like,
you should act on it because you've been right about a lot of other things and the probability that you're right about this one is higher. And for our clients, think, you know, helping them, especially the bigger legacy brands, right, helping them show up in culture and join these conversations is, you know, it's a really fun but like complex.
task actually like, and this is the fundamental shift in advertising and why I think influencer and social platforms, all of this is like the biggest shift since World War II when everyone moved to the suburbs and scaled media as we know it was created and thus advertising as we know it. like since the fifties, the playbook has been the same brand comes up with their story they want to tell. They use
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James Nord (21:03.662)β
paid media to tell that story and the majority of customers are finding out about brands and their products from the brands. But now the majority of people are finding out about brands from people. And you can't buy, there's no longer, you can't pay to get into these conversations as effectively. And so your job as a marketer becomes, well, how do I curate the conversations I want happening? How do I?
encourage people to tell the story that I want told. How do I amplify the ones that are working? it's, you know, I think a big part of that is helping brands, you know, know where the puck is going. the challenge becomes like getting these, again, multi-billion dollar companies to move really quickly.
which is not what they're used to.
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Justin Levinson (22:04.721)β
Are they more hip to it now, you would say, than, I mean, in the past, do you think that the, especially the legacy brands, they more, do they understand the value that you bring? Do you have to sort of sell it less? And do they really recognize the return on investment that you're showing them? How clear are they about what you're doing?
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James Nord (22:25.998)β
Mm-hmm.
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James Nord (22:29.484)β
think the realization that not building a strength in this, like if they as an organization can't figure out how to make influencer work for them and they can't figure out how to scale it, that's an existential risk. Not today, not a year from now, but like it's going to be increasingly important. I look at the fastest growing consumer brands in the world.
most of them are, you know, they're either influencer first, and that's the core of their strategy, or they're literally started by, you know, celebrities slash influencers, right. So I think even from a performance standpoint, you know, brands look at what skims or, you know, poppy or ollie pop or something are doing and they say, okay, yeah, if I could snap my fingers and do more of that, would I guess now? You know, what we still deal with is that
media consumption and media spend are still wildly disparate. I think brands accept their customers are spending more and more time on social, but they are still spending significantly more on other legacy platforms and places because that's what brands, they've got like last year, they do
They do iterative change. They're not doing like, you know, zero budgeting. don't, they don't say, okay, we spent 2 % of our ad budget on Influencer next year. Should it be 5 % this year? Like, I would love those kinds of changes from the bigger companies, but it's more like we spent 2%. What about 2.2 % this next year? then, you know, and look, maybe it'll be like the Hemingway, you know, how do you go broke gradually than suddenly?
And like, I do think that we have, probably have these iterative changes and then we're going to get more CMOs who are, who are like coming from influencer and social and like, we'll see a much bigger shift and we'll, you know, it won't matter that I've been buying media from the same salesperson for 15 years and they give me his ticket to the Superbowl every year. And so like, I feel like I'm going to keep doing that, right? Like things will change. that, but that storytelling.
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James Nord (24:56.32)β
is still a big part of what we're doing inside these companies. It's like there is a belief, but turning belief into spend still takes a good amount of work.
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Justin Levinson (25:06.949)β
Yeah. How has the rise in TikTok changed things? And when there's been some scary about it going away at times, how has that affected your thinking?
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James Nord (25:20.086)β
Yeah. I mean, TikTok has changed so much. mean, we, I'd say three or four years ago, know, 85 % of the sponsored content we did was a photo and a caption. I think we're like 90 % video now. So short form video, you know, obviously has changed everything.
The other, you know, the other big changes is that increasingly, especially on TikTok and increasingly on, on Instagram, you're following your algorithm, not a set of people. And so performance is so much more variable. and you know, whereas if you looked at, again, five years ago and a creator got, let's say they generally reached 30 % of their audience, there would be a
a five to 10 % variance on that performance. Sometimes they reach 25%. Sometimes they've reached 35%. That was it, right? Now you take someone who has average is reaching 30 % of their audience, but sometimes they're reaching 3%. Sometimes they're reaching 300%. You know, the spikes are much larger. And so that means we have to work harder on strategy. We need to work harder to make sure the creative is good.
It used to not matter as much because an audience was following a creator and if a post wasn't their best, it would still get in front of them because the audience was kind of locked in. That's not true anymore. so we've invested really heavily in the last couple of years on a strategy team.
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Justin Levinson (27:00.315)β
Yeah.
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James Nord (27:13.158)β
in making sure we are doing a lot more work on the upfront to land on the right strategy and then to find the right creators to do that. Bring those creators to the table, tell them what the KPIs and the goals are of the brand, help them to be able to pitch us concepts. Because, you know, there are, you know, multiple hundreds of percent swings in performance that you can have with the same creator. so we feel like the
The impact thing we can do for a brand is make sure the content does well and overperforms and gets in front of more eyeballs. that also, performance in those organic posts is driving performance in the paid as well. And so the better a post performs organically, the better it's going to perform in paid and the more ROI they're going to get out of it.
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Justin Levinson (28:05.233)β
How many, you know, when your strategy team is working with the content creators, could it be like a lot of different takes, a lot of different ideas that the creator has to do before you guys land on one that kind of goes to publish?
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James Nord (28:21.088)β
It's a question. We try not to put too much of that on the creators, recently, they're quite expensive. It's increasingly difficult to create this content and it takes a long time. We also have this model where we don't spend the same amount of time on every partnership.
with every influencer, right? Like if they have 10,000 or 20,000 followers, we're gonna give them a brief, we're gonna give them guardrails and we're gonna let them, you know, do their thing. We may not even have content review and approve it. If they have 10 million followers and we're working on a, you know, some sort of series or, you know, piece of like kind of much more scripted content, we're gonna spend months on that sometimes. And so we will go back and forth on concepting.
But, you know, we do look at that like, you know, how big is the audience? What's the opportunity cost here? How much can we trust the person and try not to do a lot of reshoots? Now, where we are trying to move to from a technology standpoint is building out a system whereby the creator can upload their content and we can have
a prediction of performance because ultimately we have, you know, hundreds of millions of posts that we have data on. We have every post from the influencer. And so we can look at that post and predict how well or how poorly it's going to do. And so in the future, we'll be able to to make sure that
We don't have posts that really bomb, but that we can also steer the creator towards things that are gonna perform better.
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Justin Levinson (30:24.977)β
Interesting. I mean, you guys are kind of a dealmaker in a way because you're kind of juggling, you know, to, know, you know, think of myself in, in, in, in, do a lot of work in creative recruitment and I'm always juggling the candidate and a client and just kind of juggling two separate, two separate entities in a way you guys are kind of juggling the brand and you're juggling the creator. How often do you, do you let them communicate together without you in the middle? How does that relationship?
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James Nord (30:31.598)β
Mm-hmm.
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James Nord (30:45.602)β
Mm-hmm.
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James Nord (30:52.118)β
Yeah, yeah, we want the brand to have a relationship with the creator. know, we we we don't represent influencers and and so we don't see our value in creating a like barrier between the brand and the influencer. Our value should be in our ability to, you know, come up with a strategy that works to
be able to execute the campaign at a higher level than they would be able to do on their own, better reporting, all that stuff. especially with bigger relationships, the brand wants to, they wanna know these people and we'll see the brand sometimes work with the creator on their own outside of work that they do with us. And honestly, that's a W.
I feel like that's a W for us and it means we really got that right. And, you know, we'll even on some of the bigger deals, like the brand wants to be the first person to reach out to like make the offer. It's totally fine. And then we'll just be like, yeah, put us on CC and we'll, take care of it from there. But we, it's, you know, it's exciting to offer someone a big contract and, and,
the brand wants to make sure the creator knows that this is coming from them and they're really excited about it. So I think the relationship side is so important. Now, most of our clients really appreciate having a barrier between themselves and the creators, not because they don't wanna have a relationship, but because it's, if you work with a thousand influencers in a year,
That's a thousand different email threads and that's probably 800 talent managers and it's an enormous amount of back and forth and work. And so we increasingly like make sure they get all the good stuff from the relationships and all the benefits and that we're taking all the frustrations so that it can just be a really positive experience for them.
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Justin Levinson (33:12.335)β
Yeah, that's awesome. I'm curious just because I'm always a serial problem solver wondering, you know, and obviously I want to keep everything positive. This is a great chance to talk about successes. We can get into that right after. But curious, if you know, there's any pain points in the industry right now that you could share any any sort of struggles I'd be interested in, and knowing just in case I can solve all those problems for you.
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James Nord (33:21.73)β
Yeah.
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James Nord (33:34.798)β
Yeah, yeah. I mean, one, one is that the industry is in this period of change where, you know, influencers increasingly moving to the center of what brands are doing. And it's, you know, it's, it's, it's creating some conflict inside of these organizations. You know, they have budgets everybody is fighting for.
And the ownership of influencers often shifting around now that it's becoming this big growth area. I think more departments want to take it and own it so it can be theirs. It just means that we can work with a client for a year or two and sometimes it's two or three different people that are owning it and it's just kind of bouncing around inside of an organization.
You know, that's a challenge. Another is, you know, just from a business model is that it's, it's different, you know, it's, it's, it's unique because we're doing strategy. We're like dealing with creative, but we're also doing distribution and the clients don't know exactly how to pay us. You know, some of them think, well, this is media.
And so they want to pay the way that they buy media, but, but, you know, it's so much more intensive and so much more work to do it. And so I think figuring out, you know, because it's consolidating sometimes what two or three different agencies or one agency would have that, you know, three, two or three different practices. They'd have a strategy scope, a creative scope, you know, and a media. Well, if it's all the same thing.
How do you pay for it? And I think that's a constant conversation. And again, it's a human business. It is harder than coming up with great creative and then you just can say, okay, let's go put $20 million behind this creative and that's like easy and one person can do that. Now spending $20 million on influencer is, you're probably gonna need a team of
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James Nord (36:01.76)β
at least six or seven people, it's hugely intensive and difficult. And so, I think for everyone, it's like, how do we get this to the scale it needs to be to be impactful for these huge organizations without having agency fees that are not, that they can't feel like they can pay.
So that's where technology comes in and some innovation there.
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Justin Levinson (36:30.405)β
Yeah.
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Justin Levinson (36:36.453)β
Cool. Well, it's got kind of two questions left for you here. One, I'd love to hear any real success stories that you feel like maybe most proud of in your career. Is there any certain campaign or project that you, that's of standout to you?
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James Nord (36:53.666)β
Yeah, mean, we really proud of recently we just had one that is recent that I'm really excited about, but we launched what's called the varsity team for Dick's Sporting Goods. was based off some work, similar to some work we had done with Sephora and Sephora Squad. But the idea being for brands that have these...
customer basis that are passionate and really love the brand that like the best way to find the group of influencers you want to work with is to run an open application. And so, you know, we did that for Dix. We just got 5,000 people who applied for, you know, 30 spots as, as a ambassador. Their, their total reach for all those people was 380 million followers for, all of those applicants. And so
We've got Olympians in there, pro athletes, know, college athletes, you know, just like enthusiasts. But we're going to find this group of people who are deeply passionate about sport and about dicks and who have taken the time to apply, raise their hands, say, I want this, you know, and explain why they think they'd be a good fit. And, you know, it's it's going back to my original idea about trying to create this more egalitarian
way to connect with brands. And ultimately, this is a job and jobs should be listed publicly, anyone should be able to apply for them, right. And the influencer space is unique in that they're not, you know, these deals are just done by somebody, find somebody, they reach out and they hire them. I can imagine if your only way to get a job
was sit around and wait for someone to give you a job, right? And it would be hard for, if you were more up and coming than to compete. And so, you we love running these kinds of application-based processes and this will be, you know, think twice as hard to get in as Harvard from a percentage standpoint. So we're really excited to launch the group that is gonna be the creators for Dix this year.
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Justin Levinson (38:50.747)β
Yeah. Yeah.
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Justin Levinson (39:16.529)β
That's really cool. Anything that you do for your, just to keep yourself sane outside of work, any hobbies, things you enjoy?
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James Nord (39:25.218)β
Well, yeah, lots, you know, I was just, you know, we're talking about bike racing. was on the, I was on the bike this morning in Central Park. That really helps. I, you know, I still carry a camera around with me every day. I switched from digital to film recently, but I still love shooting.
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Justin Levinson (39:29.795)β
I think. Yeah.
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James Nord (39:54.74)β
And you you got the guitars behind you. I, you know, I also like to like come home at night and play guitar sometimes and just like totally, totally disconnect. But I think, you know, I think keeping the hobbies going is super important, especially since, know, this is a, it's a hard, it's a hard job. Life is hard for everyone. I think you gotta, you gotta make sure you have those outlets.
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Justin Levinson (40:22.829)β
Yeah. Cool, man. Well, thank you so much for being on here and chatting with me. You've been a real pleasure. I've learned a lot. I'm sure the people that are listening are also going to get a lot of value from the conversation. So yeah, man, have a great rest of your week and I really appreciate you. All right, James, do well, Bye.
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James Nord (40:26.222)β
Thank you.
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James Nord (40:38.254)β
Thanks for having me.
Cheers.
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Agency Side host and the creative matchmaker extraordinaire at Coming Up Creative. Connecting top talent with leading agencies by day, uncovering industry secrets by night (well, whenever we record).