Joe Gagliese: Redefining Influencer Marketing

Justin Levinson (00:00.546)‍

Hey everybody, welcome to the Agency Side Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Levinson. I'm here today with Joe Galezzay, who is the CEO, co-founder of Viral Nation. I'm so excited to have him here today. Thank you for being here, Joe.

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Joe Gagliese (00:14.735)‍

Thank you for having me,

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Justin Levinson (00:17.102)‍

Yeah, the first thing I like to ask guests on the show is just to give us an introduction about what you guys do at Viral Nation for those who might not know.

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Joe Gagliese (00:26.139)‍

What do we do at Vyral? We do a lot of stuff. Vyral Nation is really a labor of love. I started the business 11 years ago. I was 22 years old at the time. And I fell in love with creators. I really just thought they were, what they are now is how I felt then. And basically kind of dedicated.

my life at that point to figuring out how to help them monetize. And that's where all of Viral Nation began. Started with a couple creators, went to lots more creators, and then opened the marketing firm and started delivering creator marketing campaigns on behalf of brands, and then got into creator technologies and built really cool cutting edge kind of social technologies that helped our customers understand the value of social and creators.

And then, you we went through a period of time where everybody in the world was saying that influencer marketing could be a fad and influencers were going away. And I remember that like it was yesterday. And that's when we diversified the business into all things social. you know, in 2017, 2018, we began developing departments around every key touch point of social. So from everything from community management to a studio dedicated to social content, to paid social experts, to, you know, my,

Hypothesis at that time, Justin was like, social is too big of a beast and people don't understand it. And eventually the big brands are going to go, this is really important and I can't have this living in 10 different places. So, you know, in a lot of ways we built a warship that we weren't sure anyone would want to board. But at the time we were just so passionate about what social could become that, you know, we diversified the business to go across all of social. And then we went a number of years of just kind of radical growth and

kind of crazy cool stories and incredible things happened. And then we were able to secure, three years ago, secure an investment for the first time in our history. And that enabled us to kind of put our pedal to the metal on the tech side of what we were trying to accomplish. So through all that, Viral Nation today, we're a very, very cool kind of, it flywheel ecosystem of a business that's unique. We have Viral Nation.

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Joe Gagliese (02:44.091)‍

technologies where we specialize in kind of two areas. We have security technology called Viral Nation Secure. It's a patented tool that basically enables us to do full social screening of an individual. So we can pull a person's entire social history down and we can analyze every single thing they've ever posted, said, video, text, comment, and we can use that to develop intelligence around the creator to see

What do they speak about endemically? What are the things that are native to them? What type of content do they make? It gives us a better view of what the creator's potential is for a specific brand. So we use it for intelligence and matching. We also utilize that tool for brand safety mitigation. So big brands are worried about creators in a lot of ways. There's been a lot of press around, know, did a deal with a creator and lost 25 % of my market cap. So that fear is actually a hindrance to the creator economy investment. So we built this tool to try to

try to unlock that and keep the CMOs and brands interested in investing in the space. And that's gone a long way. So we're able to work with predominant brands to say, hey, we're going to run your entire social and influencer ecosystem. But guess what? We've really invested in a tool that enables us for you to be able to sleep at night. So that's called Secure. Then we have Creator Operating System, which is basically like a big data tool. So a lot of people in the creator economy build

creator and social tools that are kind of built to be like kind of do it yourself or that process. We don't believe in that. Influencers are human business. It's different. They're not ads. It's very different. Creatives are different. Approvals are different. Each individual creator has their own wants and needs. It's not something you want to automate. So we decided to build tech to validate instead.

It's a big data platform and we run and develop our own mixed media models and we help brands basically take all the data from their social and influencer campaigns and distill it into business result. Right? So whether that's sales, whether that's outcome for brand, whether that's you name it, right? Product releases, et cetera. We've really buttoned ourselves up on the world of data and analytics. So that's tech. Then we have viral nation marketing, which is our business, biggest business by people and.

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Joe Gagliese (04:57.989)‍

and size, we represent just over 80 brands and we run basically all of their socials. So, you know, everything from influencer marketing, affiliate programming, content for social, community management, paid social, like the entire social ecosystem. But our biggest differentiator as a company, like our secret sauce, is that we're able to scale social to enterprise levels. So what I try to explain to people sometimes is,

There's a, there's, if you spend a million dollars in social, that's one company. If you spend 20 million in social, it's a totally different firm. And that's because social is really hard to scale, very hard, right? It's easy to do, but very difficult to scale and big brands need that scale. So we provide what we kind of call social transformation, which is we go into these big brands and we go, okay, you have social living here, here, here, here, and here.

We bring it all together and we drive it to scale and we do all the reporting and security. And that delivery aspect of our business kind of makes us like a social AOR. But we operate like a tech services business. And then we have Viral Nation Talent, which has now become the largest talent agency globally in the creator space. We represent over thousand creators across 20 verticals, ranging from families to pets to professionals to...

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Justin Levinson (06:01.731)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (06:20.281)‍

you name it, and we run the entire backend business of the creator. So when we started that 11 years ago, when I was running around and sleeping in crappy Airbnbs with nine influencers and all that stuff, I never thought it would get to this point, but we've been able to develop viral nation talent to essentially help creators unlock all the financial opportunity that surrounds them. So a creator walks into viral nation and very dissimilar to

kind of like UTA and CAA and traditional management companies, creators aren't celebrities. They're media companies and there's a lot of them. And sitting there and resting on the laurels of management and hoping a creator gets an opportunity is not how you scale this business. So Viral Nation is very unique in that we go to work for the creator, right? We go and sell the network. We go and build brand relationships. We go out and it's almost like

our model is more synonymous to a media sales business than it is a talent management business. And the rationale for that is that's the way it should be done. And we basically unlock all monetization for a creator in one place, which is also really cool. So whether a creator wants to launch their own brand, get a TV show on Netflix, monetize their content in Asia, they want to just do brand deals, our teams are able to satisfy the entire need of the creator from a business perspective.

it's truly become an incredible company. But what's really cool is, you know, if you kind of step back across all the crazy stuff I just went through, it formed something kind of beautiful, which is, you know, from security and data to inventory being influencers and creators and the ability to execute in between creates a really significant opportunity for these enterprise brands to be able to get to where they want to be in a very, very straightforward manner. And that's been, you know, the reason we've been

you know, I think so successful. And the reason why we've grown so much is because we're doing things a lot differently, but, the difference is, you know, more so the way it should be done versus how I think folks perceive it to be. And that's been our kind of special sauce, but that's kind of our own nation in a nutshell and kind of what we do, Justin.

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Justin Levinson (08:31.086)‍

Yeah, now that's that's super fascinating. And yeah, it's not no surprise that you guys are leading the charge here. You have your you that's pretty pretty phenomenal. Yeah, I guess like you mentioned that you have a partner that or your co founder. How was how was that structured? Did you sort of have a somebody else that you started the business with?

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Joe Gagliese (08:54.425)‍

Yeah, so my best friend Matt, we went to high school together, believe it or not. And we weren't really friends in high school, but we were more acquaintances. And then in university, we ended up going to the same university and became friends there. And we've been together ever since. You know, Matt's kind of the yin to my yang. I'm the one whose head blows off and he goes, okay, whenever you're done, let me know. So we're these two different energy archetypes that have blended very well to be able to be productive and not get jammed up.

but, yeah, him and I have been, together since kind of day one and, and, and continue to kind of work together. And we play different roles within the business. and that's critical, especially when you're going through this type of growth, it's, know, can you watch my back? I can't, you know, grab these three or four things, but can you grab these two and kind of being supportive and, know, the cool part I'd say about our relationship that sticks out to me is like, there's no competition.

And someone asked me the other day, like, what do you think? And I didn't even know how to answer, but you know, what's interesting is it's like when you have someone who doesn't, not competitive with you in the nature of, yeah, Joe's better than me at that thing, you know, or Matt's better than me at that thing. You know, I think that is kind of like the special underpinning that makes something like this work because you go through so much and you go through ups and downs and you know, there's times where I'm rocking for six months and you know, probably out producing Matt.

couple areas, but it doesn't feel like resentment. doesn't feel like why, what is he doing? So, you know, there's this mutual respect that I think kind of goes a long way in that relationship that helps us, you know, stay on, stay on track for the most, most part.

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Justin Levinson (10:33.196)‍

Yeah, it must be you guys have grown exponentially, correct? Over a pretty short period of time.

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Joe Gagliese (10:38.619)‍

Yeah, man, like we started in 2014, you know, I think we did 300 or $400,000 in revenue and 2018 we're at around 7 million and then coming into COVID we were at like 70 and then you know, so it's been extraordinary growth in a lot of ways. And that's been the hardest part, right? You're kind of building a plane in the air. And by the way, your plane's flying through something that's they've never flown through before, being that the space is totally new.

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Justin Levinson (11:07.736)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (11:08.367)‍

That's the hardest challenge. yeah, Violination's gone through pretty extraordinary growth in all three of those categories, which is the interesting part. You know, I was always thinking potentially one would laggard the other or one, you know, might be a little bit slower to the altar, but all three of those business lines have been knocking the lights out, you know, marketing a little bit more. And that's just because like the competitive landscape for us right now is very little.

Like there's not a lot of people who can do what viral nation does. So we get a lot more looks. Whereas, you know, in the talent business, I read a stat the other day that there's something like 2600 management, influencer management companies. And that scares the lights out of me, Justin, because it's like, that is not where a creator maximizes the opportunity they found themselves in. And I've dealt with this since I started viral nation, right? It's like, you know, because the barrier, the entry so low.

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Justin Levinson (12:00.0)‍

you

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Joe Gagliese (12:05.701)‍

Like Justin, anyone we know could be a manager of a creator, right? And the creators don't have the acumen of a celebrity or an athlete. So, you know, there's some education in that space that needs to be done to make sure that we're getting, you know, these creators are in the right place and stuff. And I think there could be some more rapid growth as that consolidates, but they're swinging out of their shoes right now. So they're doing a really great job.

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Justin Levinson (12:30.702)‍

How do you go about like, I really liked how you described the partner that you work with, your friend who you have such a into your yang. How do you sort of like maintain that culture within a company when it's growing that, that quickly? there any, what's the trick to that?

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Joe Gagliese (12:49.731)‍

You know what? It's interesting you ask, cause like this has been top of mind for me all year this year. know, we, Matt and I both kind of come from, you know, hard working families that didn't have a lot. So for us, when we built the business up until about two and a half, three years ago, it was just make the right decision. You know, like there, there wasn't outside influence. was like, that doesn't feel right. We shouldn't do that. Or, you know, this person's right. Maybe we should do that.

And you get this very entrepreneurial vibe that creates the magic. then, you know, a couple of years ago, when we hit these major thresholds, and, you know, we were investing more in technology, and we hit 100 million in revenue, we're going through all that stuff, it was like, there was this pressure to mature the business into the next stage. And we went on this journey, we were like, hiring folks and putting folks in certain positions and getting a little bit more corporate in certain areas and stuff like that. And, you know, I thought,

as an entrepreneur that that was the right move. It wasn't until I completed those moves that I realized it caused more harm than it did good to that culture because that type of culture can't breathe in those types of environments. And it's very difficult to see through that as an entrepreneur when you haven't done it before. So I've spent the better part of the last eight, nine months kind of resetting that. And, you know, what I found was interesting, Justin, is like, it hurt because

you know, you have all the right intention and you don't get the outcome. And then when you're on the other side of the outcome, it's like, you're an asshole. And it's like, shit, I really didn't, I was trying not to be. so, so it's interesting that question because now I think now that we've corrected that issue as a business, we have financial controls and operational controls and, things that are elite for our size, like that are, are, are comparable to a public company. Like they're extraordinary.

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Justin Levinson (14:23.096)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (14:42.233)‍

and we've removed the rest. And when you have the spirit where we came from back and you have that type of rigor in the places where it matters is where now we're seeing the soul come back out across everything, right? And that was a big learning for me, was thinking that you were benefiting by running the playbook into that next chapter and only to find out that you drowned some people and you...

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Justin Levinson (14:55.096)‍

all that.

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Joe Gagliese (15:08.941)‍

almost extinguished a little bit of that flame in certain areas or you caused frustration or that disconnect of being heard. so that was an incredible, incredible learning. Probably the hardest thing I've ever dealt with in my life as an entrepreneur, because I felt terrible about it. And kind of coming out of that, that culture now resonates. you know, we do this thing, you know, I changed everything, Justin, like we do this thing when a new, new employee joins viral nation, we do like a half hour or 45 minute session.

I don't care what position it is, they meet with me and we just chat, you know, and it's like, anybody on this call can call me. You have a better idea about the business or you see a thing we should change, call me. Like we're good to go. Like I'm a normal guy and I love this business as much as I want you to. And it's, we've connected everybody again and given people autonomy and a voice like we had when we were entrepreneurial, but we're super mature. And that, you know, Matt and I have worked through in my whole team and like so proud of how that kind of came together. that.

That all makes sense to that question.

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Justin Levinson (16:06.988)‍

Yeah, no, that's great. I'm curious because I see you guys work with so many like really huge brands. Like, how do you you know, how do you go about winning those sort of clients? Like how how does what's that process like?

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Joe Gagliese (16:24.493)‍

It really, it really depends. So, so a lot of our customers come organically to viral nation. We have never been really the best at like shouting from the rooftops or putting ourselves out there and like a salesy capacity, which, know, honestly, we should be doing a lot more. So a lot of our growth comes from our existing customer base referrals from them.

And we have a lot of CMOs and vice presidents who leave brands we're working for, go for others, and we're first on the list to just get in there and get going. So that's beautiful because that's real business. And then we have become, we've now gained over the last couple of years some notoriety in the space in terms of our leadership on the social side. So now every week we'll get a few RFPs from big organizations saying, hey, Vyronation, we want you to participate in this.

hey Viral Nation, would you participate in this? And we kind of choose those and we go into it. And basically we have like a really cool, call it like a little seal team inside of Viral Nation that represents all the different parts of the marketing business. And they kind of come together and surround those opportunities and kind of go all the way to the end. So unlike another business where you'd have a BD person doing that, Viral Nation's leaders do it. And that's special because now in the room you're getting pitched by the person who's actually leading the charge on doing it.

So that's how we approach those things. And basically it's like, if an opportunity to commands everything Barrel Nation does, every leader from all the different pieces come together to make that happen. If it's three of the 10 pieces, the three go. If it's one, the one goes. And it's about bringing that leadership in to basically be the thought leader as opposed to salesy. And that's been really helpful in us having like a very, very, very high win percentage on those deals.

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Justin Levinson (18:11.502)‍

That's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's a great way to do it. And it's so cool that it's coming in organically too, because a lot of influencer marketing agencies reach out to me and they're always looking for salespeople. Those are the hardest people to find in this space. So it's cool that you guys have inbound traffic and that doesn't need to be such a big part of the business.

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Joe Gagliese (18:30.585)‍

Yeah, well, during that maturity phase we corrected, we also hired a bunch of sales folks and those folks aren't here anymore. Again, it's not the playbook. The playbook for me is work your ass off, deliver at all costs and those things will come. And, you know, when you're force feeding it versus winning in it, I think that becomes the win. Like that's the winning formula because we had the best Q1 in our company's history this year.

January, February. And there's the reason for that is we're back, right? It's just it's just how we were before with a lot more support and visibility, right? And that's has nothing to do with salespeople. It's nothing to do with process. It's nothing to do with operational process. It has to do with people being motivated and people showing up because when they show up, your close rate goes to 67 % when the industry average is like three, right? Like those are what we want more so than we want to just knock on everybody's door, right?

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Justin Levinson (19:26.786)‍

Yeah. And how do you see like, you know, is there any secret sauce in retaining these clients and, keeping them coming to you once they've found you and you're working with them? How does, how does that look and how, how do you show them like a return on investment?

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Joe Gagliese (19:41.807)‍

Yeah, so we approach that with kind of three, three theses of how we operate. One is kind of radical candor. So our clients expectation of us is that we don't hide anything and we tell them everything as soon as it happens. That's just kind of like a Joe and Matt rule since we started the business, how we operate. But it's the idea that something's going wrong. Tell them right away. You know, something is awry. Tell them, you know, you need a quick decision. Call them. Right. And it's this idea of maintaining partnership.

versus this distillation of vendor. And that really helps, Justin, because when you include your client in the decisioning and you're honest and transparent, they're part of your team. They're not judging your output. So that's a big one. The second one is we've made a really critical investment financially into our business intelligence teams. Viral Nation as a social company is very unique because we actually have a center of excellence, a whole team dedicated to business intelligence and data science.

That team's sole obligation is to go through the AD plus clients and continuously be showing them that the work is providing them the KPI they're looking for. And that's all they do. And they hold billions of lines of data. They pull everything together and they're senior. So gone are the days of an account person going, hey, we got this many views and this many clicks and whatever. This team rolls in and says, hey, MGM.

what's your most important KPIs, room bookings, fantastic. We're gonna set this up in order to do that. We're gonna enable the execution of the data and then we're gonna report back to you on this cadence. And that team works on that as the campaign's going. So we've stood up that center of excellence because Justin, there's nothing easier to sell to a brand than something that works straight up. Not for anything, whenever you can put rubber to the pavement for them, you don't need to sell anything because you're helping them achieve their goal and that's.

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Justin Levinson (21:17.838)‍

you

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Justin Levinson (21:26.23)‍

Yeah, that's true.

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Joe Gagliese (21:35.941)‍

been my North Star with my teams. like, that's why we did BI. Because the problem in social is it's very hard to determine its importance. But we know as consumers that it's hyper important. And when I sit down with CMOs and I'm like, hey, by the way, you bought a car without watching a YouTube review, you've lost your mind. Right? There's inherent nature playing out on social. It just can't be captured. It's like lightning in a bottle. So we've worked with the platforms to enable and develop

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Justin Levinson (21:45.134)‍

Hmm.

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Joe Gagliese (22:02.299)‍

proprietary systems to do this measurement. And we play at a level that no one in the space even is contemplating. And that's big for us on the retention side, because like I said, if you're winning, you're good. And then the third is transparency. So one of the major, major differences with viral nation and a lot of other firms is we don't hide costs of anything. We tell people how much an influencer costs, right? Most of our peers put their margin in a campaign amount.

and they try to save money on creators, we think that's disincentivizing. So for us, that transparency at a level of they're working on our team has been monumental. Because when you take away the guessing of how much did this influencer cost or who performed this and this, and you remove that and you go transparent, you unlock a very different level of trust and autonomy within that organization. And we made that decision in 2020 to drop the fact that we were

putting margin in creator campaigns. And we said, listen, pay us for the work we're doing, and you should be incentivized for us to spend less on creators, if anything, not incentivized to spend more. And we flipped the model. And because of that, frankly, to displace us would be extraordinarily hard, because now you have to displace us with the raw metrics and not creative ideas. And that for us was huge, because it's like our own nation knows that on average we spend 30 % less on creators than any of our competitive set.

That's a fight you can't win, right? So that transparency enables us the ability to get that trust necessary for them to say, well, the only reason I'm firing these guys is because we're not doing it anymore, or the macro of it's not working, but it's not gonna be because they're unsure or think someone can do better, because we're very transparent on what we're doing.

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Justin Levinson (23:49.462)‍

Yeah, no, that's really, that's really interesting. I'm curious on the the influencers that you guys work with. I mean, you said you have over a thousand people now that you're different content creators that you're working with. I guess, how do you how do you scale that? I mean, how do you end up knowing all those people and getting them into your ecosystem? How does that happen?

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Joe Gagliese (24:13.273)‍

Yeah, this might blow your mind a bit. we get six, like three to 600 applications every couple of days from creators wanting to sign with viral nation talent. So we've, so, so three ways we handle scale. So one is we created a verticalized pod structure, meaning we have teams that sit on top of creator verticals. So let's say for instance, culinary, right? There's a certain amount of spots of creators we will represent in culinary. Let's call it 200.

They have a dedicated team in culinary that's a director who's like the lead, lead, lead on the account, the most senior. And they have covering folks that work for them on their behalf. And then they have folks who work for them and they run that business like a media channel. And we open new verticals when the verticals get big enough, right? So we just opened up professionals, experts it's called. So doctors, nurses, professors, teachers, whatever.

So that's now gotten big enough, so now it's turning into a verticalization. And it has leadership and the team gets built. So we build leadership around the verticals and that's how they scale. And then they're not meant to sign every single person, right? So we've created what we call the sweet spot. And we've used data, Justin, to basically determine where creators at in their career based on all their data and what the probability is they are for monetization and at what level. And if they hit a certain threshold, we'll sign them. If they don't, we don't.

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Justin Levinson (25:21.262)‍

Hmm.

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Joe Gagliese (25:41.581)‍

And the reason for that is we dedicate a lot of time and investment into the creator verticals. So if we're going to have a creator sit there for a year and get one deal, it's not good for him. It's not good for us. Right. So we've developed a system to basically understand which creators are the ones that have commercial commercial ability and which ones are too early or which ones are outside of that potential. And then they go through an interview process, basically. So it's like a big thing for us, Justin is

We want to represent good people. And we're not interested in folks who are edgy and folks who are doing things that we're not aligned with. So it's not an area we play, right? We don't have gambling creators. We don't have provocative creators. don't have, it's just an area. We work with Disney. We work with Coke. We work with Walmart. We work with, so for us, it's like, we want to really be the professional side as much as we can get it there.

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Justin Levinson (26:12.248)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (26:34.305)‍

We also represent kid creators and family creators. So like it's our DNA to kind of keep that all very kind of kosher. And we bring in, you know, these experts and we'll ask around, hey, how is it to work with this person? What did they do on their last campaign? So it's very rigorous to get through the gate. But that being said, we turn down hundreds and hundreds of them a week, like literally hundreds. And the...

For me, the reason viral nation talent has a good reputation after representing 1000 creators, because he thinks a bunch of them would leave and, you know, talk badly about you is because we do that. Because it would be so easy, Justin, for us to go, let's sign everybody. We're going to have 3000 influencers and we're going to, but if you can't service that individual, you're going to have 500 creators running around saying viral nation didn't do anything for me. Viral nation didn't deliver for me. So we've always sacrificed speed of scale for ability to

service that person and and and I do think you know Business person to business person. It's like if we signed all six under those creators every week Would we have a larger revenue number at the end of the year? Yeah, we would but is it worth the pain of all the churn and all of the you know pushing people to the maximum and so for us We've been just we built a really dope system. It's almost mathematical

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Justin Levinson (27:50.958)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Joe Gagliese (27:57.095)‍

And it's run between finance and the presidents of our talent company and they they every month they they make their adjustments They bring in people they open verticals they do it on a pace and we measure the whole thing and it's all clean and It's a really cool system. So that's kind of how we think about those those pieces

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Justin Levinson (28:14.198)‍

Do the brands have any say in terms of the content creator that they're working with as well? Or do you guys sort of make that judgment call? Or is there a select group of content creators that you will suggest to them and they make a choice? how does that decision making go?

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Joe Gagliese (28:26.809)‍

Yeah. So that's the super cool part about viral nation is like, we are so far away from the creative version of influencer marketing and we are on the science side, right? There's the creative side, which is this person looks great or their audience is kind of like ours or looks like my customer. We're, we're, we're not that we those that's reserved for like comms agencies and stuff like that. We make media decisions. So when we bring forward a creator to a brand, it's not because the guy on the creator team thought they were cool.

or that they were a great fit, or she has to come with data backing it. So when the customer is getting to that point, let's say we sign a new customer and they're going through their first round of influencer approvals for a hundred influencer campaign. They get presented in our technology, a list of creators with rationale and the data to back the decision. And they're making a data decision and they're not making a personal, I don't follow that person. So we actually work really hard.

to try to take away the human element of biasness out of that equation and try to make it a media decision because here's the other cool thing viral nation does different than everyone else is we optimize wave to wave on every campaign across all lady brands. So when we hire five influencers for rocket mortgage, those influencers go, the business intelligence team sends a report to that team to say,

Here's what worked, here's what didn't, here's what you adjust, here's what you altered, do phase two. They do phase two different than phase one and that continues to go. So what we were able to calculate last year is on average we can increase performance on a campaign by 30 % campaign to campaign to campaign, which means at the end of a year we might increase it by a hundred. So these are the, like, and this is the maturity stuff, like 99 % of companies in our space don't even think about that stuff because it's hard. But if you want to see,

future scale of creator marketing at a level where a brand can spend $20 million on it, it needs to be that way. Because that way you pull your hair out and jump out the window behind me there, right?

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Justin Levinson (30:31.402)‍

Yeah, that's brilliant. I you can't argue with the data, right? I mean, if that's if that's what you're, know, you're going to bring deliver the best person and get the best result. And it's not gonna there's no way it's not gonna happen.

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Joe Gagliese (30:34.948)‍

No.

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Joe Gagliese (30:44.163)‍

Exactly.

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Justin Levinson (30:45.452)‍

Yeah, that's really, that's really fascinating. How, you know, how has the industry changed? mean, I imagine some of this sort of data driven stuff that you guys it's unique to you guys, it's probably a big change in the industry. But have there, I mean, AI is obviously a huge part in the world now, what are you seeing as sort of the big, the changes maybe in the last five years or so?

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Joe Gagliese (31:09.635)‍

Oof. Well, the whole land of social migrates continents every once, like once or twice a year. You know, I would say that, I would say the biggest changes have likely been...

Brands used to be really easy, Justin, to pull fast ones on in this area, right? You could go into a brand, you'd say whatever you want, you'd put up whatever numbers you want and they'd go with it. The biggest change for me is now the marketers have gotten smarter. That's helped us huge, right? Because while we were doing kind of God's work and killing ourselves to try to optimize and use the data and all that stuff, sometimes for a number of years, Justin, we'd lose to some incumbent that just had a cool idea or didn't have any of these processes, because you know,

the CMO or the decision maker didn't know how to distill that value. So we looked apples to apples, even though we weren't. So I think one of the biggest shifts is marketers went from, yeah, this is social on the side needs to happen. You know, I'm worrying about my TV shit. And they've now migrated to, need to be a steward of social. I need to understand how these channels work. Are we optimizing? How are we using the data? How are we reporting? So they brought this rigor and that rigor has been a catalyst for our business because now all of a sudden it's like told you.

We're already here. So here's CMO, here's what you need. Here's right. So that's been a magnificent shift. I think that culturally creator has taken a massive like hockey stick turn, right? So, you know, creators, I was talking to someone the other day, who was I talking to? So the Mr. Beast episodes that aired on Amazon Prime Video, right? Broke all the Amazon Prime Video records for unscripted film. Okay.

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Justin Levinson (32:25.262)‍

you

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Joe Gagliese (32:52.495)‍

That to me was like a major reckoning because I remember five, six years ago, a celebrity, I'd ask a celebrity if they want to make content with an influencer and they'd say, influencers are losers. It's like now the influencer is actually more powerful than the celebrity and they get it, right? So now you have folks like Kevin Hart making videos with streamers, right? You have these folks engaging that way and they only do that because they're more powerful now on the other side. So I think that...

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Justin Levinson (33:11.117)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (33:18.683)‍

creators are starting to earn the level of I don't want to say celebrity because celebrities the wrong way to say it the level of importance that they provide or the level of Power that they have is now being I think recognized and respected where before I think that if you ask Nine out of ten creators would feel like people treat them like shit, right? So I love that

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Justin Levinson (33:39.32)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (33:42.799)‍

that growing up of that and I love seeing creators be empowered and I love seeing creators at the Grammys and I love seeing them kind of be who honestly I thought they were 11 years ago. So like it's beautiful and I think that shift is pretty amazing and I think you're gonna see a massive amount of content on mainstream from them. I think you're gonna see movies from them. I think you're gonna see just a totally different outtake on how news is done. Like these guys are gonna take over the world.

So I think that that started to its head and now it's totally out of the cave. So those are the two things I think have been the most dramatic in terms of like cultural shift or industry wide kind of shift.

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Justin Levinson (34:22.816)‍

Yeah, sounds like you're in the right business, It's pretty, it's pretty cool. What do you do for for fun outside of work? Yeah, I didn't get to tell the viewers or discuss that you're actually you're in Toronto. That's where you live. What do you kind of do? What do you do for fun outside of work?

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Joe Gagliese (34:26.992)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (34:44.837)‍

Yeah, listen, I have three kids. And honestly, man, they're my worst.

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Justin Levinson (34:48.522)‍

You don't have any hobbies basically, right?

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Joe Gagliese (34:51.699)‍

You know what, I don't. know, I tinker at golf here and there in the summer. But no, you know what, heart, weird, but I love farming. And I grew up, I grew up, my grandparents owned a dairy farm. And that's where I spent most of my childhood. And when I became fortunate enough to have the money to kind of buy my own home and live where I wanted, I convinced my wife to kind of settle on a farm. So that was a couple years ago. So

you when I'm not here, I'm doing chickens, I'm building stuff, I'm doing maintenance stuff around the property, I'm spending, you know, nine hours outside drilling a fence. You know, that's where I feel the most comfortable, Justin, is in that environment. And it's changed my life in the sense that, you know, last year, I probably on the weekends would spend 14 hours outside Saturday, Sunday, the kids with me. And so for me,

that roots and nostalgia of kind of where I came from and that simplicity of, you know, growing my own food and taking care of that stuff and being mobile is basically the thing I look forward to the most every single day. So that's kind of my hobby. Now I haven't escalated to larger animals yet. I have my chickens and I have a couple other things, but I'm thinking of going into some cattle and some horses and stuff like that.

But I've been trying to convince my wife because unless I'm retired from viral nation, I need her help, right? Because if I can't do it at the book, so I'm trying to coax her into like, will you three days a week do it in the mornings if I can't? I'm working that battle and if I can get her there, then we're moving forward on the bigger animals. But that's my passion, man. I love that stuff quite a bit.

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Justin Levinson (36:15.022)‍

Thanks.

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Justin Levinson (36:20.558)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (36:34.092)‍

I it. Yeah, I feel like, you know, I work in entertainment too. Most of my work is in Hollywood and New York and London, but I actually also am out here as we discussed a little bit before the conversation. I'm in Vermont as well, and it's very rural. And most of my neighbors have no idea what I'm doing. They're like, wait, you do what with all these different creative agencies? And you run this podcast and you place talent, these different companies? What's that all about? They have no idea really what I do because most of the people here

You know, we're actually surrounded by a of farms as well. That's a really big part of Vermont, it's a big maple syrup place, you know, as well. We have maple trees everywhere that my neighbors, they tap. You know, it's a real, and like in your background, also have some hardworking people. But I think it's important, you know, I enjoy sort of the relaxed atmosphere here where I can just kind of, you know.

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Joe Gagliese (37:06.639)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (37:18.417)‍

hardworking people.

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Justin Levinson (37:29.998)‍

I have the wood stove upstairs and can just kind of relax. I have two kids as well. That's reason I said you have no hobbies anymore because as soon as I, but after the second, once I had the second kid, it was just like, oh man, I'm like, I'm not, I'm gaining a little weight. I'm not like going out and throwing a baseball with my buddies as much. Dad, puns are in, man.

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Joe Gagliese (37:47.003)‍

Dad bods are in. Dad bods are in. So I maintain mine rigorously.

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Justin Levinson (37:53.582)‍

Well, you're on the farm and you're moving around. That's a great...

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Joe Gagliese (37:56.377)‍

That's the only reason that's the only reason that you know what in the winter I can't go outside as much like we had a huge snowfall a few few weeks back and it dude I had like mental health on the weekend I was like I gotta go outside I can't I can't do anything I couldn't get my machine out of the driveway because there's so much snow so I was stuck and I realized how important that routine had become for me when I couldn't do it anymore but it's funny because I also come from a family like my dad and my brother would rather be caught dead than outside

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Justin Levinson (38:12.782)‍

Yeah.

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Joe Gagliese (38:23.547)‍

Right? So it's funny because I kind of like the anomaly, but anyway, Ben, um, that's super cool. And that area, you know, my old thing with, with folks who, know, farmers and folks who, who work like that is I just find they are sheltered from the realities of stuff we don't need to see every day being on social and all that stuff for the most part. And hard work to them is not.

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Justin Levinson (38:23.789)‍

Ha ha.

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Joe Gagliese (38:45.227)‍

scene like hard work is to us and I just like I just find reverence in how they operate and I just have so much respect for those types of people because it's kind of like they figured it out in like a non-optimized way.

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Justin Levinson (38:59.586)‍

Yeah, no, totally.

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Joe Gagliese (39:00.933)‍

You know, they're still doing the hard stuff, but they got the other stuff unlocked.

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Justin Levinson (39:04.8)‍

Yeah, do you find that you like to read at all? you do you like to kind of put down the social and just pick up an old fashioned book? Is that something you're interested in?

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Joe Gagliese (39:11.801)‍

You know what? I've been like a, listen, I do like reading. I would say that it's not my priority and it hasn't for quite some time. I am a YouTube monster, like consumable data from YouTube. Like I was talking, a call with, had an in-person yesterday with my business intelligence team, that group that does the analytics and reporting. And I'm like, guys, last night I watched this whole thing on physics. And I was walking them through how they basically figured out how to untangle.

an atom and I was talking to them about the stages of which they operated to do that and how we could apply that to unlocking different vertical social insights and like for me whether it's how boats are made or You know the physics of how to get to action or It's you know, dude. Perfect. You know, I find that YouTube becomes a source of entertainment and education for me like 50 degrees like

I'm consuming so much incredible information, it's making me smarter and I think that's so powerful. So I'm a YouTube monster.

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Justin Levinson (40:17.262)‍

Yeah, I do that a lot as well. And I'm like talking to GPT on this on the side asking questions about what I'm watching and trying to get the quickest download in this this old model here as possible to try to, you know, try to be competitive out there. But cool, man. I'm so stoked that you were able to come here and chat with me today. And, you know, obviously, I've known about viral nation for a long time. So I was very interested in

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Joe Gagliese (40:30.651)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (40:45.806)‍

hearing your story and what makes you tick. And yeah, I'm just really stoked that you took the time out of your day to speak with me today.

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Joe Gagliese (40:53.697)‍

thank you for having me man. And listen, anybody who cares about the space and etc is a friend of mine. And, you know, I'm here anytime. So I'd love to chat with you further in the future and and get to know you better.

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Justin Levinson (41:06.67)‍

Definitely, Joe. And if you're ever here, you know, in the Green Mountain State here and you want to pop in for a cup of coffee, I'll be happy to treat you to one. All right, Joe, have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much, buddy.

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Joe Gagliese (41:14.405)‍

Love it.

Love that. Love that.

All right, talk to you soon.

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Justin Levinson (41:23.086)‍

All right, bye.

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