Emerging out of the Wild West with CEO of Paladin Software James Creech

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I am here with James Creech from Los Angeles. Hello, James.

Hey, Larry. Thanks for having me.

Hey, I'd like to congratulate you on the success of your business, Paladin Software. And I see your revenues are up, over, closing in on 4 million a year. You're in 25 countries, offices in U.S. you know, you know the United States, but Europe and also Asia. And you also got your own podcast going. So you're a busy guy and you've accomplished a lot. And so how old are you, by the way?

Thanks, Larry. I appreciate that. I'm 31.

31. You're just a baby.

That's right. Hopefully.

Yeah.

I've got a lot of years left in me.

Yeah. So like when I started, I was the youngest, always the youngest guy in the room. And now for a long time, it seems like I. Not really, but it seems like I'm the oldest guy in the room.

But nothing wrong with that.

That's what happens over life, especially if you choose your own deal and you choose industries to operate in that have huge potential. And you have done that. You are in the marketing business and tell us about your world, your business, and then we'll dig into how that all happened. Sure.

Yeah. So Paladin is an influencer marketing software company. Our technology powers brands and agencies to help them identify social media influencers on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch. Right. Help them find the right social media influencers to work with, how to track and manage those relationships and ultimately report on branded content that they produce. So a brand wants to sponsor brands to wants a video or a photo or something that the influencer will create and then they want to measure the results. Who did this reach? How did it perform? Should we work with this influencer again in the future? Our software aggregates all of those insights and builds reports for them in real time.

And it seems like it's pretty popular.

It's going well. Yeah, it's influencer marketing has been a really rapidly growing category. It's been exciting to be in the space early on. Right. My co founders and I all worked at early influencer agencies and creator networks. And five plus years ago, it was the Wild west. Everyone was doing this in spreadsheets and leveraging screenshots and it was just tedious. Right. Manual processes, ourselves included. Right. As practitioners of this and realized, hey, you know, there's got to be a better way. We're sick of banging our heads against this wall. Let's build some software to make it easier, not just for ourselves, but for everybody else in the industry that's trying to tackle the same problems.

And how did you do that? How did you get to where you were even involved in the business way back then? And then how did you emerge out of the Wild West?

Sure. So, you know, I went to university for film and TV and business and political science. And so studying, you know, these different career paths, I thought, oh, I was going to go work in traditional entertainment originally. And then I figured, oh, well, maybe I'll go into corporate America with kind of my business background. But I fell into working at this company right out of school that was an ad tech kind of startup and so caught the startup bug early on. Really liked being in early stage companies and being more entrepreneurial. And so went from there. After two and a half years at that company, went to that early influencer agency, creator network called Ben Pixels, and witnessed these problems firsthand and just said, hey, there's got to be a solution for this, right? This is a rapidly growing industry. All these media companies popping up, influencers are building businesses. The creator economy is kind of unfolding before our eyes. Let's be, you know, the folks building the picks and shovels to make this business easier. So to be honest, just kind of stumbled into it. Never, never thought this was going to be my path, but found my way into it and have really loved it ever since.

It sounds like you could refer the early, the influencer business kind of like a match.com for businesses.

Yeah, a little bit. A lot of people had a marketplace model early on where they said, okay, let's bring the influencers and the brands together and we'll facilitate these transactions. Of course, you know, number of agencies doing that too, saying, hey, we either represent influencers or we have good, close relationship with these influencers, or we could help, you know, you work with the right brands and vice versa. Hey, brands, we know how to speak this language. We can make sure there's, you know, brand safety and that your values are reflected in the content that's being created. So certainly a number of folks popped up to serve those needs. And then we came in as an additional layer, really as a software, as a service layer to say hey, we want to build the tools to facilitate these types of transactions, to arm the agencies and the brands with more effective technology to run better campaigns and do this business more effectively.

So who uses your stuff then? I mean, it's not just you using your software, it's these agencies using your software as well. It sounds like.

Yeah, that's right. So we power customers in a little over 30 countries now across five continents, work with a number of brands and agencies, esports, teams, talent management companies, everyone from, you know, like a faze clan to Viacom to small independent influencer agencies in, you know, the Middle east or Southeast Asia and other emerging markets that you've probably never heard of. Right. So it's interesting how this is quickly become a global phenomenon. And that's part of the fun for us is we're getting to work with companies large and small across the spectrum to help them achieve their goals through our software.

Well, it's always fun to have business and to grow and to have new customers coming in regardless where they are. But it seems like a lot of the business that comes your way, what I like about what you're all about is growth and getting big and helping people grow and get big, which is what I've spent my life working on, you know, and if people don't want to grow, they don't want to get big, they don't want, they're not going to be coming looking for you, are they?

That's right. And their success leads to our success. That's really our philosophy, right? Is how do we, you know, give you tools that fundamentally reimagine the way that you, you work with these influencers and save you time and help you run more effective, more valuable campaigns. And that's absolutely our philosophy, right? Is like, how do we help our customers be successful if they're growing, we're growing. Right. We want this industry to be growing as a whole. So we want to be a good steward. We want to be an important part of this industry as it continues to mature and making sure that people have access to the resources they need to fuel their growth.

And most of that sounds, you know, the, the first thing that comes to my mind is that is sounding like a lot of the BS that comes out of corporate America. Like IBM is going to come in and we'll send a developer agent or we'll take you under our wing and we'll help you develop your business to where you're global and they don't do a God blessed thing. You know, it's just Like a life insurance company, Whole life insurance company going out and pretending that they're financial planners or even a stock brokerage company. You know, they run these ads. Hey, you know, we, it's funny, it's like they all think they invented this. Like, we're not going to be cold and impersonal. We're going to treat you like an individual. Shocker. You know, nobody's ever run that ad campaign before as a financial, you know, an investment program and so. Or bank, you know, every bank, it just drives me nuts. Every bank, especially if they're new, is like, hey, we've got a new idea for running a bank. We're going to treat you like a person, like. And they don't, you know, they don't treat you just like every other bank. And so when I hear this kind of conversation, it sounds like it could be in the wrong hands. More blue sky. And so how do you take your stuff? And why is your stuff you're not growing if it doesn't work? So how do you differentiate your stuff to where it really does perform?

Yeah, it's a number of things. The first is we've invested very heavily in the technology, so we've got a large number of engineers constantly working on the software to make it better. We wanted to build a solution that encompassed all of the major global platforms. So we're not just focused on only Instagram or just Instagram and TikTok. We've really tried to go wide and cover in depth. All of the different platforms provide really in the weeds reporting so people get really strong analytics and can understand what content's working, what's not working. How do we improve the performance with these influencers over time? So that's things like daily data, right? Rather than just giving people lifetime values or end of the campaign reports, we want people to have kind of real time analytics and reporting as the campaign's going on so they can understand what's working.

So what you're saying is there. Rather than wait till it's all said and done and the campaign's over and say, here's what happened. You're monitoring it as you go, as you go, so people can track it. And also having that information allows them to make improvements or reiterate the marketing strategy and kind of dial it in for greater effectiveness.

100%. Right? I mean, postmortems are important. You absolutely want your end of campaign report. But you know, if you wait until the end, oftentimes it's too late. Right. I mean, you can learn for Next time. But what we want to do is say, okay, we can give you all that, that's no problem. But why don't we go much deeper and give you, rather than just a snapshot, you know, this real time analytics into how the campaign's performing. And that way you can move quickly, you can turn on the dime. If something's not working halfway through the campaign or you know, you launch and some of the influencers haven't posted, or it's not getting the traffic you were hoping for, you're reaching the wrong audience. How do you pivot quickly and then make sure that you are reaching the folks you need to so you can still, you know, learn throughout the campaign and optimize its performance as it's going on.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion.

In assets under management and has done.

Well even during trying times. Now if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to whiteellawinning.com webinar Now I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give your an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

So let's break this down into someone who is just got a business and they're trying to get ideas that they could use themselves because you know, winning principles are trends across the board. A lot of times you don't see immediately obvious how these things apply, but how these would apply. How what we're talking about here, how it applied to an eventual getting started or trying to move up, is to have daily targets, weekly targets, break these things down into bite sized chunks, expect results every day, have a way of tracking those results and be able to react to it. Be nimble on your feet so that if you've got a losing program or a losing strategy, you can find out right away and make the adjustments. Because a lot of times losing strategies are almost winning strategies. And if you have the numbers on it, you can see what it is you need, you know, to tinker with to turn a loser into a winner. But it's impossible to do that without the tracking of the numbers. Would you, are we, is that what we're saying to people?

That's right, yeah. No, you got to put first things first and then the data is essential. Right. You can't operate or make effective decisions without understanding the performance. So making sure you have a clear grasp on the numbers, making sure you have a real time feed of the information. You know, that's that leads to success in any aspect or any industry, much as it does, you know, in our business when we're talking about running influencer campaigns, it translates to any other field or any other business as well.

Well, it seemed like if I were to go to you, I would want. See, one thing is to track numbers, another thing is to track the important numbers. But it appears that you guys have figured out what are the key results and the key things to track to, you know, make the company grow. So for most marketing campaigns, what are the key things? You're just going by responses, right? Email responses or do they follow up? Do they click here, do they open the mail or do they buy the product? What all do you track?

Yeah, so when our influencer marketing started, it was really focused on what we think of as top of the funnel metrics. Right. So awareness, impressions, engagements. Right. A lot of these things that, you know, today we might call vanity metrics. Right. It's okay, sure. You want people to see it. And if the goal of the campaign is awareness and oftentimes that's great. Maybe you're looking for brand lift or you're just trying to get your name out there, you're launching a new product that can be a valid strategy. But increasingly we're seeing more performance oriented marketers leveraging influencers as a strategy to say, okay, how do we drive things like click through and conversion rates and purchase consideration or intent, more of these kind of concrete bottom of the funnel metrics.

Well, it seemed like if you're going to run a campaign and be able to continue to run these campaigns, you got to have the performance working for you. Because the ideal is to be able to afford bigger and bigger campaigns. But you can't do it if the first campaigns don't work. And so at what level do people bring in someone like you?

I'd say most people that want to engage software for their efforts are looking to turbocharge a program that's already in place. Oftentimes they might start off dip their toe in the water through an agency partner. They're experimenting and maybe they tapped into some marketplaces and they've got some folks in house that are trying to work with influencers. And once those programs get up and running and they say, okay, we need to have better control of this information, we want to centralize the data, we want a dedicated CRM, we want this institutional knowledge to be codified. In a single place so that we can, you know, easily transmit it across the organization if people leave. We've got, you know, this central knowledge base that's kind of step one. And then activation. Right. How do we find the right influencers? Well, oftentimes that's manual and tedious. We're just searching through Instagram or YouTube or TikTok and trying to find the right people. But you never know if you're on track or not. You know, it's much more helpful to have a robust search engine where you can dig down deep and pinpoint the right influencers based on your specific brand criteria. And then the last piece is activation. Right. So how do we make sure that we're, you know, tracking deliverables and overseeing the fighting of the campaign and again, coming back to the real time reporting, funneling in all the data and then making sure we're hitting our targets throughout the campaign, not just at the very end. All of those pieces are essential. And it typically comes into play when a brand or an agency is a little bit more established in their. Influencer is a pretty important part of their strategy.

Influencers are, it's kind of a version of affiliate marketing or since, you know, we've had people talk about that on here, you know, when they launched their product, they tapped into the bloggers in there. You know, they sent free samples to the bloggers that were in their niche and they. Or they tapped into the affiliate marketing people in their niche.

Sure.

And gave them a piece of the action or something like that. But it. Influencer works a little different. How do influencers work? And I'm, you know what? I can't think of influencers without thinking of the, the girls in the bikinis with the selfies and the hair made of the Kardashians.

Sure.

It's hard to think of influencers other than that type of teeny bopper type, beauty queen, model, actress, you know, airhead, but gorgeous, you know, gorgeous airhead type thing. But a lot of these gorgeous airheads are really not airheads.

There's some pretty smart businesses going on underneath the surface. Yeah, it's funny. Influencer marketing is really nothing new. We've had celebrity endorsements, we've had affiliate marketing models for a long time. The Internet, of course, has changed that and supercharged it. And then this passion economy or this creator economy is further changing that. But we've had influential people for decades and centuries. They probably would have been called a bestselling author in the past or certainly blogger or a celebrity athlete, musician, now, we've got those folks engaging with social media, but we also have this kind of organic, homegrown crop of creators on platforms. And that can be social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, that can also be B2B platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter to an extent when it's used for B2B purposes. And then you've also got this emerging class of creators and journalists and authors on substack, right. And review and all these kind of newsletter platforms.

What was that word? Substack.

Yeah. So substack is probably one of the best known examples of these journalists and other independent writers leaving in some cases, big publications like New York Times to set out on their own and saying, hey, we can use technology and we can use the Internet to build our own audience. Now, I don't need to work for a gatekeeper. I can create my own content. I can distribute it, I can monetize it without having to go through a magazine or, you know, a newspaper or TV station or a film studio. Right. Anyone can build and engage an audience globally at this point through the Internet. It's a lot more. Right. We're seeing this evolution of platforms. You've got a whole host of new platforms popping up, like paparazzi and dispo and only fans and community. You've got this whole new class of creator platforms and social media platforms to connect us all online. And the idea of an influencer is changing rapidly. Right. Of course, you think of more of the vapid Instagram Life is Perfect fashion and beauty, maybe lifestyle vloggers that people think of when they think of the term influencer marketing. But it could just as well be, you know, an entertainer, a musician, you know, an independent artist or creator that's leveraging these platforms to reach their fan base in a more direct, you know, authentic way.

Give me a special, a specific example of someone, a company you've worked with and you've connected them with influencers and you've monitored a success story. Give me a success story.

Sure, yeah. So in many cases, our success stories are influencer marketing agencies that are running these types of campaigns on a daily basis. And so sometimes they will exclusively manage talent where an influencer will come to them and say, hey, you know, I'm really good at creating video content, or I'm a musician, or, you know, I'm a aspiring sports star. And so I'm really good at building my audience. But, you know, maybe I'm not so good at the business side. I need a manager who can help me monetize my content through ads and subscriptions and merchandise and you know, licensing deals, partnerships. Right. All the things that you would think about in kind of this, this new creator economy and these monetization models. And so these management companies, these agencies, they do this for a living. They say, okay, great, that's our expertise. We're going to supercharge your talent and tap into ways to monetize and activate, you know, this fan base. So we'll help build the infrastructure around you. But in order to do that, you know, we need technology, especially when it comes to branded content, to save us time and you know, generating sales materials. So we go out and pitch you to brands and of course tracking those campaigns, reporting back to the advertisers. So Coca Cola or Nike or Toyota can say, hey, this was an amazing success and we can compare these results against our other spends and at a home and print and you know, traditional entertainment and say, okay, this is why influencer marketing is delivering results for our brand. Let's go ahead and lean more heavily into influencer. Let's increase our spend. So that's what our software is doing is it's taking them out of, you know, Google sheets and email.

What is the name of that category of management company?

They're traditionally called digital talent management companies like an Underscore Talent or an XX artist. And then there's also influencer marketing agencies like the Sociable Society or Maiden. Right. Any of these companies that we work with to help them with technology on.

The back end and who should go to them?

Well, certainly influencers want to work with them because they help magnify their growth and their impact. And then of course, you know, brands want to engage these talent management firms and these influencer agencies to help, you know, reach the audience that they're looking for and translate their marketing objectives into actual results.

Get more specific of someone like a biggest success story of a company. You don't have to give the name of the company. But talk about how if you're trying to sell me on this and your service and everything, show me a success story that you would talk about.

Sure, yeah. We have a number of case studies. We've done one with Faze Clan about our impacts on their esports business. So they represent this roster of professional esports athletes who compete in online gaming competitions and then they also have a team of streamers. So social media influencers who aren't necessarily pro level competitors, but they'll broadcast their gameplay on Twitch or YouTube. Right. And so they've got these massive audiences of hundreds of friends.

It's incredible to me because, you know, I'm not young, but these kids will get on. I read an article of a kid who got on, and it's a kid. He's like Yuri, but he was real good at playing some kind of game I'd never heard of. And within a week and a half of streaming, you know, just let people know he was playing and he was streaming himself playing the game. He had, like, tens of thousands of people following him and he was, like, making a literal fortune.

Oh, yeah.

And this is a global phenomenon, you know, so you're tapping into things like. Like that, right?

That's right. And it's really powerful. Right, because that person doesn't need to get signed to, you know, a pro sports team anymore or get a record deal or a tv, you know, contract. He can light up his broadband Internet connection and go ahead and start streaming his favorite game on Twitch and build an audience in 10 days, like you said, and, you know, start building his. This individual income stream as a result of these global platforms.

Unbelievable. Now talk to me about the. How you evaluate influencers. Is it a matter of followers or do they have these. Hit a certain level, if someone was out there listening to this and say, I want to be, you know, I don't want to build a brand, I want to be an influencer. So how would they. How would. What level do they have to get up to be taken seriously?

Yeah, there are a lot of criteria, and there are different levels of influencers. You've got, you know, traditional celebrities who often have an audience outside of social media, but oftentimes reach pretty significant followers on. On social platforms as well. Then you've got, you know, the mega influencers who have hundreds of thousands, in many cases, millions of followers on social platforms. You've kind of got the creator middle class, which tends to be tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of followers. And then you've got more of the emerging creators. That's micro influencers, which have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers on average. And then nano influencers, which have fewer than 1,000 followers. And of course, this varies by platform, but those are kind of broad strokes.

Okay, Micro influencers. Nano.

Yep. Mid tier. And then, you know, the mega influencers who have, you know, over 100 million followers in some cases.

Yeah. Unbelievable. So it's like anything you grow step by step up the ladder.

That's right.

But there are people who would go in there and start working with what you call a nano influencer.

Yeah. You know, every brand strategy is different. I think what we see as the most successful and impactful influencer campaigns tend to be with that mid tier and the largest influencers. But that's not to say that, you know, you can't do a successful micro or nano influencer activation strategy. And I'll give you a quick example, right, there's this whole crop of kind of college influencers that have popped up and so you don't need to have 100,000 followers to be a good ambassador for a brand or to be a well known figure in your community. You know, at your local college you could have, you know, a thousand, two thousand people who follow your Instagram posts. And you know, that's pretty influential within that college that a brand might want to target. So that's increasingly become a really interesting marketing phenomenon. Of course, you've got that in other niches, other categories as well. But the college university marketing has leveraged influencers very effectively and they can certainly be on a smaller scale.

Well, thanks so much, James for sharing that insight into that world that I'm familiar with. And you know, I'd heard the words but I hadn't really had the explanations in depth like you've covered and appreciate you sharing that with us.

Oh, my pleasure. I'm happy we could shed some light.

On it if you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world. Girl, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.