The #1 Mistake Killing Your Influencer Marketing ROI

Sean Weisbrot: In today's creator economy, monetizing your audience is only half the game. The real power lies in building authentic, scalable partnerships. You don't need millions of followers. You need a clear, niche and real engagement. Brands are very interested in finding the right creators faster, but without clear positioning and contactability, you're invisible. I sat down with Ryan Davis, co-founder of People First to break it All Down. This episode is your blueprint for monetization, creative control, and metrics. Let's get into it. How can a creator position themselves to be sought after by brands to work with them?

Ryan Davis: I think by trying to capture a very specific niche, you know, we're moving away from these really broad influencers who have, you know, a lot of topics focus on, you know, business or health or travel or beauty or these specific niches. These are the folks who are really growing, the audiences that brands want to talk to. So, you know, somebody like yourself who's, who's, you know, created a podcast where they're talking to founders and they're talking to business strategists, you know, positioning yourself. You know, to get, to get a lot of outreach from sort of B2B campaigns, and that's something we see happening a lot more in the influencer space. B2B, LinkedIn, these things weren't even talked about five years ago and now you know, everyone's trying to crack the code there.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you think AI has its place in this kind of drive towards B2B collaborations?

Ryan Davis: I think AI has a place as a, as a collaborator, as a, as a thought partner. I think AI content, uh, is not gonna perform as well as, as sort of real authentic human content. And that's sort of how, what we sort of stake their business on, that people are gonna wanna still hear, hear from real people and that there's gonna be a flood of, of AI content. And one of the ways that businesses will be able to say that they're different is to have. Real people versus AI content. Um, so yeah, AI is gonna, is, is a tool, but I think ultimately the, the end product should, should really be censored on people.

Sean Weisbrot: I guess what I meant by that was do you see a drive in AI based companies and products looking to do these B2B collaborations?

Ryan Davis: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think, you know, the, the amount of. AI startups that are trying to sort of explain what they do to, to folks in the market, uh, has increased. And, you know, if you have a new product out that is an AI powered HR platform, who better to talk about that to the buyer, which is ultimately HR folks than other HR folks. So, you know, we would find those, um, you know, HR professionals to talk about this product. You know, what it's doing, how AI is, is making their lives easier. Take that. You take those five to 10 videos and you put them up against an audience of other HR professionals, and all of a sudden, you know, you, you're kind of inside this community having the discussion.

Sean Weisbrot: I feel like it's always been difficult to grow as a business podcast specifically because there might be another type of creator that's only making finance content, and so every person that comes to them knows they're going there for finance content and YouTube knows that. They're putting out finance content where I might have an episode about marketing and then the next episode might be about sales, the next market. Uh, next might be about HR and the next might be about product because every business owner that I'm interviewing is different. Yeah. Their background is different, their focus is different. And so how can someone like me that is running a business podcast be able to. Monetize that with sponsorships, knowing that there's so many things that I can talk about. So like you were talking about this HR platform. Well, I have a degree in psychology and I have a background in HR management. I did HR management for several companies before I started my own company, and I've had multiple companies that I hired and fired and managed the policies for. So I could talk about that, but someone might not think about me because they see me as a business podcast host.

Ryan Davis: Yeah, I think. When we're putting together a campaign, we might say put together multiple personas. So depending on who the buyer is, it might be. Strict HR folks, but it might be, you know, people, business podcasters who, who talk about, you know, these topics. So, but you'll be coming from it from a slightly different perspective than somebody who worked in HR right now at a company, right? Like I'm running HR now. You're a thought leader. You talk to a lot of people, you can talk about it from a perspective. And I think that there are, like thinking about the different way these messengers like ultimately influence people's like decision making. Like, uh, you know, you might be a really strong messenger for one type of buyer and an HR person in the current position might be a strong, so, you know, you would, you would mix it up, test it, but small business owners, you know, SMB owners, like tho those folks are always, we're always trying to reach them with so many campaigns. And a podcast like this. I feel like that is like probably a large chunk of your audience or folks who are like startup founders, you know, trying to figure it out. So like, you know, I think this is, is, is well positioned and it's just like, it becomes sort of like a discovery issue. It's like, how do we find, like, you know, who to work with, who's gonna turn around videos fast? Who's gonna, who's gonna respond to us? Um, who's easy to find, you know? You know, make you know, it's really simple things. Making sure your website makes it really easy to contact you. Make sure your social channels have a business email to contact you. You know, let people know that you're actually open to collaborations and you're more likely to receive offers.

Sean Weisbrot: I've been receiving a lot of offers 'cause I have made it clear on my video descriptions, on my channel description, on my website, I have a sponsor's page. Uh, with previous examples, things like that. What is the process from the agency's point of view of finding someone and. So, like for example, someone reached out to me and they said, Hey, give us your quote, right? And I'm like, okay, but like what's, what is that for? Right? What's the scope of the project? And like, who is the client and when do you need it by? And right. So like you're just, you're asking me for a quote, but that's. That I'm getting nothing to work with how I'm supposed to give you a quote. So then I have to start digging for, for questions. And one of them was like, well, we're getting like a bunch of quotes and then we're just sending it to the client and seeing what they think. And so it seems like that client is just focused on what's the least I can pay to get this done.

Ryan Davis: Yeah, that sounds like a bad client. We, we, we don't, we don't structure deals like that. So we would reach out to you and be like, Hey, we're working with an HR. Platform. You know, it's, it's a new platform. It's got AI integration that does X, Y, Z. Um, you know, we think that your podcast as an audience that's interesting, is this something you would be interested in? And then if you say yes, then we, we start, we give you more information on, on what, what the deliverables would be, which is exactly what you're asking, what's the timeframe, what are the amount of, how many videos are you delivering, you know, specifics. And, and then, um, we would give you an offer based on. Your audience and engagement rate and the, and the video content that we are asking you to produce, and then you would be free to counter on on that. But, um, you know, most, most create we, we try to get, you know, within, we have like an algorithm that, that determines what we think the video is is worth. Now there are like ups and downs on that. If you, if you are a really specific, lemme tell you, it is so expensive. If, if you are like an expert in. We just had to find experts in aviation for a client, and we needed to get five aviation experts to talk people with like very specific aviation backgrounds to talk about a very specific thing. And boy was that, was that hard because it wasn't hard to necessarily find the experts, but it was hard to find the experts who wanted to opt in to getting paid to talk about, you know, X, Y, Z. And uh, so that's why it gets really difficult.

Sean Weisbrot: What are some ways to get yourself blacklisted from working with an agent?

Ryan Davis: That is a great question. So, you know, generally, you know, the US is an interesting political situation. 'cause what that, that question, the answer to that question is different now than it would've been 16 months ago. I think brands would've been more conservative, more lowercase, conservative about the kind of folks that they were working with. So they would probably avoid creators who were like too seen as too maybe too right wing. I don't think that would be the case anymore. If anything, it would be like, if you've posted too much. Left wing political content. So political content in general scares brands away too much political content so that, that it can be a flag. And then obviously like you would be surprised at how conservative some other organizations can be in regards to things like too much, too many, too much swimwear, normal adult alcohol use can be a flag, which I think is like ridiculous. Like, and I'm talking about like swimwear, like somebody was at the beach in June and they were like drinking a mimosa, like a totally normal. You know, and this is not like all their content, most of their content is them, you know, doing totally other different stuff. So surprising things can flag extreme politics is definitely one of the up there. And then, you know, we're, we're automatically getting rid of any accounts that would've have, you know, any, any racist or sexist or homophobic memes. All that stuff just gets kind of automatically pulled outta the database 'cause we're ingesting like. All publicly available information across all these social networks to help us find their creators. So we're looking, then we're getting all that data and we're looking for keywords. We're looking for, you know, people who have, uh, certain audiences on certain networks.

Sean Weisbrot: I guess I was thinking more of like, so like the, the last sponsor I was working with, I was working with the PR firm and the PR firm, or I was working with the PR manager at the firm. Yeah. And the PR manager was working with the client, so I never got to talk to the client directly, which is fine. Not necessary as far as I'm concerned.

Ryan Davis: Sometimes we don't even get to talk to the client directly. Like, 'cause we are working with the pr, the PR agency's hiring us to run their influencer white label, so the client doesn't even know we exist, you know? Um, so the influencer is now like four people away from the actual person that's making the content. As

Sean Weisbrot: long as I get paid based on my contractual requirements, I don't really care.

Ryan Davis: But there are other, there are other things, right? Things that probably like obvious tactical things, like if you buy fake followers, if you're buying fake engagement, if you're, if that stuff. You can't get away with it anymore. Like 10 years ago there you could get away with like fake numbers, but now with all the network analysis tools that we have, we can tell if the engagement's fake. We can tell that and like that you know, means we probably won't wanna work with you. Another thing that people do that they think is helping but ultimately is sort of engagement farming, is they form these sort of. Collective. So like, you know, me and you would be in a group with 48 other like business podcasters, and every time you published a podcast you would drop it and you'd be like, Hey, like this, what? And like that gets a lot of engagement. But what happens is engagement all from the same network and we can see that and it looks, it, it actually ends up looking like fake engagement, even if it's not. And so that's that, that kind of goes against what you're trying to do, right? Hmm.

Sean Weisbrot: So one of the things that I was experiencing with this client that has me concerned that they may not work with me again, even though I liked the PR firm and the PR firm likes me, that's what it feels like, is that the client was extremely rigid and kept wanting to force me to make changes, and I pushed back on a lot of the changes and. They were like, they wanted to throw extra money at me. And I was like, you couldn't pay me a million dollars to make that change. I'm sorry. I'm just not gonna do it. Um, because that, that change takes my thumbnail from a good video to obvious advertisement. And the PR firm was like, to be fair, it's an advertisement. I go, yes, I know it's an advertisement. The audience knows it's an advertisement and the client knows an advertisement, but I'm trying to make it feel like a story so that people actually click on it and watch the damn video.

Ryan Davis: It's a really bad note that they gave you like the. It, to be fair, it is an advertisement. Like, no, you don't want it to feel like an advertisement. Like, like the whole point is it shouldn't feel like an ad. If it feels like an ad, you're doing it wrong. You know, be, and that defeats the point of, of having like this sort of a, a content, um, even if it's produced, it shouldn't feel like an ad. It should feel like a comedy sketch. It should feel like a, it should feel like a, a, a TikTok, like a viral TikTok thing. It shouldn't feel like an ad, even if it, even as an, even if it is an ad.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I mean the, the way I did it was part like, maybe two minutes of the eight minute video. So it was a, an e-commerce focused platform where you can search for different, uh, business trends, market analysis, these kinds of things based on a certain image or a prompt. And it's connected to Alibaba and, and other platforms, so you can get real insights from manufacturers. And I, in the past, uh, in this year was researching the idea of starting a vegan dog treat brand. This is real. So I spent about two minutes of the eight minutes talking about my experience with this, you know, with this idea and the research I was doing and how when the brand came to me and asked me to do a video about them, I decided that I was gonna talk about it and, and what I learned from using the platform to do some research. And at first, the client wanted me to get rid of that. And I was like, no, that's the thing that makes people think that this is like legitimate. Like this is me sharing of myself and validating the fact that your product is actually good and interesting.

Ryan Davis: Right. And when we hire a creator, the whole idea is we are, we are asking that creator to put, use their credibility with our audience, their expertise, their authority. To validate the product. And so that's, you were doing what they asked you to do. It seems like, here's the thing though, not all influencer marketing firms are the same. There are a lot of folks who are, who are, you know, really leaning in still to the kinda the old school affiliate playbook where it's very heavy, like put the CTA in the first five seconds kind of thing. And that's a certain way to, to sell a product if it's like way down the funnel. But. You know, we think creators are incredible, like education, awareness, persuasion, play, and that kind of more soft, that softer upper funnel stuff is so important and creators can do that incredibly well. And then the folks who saw your video should be getting like a crazy direct, like 15% off, you know, like direct CTA thing after they've seen the video that they're, that they're clicking on like through remarketing. But that shouldn't be your job. They don't want that to be your job. 'cause that kills your credibility with the audience.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. Luckily for me, this particular product is free to use, so I don't have to offer any deals or anything like that. Yeah. But, um, but yeah, actually I had, I had filmed the video and they're like, at one minute in 29 seconds, I. We want you to add in there that like you can go, like if you're, if you're so excited and you have to see the product, like you can go to the link in the description below and I was like, why do I wanna take people away from the video before it's finished? Yeah. I did it anyways because they were being annoying about it, but I. Because then like I had to re-record these like five seconds and I had to get B roll to fill it. 'cause I didn't wanna film my face for those five seconds. Yeah. And, and then my editor had to extend the video and all of the aspects on the track and, and all the assets had to be shifted over by a few. It's like. It was like eight days of

Ryan Davis: hell. Now, when you do that, do you like, so we, part of our standard influencer contract is one round of revisions. If we're doing a video and working with like a, a celebrity or a really high level creator, they won't make a video. They'll send us basically a outline. Slash mini script of what they wanna do, the client or like approve that and then they'll make the video one round of feedback on that in the, you know, one round of feedback in the understanding that, you know, everything in that outline was already approved. So like, we're not going back to that. And then the content can go live with a micro creator. You can kind of get more rounds of revisions in. But that's, that's the kind of thing that should be stipulated in, in the contract. And you should say, how many rounds of revisions are we gonna go through? Um, they wanted three,

Sean Weisbrot: I said two. Yeah. And they were pushing it very hard and I was like, yeah, I'm not happy with that. So the experience made me realize that I needed to go to chat two PT and generate a contract based on the things I will do and the things I won't do. Right, right, right. That's a good idea. Now I have, now I have a dedicated video contract and a podcast sponsorship contract. That way anyone that wants to deal with me, they sign that thing. They understand all of the things like, yeah, I won't do it like that again.

Ryan Davis: So this, so, you know, Stanford University did a big study that we, we provided some, some data for where they looked at hundreds of thousands of influencer contracts, and then they looked at the content that was produced from those contracts and they found that. The more specific the brand was with the instructions to the creators, the least amount of freedom the creator got. The content at the end of that performed worse. So like the more open that the contracts were to letting the creator make the content that they knew already fit their audience, the better it performed. So. You know, ultimately the more feedback a client gives, even if they're trying to do their best, they actually can't know their audience as well as, you know, you know your audience, or I know my audience, or Mr. Beast knows his audience, or whoever it is, right? Like, and that's the reason you're hiring the creator and you've gotta learn to give away your creative direction. You know, you're the creator is now the creative director and you're the, you are working with them, you know, in that capacity.

Sean Weisbrot: And Chacha PT suggested all of those things in the contract that it generated for me is like, did I, I have full creative control, too bad deal with it.

Ryan Davis: Yeah, but I'm just telling you that, that. You know, not even from the influencer perspective, from the perspective of the brand, it's not a good idea. So if you're out there hiring creators, give them a more, you know, under, you know, go in there with a very clear call to action. What do you, what do you, what's the objective of the content? But give them flexibility to speak to the audience. 'cause that's, they, they understand that audience and, and that's why you're bringing them in.

Sean Weisbrot: Hey, just gimme 10 seconds of your time. I really appreciate you listening to the episode so far, and I hope you're loving it. And if you are, I would love to ask you to subscribe to the channel because what we do is a lot of work. And every week we you a new guest and a new story, and what we do requires so much love. So that we can bring you something amazing and every week we're trying really hard to get better guests that have better stories and improve our ability to tell their stories. So your subscription lets the algorithm know that what we're doing is fantastic and no commitment. It's free to do. And if you don't like what we're doing later on, you can always unsubscribe. And either way, we would love a, like if you don't feel like subscribing at this time. So what's the. Smallest number of, I don't know, call it subscribers or views or like what are the, the, the lowest amount in terms of metrics that someone's looking for, where they start to be willing to sponsor someone?

Ryan Davis: Well, I think there's still like a fixation with like the less sophisticated, um, marketers around like, you know, getting like celebrities and like macro creators. But on the, on the, on, you know, down in the follower account and what we call like the nano and the micro, and these people with like 2, 3, 4, 5,000 followers and above. You know, that's where you're seeing the highest performing content, the best, um, return on, on investment for, for brands. So you, you don't need that many followers, just, just a few thousand on any given platform. Focus on one or two platforms, not, not, you know, people spend all their time on one platform and then TikTok goes away. You know, that's, that, that sucks. So like, you can be a TikTok person, but also, you know, be, be, you know, have an Instagram reels presence just in case, uh, you know, you can be a sub stacker, but you know, have. Have a u, you know, YouTube presence, just in case. One of the great things about Substack of course, is that you own those, those connections. Um, but yeah, I think the follower accounts matter less 'cause because now you know, a good 10, 15% of the clients who work with us, they don't even want the follower. They don't even want the creator to post. They want the video. So they don't care how many followers you have. They care that you look the part you, you can, you can and you can, you know, perform it. Yeah. 'cause the people that have come to me want it on my YouTube channel. Yeah, well you have a good, a good YouTube channel, so that makes sense. But, you know, there's a whole thing now of fake podcast UGC that's happening where, you know, guys will set up like a, like a situation that looks sort of like a Rogan, you know, they've got the cool headphones and thing, and, and they, there's no real podcast and they're just recording user generated content as if it were a podcast conversation. But it is really just like this, this to me is like, sort of like the, the newest form of, um. You know, that TV advertising, uh, you know, we used to watch all the time where it's pretending to be a talk show, but it's really a, it's really just a, a sales show. How do you pretend I've, I've never, I don't understand this. I mean, you just, you just, you're not making a podcast. You're making a, a user generated conversation like you and I, and we're recording this and we, we package it, and then that becomes the ad and it looks like you and I are having a podcast conversation. But in reality, this is an ad for an HR platform. But the viewer doesn't know that. 'cause it just shows up in their feed and they think it's two people like having like a podcast conversation.

Sean Weisbrot: I would do that if someone pays me.

Ryan Davis: Yeah. No, I don't think it's a bad, I I, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm saying it's, it's a but but you actually have a podcast. You're not just some guy like

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Ryan Davis: Producing, you know, pretend podcast content.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, so I did recently interview two co-founders of a legal AI tech firm. I. That was funded by Silicon Valley and originally they wanted to be affiliate, or they wanted me to be an affiliate marketer for them and give me a percentage, whatever. And I was like, I'm sorry, I don't do affiliates because I, I can't feed my family on hope, but if you wanna sponsor me, then you can sponsor me. And they agreed to be a sponsor. And when I was doing the calls with them, I was like, you know, I like what you're doing. I wanna interview you. Why don't we just sponsor your episode? And so I'll put your ads. I'll read your ads and I'll, I'll, I'll write it and I'll read it, but I'll also interview, it'll be a real interview, but also I'm promoting you at the same time, and they're like, okay, cool. So I like that idea and I would like to do more of that where I'm interview, like I'm, I'm interviewing, you know, funded founders from Silicon Valley that are doing cool stuff that I like. While they're sponsoring the episode, so I, I get paid to interview them, basically.

Ryan Davis: Yeah. I mean, that's a sponsored, that's just like a sponsored content play. That, that, that to me totally makes sense. And as long as you're like, you know, you, you feel comfortable, you can maintain your audience, like credibility and your, like, you know, you feel comfortable about the stuff you're endorsing, then, you know, I don't see any, any issue with that at all. It's like, you know, it's the same thing.

Sean Weisbrot: One of the two interviews is my best performing video of all time.

Ryan Davis: Fantastic.

Sean Weisbrot: It's gotten 33,000 views. So that's a win-win. Yeah. Yeah. They're happy with it. The funny thing is, it's the, the, um, the, the lawyer, so there's a, a technical found, a co-founder, and then there's a, a lawyer who's the other co-founder. And because it's a legal AI play, you need a lawyer in the loop to make sure that the AI is doing things correctly and the, the lawyer's interview did better than the technical interview. In the technical interview we were going into how you make the AI data not mess up. Where are you getting the data from? How are you training the models? You know, we talked a lot about the, the infrastructure, the backend of how the system works, which for me is fascinating. I love those conversations. Not everyone is, but some people are. But yeah, I think, I think the, the lawyer one got like seven or 8,000 more views than the technical one.

Ryan Davis: Is there, and is there anything in the analytics, like did it get picked up by like a, like a law blog? Did it get tweeted by like somebody did it get into some network that you don't usually get into? I don't know.

Sean Weisbrot: The thing is, I, I run ads on YouTube Right. For almost every video to boost. Right. We've had this conversation. Yeah. I'm boosting the videos so. I put the same amount of money on both of the videos. One just performed better than the other. I don't know why. Maybe, maybe 'cause they're Silicon Valley founders, um, maybe because law is more interesting to people than tech. I'm not really sure. Maybe I had a better interesting title than the other.

Ryan Davis: Yeah. And also you're, you're, you're really into the, the, you know, you and I have talked about YouTube, um, gosh, the, the, the stills. The thumbnails. The thumbnails. Yeah. We've talked about thumbnail. You're like a thumbnail guy. You've, you've, you're like,

Sean Weisbrot: I'm trying, I I try to focus on every aspect. Right? Like Mr. Beast is so big because he's been obsessing over every tiny detail of everything you can obsess over for. 10 years or so.

Ryan Davis: I read like a 10 page analysis of like Mr. Beast's thumbnails, like, uh, a year or two ago. And I was totally convinced that, uh, like, like he had figured it out. And then, and then once you are, like, once you are aware of like what he's doing when you go on YouTube, you're like, okay, that's, that's like he invented this thing now every, like he, he figured out like what the algorithm likes,

Sean Weisbrot: well, what the algorithm likes is what people like. The algorithm is looking for, I think there's a hundred different signals that an individual viewer is giving off, like the conversion rate from the, uh, from the title and the thumbnail over to the intro. Yeah. How long are they staying on there? Are they watching something else after? Are they just leaving the platform after? There's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of details that, that you,

Ryan Davis: yeah. I feel like the Instagram reels algorithm is so simple. It's like, you know, are, are people stopping? You know, what's the, what's the watch time And like, share, it's so, it's like, so it's so easy to kinda like figure out how to like create. Things that kind of like live in that short video world. YouTube, YouTube's always been more of a black box to me. I've never been like a serious YouTube publisher versus like all the other channels that I have. So I've never like run my own YouTube channel or run a brand's YouTube channel. I think, you know, it's, YouTube itself as a platform is, is different now than it was a year and a half ago, right? Like now the majority of YouTube views are happening on smart TVs, right? So like the entire experience people had with YouTube 10 years ago was always on their laptops or their phones. And now that experience is entirely different. So, so, you know, your viewers might be watching this or 51% of them might be watching this like, you know, on a smart tv and that's that, that's a whole different experience.

Sean Weisbrot: I actually saw that, I think it's 90% of my people are watching from their phone.

Ryan Davis: Really? Yeah, that's pretty good. It's pretty, pretty mobile, pretty young hip audience you've

Sean Weisbrot: got? Well, about half of them are 25 to 34. That makes sense. So they're probably used to listening to podcasts on the go. Yeah, so it would make sense to me. You know, I don't know what percentage of them are premium users, but. With premium YouTube, you can actually turn your screen off and put it in your pocket and keep going. Right. And it'll keep playing. I, I buy premium for that reason. Exactly. And this is, this is why

Ryan Davis: I don't, yeah, this is why I don't watch, like, I'm like a Apple podcast guy. You know, like I, I love podcasts, but I'm not like a YouTube podcaster. I, you know, um, you know, I have a podcast, a travel podcast out of office, and we've been doing it for five years. And Apple Podcast, we get 15,000 downloads in episode. Built like the old school audio way. The the, we don't have any video, video component. We go on YouTube, but only 'cause the podcast thing publishes there and it's just audio. And we would love to do some video component of it. We just haven't, you know, it's like a side project for us. And it's just the, you know, it's like another level of commitment to do more video work. But when we launched the podcast five years ago, video, video podcasts were a thing. But they were very, they were, they were a different animal, you know? They were like, they were. Now I feel like there's been like a convergence where you're expected to do both.

Sean Weisbrot: My first a hundred episodes were audio only, and then I started doing video and I regretted not having a hundred videos worth of content. And so I went back and I made audiograms that I uploaded to YouTube so that you could listen to it, but it looks like it's a video in a way, but it's, it's like it. It's like the audio that's like moving as the person's talking. Right. I still regret I don't have that content because I did video calls with the person as I was recording. I just didn't capture or edit the video. So I'll, I will never have access to that content. Only the audio.

Ryan Davis: Well, you know, we just, we just made a decision on people first marketing team that. You know, we have a substack, we've got 4,000 subscribers. We've been, you know, it's, it's a, it's a really quality, uh, strategy, social impact strategy newsletter, and now. For every newsletter we produce, whoever writes a main essay has to do a 62nd explainer video along with it. So we're gonna start like producing a piece of video content along with any, any other serious marketing collateral report, et cetera. You know, 'cause we're producing all these great numbers and like we can get it into the, into wonky people, you know, but the, the one, the level below the wonky or, uh, we need the video to reach 'em. I think

Sean Weisbrot: you can. Probably generate that video from the transcription. I mean like AI could generate it completely with the voice of the person

Ryan Davis: we want. Like I know people first. Yeah. Part of the brand. I know, but like part of the brand, Sean. No. So what I've been thinking on the travel podcast though is we gotta be pretty close to a, an app that I can upload my podcast and say, create like an animated video that like, like goes along with this podcast. Then, then, you know, it's a travel podcast. It could, while we're talking, it could show Ireland, it could show whatever. So I feel like with the audio, there must be a way to just backwards produce a bunch of like. AI swap that,

Sean Weisbrot: that, that could go up on YouTube. You could. The problem is, I'm imagining your podcast is 30 to 60 minutes. Yeah. It's, it's, it would be an exorbitantly expensive to generate that kind of video. Yeah. From an AI at this stage, rather than using stock footage. Yeah. If you were to use an AI to. Find stock footage, not AI generated footage, you would be able to do that much faster or much cheaper.

Ryan Davis: I could probably just hire an editor to, to knock it out. Uh, overseas you could,

Sean Weisbrot: and they'd use ai, but how many episodes do you have that you'd have to generate content for? I imagine it's a hundred, 200, at least. Almost 200. Yeah. Too many. It, it would be very difficult to, it, it would be costly as well. I'm actually. I'm, I'm gonna be hitting two 50 soon in, like, in this month. And that's a lot. I was thinking. Yeah, well I've been doing, August is five years, so I was thinking, what if I were to extract the transcripts from every single one of the audios. I, I still, uh, every time I upload a video, I extract the audio from it in order to publish on Acast, which then pushes to Spotify and iTunes. Right. So I have all of that and I have half the transcripts. 'cause at some point I said, screw it. And I stopped doing transcripts. And I was thinking if I could generate the other half of those transcripts. I could probably feed them into an ai, and the AI could probably extract one lesson from every interview and then collate it into, I don't know, an ebook or a website or something, and then I could create an AI assistant that's connected to that content so that you could query the assistant based on the the content to find out. Information from it. Right? And whether that's a giveaway for everyone or whether I charge people, you know, five bucks, 10 bucks, like one time, just thank you, you know, for creating this. Uh, I, I don't know, but I feel like there's tremendous potential value in doing something like that. That's

Ryan Davis: cool. Yeah, no, I mean, the. The, yeah, that, that, that's a fun idea. I mean, there's lots you can do with that data.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could potentially create a report and sell it to other business owners. You know, over five years I've spoken to 250 brand owners that are running seven to nine figure annual revenue brands. This is the thing that they're most concerned about. This is the thing they're most excited about. This is the thing that they're focused on, you know? These are the things that they're planning for whatever, whatever. Although if it's five years, you know, the data gets skewed over that time. So what's something that I haven't asked you that you feel is really important to help close out this conversation?

Ryan Davis: I think that we touched on like the co-creation bit, but what, you know, one thing I'll say is, is whether or not you are a creator who's trying to figure out how to build like sort of a niche specialty. Or you're a small brand, you know, this is a real opportunity for, for, for, you know, smaller brands and creators sort of work together, help each other figure out in innovative ways to collaborate and, and, uh, um, you know, I think we're gonna see the rise of, of, of creators as, as, as partners in companies. Um, you know, as, as CMOs and entering sort of a really interesting age of. Of, of marketing that's gonna be divided between this incredible AI moment and, and this other sort of competing moment of, of influencer and, and, and creator. So it'd be, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.