Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Revolutionizing Influencer Marketing with AI: Insights from Alexander Frolov, CEO of Hype Auditor

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 393

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AI is redefining influencer marketing by enabling brands to identify the right influencers with unparalleled precision. In this episode, we discussed the transformative role of AI in influencer discovery, personalized outreach, and campaign performance analysis.

• The continuous growth of influencer marketing and its increasing relevance
• Importance of using AI for authentic influencer identification
• Streamlining outreach processes through AI personalization
• Enhancing campaign performance analysis with AI
• Evolving landscape of influencer marketing with a focus on short video formats
• Anticipated innovations in content production driven by AI

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Speaker 1:

AI is changing everything, including how you approach influencer marketing. Imagine finding the perfect influencers, sending personalized messages that resonate, and measuring ROI with unparalleled precision all with the help of AI. In this episode, I dive deep into the synergy of AI and influencer marketing with Alexander Frolov, co-founder and CEO of Hype Auditor. Learn how to leverage AI tools to save time, boost creativity and elevate your marketing game, but only if you stay tuned to listen to this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neil Schafer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, welcome to episode number 393 of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer, just returning from a wonderful week in Japan. More on that to come in future episodes. But one thing that was very interesting is that there is a boom in startups that is happening right now in Japan. Governments are actually funding startups. They are investing in co-op working spaces. They are fostering the growth of startup culture in their local economies. If you were thinking of becoming a digital nomad or launching a startup or collaborating with other startups, japan is a legitimate option. More on that to come.

Speaker 1:

Today, we're diving into how artificial intelligence is reshaping influencer marketing. You all know hopefully you've read the Age of Influence, if not even in digital threads. I cover influencer marketing, but it is one of the most effective ways to build your brand and connect with your audience, but doing it effectively and efficiently can be a challenge. That's where AI comes in. Today I interview Alexander Frolov, ceo of Hype Auditor. Maybe some of you have used some of their free tools before to check for fake followers or how much influence one influencer has over another, but they are a leading platform for influencer analytics and campaign optimization. I use them, I recommend them, and I hope you'll check them out as well. Together, we'll explore how AI is making influencer discovery easier, outreach more personalized and campaign performance analysis more insightful. If you're looking to save time, increase your ROI and stay ahead in the digital marketing game, this episode's gonna be for you. So, without further ado, here's my interview with Alexander Frolov.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. This is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer. Welcome to another live stream edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Today's live stream and podcast episode is being sponsored by my new book Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth a practical guide to building your brand and driving results. I haven't really talked a lot about this book because I've been focusing on digital threads, but it did come out just this last Tuesday, september 17th, so definitely check that out, and right now, until the end of the month, it is only 99 cents. Can you believe it? I can't. But anyway, act now before it's too late, and I look forward to hearing your feedback about the book.

Speaker 1:

Today, we're going to talk about influencer marketing, but not just influencer marketing, but influencer marketing and artificial intelligence technology. For those of you that bought or have read the Age of Influence, you'll know that back in March of 2020, this is a topic that I was already talking about In fact, if we go to the final chapter of the book, chapter 17, final thoughts, the future of influencer marketing and the Role of Artificial Intelligence and I think, as you'll find out from today, the field continues to evolve, and I think it's going to continue to evolve. We have not seen the end of what AI can do to help you, and I also think, as we talk through these issues, you're going to find ideas where you can leverage AI in other parts of your marketing operation. So I'm really excited today to bring on one of the founders and CEO of Hype Auditor, alexander Frohlob, now Hype Auditor.

Speaker 1:

For those of you that don't know, it really is the definitive influencer marketing tool. You don't need an enterprise package to get started. They've always had free tools. It's been extremely accessible. When I teach my influencer marketing class at UCLA Extension, I already have a number of students who say oh, yeah, yeah, I just use Hype Auditor to do analysis. So it really has become one of those default tools and obviously, if you haven't checked it out, you should. But today we're not going to talk so much about the tool, but about the technology and how best to use that technology for your influencer marketing. So, without further ado, I'm so excited, so honored to have Alexander Frolov, the CEO of Hype Auditor. Alex, welcome to the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 3:

Hello, hello everyone. I'm glad to be here and thanks for such a warm introduction.

Speaker 1:

So, alex, I guess you know with all of my guests influencer marketing when we were born was not a thing. So at some point you got interested. Obviously you built a company based on technology with influencer marketing. So I'm just curious how did all this get started?

Speaker 3:

Actually it's pretty interesting because, like influencer, marketing, for like a long, long period of time, has been a topic that is widely discussed, but sometimes more, sometimes less. But even when we started a company, it was quite a big topic and it makes a difference from the other industries because it's growing from year to year, not exploding like other industries, because it's like growing from year to year, not like exploding like other industries, but step by step, growing, growing every year, and it's already become a part of our life, quite important part. There is not so many people who do not use social networks and do not look on influencers. But back in our days it was also quite popular and we think this was a good area to make a startup and we have previous experience working with a big data project working on the Hyalur project.

Speaker 3:

So we are coming live more not from advertisement side, but more from a tech side, and our first idea was to create a marketplace where everything will be fully automatically brands from one side, influencers from outside and we are just somewhere in the mediocre have them making the deals. But it was a very hard task, as we found out on the way, and there were around 200 of other startups trying to do the same and probably very few succeed and there is not a marketplace model in its original way working right now. But at this moment, we find a big issue that there is a lot of issues about authenticity of influencers, about are there real followers, real engagement, or the fake one? Back in 2018, there were a lot of bots and it was like a big topic and basically that was our point of start. Our first two was like very simple you check Instagram accounts and give you an analytics, and one of the most important parts of this analytics was like fraud detection and it makes us like popular in our like first year.

Speaker 3:

It was quite surprising. We do not solve it in any other business. We get a viral effect in the beginning. Influencers start to talk about us, we get a good rating on the product content. Yeah, that's how we start there, but following the years it becomes like more complicated too. But yeah, that's how the story started.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha. So you had a technology background and you also saw this growth of influencer marketing. It's true that at the beginning there were just agencies. There really wasn't much technology, and I guess there were some social listening tools that said, oh, we do influencer marketing tool, but nothing really dedicated to the space. So you saw opportunity there. I mean, it does not sound like. It sounds like you have more of a technology background rather than a marketing background. So I'm just curious at what point did you think that influencer marketing had legs or this? You know this is something big that, as a startup, nobody else is doing we need to do it. Was there like a turning point, an epiphany moment, something that said you know, we got to do this?

Speaker 3:

Actually there is two parts Like one is a business part, where we see like the market is growing, where we see there are more budgets spent, like 20% grow year over year.

Speaker 3:

But there also was a human factor because I personally believe in the beginning and still believe in this topic because influencer, marketing, creator, economy, overall changes our life and I think it's a good change because if you remember, like 20 years ago, but some people, even in our days, you just see to watch a tv ads, for example, and you cannot skip them. Nobody cares about how to integrate them, all the stuff. And now, like all this brand, like carefully integrated, it's in what's interesting to the people, audiences, so it's shaping the world, it's shaping the advertising, it's shaping how the products company trying to make the products ready for influencers. But that also mean that people will like these products and this is a good way. So there was like two things about it because, like there were markets, data, but there also was a human feeling that it's good and important area where I can use, like my skill as a businessman and bring some value.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more and it's funny because I wrote this book, the Age of Influence, back in. It was written in 2019. It came out right when COVID started and there was a lot of people saying, oh well, now that COVID's here, influence marketing's dead, and we've heard that over the years. Email marketing's dead is another thing we've heard and, alex, I think you'd agree. Looking now at everything you just talked about, there just continues. And with every younger generation there's actually more content creators and more reliance on the opinions of content creators and influencers. So it really is amazing to see this industry grow Now in parallel to influencer marketing growing.

Speaker 1:

And when I wrote that chapter on AI, this was a few years before ChatGPT. We had IBM Watson, we had some, I guess looking back, really primitive what we thought were cool tools at the time really primitive. So let's start with talking about AI. And obviously ChatGPT changed everything. So let's start with the technology. Did Hype Auditor at some point say I think even before ChatGPT you were already leveraging AI? Did ChatGPT change anything for your technology? Did you make any changes yourself or do you think its bigger impact was just on the way that it could impact the influencer market industry?

Speaker 3:

Actually, I think there will be no business in some time that will not be affected by technologies like ChatGPT, because these large language models basically open a new era, I would say, in technology. So, yeah for sure, we start to utilize it inside our product, to utilize it inside our product, and for us it feels very natural because from day one we use artificial intelligence. But there were no large language models when we started. We used just different machine learning patterns. We trained the machine learning on the data sets, like, for example, our fraud detection was based on like 54 different machine learning data sets. So it was AI, but not in the way we know it today.

Speaker 3:

Because large language models and generative AI, they kind of change the scene and now everybody tries to utilize this. We also because it could drastically reduce the time you spend on many tasks and also it makes feeling like many interfaces more natural, more human. For example, on the very first stage where you can try to find influencers, previously we used like only keywords, hashtags or something like this, but now you can like describe the persona you're looking, using like human language, like I'm looking for the woman doctor, like dermatologist, something like this, and now Discovery will understand you and I think many other influencer marketing platforms do the same, at least the top one, because I think it's generally the future not only of influencer marketing software, but all software overall. Like interfaces become more human-oriented, you're feeling more like in dialogue with the system, not like an engineer moving the buttons, scrolls, something like this, but more like a human person something like this, but more like a human person.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so Alec is this technology. So I was going to get into these three different ways in which AI can help influencer marketing so finding the influencer and we have this scenario where, for instance, we're all marketers here. So, in digital marketing, like SEO, well, I'm just going to use ChatGP to tell me what keywords I should target, and I would always argue against doing that because that's really not what ChatGPT was made for. I would still use an SEO tool that's going to give me the numbers in terms of keyword search, demand, competitor analysis. But it sounds like what you're building, then, with Hype Auditor, because you have the backend of this influencer database. In other words, if some REST Ahrefs were to build that tool, it would be based on that data right, based on all the machine learnings that it would be a lot more accurate than just asking a general large language model.

Speaker 1:

So it sounds like what you're doing then is, instead of us doing hashtag searches or location searches with a user interface, I can now do this in a human way and basically type in I am a fashion brand targeting Gen Z, female. I am looking for nano influencers who live in urban areas who have a high engagement rate and are primarily on TikTok and I'm assuming is that what you're talking about, alex. That now I can basically it almost sounds like an influencer marketing brief that a brand would give an agency to find influences. Are you saying now you feel confident with AI, that we're at that level now, that we can achieve that today with the tools?

Speaker 3:

You described kind of like step two that we are going to make. At the moment we are, like more on the step one.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so what is step one? Just so we all get an understanding.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, step one is kind of used to using the filters like to find right audience location, like all this stuff. That is about like your target audience, quality of influencer, all this stuff. But you can skip the part of looking like persona with a like right type of content, right type of personality, right type of personality. So previously you need to use like hashtag keywords, something like this. Now you can describe like persona who are you looking for, like a football player in US, something like this, and system gonna show you profiles and it will analyze not only like descriptions, text posts, but it also will analyze pictures, understand like what the person is doing and recommend you like influencers that is most close to the persona that you describe. And yeah, probably there will be a step two where there will be just natural interface, without filters, all the stuff, and you will just chat with the system, but it probably will be the next step.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I was getting ahead of myself there, but basically you are using your machine learning algorithms and your database of influencers and content. Let's say, someone in their bio did not say they were from New York City, but they're often using hashtags related to New York City. In their captions they mention New York City or their photos have some, you know, new York City imagery. I'm assuming then you you know in your database that you're then using your machine learning to tag them as being in New York City, even though it's not you know, on their bio. And that's just one example of how you're using AI to make it easier for brands to find these influencers. Is that a correct assumption? That scenario I just said?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, actually for sure, we will analyze also images, we will analyze geotext that influencer is using, and also one way is to check where influencer is, but another way is check where his or her audience is, and you also can select, okay, audience in New York and I need the personal influential for this city, and if this parameter matches, okay, you get.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you almost. If you're not using AI tools for influence marketing, you're almost doing it in the blind. And I think of this example of this class I teach and one of my students is an influencer in Costa Rica and she speaks Spanish and all her contents in Spanish, and now she's in the United States. She's only been here a year and brands are reaching out to her, but they're finding out that most of her followers in Costa Rica, in the United States, she's only been here a year and brands are reaching out to her, but they're finding out that most of her followers in Costa Rica, not the United States where they want to target right. And I think this is just a great example of things that we take for granted that the not the chat GPT type of AI, but the machine learning AI in the background can really help ensure that you are identifying the right influencer and, once again, tagging and adding those extra filters to make sure that we find the right person for our campaign. So just a reminder to everybody that technology really is a huge benefit here. So we talked about using AI and influencer identification. I think that's going to be the easiest one to understand.

Speaker 1:

But maybe the second point, which is streamlining influencer outreach with AI personalization. So, if you've been following me on LinkedIn, I've been answering a lot of collaborative articles around influencer marketing lately and it seems like every article that I contribute to I'm saying influencer marketing is a numbers game, right? If we think of this funnel, you need to be reaching out to way more people than people that are going to respond back to you and then, from there, the people that will actually agree to work with you from a financial perspective or a timing or a brand alignment. And then, even when people agree to work with you, they don't always post on schedule, right. So it is this funnel and I think where most brands struggle.

Speaker 1:

I think influencer identification. That's my key thing. If you're working with the wrong influencers, that's kind of the biggest impact of your ROI. But that outreach of reaching out to many people and it really does require this personalization that a lot of marketers are really lazy. They'd rather use a tool, just send out 100 emails or 100 DMs, and they're just not going to be as effective, as you know. So this is a really interesting use case scenario of AI personalizing these outreaches. So, alexander, can you go into a little bit more detail about this and about how our listeners and viewers might be able to take advantage of this. And this is one of those things where, if you can personalize influencer outreach, you can personalize email outreach right and email marketing or, if you're in sales, sales outreach. So I think it is very universal, but we'd love to hear more about this point.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it's one of the points where, like ChatGPT and tools like this are, like most effective because, like they can understand the context, they can write a good text and they do not need to know too much like an additional information. So, basically, you can use ChatGPT directly to help you write messages. We do run some campaigns for our biggest clients and we check how ChatGPT will just write down outreach letters for the influencers and it's doing it pretty good generally. So it's like point A, like where you can start. Chatgpt can save you a lot of time when you're just struggling Okay, how should I outreach? Like what should I write down to the influencer? So you basically can grab a lot of ideas and ready text from the chat dpt like from the beginning. But next step, yeah, would be to personalize those messages include something about this person, their latest content or something like this. We just have like very basic functionality messaging in the moment, but it's generated like first messages, but we are like working on developing it further because it saves a lot of time. But even now you can do like all this stuff manually. Like, for example, you can just get a list of your influencers, put them in Excel and there are plugins for ChatGPT that can write personalized letters for each one of them and you just need to edit the stuff.

Speaker 3:

Have some time to like educate yourself how to properly ask chat GPT, because making a right prompt it's also kind of a part of engineering. And yeah, right now we are experimenting on this field and probably it will quite soon appear inside of product to make life of clients easier. But you can do it manually and just describe in as much details as possible, like what result do you expect? Do you expect to talk about latest content? Do you expect to describe your product in some way? Do you want to include some topics to discuss for your future collaboration, some questions?

Speaker 3:

So basically you can go back and forward asking chat GPT questions and saying what you need to correct to get the right formula, like how to ask to make these letters, and then basically ask this formula for all your outreach list and then just review it and it will save you a ton of time in the future and you can definitely use it while answering back and there's a lot of plugins to do so. You can just like put down like short answer what you want to answer and, like chat, gpt, do it in a correct, nice way and you will save a lot of your time. So, yeah, basically, in terms of outreach and personalizing letters, I I would say there will be more and more of this, and it works not only for the side of brands and marketers, it also works on the side of influencers. There is a lot of tools which work for influencers to optimize their communication with their followers, and this is also cool and it helps to increase engagement rates, all the stuff, and this is also good for marketers in the end.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I guess, for those listening and there is no I'm assuming that many of you have already used ChatGPT. There's still some business people where I'm teaching them how to get started with it, but, if you were curious, my approach to this would be just put in a prompt. You are an influencer marketing expert. I would like to do personalized outreach to influencers that I've never met before, in hopes of getting a response. What is the information you need? I want to publish this as a direct message on Instagram, for instance. It could be email. What is the information you need from me about each influencer in order to generate such a personalized email? And I would really ask ChatGPT for the inputs. You could put those inputs in a spreadsheet and explain. I'm going to put these in a spreadsheet.

Speaker 1:

Input A is going to be this, input B this upload the spreadsheet and then I'm assuming, Alex, that that would spit out these personalized emails, or you could do it one by one, so it's really not hard to do.

Speaker 1:

How effective is it going to be is another question, and what I'd really love, just from a influencer marketer perspective, Alex, what would be really cool is if you develop this technology in the background and you allow brands and marketers to send these personalized outreach emails directly from Hype Auditor is to actually start getting some data as to which of those messages is actually getting opens, clicks, responses and then feeding that back into the AI so you can further improve upon that process. That's harder for us as individuals to do, but if you have that technology, it sounds like something you can do, so I hope that you're working on. I always tell marketing technology companies you have access to all the data. Use the AI to recommend how I can improve my marketing, and I see very few companies do that, so I hope that you'll be working on some of that with AI in your product.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, for sure, we are working on this at the moment and here, like there is, I say, the part of technology was already done. For us, chat gpt is already exist. We can use just it interfaces and it will done it work amazingly. For us it's a more like engineering work of understanding what influencers better react to, what clients think they need to tell to influencers what could be. These parameters, like chat GPT, need to know about influencers. So it's more on the side of the business understanding of the process, how to make it work better, and this is also kind of like prompt engineering, I would say the new era of engineering, and there is more work on this side to understand, like, how interface should be, like what information we need to gather, how to make it work better. Yeah, but it's definitely one of the things that we are working on yeah, that that sounds great, I think.

Speaker 1:

The final point, and we look at that funnel of influence identification, influence or outreach and I guess at the bottom there, and once again, if influencer marketing is a numbers game, it means that I always, you know, say, the 80 20 rule probably 20 of influencers are going to generate 80 of your results. So there is a need to sort of analyze all of this campaign performance, understand what were the platforms that perform well than others, what were the influencers that performed better than others? So maybe this isn't something built into your tool yet, but is this something that you think AI in the future will be able to help us with, to really analyze and crunch the numbers and give us some really important insight and how we can improve our influencer marketing?

Speaker 3:

I would say here AI makes it easier, like in any other area, and it also makes it more flexible. I would say main numbers you already get. You can calculate like EMV, cpv. You know how much you spend, you know how many views clicks. You get all the stuff, all this information, how many views clicks. You get all the stuff, all this information you can get even without AI and just sort the list and find the influencers that perform better here or there.

Speaker 3:

But what AI can do here, it can make your life easier. Making some summary for you, making like some summary for you, like select like the influencers, make like some proposals. This we definitely need to work, this definitely not Make like some description for this in more human form. And also it can make it like more flexible, for example, on some brands like care more about like brand safety, for example, or they care about how much positive reactions do they get for this content and for them it's more important to get positive feedback than the clicks, especially for some kind of brand campaigns or something like this or something like this.

Speaker 3:

And the AI can help with this, because definitely tool will not allow you to analyze your campaigns in any possible angle, but we kind of have all this information in the system. You can upload a CSV file and there will be information about how many likes, comments, authenticity, tone of voice, brand safety, all those kinds of information. But we do not know in the interface what you want from this. Find the influencers who, like underperform in terms of brand safety, like who do something unsafe. Find the influencers who bring, like, more positive reactions in their engage. What do you want to find?

Speaker 3:

But using AI, you can save your time and find answers to these questions pretty easily.

Speaker 3:

Just download CSV from your system where you're working, where you get all this analytic information about your campaign, and then basically ask ChatGPT to read it and answer your question about it, and it can give you much more question than the user interface can, because user interface is built up to make some like exact scenarios one, two, three, four, five and that's all and you can have like 15 different scenarios.

Speaker 3:

For example and here, when you have like these kind of specific tasks in influencer marketing, ai definitely could help you arrange those tasks and somehow it also managed to find some interesting stuff that human eye not always detect, for example, because it can analyze all this amount of information. For human eye it can be even difficult to see, when you upload all this CSV, if you had a big campaign, for example, 150 influencers, long list, a lot of numbers, a lot of content, and it's even hard to put it all inside of your head to analyze it like one picture. And for ChatGPT it's not so hard and it will help you to find some surprising things that probably without it you will not find.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, indeed, and I think even just compiling all that data and being able to understand your influencer marketing results even before AI is still a challenge for a lot of newer companies in influencer marketing or companies that aren't leveraging the technology that they should be leveraging to bring all that together.

Speaker 1:

But, yeah, I look forward to seeing, and maybe this is something where there's not going to be a tool, but you're just going to have to become better at prompt engineering and, you know, finding insight from all the data that you have. So, alex, this has been a great conversation about. You know how far AI in which ways can help you with your influencer marketing and I think in doing so, hopefully people listening and viewing are getting ideas for other ways of leveraging AI. So I want to ask you a few questions as we get to the end here. First of all, what is next in influencer marketing? Where do you see over the next six to 12 months? Do you see any changes in influencer marketing, anything that our listeners should be on the watch out or want to tune into to make sure they understand an emerging trend, or do you think it's just gonna continue as is it, just slowly and gradually growing as it has over the last few years actually influencer.

Speaker 3:

Marketing landscape is always changing and right now we are, like I would say, in the middle of changing to the era of short video format, because it started from TikTok. After YouTube, shorts, instagram Reels, everybody trying to achieve what TikTok achieved make some viral format, build a new TV where you can just scroll and scroll and watch a lot of content that is recommended to you. So we are kind of in the middle of this era and this shift will continue to rise, like there will be more and more YouTubers supporting YouTube Shirts, instagram Reels will be on the top matter list for the Instagrammers and so on. So this will continue. In terms of our today talk about ai, I think there is a lot of stuff happening.

Speaker 3:

We do not clearly know which would be, like the most important thing of tomorrow, but there is a lot of stuff happened, a lot of stuff happening. A lot of tools for influencers to boost their creativity, to communicate with their audiences, to create content in an easy way. One of the important things for influencers automatic programs to translate their content to different languages that open them access to like much wider audience and YouTube are going integrated inside YouTube. You just need to push a button and you have your lip sync function on and voila, it's speaking French, amazingly.

Speaker 1:

That was an exciting announcement from YouTube, wasn't it? And this is really recent, so really exciting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah. So in terms of content production and how the influencers work, there's a lot of changes every day, and we're talking a lot about digital influencers, or what they call virtual influencers, and I think this topic will also get a massive boost, because previously, there were a big cost of creating such influencers.

Speaker 3:

You need 3D design, you need like some production for this. It's quite a costly stuff and now with those generative AI, you can create basically these digital influencers. You just need to have an idea in your head what kind of personality, how to communicate, what will be the style. So you basically just need one persona who will imagine all this stuff. And with every day it becomes like more, easier and more realistic. Every day it becomes like more easier and more realistic, because in the first generations of mid journey you couldn't even think about making an AI influencer using this tool because it was like far away from looking as an influencer.

Speaker 3:

But nowadays, like they make consistent photorealistic picture and many people already struggle to identify where is real person and where is AI, especially the old, elder people, like for the teens, they use all this technology. They can see like the marks of, like majority of the style, how does it look like, or like stable diffusion, something like this, and they can identify. But for their like many people of elder age, they already can't understand where is the real person and where is the generated and it's for today and the technology developing with a great pace like who knows what happens in the next year. Maybe none of us will find the difference between the real people and the generated one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, indeed, and I think that's a great reminder that we were talking about influencer marketing and AI. But from a content creator, or if you are a brand looking to create more content, ai absolutely allows you to access new audiences, tends to improve the quality. And just to give you some data points, I was at a conference called PodFest in January of 2024, which is a podcasting conference, and they were already showing digital doppelgangers, so basically a digital copy of you, and there were people that were interviewing their own digital doppelganger on a podcast. Right, it's like you talking to yourself, but the doppelganger, or the AI version of you, because it's been fit years from now, all these videos that you're creating, they can all be done through AI at the same, if not higher, quality, whether it's the script or it's just a human-like. You know. Just prompt it and you know the technology is moving in that direction. Just like with generative AI on text and with audio, you're going to see it in video. So these are really good reminders, alexander.

Speaker 1:

And the other point I wanted to talk about and sort of leapfrog off what you were saying is you're absolutely right that we're in this era of recommended media.

Speaker 1:

So I think, alexander, you'd agree that influencer marketing really started as an Instagram-centric approach based on number of followers, and if you had a certain number of followers, you were like a nano-influencer or a micro-influencer. But in this era of recommended media, which a lot of people are saying it is, it's not about the followers, it is about the views of the content. It's actually about the quality of the content and TikTok really represents that and I think that I've always been a fan of. It's not about the number of followers, because we know I mean you developed the fake follower tool many, many years ago because so many people bought fake followers and bought fake engagement. So I believe that the algorithm at the end is the ultimate. You know, I'm not going to say God, but is the ultimate decider of is your content really resonating with people, right? So that was a great reminder that if you haven't shifted, you know if the algorithms are shifting in that direction, you also need to be shifting your influence and marketing that direction.

Speaker 3:

So that was a great reminder and we already see how the top YouTubers following it, like MrBeast basically, from like one influencers he become like an entertaining channel with a lot of actors, a lot of personas. He's still there, but actually it's much closer for some like reality show than just one YouTuber channel and, yeah, that's representing the shift.

Speaker 1:

He was supposed to be at VidSummit and they showed a video of him. He's like hey, I'm filming a TV series for Amazon right now, so couldn't make it. So, yeah, he eats. You know, he has his hamburgers. He has a snack bar, you know Feastival. So it's pretty incredible what he's achieved. It all came from, I think his first 100 videos were shot in a broken iPhone, so it's not a question of technology either. But anyway, alex, this has been awesome. Any sort of final notes or advice on this topic of influencer marketing, ai for audience? And, obviously, if people are interested in your tool, where should they go to find out more about it?

Speaker 3:

Speaking about tool, it's quite easy. Just go to hypeauditorcom and you'll find a lot of information and what makes us different? There is a lot of like free samples. There is some free tools. You can look top 1000 rappers in instagram like best influencers totally free on the stuff and they that can will give you a sense about the tool and about final advice.

Speaker 3:

Following our today topic, I just want to recommend anyone who is not using ai yet and like thinking how I can use it in my work or how do I enhance my like career using it and still not using it. Just start using it. It's fun, it's quite simple and you can then develop your skills step by step. Just ask ChatGPT to go to a dinner today, what to do on your vacation journey like top 10 things, all this fun stuff and download some application like Midjourney to generate some fun pictures. Just start using it to get a feeling of prompt engineering, because I think many people are just somehow afraid of this first step because it sounds like artificial intelligence, like something very cool and only available for professionals. But it's very user-friendly technology and it's really easy to start and the best way to bring some value to your work or to your processes. Start using it today and get a sense of what it is and how it works.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I always say just treat it like you're hiring an executive assistant, a virtual assistant, an intern, and just talk to it in a human way of what you need done. It's funny I won't mention any names, but a friend of mine who is a baby boomer, so you can sort of guess his age we had a talk on Friday of last week and I basically taught him from scratch and it was like a few minutes just showing him how I could prompt things and get all this various content, and over the weekend he wrote his first blog post using ChatGPT. So it's not rocket science, in all honesty. There is an art to getting those right prompts. But I also believe the more you use it, the more I mean YouTube is a phenomenal resource for really anything but recommended ChatGPT prompts for fill in the blank. You'll find loads of ideas, and I still find loads of ideas myself.

Speaker 1:

Like I mentioned, I wanted to replace stock photos on my blog with AI generated images and I realized I can upload images to ChatGPT and ask it to create a prompt describing that image so that I could use a mid journey or a stable diffusion or ChatGPT 4.0 to generate an image. And I've started doing that and it's been brilliant. So it's like the internet itself. So many people, I mean, develop entire industries based off the internet and we're seeing that same AI effect right. So there's really no limit to what you can do, other than your imagination and creativity and just spending the time to do it.

Speaker 1:

So thank you so much, alexander. This has been awesome. I couldn't agree with you more. We should all be finding ways to use it more in our life and really understanding having more AI literacy, because we're going to get to a point where I'm already there where I can sort of tell if it's AI generated or not without using a tool Sometimes, not all the time. So you know, the human element is what's going to be the differentiator, in my opinion. So use these tools smartly. In some ways, I always say you know AI in the inside, human on the outside, as much as possible. So, alex, it's been awesome Hypeauditorcom, and I look forward to having you back on the show as influencer, marketing and AI evolves and seeing where things have gone. So thank you so much, alex, for everyone listening. Thanks for tuning in. We do these live stream interviews on Fridays at 9 am Pacific on most weeks, so make sure you tune in next time. Until next time, sayonara, thanks again.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much, neil for having me have a great weekend. Thank you so much. Goodbye everyone. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

All righty. You know, influencer marketing is just one piece of the entire digital marketing puzzle that we cover here on your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Not every episode may be relevant to you, but there is a lot to cover and I like to have a broad, holistic approach to digital marketing. So I do hope, if you haven't already, you'll subscribe so that you'll be able to hear future episodes, half of which are my solo podcast episodes and half of which are interviews with thought leaders, authors, inspirational entrepreneurs and what have you. Also, if you'd like a little helping hand with your digital marketing, I actually offer two different options. One is a group coaching community called Digital First. You can find out more about it at neilschafercom slash membership and the other are fractional CMO services. These are one-to-one consulting initiatives that I do together with you and your team. You can find out more about that at neilschafercom slash CMO. And that's it for another episode of your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is Neil Schafer signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links go to podcastneilschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your Digital Marketing Coach.