- 2 years ago
Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA Worldwide, was recently a guest on Benzinga's All-Access.
IZEA Worldwide is a marketing technology company providing software and professional services that enable brands to collaborate and transact with the full spectrum of today's top social influencers and content creators. The company serves as a champion for the growing Creator Economy, enabling individuals to monetize their content, creativity and influence.
IZEA has built a new AI tool called Form AI, which is intended to allow influencers and businesses to run their campaigns better.
IZEA Worldwide is a marketing technology company providing software and professional services that enable brands to collaborate and transact with the full spectrum of today's top social influencers and content creators. The company serves as a champion for the growing Creator Economy, enabling individuals to monetize their content, creativity and influence.
IZEA has built a new AI tool called Form AI, which is intended to allow influencers and businesses to run their campaigns better.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Hey, good morning, Todd.
00:05 Welcome to the show.
00:06 - Hey, how are you doing?
00:08 - Doing great.
00:09 Glad you're back.
00:10 I know we've got some visuals to go after here as well,
00:12 but before we get to that, my man,
00:14 give me a quick brief overview for the folks
00:16 that may not be familiar at home.
00:17 What is it that your company does?
00:20 - IZEA is a MarTech company that is focused
00:23 on the influencer marketing space.
00:26 We have both software and services
00:28 that we provide companies primarily focused
00:31 on Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 brands,
00:35 but we also have a software offering
00:37 that is catering to smaller businesses as well.
00:41 - You know, we've kind of learned about this term
00:43 in the past couple of years of it being a creator economy.
00:46 We've seen it really, really rapidly,
00:48 you know, getting more important.
00:50 You're the pioneer of the influencer economy, right?
00:53 What has changed in the major trends in the last few years,
00:56 but also how has it changed since you started in this space?
01:00 - Oh my gosh.
01:01 So we have to go way back.
01:03 We're talking about when I started.
01:04 That's back to 2006.
01:07 In the beginning, it was all about mommy bloggers.
01:11 Honestly, mommy bloggers are really the pioneers
01:14 of the influencer marketing space.
01:16 When we first started doing this,
01:18 it was on message boards and early blogs,
01:21 and even on MySpace of all things.
01:24 And people were really focused on long form text content
01:28 at that time.
01:28 And what has changed is the advent of the iPhone
01:32 and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, YouTube Shorts.
01:37 And now people are really focused
01:39 on high quality snackable video content,
01:44 primarily vertical content in nature.
01:47 - Yeah, I mean, that short form content
01:49 really is blowing up and we continue to see ads
01:51 and brands kind of go in that way.
01:53 So let's talk about the brand's most effective use
01:56 of the influencers and how are you kind of enabling this?
02:00 - I think that there's really two ways
02:01 that brands are using influencers.
02:04 One is for the people that have big reaches,
02:08 hundreds of thousands, millions of followers.
02:11 They're spending a lot of money investing in those campaigns
02:15 and the influencers themselves are making thousands,
02:17 tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars
02:20 for a single post to their social media feeds.
02:23 And then one of the things that we've seen more recently
02:26 is brands really starting to invest more heavily in UGC.
02:30 So they are looking for content that's created by more,
02:35 either nano influencers or just their end customers
02:38 and getting that type of content promoted
02:41 and distributed through either their own social handles
02:45 or doing paid promotion on the social channels.
02:47 - And that second part is so important
02:49 because sometimes people believe that,
02:50 hey, if I don't have X amount of followers,
02:52 no matter how good I am, I cannot get brand deals.
02:55 I cannot get sponsorships.
02:56 I cannot do this for a living, but that's just not true
02:58 because if you create quality things,
03:00 brands can go ahead and use that
03:02 and amplify it on their own message
03:04 by the content that you've created.
03:06 Let's talk about Form.ai.
03:09 Who is it for?
03:10 - Oh my gosh, I love Form.ai.
03:12 So I get really excited when we talk about it.
03:15 Form.ai is a suite of AI tools that combines technologies
03:20 from Stable Diffusion, OpenAI,
03:23 and kind of brings them all into one platform.
03:26 So we have the ability to create really high quality
03:30 photo images, text images,
03:33 create videos of talking portraits,
03:36 and also you can use chat GPT
03:39 right inside of the system as well.
03:42 So it's really cool.
03:43 It's focused on both brands and creators.
03:46 It's super low cost,
03:47 but it's designed for more of those power users.
03:49 So if you think about going into a chat GPT normally
03:53 and asking it for an image,
03:55 you might get one or two images back.
03:57 In our system, you can go and you can create 96 images
03:59 in one shot and it's really fast.
04:02 - Now, how does that differentiate from IZEA Flex?
04:06 - So Flex is really gears toward our enterprise marketers.
04:10 So those brands that are spending, you know,
04:13 hundreds of thousands of dollars a month
04:15 in their influencer marketing initiatives,
04:17 it provides a platform for them to manage
04:20 all of their creators, manage talent agents,
04:23 manage payments to creators, contracting.
04:26 There's a content repository
04:28 and it connects directly into Shopify.
04:31 So it allows them to actually close the purchase loop.
04:34 When an influencer is promoting a product,
04:36 they can actually see who bought the product
04:39 on the other side, what product they actually bought,
04:43 and then see their ROI for each individual influencer
04:46 in their content.
04:47 - So you've got a lot of cool things
04:48 that are currently going on.
04:49 I like the Flex video aspect of it,
04:51 especially with what we talked about in terms of video
04:53 and the fact that enterprises are able to utilize it as well
04:55 to benefit their own bottom line.
04:58 Let's talk about money.
04:59 You reported a slight decrease in revenue
05:02 and an increase in operating costs for Q1 this year
05:06 versus what you had reported in Q1 of 2023.
05:09 What happened to kind of lead to this?
05:12 - I think we're talking about Q4.
05:14 So it was actually a slight increase.
05:17 Sorry, a 1% increase in revenue
05:20 and then also an increase in expenses.
05:23 Last year, if you go and you read our earnings,
05:27 or you listen to our earnings calls,
05:29 you read the transcripts,
05:31 you'll know that we parted ways
05:32 with a very large customer last year.
05:34 So it was a big transitionary year for us.
05:38 We had a lot of costs with those transitions
05:41 and also we were making investments
05:43 and expanding into new markets.
05:45 So we expanded into South Korea last year.
05:48 Prior to that, we made investments in China and the UK.
05:52 So we are very much so in a growth mode right now.
05:55 We are investing in that growth,
05:57 both on our managed services side of our organization
06:00 as well as in technology.
06:04 - Now, do you expect this trend to continue?
06:06 - We expect this year, we're gonna see increased bookings.
06:10 It's gonna take some time for that revenue
06:12 to catch up to the bookings.
06:14 But if you look at the numbers that we just reported
06:17 for our Q1 bookings,
06:20 they were up 53% year over year to 9.3 million.
06:24 So we're back on a good bookings growth trajectory.
06:27 We expect that to continue.
06:30 We are trying to grow this company.
06:32 And so when you listen to our last earnings call,
06:36 I laid out a vision to get the $75 million
06:39 in annualized revenue over the next three years.
06:42 And we're pretty confident that we're gonna get there.
06:45 - And I'm pretty confident as I'm sure you are as well.
06:47 The creator economy is just kind of the beginning, right?
06:50 We were used to in this space,
06:52 and this is my opinion,
06:53 that you had actors and actresses
06:55 that were on movies and screens and ads,
06:57 but now you have creators that are there.
06:59 I know plenty of them that now work with the NBA.
07:01 There was a meme that was going about a TikTok creator
07:04 and how they were kind of a gaslighting him
07:06 and making fun of his content.
07:08 The NFL picked it up and said,
07:09 "Hey, you're popular.
07:11 We're gonna use you."
07:12 So he got a bag from the NFL.
07:14 So we're in this space, in my opinion,
07:16 is just the bottom of the first.
07:18 But what is your take in terms of the future of influencing?
07:21 - I think that it's still very early days.
07:24 I mean, I've been at this for almost 17 years now.
07:27 So it sounds crazy to even say that.
07:29 But as these tools and the technologies continue to grow
07:34 and more people get access to be able to create content,
07:38 there's only gonna be more of it.
07:40 And our goal is really to democratize
07:43 the sponsorship aspect of this space
07:46 and give more opportunities to more people.
07:48 Those smaller creators who may not have the chance
07:51 to go out and reach out to a brand directly
07:55 or out to their agency,
07:56 we provide a way for them to connect
07:58 to those brands and agencies and get their first deals.
08:02 - Awesome.
08:02 Thank you so much.
08:03 This is a space that I'm sure you and I
08:04 will be continuing conversations on.
08:06 And I appreciate you coming on this morning.
08:08 - Thank you.
08:09 (upbeat music)
08:12 (upbeat music)
Comments