Is The Creator Economy Broken? ft. Manuel Albuquerque

The biggest asset of a company is its people. The second biggest asset of a company is data. I would say it's probably the most exciting moment to be in this sector because we are witnessing the merger of the three biggest markets, commerce, social and creative marketing, becoming into one ecosystem. There's creator in there, there's nano, there's micros. Is there a stigma about being an influencer now, do you think? What is an influencer? Right. You always associate the word influencer with someone on digital. Young making a lot of money. My biggest influencer is Michael Jordan. He didn't have one web page, nothing. One social. You can see actually the big agencies, LLPP building, Agentic models, Omni Omnicom building that. You can see all the agencies trying to transition from FTE and people are trying to follow what they're hearing other people doing. And then that's kind of creating this ripple effect of people not really knowing what they're doing. And I understand why. Hello, welcome to a very special edition of Building Brand Advocacy. We're live, we're in a room full of incredible marketers and I'm sat with a man who probably has the most amount of kind of creator economy data than anybody in the industry right now. So we're going to get into that. Welcome to the show. Manuel, thank you so much for inviting me. If you could give the creator economy an honest review right now, what would you say that looked like? I would say it's probably the most exciting moment to be in this sector. And the reason why is because we are witnessing the merger of the three biggest markets, commerce, social and creative marketing, becoming into one ecosystem. So whomever today is in the sector, you should be in grateful because we are helping the path for the next 20 years of what digital represents. And the epicenter will be on social, media, commerce and career marketing into one fully ecosystem. What's interesting to me is you didn't start your business Prime Tag as a marketer, you were a basketball player. You've just told me that you were in a band, quite a big band in Portugal. Yeah, yeah. And obviously so music was a big part of that. What do you think coming into this space as someone that wasn't a marketer? Fresh eyes kind of gives you in terms of like Prime Tag, what you're seeing now versus what we're all seeing. What, what have we missed over that time? Yeah, great question. So my background is very. I became pro when I was 15, first division. I went to New York, played basketball, tried to get first division, NCAA injured my Left knee. That's my first startup. I always say that. And I get back to Portugal and that's. We call in Spanish. I'm not Spanish. We call it Culincheto. We cannot stop doing things right. So I went to the music artistic sides and I was witnessing all these my friends back home, back in New York, becoming pros, getting hundreds of thousands of fans in their Facebook pages while their sponsorships were based on their court performances. And I was like, you're uploading a video, a photo, an image on your Facebook page, having hundreds, thousands of likes, hundreds of thousands of views. And even so, your sponsorship with Adidas, with Nike is still the same. I don't get this. So I had this artistic side and this connection to this world. But I'm a geek. You see me in my airplane, I'm doing math counts. I'm doing all these weird games. Counting 25 multiplied by four divided by. I'm this guy as well with complete opposites. That is not where my brain goes. So I was like, how can I make it tangible? All this influence. Where in 2012 the word influence was not there yet. And for me it was Rose Roy performance. Let me help these guys out. And that's how I became entrepreneur on the tech sector. No clue what tech was, no clue what web digital was back in 2012. It's interesting you say that. I'm gonna throw something in there because I had a conversation the other night about the world influencer. Obviously it didn't exist. It does exist now. It was such a big word. And there's creator in there, there's nano, there's micros. No one kind of knows what to call themselves. What do you think to that? Is there a stigma about being an influencer now, do you think? In the creator space? I think there is. And even was before the name was called out in 2015, 16. Because what is an influencer? Right? You always associate the word influencer with someone digital, young, making a lot of money. My biggest influencer is Michael Jordan. He didn't have one webpage, nothing one social. And he raised the brand like Nike in 83, 84 to become what it is today. So I think there's this concept of influencer is not very clear today. I think what we're looking at today is content creators. That's the right word. And if that content influence somehow that's great. Probably it's more on the lower funnel, but if the message passes throughout millions of people, maybe it's not influencer, but it's still available. To create content around a specific topic or product. Right. So I think the right word is content creator. I would say that, but there's probably people in the room that might want to argue that. But, you know, obviously data is your thing. So you've compared creator data to ingredients. Right. So the fresher, the more organic, the better the dish. Is that correct? Yeah. How much of what brands are basing decisions on that data do you think is actually bad data? That's a great question. I think the biggest problem today is that we don't have time to cook. So whatever we have, we put in the microwave. We press 30 seconds and whatever comes out, comes out. So I think the biggest issue today is not having the right or wrong data is you don't have time. New campaign, new collab, new problem, new approval, new whatever. How can you make sure that you're getting the right insights from that data to learn, iterate and go to the next stage afterwards so clear there's a problem within the right data and the wrong data, but there's a problem upstream, which is, do I have even time to look at them? Right. So we're going over the basic stuff of data to make sure this is the right collab to convince my boss to move forward. Because, you know, I want to leave at 6 or 7, which is rightfully so. That's what it should be, but there's no time for it. That's the biggest problem I see today. I mean, I've also had conversations with a lot of people. I mean, obviously AI is your world. It's huge. And I suppose in the influencer creator space, it's. I mean, I don't know, just in general. In a lot of businesses now, we're getting a lot of founders that are obsessed with AI. They're pushing AI and we're kind of. We don't know what is the right and right thing to do with it anymore. In our space, in the influencer creator space, if you had to name one belief, like one assumption that is collectively costing the people in this room money right now, what do you think that is? I would say that AI is not. And the reason why is because everyone is looking AI from the bottom up. We need to unlock operatives to do a faster job. But leadership, they don't know what AI is either. So the biggest belief is don't buy AI, throw it to the operatives, and then hope that efficiencies come. If you are a leader and you're like, you have a team, learn how AI can actually become useful for you and your team build up processes, build up adoption processes, and then look at efficiencies afterwards. So I'll say the biggest belief is that AI will solve your problems. It won't. It's your mindset, the people, what you believe in order to make things more efficient. But it starts with the leadership. Not with the bottom up, with the top down. But if you are on the bottom, not the bottom. But if you're not in that leadership team, how do you kind of give them that message? Like, what are we meant to. How do we kind of go back to them and say, you need to learn more about this, it doesn't operate like this. What would be your advice there? My advice would be stop with the basics. Because AI is able to be taught in a way where you can build a framework that makes sense for you, not for the company, but for you, and operate based on that. So you can apply your AI not only as a company or department level, but for your own benefits. What are you doing today that is taking too much time and not bringing much value to the business you're dealing with. And look at which tools are there. Pick one and automate that. Probably the time will take for you to learn that AI tool and automate that task or make it more efficient is 1000 less than how it will become your life. Much easier. I saw a great post today and it was someone in the influencer world and she kind of listed all the things that she'd got AI against and all the tools that she was using and the ones that were still left. The human touch was that relationship piece. There was another post that she picked out someone in particular and was saying like, it's great how this one person was spending time getting to know influencers. They were jumping on zoom calls, they were going for meetings and all that. But in our world, we know that that still has to happen. That's just Influencer Marketing 101. It's quite frustrating that there's a lot of companies out there, a lot of people saying that that relationship building piece can be replaced by AI. No, it can be enhanced. AI doesn't stand for artificial intelligence, it stands for augmented intelligence. When you have AI, you look more intelligent. And the 20%, 25% of the time you spent building relationships, working with your team, why not spending 90% of your time and those 70, 80% that you are doing manual work, pulling data, pulling reports, building media kits, building, building PowerPoint presentations, why not automate that and spend the remaining of time not stop working, but building Those relationships, having more conversations, building more, you know, ideas around it. Right. So I truly, truly, truly don't believe AI will replace humans. I believe will augment their intelligence and will replace the time you're not delivering value for your company to delivering relationships more deep and more close to each other. Okay. Right. We're going to do something a little bit different now. Okay. Everyone will have a true or false card. I'm going to give you three myths, and you need to vote whether you think it's true or false. And then Manuel's going to dig into it a little bit. So the first one, AI, is the biggest competitive advantage of a business. Do you think that's true or false? Okay. Oh, but mostly true. I would say the votes here. Absolutely not. Sorry, sorry. AI. The biggest asset of a company is its people. And because of AI, because of AI. The second biggest asset of a company is data, not AI. AI before 2023 was really valuable. How much does it cost? A cloud subscription? £30. That's the value of AI today. What you connect to AI is your unique IP. It's your IP, it's the data. So the question is, which people do you have working with you? And number two, which level of data and quality of data you have that can feed that AI to become different than any other AI? So for me, it's false people, number one. And now data for the first time is the most important one, because AI can make magical things with your unique data, you made some people very happy by saying that. Okay, the next one, the biggest impact AI will have is on the creative side. True or false? I thought this might be the case. We're going with pretty much false one. True. Manuel. I would say it's false. Brace yourselves for what's coming. Because the biggest impact AI had was on the creative side, because it was the easiest to pivot from what it was and what it's become. But the biggest impact of AI is going to be on the business model of companies, because we're shifting the mindset from how much, how much time did it take to reach this value to how valuable this is. The time now has no value. Knowledge has no value whatsoever. Right. So for me, it's false, that myth, because the biggest impact will be on the business model side where FTEs AD count will stop being the currency and the outcome is starting to be the currency. How do you value outcomes? How do you value that? So that's a huge impact that not only showcases the creative side, but also the efficiency side. And I wonder how Agencies will collab with brands in the future. No, I wonder how creators, when they're building their content in production and all of this, how are they going to charge for those pieces as well? It's going to be a big, big change coming up. And I think the reason why is still not because we are in a transition phase from legacy to AI. In 18 months, this transition is over because the impact is so big, you don't want to go back. I use AI every day now. Like, even if I was not an AI geek, I probably would use because it saves so much time. Time and knowledge is not a valuable currency anymore. So let's see what happens. You can see actually the big agencies, LPP building agentic models, Omni Omnicom building that, monks building the same thing. You can see all the agencies trying to transition from FTE to we have agentic, we have AI, we have this, you know, and everyone is scared of what this means for them. And people are trying to follow what they're hearing other people doing. And then that's kind of creating this ripple effect of people not really knowing what they're doing, but creating this scarcity within a lot of brands, I think. Absolutely. And I understand why. You know, I know 0.1% of what AI means, and I'm scared as well. But I'm excited because I can unlock so much more powerful things humans are not today using in terms of their own capabilities. That I believe, I truly believe that this will create a different environment of what is productivity, a different way of looking at value. That's very beautiful. Okay, last myth. The best creator brand matches are found by people, not AI. True or false? Okay. Oh, are we no more true? Okay, some indecisiveness. What do you say to this? Not sure. Well, no one will have the sensitivity of someone. So for scouting, when you look at someone, you say, I want this person because of why and whatever, but you cannot not have AI in the process. Yeah, I agree. You know, when you use platforms and you apply all those filters and you get 1.2 thousand results, are you going to look up at all of those results? No, you won't. But you can ask AI to look it up for you and it gives you 10, 20 results. Now it's on you to pick the perfect match. But the heavy lifting was done by AI. So I think it's a symbiosis. It's like it's a partnership between AI, but the last, the last decision comes from the human side. Has to be. Has to be. And then the relationship building follows by the human. Absolutely. Amen. I'm going to finish on one question that I have to ask everyone. What do you think most brands get wrong when it comes to building brand advocacy? I think they're trying to push conversations versus being part of conversations that people are already having on social media. Why continue pushing those conversations forward? Your target is already having really interesting conversations, probably with creators, probably it won't, but you can be part of it, humanize your brand and be relevant. So they think your brand is actually providing something more than just the products. And I truly believe that when you say we work with the best creator is this person and we should hire them full time. The best creator is the founder of the company. Where is he? Where is she? Go out there. You are in love with your product. You launch your product. You know the people working for the company and they are full time employees. They should be the first creators of that. So the question is how you can humanize your brand. And the first part is have a voice. Have a voice within the conversations people are already having. And well, this has been awesome. This has been one of the fastest rapid fire podcast episodes we've ever done and one where I've had two spicy mugs before I've had an interview, so this has been great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.