IZEA Worldwide, Inc. (IZEA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. My name is Ted Murphy, Founder, Chairman and CEO of IZEA. Thank you for joining me today. I am so excited to show you BrandGraph, our new social intelligence platform. Our team has been hard at work, adding new features and functionality, including BrandGraph trends, which you're going to get a chance to see in just a little bit. The goal of the presentation today is to walk through BrandGraph from top to bottom. We're going to show you what BrandGraph is, how it works and how agencies and brands can use the insights and data to create better social media campaigns and influencer marketing strategies. At its core BrandGraph maps the relationships between brands, companies, industries and categories, then analyzes social media content to determine what is being said about those entities. To illustrate this concept, I'm going to click on the Explore tab here in the BrandGraph web interface. What you are viewing is what we call the BrandGraph universe. This is a visual representation of the relational data in BrandGraph and how entities are attached to each other. We're going to zoom in on the universe and select what we define as an industry. In this case, food [indiscernible] within [indiscernible] I can see classes [indiscernible]. So frozen food [indiscernible] BrandGraph further defines by their specific competitive categories. [indiscernible] As a brand manager selling pasta is not competing against a brand manager selling pretzels. This level of specificity is a differentiator for BrandGraph. We've gone to great lengths to make sure that direct competitors are given a specific category rather than lumping everybody into a big category like CPG or entertainment. [indiscernible] cold cereal. Here we can quickly see a listing of the cold cereal brands and their owners. If I click filter, I can isolate the cold cereal notes. We can now better understand the relationships between cold cereal brands and the companies that own them. I can drill into a specific brand such as Wheaties or Wheaties' owner, General Mills. General Mills happens to own brands across multiple categories. So by clicking filter here, it shows me the diversity of their products and the categories that they compete in. And now if we zoom back out, we can see that the BrandGraph universe covers consumer brands in hundreds of categories, we can look at vehicle manufacturers, sports teams, retailers and restaurants. Now let's look specifically at travel and tourism, something impacted recently by COVID-19. Here we have hotels, but I want to dig a little bit into cruise lines. So let's isolate cruise lines out and here we're going to see a relatively tight cluster. But there is one outlier here, way out there in the distance, and that's the Walt Disney company. If I filter on this entity, we can see just how BrandGraph plots large companies across different brands and categories. By mapping these complex relationships, and combining IZEA's knowledge database with our unique social data, we're able to produce deep and insightful reports for brands. So let's jump back to the cruise lines and take a look at a specific brand. We're going to look at Norwegian Cruise Line. I'm going to leave the BrandGraph universe and go to their dashboard. The dashboard provides an overview of the key metrics for the brand. We can see the average engagement rate, average reach, share of voice in the category, content rank in the category as well as look at this data over time. Now scrolling down the page, I can see the top organic content and sponsored content based on reach. This gives me a quick overview to see what type of content is being created on their behalf. It looks like they did a paid partnership with influencer Zach King midyear last year. Let's check it out. Yes, here we can see that they're tagged as well as hashtag app. In addition to content for the individual brand, I can see the sponsorship activity and sponsored content volume for the top players in the category as well as categorical content comparisons on reach. Let's check out the influencers for NCL. We analyze about 4 million creator accounts right now, and we sit on top of about 500 million pieces of content. BrandGraph is adding new content every 10 seconds. And from that very large data set, we're able to determine who is talking about the brand, both as a paid sponsorship as well as organic content. So here, we can see aggregate reach, content volume and engagement rate. We can see sponsored influencers. There's Zach, for instance, as well as organic influencers. We can also filter by reach, engagement and engagement rate. This is not designed to replace the much more powerful influencer search and profile features found inside of IZEAx. But what it does allow you to do is figure out which brands are working with which influencers very quickly. Where BrandGraph really shines is these amazing custom reports. I can't wait to show you what these look like. I'm going to generate a BrandGraph report for NCL for the past 6 months. These reports typically take about 3 to 5 minutes to generate. So for today, we're going to click on a report I created this past weekend. It is important to note that this PDF report is 100% programmatically created by the platform, including all logos and images. It is a detailed analysis of performance against NCL's percept. It includes category analysis, content analysis and sentiment analysis as well as pan gentle and associated brands. We can easily look at the top organic content being created for these brands as well as the sponsored content. And what's so cool is that all of these images are clickable right here inside this PDF. We can view the engagement pyramid and even see who the super fans are for the brand. From content volume to sentiment analysis, BrandGraph reports provide a comprehensive way for brand marketers to quickly understand how they stack up against their competition. These reports are comprehensive enough to be able to inform your social media strategy, but they're also designed in such a way that you can pass them on to the CMO of your organization. Not only can you run these reports for your brand, but you can also run these same reports for any brand in our entire database, whether that is a competitor, a partner or someone who you think is doing a particularly good job with their social media marketing. All of this at no additional cost to you, just search for the brand and get access to the data. And if you don't see it, just click the suggest button and we'll consider it for inclusion. Now let's jump on to BrandGraph trends. This is a brand-new feature that I am so excited about. It just received a major new upgrade today with the addition of trend cards. BrandGraph trends let you look at any class, industry, category, brand, hashtag or keyword. For example, I can map the keyword coronavirus against the keyword board. Content about being bored has increased 3x since February. But look at what is happening to content about coronavirus. It has decreased by 30% from March to April. And it's on pace to decrease another 40% from April to May. Let's look at the engagement rate for the same keywords. Cronavirus is tanking, while content about being bored is seeing a dramatic lift. From a marketer standpoint, it seems that consumers are growing tired of coronavirus messaging. Let's look at COVID-19 as it relates to brands. Here, I'm going to map Lysol versus Purell versus Clorox versus the entire household cleaner category. If we look at the most recent 90 days, we can see 2 major spikes, one here, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the other here, when the President suggested that you may be able to inject disinfectants on April 24. Speaking of the President, we can map politicians, too. Let's look at Donald Trump versus Bernie Sanders versus Joe Biden versus Mike Bloomberg. We can see here that both Biden and Sanders got a bump when Bloomberg dropped out on the fourth. The second spike on April 8 was Bernie Sanders dropping out of the race. How do we know? Trend cards, I can now click on any date and see the top content from that day. This provides me with context around any spike on the chart. All of these brands have been impacted by coronavirus, but you know what else has, delivery services. Let's graph it. We're going to add FedEx versus DHL versus Grub Hub versus Uber Eats. These new trend cards give previews of the associated content and other information like engagement rate. We can see that Uber Eats is trending up. We can also see in these content previews that partnerships are driving engagement rate. This content here features both Uber Eats and McDonald's. If I want to check out a competitor to Uber Eats, I can simply click on their logo. Let's checkout Post Mates. Now let's jump back and take a look at the cruise industry again to see what we can learn from the data. If we examine content volume for cruise lines, we can see that it's going down, something that you might expect given the global pandemic. Let's map that against hotels, almost the exact same pattern. And airlines, another mirror to the same trend. These are all in the travel industry, which have been impacted in large with the same way. But what happens if we look at a completely different industry over the same time. If I add beer brands to the same chart, we can see that all these concepts are, in fact, tied together. Let's look at it in a couple of different ways. Let's switch from a line chart to an area chart and now look at the unique creators. Let's go back to the line chart and look at total engagements. And let's now switch to momentum, and we'll look at that over 6 months. So what does this correlation mean to a marketer? Well, we know that beer sales at grocery stores have spiked since the coronavirus outbreak. But travel is largely on hold. So even though people are consuming more beer at home, they aren't posting about it in the same way that they used to. It turns out that it's much more fun to post the picture of yourself drinking a beer at the beach than it is posting a picture of yourself, drinking a beer, sitting on your couch, looking at pictures of the beach on Instagram. There's simply less content being published about beer right now. And that's an opportunity to gain share of voice at a time when influencer content is less expensive than it was prior to COVID-19. We can now draw a correlation between travel and beer. My assumption is that it has to do with people taking less vacations. Let's check that hypothesis out and add vacation to the chart. Yes, it looks like people are also producing less content about being on vacation. Perhaps an influencer marketing campaign, talking about a home vacation or other safe local destination would make sense. This is what BrandGraph does really well. It helps us visualize trends and understand associations between entities. Let's keep pulling at this thread and try one more search. If we zoom out and we look at the entire alcoholic beverages market and switch our filter to sponsored content only, we can see that there has been an industry-wide pullback on influencer marketing. It looks like there's been about a 30% drop in content volume from February to April across all brands. Let's click on CÎROC vodka. That's about an 80% drop from February to April, but look at that engagement rate on their social card. It's recently spiked based on this graph. Let's switch our chart to average engagement rate. There we go. If I'm an influencer marketing manager for a spirits brand, that is a pretty interesting trend line. So if I were a competitor to CÎROC, how would I play this? Let's look at some keywords and try to maximize our engagement rate. We will start with vodka. There's a definite uptick there. How about cocktail also an uptick but lower than vodka. Bloody Mary, close to cocktail, nothing really special. How about a Martini. Yes, highest engagement rate with a recent meaningful upswing. If I was a brand competing in the vodka category, right now, I would be focused on creating content around [indiscernible] with influencers. This is a great time to do it because there is less sponsored content in the alcohol category in general. BrandGraph is all about empowering marketers to make smarter decisions. If I want to export this data from my own custom report for a client or maybe my CMO, I can simply click export to download the raw numbers. I can also download HD quality, JPEG, PNG and PDF versions. Let's look at the food industry. There was an explosion of food content from March to April. If we look at hashtags for cooking and recipes, we can see an interesting trend. Content is up, total engagements are up, average engagement rate is up, and the number of creators producing content is way, way up. If we drill down into the last 90 days, we can see a little spike happened here. The 5th of May, Cinco de Mayo, let's look at the hashtag Cinco de Mayo, and drill a little bit deeper. I'm going to add tacos and nachos to the graph. Look at that, on that day, more people are talking about tacos than all recipe content. Nachos, [ Nacho ] much. Why is this important to know? Well, if you're a food brand who sells a product that could be used in Mexican dishes, you may want to focus your influencer content specifically on tacos or maybe you want to market nontraditional taco alternatives or a complementary beverage but use the taco hashtag. Let's now filter to sponsored content only to see influencer activations. And I'll delete cooking and recipes. Some brands seem to understand the correlation here but there appears to be a large opportunity for food brands next year. From a volume perspective, this is a very low bar. One brand alone could dominate Cinco de Mayo next year with a relatively small investment. Even tequila brands have set a low bar for influencer activation and share of voice. With [indiscernible] trends, we can look at the changing world that we live in, let's look at home workouts versus home offices versus masks versus the stay-at-home movement. Look at that, stay-at-home is dropping as masks our gaining momentum. BrandGraph is designed to be a stand-alone product. You can license it separately from IZEAx, but it also powers this search to make influencer discovery a radically better experience. Remember all those dots in the BrandGraph universe. Behind each dot, there can be hundreds of disassociated phrases, handles, hashtags and URLs. That helps us better classify and enrich content. For example, behind the Star Wars brand, BrandGraph also understands that Light Sabers, Luke Skywalker, Yoda and other terms are associated with Star Wars. I'm going to jump into this search in IZEAx to show you how this works. Let's type in Star Wars and click on a result. Here, we can see that this post does not mention Star Wars, but because BrandGraph has classified the content, it is tagged properly and added to the Star Wars search results. And because we are looking for such a wide array of brand matches, we can see both LEGO and Star Wars being mentioned in the same post. Standard search engines aren't very smart. When I put in the keyword hotel, it doesn't understand that Ritz-Carlton is a hotel or that hotels are part of the travel and tourism industry or that Ritz-Carlton is owned by Marriott International. Out of the box, search engines lack context, especially as it relates to brands and companies. So when I search for the word hotel, I only get mentions of the word hotel, but with BrandGraph enabled in IZEAx, brands gain unprecedented context. Let's click Marriott International into this search. As you see here in the search bar, we have identified 16 different brands under Marriott, such as Westin, St. Regis and W with 1 query, we are able to quickly see all the content associated with the brands owned by Marriott International, no matter how they were mentioned. I can also see other brands mentioned inside the same content. So here, we have Marriott Hotels and American Express. And here we have Ritz-Carlton and Mercedes Benz. Remember, when I mentioned associated brands as part of BrandGraph reports. This information can be used to identify partnerships and opportunities for co-marketing. If I click on the logo of the brand, I can instantly search for content about that brand. I can search for a specific brand, say, Coca Cola or all the brands associated with the parent company, such as the Coca Cola Company. I can search for all the nonalcoholic beverages or I can search for the entire beverage industry. The Rock has really been promoting his new tequila. So let's trim up the followers to 10,000 to 250,000. Now when I search for hotel with BrandGraph enabled in this search, I am not just looking for generic uses of the term. I am looking for brand mentions of leading hotels. Every brand added to the BrandGraph universe is enriched and searchable in IZEAx. You can now search thousands of different brand handles, hashtags and unique phrases to identify matching content all with just 1 keyword. BrandGraph is pretty amazing on its own, but it's in IZEAx Discovery or IZEAx Unity Suite. Thank you all so much for joining me today. We are incredibly excited to share BrandGraph with you. If you'd like to schedule a personal demonstration visit izea.com/brandgraph. Thank you.