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

Good afternoon. I'm Ted Murphy, Founder and CEO of IZEA, and welcome to the IZEA May streaming event. Before I get started, I want to give a shout out to Red Octopus, who produced the interim music you just heard. If you need custom music for a project, you can find him on Shake. We have a number of exciting updates to share with you today that span the entire IZEA ecosystem. We're going to jump right into product demos, and get started beginning with BrandGraph, our social intelligence platform. Since we first launched BrandGraph last year, the universe that connects brands, companies and categories has exploded. We have more than doubled the amount of brands we are analyzing and have added thousands of new brands in categories ranging from hotels to sports teams. BrandGraph has become the brains behind many IZEA experiences using artificial intelligence to power much of what you'll see today. The data and relationships that are visualized in the BrandGraph universe are used to power BrandGraph profile pages, identify social media trends and produce these beautiful customized competitive intelligence reports with the click of a button. BrandGraph reports are a favorite among brands and agencies who use our insights to inform their overall social media strategy. This tool is invaluable when a brand wants to benchmark themselves against their competitive set. But what if you want to look beyond your direct competitors, what if you want to compare yourself to the best brands in a completely different category? What if you want to benchmark a soda brand against a video game, or a tech CEO against the cryptocurrency. Starting today, you can, with the introduction of BrandGraph Compare. BrandGraph Compare what you measure any brand against another brand quickly and easily. Let me show you how it works. To compare brands against each other, simply click on the Compare tab and enter the brands you want to benchmark. Compare gives you a breakdown of all the key statistics for the brands you choose, highlighting the leaders for a given stat and providing the top content from influencers. We detail and analyze everything from brand associations to average influencer reach. There is a wealth of data available in the Compare tool. And just like everything else in BrandGraph, we've made it super easy for marketers to get the data they need most. Want to export the data to build your own report? Simply click, download and you get everything you need, including links to content. TikTok has taken the social media world by storm and is quickly becoming a top ask among brands. In January, we announced that we were adding TikTok support to BrandGraph classifiers. Today, we are announcing TikTok units and Ambassadorships in Unity Workflow. Ambassadorships are a major enhancement to our workflow that allows brands to play out long-term, multifaceted influencer marketing programs. Ambassadorships can include tweets, pins, post, stories and, of course, TikToks. Marketers can make post dependent or independent of each other and can also bundle payments based on specific deliverables. Not only have we added TikTok to our workflows in IZEAx, we have also now fully implemented TikTok content across the BrandGraph platform. Benchmarking reports now include TikTok content as do brand profiles, BrandGraph Trends and, of course, BrandGraph Compare. These are all major improvements, but we are taking TikTok support and expanding it even further. I'm pleased to announce TikTok integration within the Discovery tool set and Unity Suite. Now marketers can leverage our revolutionary VizSearch Tool for TikTok content in the same way that they do for Instagram and YouTube content with full support for BrandGraph. Let's check it out in this search. I want to find users who have more than 10,000 followers that talk about NIKE or maybe Etsy. Or perhaps I'm looking for gamers. Let's check out Fortnite. BrandGraph makes it incredibly easy to find brand-specific content for thousands of top brands. And because we control the BrandGraph universe, we can include new customer brands no matter their size. Not only have we brought support for existing BrandGraph technology to TikTok content, we have created an entirely new group of classifiers that are even more powerful and robust than anything we have created to date. We call these new classifiers BrandGraph Themes. Themes are super classifiers that allow us to connect many different brands, categories, mentions, keywords, hashtags, even emoji, together in a single concept. When we think of a theme like video games, there are thousands of identifiers that make up that single theme. Of course, there are video game titles such as Fortnite, but the video game universe is much broader. There are game consoles like Xbox and PlayStation. There are also video game publishers, video game streaming services, esports leagues, video game characters and phrases used in video game culture itself. Themes brings together all of this and makes it searchable and actionable for brands. Let's do a real-life comparison of what this means from an end user perspective. I'm going to type in video games into VizSearch as a regular keyword that a standard search engine would interpret. You will see what I get back is about 90,000 results. That's because when people post about something like video games, they don't say I'm going to go play video games. They say, I'm going to go play Xbox. Or I'm going to go play League of Legends. BrandGraph now understands that when someone is talking about Xbox, Fortnite or button mashing, they are talking about video games. Let's do the same search again this time with a BrandGraph Theme. As I start to type in video, you can see that I have a new choice, the video game theme with its own icon. I'll click on that. I now have 7 million results versus 90,000 results. I can sort and filter them and those results are higher in quality than the keyword alone. We have people talking about games, consoles, even esports teams and BrandGraph tags brands across industries, even within a theme. Here, we can see a result that tags both LEGO and Super Mario. And if we drill in further, we get a preview of the content right here inside VizSearch. Themes already cover a wide variety of topics, and we will be adding new themes on an ongoing basis. So whether you are searching for content about pregnancy or beauty, or perhaps something more niche like asthma or diabetes, you can find influencers that create relevant content about your topic. It looks like Bella here shares stories about diabetes with their audience. Let's check out her profile to learn more about her. But before we do, let's talk quickly about another new feature, the brand selector. The brand selector customizes the IZEAx Discovery experience. You can select your own brand or any brand in BrandGraph. This is especially helpful for agencies working on behalf of brands, or those pitching new clients and doing research. In this case, I'm going to assume the role of Dexcom, a glucose monitoring system. With the brand now selected, everything I see in Discovery is through the lens of Dexcom. If I click in Unity Search and back into VizSearch, you'll see that the default results are customized for me. I'll type in diabetes again, and let's open up Bella's slide-out profile and take a quick peek. The slide-out profile has been completely redesigned based on our new Unity Profile architecture. Unity Profiles bring together technology from IZEAx, BrandGraph and Shake for the first time. These slide-out profiles are fast, elegant and they let you find the influencer information you need quickly. You can see what type of content she creates, what are available social channels are and what brands she post about most often. As we scroll down, we can see that BrandGraph has automatically identified that she has done work for a direct competitor. That may be a challenge for this hypothetical influencer marketing campaign. But she has great content and otherwise looks like she could be a fit. I'm going to add her to a list, and I will name that list diabetes competitive work. Now I have a quick way to find her again in the future. We've also added new media kits to Unity Profiles as well, perfect to share with executives who are reviewing influencers. We can pick from portrait or landscape layouts and download a beautiful PDF filled with content. I'll add a note and save this for a future client pitch. Let's jump back from our search results and switch brands. I'm going to change my brand to Bud Light. It's time to jump into the full Unity Profile experience. Let's click on this influencer and walk through the features. The first thing you'll notice is how crisp and clean everything is. There's a wealth of information, but it's all easily consumable. I can check out his content, the platforms he has connected and whether or not he's been white listed for Facebook or Instagram ads integration. I can also see the brands he talks about most and his most engaged content from the past year. And for the first time, we have Shake integration right here inside of IZEAx. Shakes are automatically added to Unity Profiles. This is part of our greater vision to connect IZEA platforms together and something you will see more of as we add additional offerings over time. This integration with Shake will let Unity Suite customers choose how they want to work with creators. They can either go through Unity Workflow and make an offer or click on a prepackaged Shake listing to buy immediately. And because these platforms share a common financial system, marketers can use their existing IZEAx account balance or credit line to make a purchase. For Discovery only customers, Shake provides a quick path to purchase as an alternative to Unity Workflow. We are still in the very early days of data sharing between IZEAx, which is a private marketplace, and Shake, which is a public marketplace, but more integrations are on the way. We're also making it easier than ever to create a Shake. Thanks to IZEAx data, you will soon be able to create your first Shake in less than 1 minute, simply by connecting your social handles. Let's explore the full Unity Profile a bit more. If we click on connections, we can see all the social channels and websites that a creator has added to IZEAx at a glance. Clicking into one, we are brought to the insights page for this connection. I can see follower count, how much sponsored content is being produced and engagement rates over time. I can even benchmark this account against other creators in a community of my choice. Benchmarking is one of the most commonly requested features from marketers and benchmarking is everywhere on Unity Profiles. Now marketers can make comparisons against our massive database of creators, brands and content. We have added engagement insights for keywords, mentions, hashtags, brands and themes, and detailed audience information so marketers can understand who is looking at this creator's content. These insights change per platform. For example, on Instagram, we have likes and comments. On YouTube, we display view percentage, view duration and more. The end goal is to provide marketers with the data they need to make an informed decision. One of the challenges that marketer space is not every influencer account is connected to IZEAx. And not every platform provides detailed audience information as part of their API. That leaves some holes in our audience data for things like age and gender, that is until today, introducing predictive insights. We are now able to provide an estimated audience composition for any social account or a piece of content using artificial intelligence. Now when you see data in IZEAx, we will also show you the source of the data whether it is directly from the social platform or based on IZEA's artificial intelligence, insights and models. We have also added an audience tab to provide an at-a-glance view of audience makeup for all connections to an influencer account. IZEAx is designed for influencer marketing teams. And often multiple team members are in communication with the same influencer. That can lead to missed opportunities or confusion. So today, we are introducing new CRM features for Unity Suite customers. We'll start with Notes. Notes enable marketers to provide context about their experience with a given creator, allowing their colleagues to quickly and easily see how the relationship is progressing. Marketers add notes here in the sidebar and the sidebar is sticky on every page of the profile. You can also add notes right here from the profile slide out, no matter where you are accessing it from inside of IZEAx. Now let's talk about creator communications. While IZEAx Unity Suite has in-platform messaging and integrated workflow communications, sometimes an e-mail outside the system just makes sense. The problem is, that means there is no central record of those communications with the influencer. Today, we are introducing e-mail capture in IZEAx. Simply click on the e-mail button and BCC IZEAx on your e-mail communications. We will ingest your email, complete with attachments and add it to the creators profile. This makes your e-mail visible and searchable for your entire influencer marketing organization. All of this data and ability to organize information is fantastic. But influencer marketing has become more and more focused on one thing: content. Unity Profiles allow you to manually search a creator's content for anything but what if IZEAx could help you find what you are looking for programmatically without you having to search? What if we could quickly answer questions like what other brands does this creator work with? Or has he talked about my brand before? Has he talked about a brand competitor? What brand categories are a fit for him? And what are the overall themes of his content? These questions were at the heart of why we built BrandGraph. And we are bringing the power of brand graph to creator profiles for the first time. Clicking on the BrandGraph tab gives you an entirely new view of creator content. We can see all the brands that this creator has worked with in a sponsorship capacity or just happen to talk about organically. We're still acting as Bud Light in this hypothetical situation. So I want to see what type of work he has done for a beverage brand. Let's explore the content he produced for 1850 coffee. Right at the top, I can see how many posts he did and what the engagement rate was. And if I scroll down, I can see his posts on various platforms. This feature is so incredibly helpful for brands, and it is mind-blowing to see how it works for different types of creators. Here's an example of a beauty influencer. We see brands like Sephora, COVERGIRL and even CVS; a travel influencer with a focus on high-end production. We see GoPro, Adobe and Sony Alpha. A foodie who creates mouthwatering recipes. Here, we see ingredient brands like belVita, but we also see retailers like Walmart as well as references to dishes served at restaurants. It's easy to lose track of time looking at these profiles with the assistance of BrandGraph. And inspiring to see the quality of work that creators are producing for brands. Let's jump back to JJ's profile and explore our next tab, your brand, powered by the brand selector. I'm still logged in here as Bud Light. When I click the "your brand" tab, I can see all the content he has created for my brand. Here, we have added sentiment analysis to these posts. And have the ability to benchmark content for this brand against other brand creators as well. This makes it so easy to look at all the content and influencer has created for my brand, whether it was sponsored or not. Quick access to content about my brand is obviously important, but almost equally as important is seeing content created for my competitors. When I click to the competitor tab, I can see that he hasn't mentioned any other beers in the past year. If I change that to 2 years, I can see it looks like he did some post for Samuel Adams back a few years ago. And clicking in, I can see a post to Instagram and Facebook. Doing this sort of competitive research on your own could take hours and if you're trying to vet and onboard a large number of influencers, it could take days or weeks. Now with BrandGraph integration in IZEAx, you see everything within seconds. Simply switch the brand in the selector and your search is done. Another way we have made influencer discovery faster and easier is with BrandGraph categories. Categories are groupings of direct competitors. As we scroll down this page, we can see that there are several posts in facial cosmetics, pharmacies and skincare. Let's drill into skin care. Here, we have benchmarking at the category level. You can see how an influencer performs in a very specific niche. I can see all the skincare brands that they have mentioned along with individual posts on a given platform. Brands, competitors and categories are all going to be game changers for influencer marketing professionals, giving them insights and data, they simply can't get any other way. But I am even more excited by what BrandGraph Themes now unlocks for marketers. Themes organize creator content in the groupings using BrandGraph's AI. They make it incredibly easy to see what creators talk about more often, whether someone is into golf, cosplay or even a dog influencer living their best life. I can get a really fast overview of the things that are most important to this individual and dig in for more detail. I also get keywords, hashtags, brand mentions, and of course, all the associated content within the theme. Themes are transforming not only creator profiles in IZEAx but brand profiles inside a BrandGraph as well. BrandGraph users can now see which content themes are associated most often with a given brand. For example, I can see that content about Jeep has a high concentration of people posting camping, photography, sunsets and the military. While people into Tesla talk more about space travel, memes, consumer electronics and climate change. These are both vehicle manufacturers, but the content culture around them is radically different. Tesla influencers are talking about Elon Musk, SpaceX and primarily luxury vehicles. Compare that to Jeep influencers, and we see that domestic auto manufacturers are most often associated. BrandGraph can do this for brands ranging from LEGO to Nutella and even celebrities. For example, we can see here that Mariah Carey is most often associated with Christmas. These are critical data points to maximize the success of my campaign if I'm a brand interested in working with her as an influencer. We didn't stop there. What we have done for influencer accounts in IZEAx, we've also done for brand accounts in BrandGraph. We have added brand-produced content to brand profiles. This allows you to see which brands are creating content or possibly collaborating with other brands. We've also added competitor mentions, categories and themes here, just like the new profiles in IZEAx. We're also unveiling the BrandGraph 500, a list of the top brands in BrandGraph, ranked by the volume of social media content being created about them. This data is continually updated as we add new brands and is sortable by month. Brands can now see not only their ranking against competitors, but the brand universe at large. We can see here in May that Star Wars saw a huge bump from May 4. So did Lucasfilm and The Mandalorian. Jumping back a few months, we can see another impact from pop culture. The Super Bowl jumped way up in the list in February as did mentions of halftime performer, The Weeknd. Everything you see in this presentation is now live and ready for our customers to use. We can't wait for you to put our software to work and collaborate more with influencers. Thank you for spending your time with me this afternoon. Champion the creators.