Agentio's Arthur Leopold - Enabling Creator-Led Advertising at Scale

Arthur (00:00)
Hi, I'm Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of Agentio, and you're watching the CPG Guys podcast.

PVSB (00:06)
Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. I am your adorable co-host, PVSB.

My co-host, he's the father of Popstars Rhea Raj and Katseye's Lara Raj. Their fans refer to him, of course, as

Papa Raj, please join me in welcoming the man known as Sri,. Sri, we're here in New York City recording on location for 2026 Advertising Week New York. How's it going?

Sri (00:32)
New York City feels like a blur, Peter. I was just here last weekend to see Lara on Saturday Night Live, which was wild. I'm back next weekend for Diwali party. It's just insane.

PVSB (00:42)
And a week or two after that we're doing the concert out of Belmont Park. Yep. So lots of you'll get to go back.

Sri (00:48)
Backstage when Notia to me cats are

PVSB (00:50)
She is very excited. She's been practicing her dance moves.

Can't wait. All right, to our audience, if you're getting value from these conversations, we just have three very simple asks. First, subscribe to the CPG guys on whatever platform you're listening to right now, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, anywhere else you get your podcast, just hit that subscribe or follow.

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Sri (01:36)
It's a number.

PVSB (01:37)
I know I am pretty old, Sri. but in seriousness, we we built this community.

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Alright, let's get to our guest, Sri, shall we? Advertising follows attention and attention has moved to creators. Yet only a sliver of digital ad spend reaches them today. Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of Agentio, joins the CPG guys to explain how his team is building buying infrastructure that makes creator media as easy to run as Meta or Google Ads. That sounds like a pretty good idea, don't you think, Sri? We dig into how Challenger food and beverage brands are scaling with creators.

How to balance testing breadth against putting real money behind winners, how to prove creator impact when most sales happen at retail, whether creator media can move sell through at Walmart, Target, and Amazon, and what the CMOs, teams, and media plan look like by 2030. All right, today we are joined by someone who will help build one of the most recognizable. I'm gonna redo that.

Today we are joined by someone who helped build one of the most recognizable creator marketplaces in the world and who is now building the infrastructure to turn creator advertising into a scalable, measurable media channel for brands. Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of Agentio, an AI-based native platform for creator-led advertising. Before launching Agentio in 2023, Arthur was president of Cameo, where he spent five years watching how brands and talent actually worked together and how manual and fragmented creator deals.

Still were. Today Agentio helps brands like Olipop, Graza, and Suri run creator programs at the scale of their paid media budgets. If you want to understand how creator media is going to reshape the CPG media plan, you want to hear from Arthur. Arthur, welcome to the CPG guys. How are doing now?

Arthur (03:55)
Doing great. Happy Adweek.

PVSB (03:57)
I know, it's crazy. you should have seen it here this morning. We're in in the Omnicom building on West Thirty Third and the line was around the corner and down sixth Avenue, so or Broadway. It was pretty packed when I got here this morning. I'm glad you were able to cut through the line and get into the building. Not too

Arthur (04:16)
The energy in New York is palpable.

PVSB (04:18)
Very

it is. And this is a great week to be here. we sat down to have lunch and we ran into two old friends who were literally sitting two tables away from us. So yeah, it's good it's

Sri (04:25)
I do

have one comment on that line though. You and I go to twenty five conferences, twenty five events. Yeah. Just like Ad Week, whether it's grew larger ones. They don't have lines like that. I think it has to do with

PVSB (04:34)
They don't have lines like that.

Sri (04:38)
Yeah, but I also feel, Peter, and I'm gonna say it. Yeah. some of the audience is gonna love this, some of them are gonna create hate mail for me now.

I think Ad Week is getting outdated. And this keeping a small space, keeping a long line feeding formal.

PVSB (04:55)
I think it has more to do with the venue not having a lot of space to do the setup

Sri (04:58)
That's

what I mean. Like why keeping it? Yeah. New York City has plenty of spaces that can accommodate those

PVSB (05:04)
We'll

we'll we'll debate this at another time, shall we? Yeah. to our audience, please check out the digital show notes of this episode. You're gonna find a hyperlink to Arthur's LinkedIn profile and to Agentio's website to learn more as we carry on with this conversation, which I will kick off now. Arthur, you were president of Cameo, which was built on connecting people with talent. What did you see there that convinced you creator advertising needed its own buying infrastructure? And why was 2023 the time to start a

Yeah.

Arthur (05:33)
Yeah,

during my time at Cameo, I joined as first employee, first investor, was president there. We built technology to eliminate the friction between fans and their favorite people and created all these magical moments. And we saw the ups and the downs. And Cameo is the ultimate COVID darling. And, unsurprisingly had a lot of great forward thinking brands that started reaching out, looking to partner with the creators of talent that was on Cameo at the time.

And it became very clear that the current ways of buying, if you're a brand trying to partner with these individuals, was this very archaic sort of friction-laden process, opaque across the board, where there's a lot of people incentivized to add friction and add complexity because of the current ecosystem and how it works. And because of that, you only have a couple percent of spend running direct from brands to creators. There hasn't been this infrastructure. So the belief was that if you could

automate and standardize the buying of creator content, you could actually enable the shift in paid media spend from brands to creators. And why that's so important is because today you have about $800 billion to a trillion dollars of spend running through Meta and Google and Amazon and Trade Desk and you name the platform. But according to the IAB,

only about $40 billion runs from brands and creators. So it's a tiny, tiny, tiny percent. But then you look at where the attention and trust is today, and about 50 % of attention on digital is spent watching creator content, watching your daughters, watching you guys, right? And us as consumers, we trust creators 70 % more than we trust brands when it comes to advertising. So all of a sudden, you have this very quick shift

in how consumers obviously buy and how the market is spending where consumers are watching creative content they trust creators more than brands but the dollars aren't following the attention and our belief was that because of AI and LLMs because my co-founder and CTO's experience and

helping build for marketers at Spotify, we could actually eliminate all the friction and enable a brand to buy creator media as you shared earlier, as easily as they buy Meta ads and Google ads. And we've been at this for three years. We're one of the fastest growing startups in the country now and working with so many incredible enterprise brands from Uber and DoorDash and Olipop to all your prototypical challenger brands in the market.

Sri (08:04)
You know, I still remember the first cameo video I received from Johnny Damon wishing wishing me a happy birthday. That was a good maybe eight or nine years ago.

Arthur (08:12)
Wow.

Sri (08:12)
But it made my

PVSB (08:13)
When we hit

Sri (08:16)
Yankee at that point.

PVSB (08:18)
five hundred last year, who who said who said congrats to us on Cameo? It was Anthony Scarmucci. Very new.

Sri (08:27)
Amazing platform, by the way, it's a fun platform. But I wanna I like your statement because we the CPG guys, Peter and I believe deeply in it. Creator should be a much larger enterprise than it is today. And here's another reason why I don't think the industry has a choice but to invest more in Creator. As AI-based recommendations for shopping take more of a foothold, customers, shoppers, whatever you call them, do not want they want co-pilots, they don't want automated direct.

stuff by AI and part of that is they want authentic content to browse, get reviews from, want to see product usage, things of that nature, all of that is creators. CPG guys are puzzled, why only two percent of digital ad spend reaches creators today. What do you think is the reason for that? Is it CMOs being outdated? Most of them don't even have TikTok accounts.

Arthur (09:16)
at the end of the day, the dollars will always follow attention if you make it easy. And we can even go back to the double click days, 23 years ago, if brands or CMOs or teams wanted to buy internet ads.

you'd have to call up a website broker and buy 10 banner ads at a time. And you'd have to call up an agency just to buy a handful of website ads. But it was so clear at the time that the attention was shifting from linear, from radio, from print to the internet. And of course, Google acquired DoubleClick.

Now trillions of dollars have shifted from brands to where the attention is because of that infrastructure. And we've built the same type of infrastructure to enable a brand to buy, measure, and scale creative content as they would a digital ad. And when you do that, that's when you see these meaningful shifts in spend from brands to creators. So we'll have brands that, you know.

Before Agentio, we're spending a few hundred thousand dollars, a few million dollars through creators, a couple percent. And then all of a sudden, over the course of three, six, nine, 12 months, they start to shift 10, 20, 30, 40 % of their spend to creators. And they see it in the results. They see the outcome from that. So it's inevitable that the spend will follow the attention. When you have the infrastructure, that's what can unlock true scale.

Sri (10:32)
Do you feel

the the part that spend will follow or investments will follow, attention is a no brainer. But do you feel that as that happens, it's the infrastructure that's been the barrier and you're actually solving for that with your new AI platform?

Arthur (10:48)
Yes, precisely. It's the infrastructure and the

Sri (10:51)
Measurement particularly or reporting?

Arthur (10:54)
the entire.

buying flow end to end has been the challenge. everything from who are the right creators, who are the brand safe creators, to how do you actually price and negotiate, how do you do so in a scalable way, how do you then build context with the engine so that for a global team, anybody in the world could actually have the same belief as the brand and same understandings to what the brand cares about. How do you then ensure that the content is delivered and is safe? How do you then measure it? And how do you take those learnings to buy again? And while the infrastructure

is critical, you can build infrastructure and there not be belief in the market. And the company is not going to do well. Right. What we've of course seen is Unilever's CEO came out a year and a half ago and as there's been so much change in the space where larger brands are seeing how these challenger brands who are socially native, who are creator first, are taking market and wallet share very quickly. We've seen this shift in belief.

And now we realize we don't have to solve this belief gap. Every CMO realizes they have kids, they have friends, they themselves are consuming so much more social creative content than they ever were before. The challenge has been the infrastructure gap, and that's exactly what we've solved.

PVSB (12:08)
Got it. In the open I mentioned the fact that you're looking to make creator buys as easy as purchasing Meta or Google ads. If you're actually able to industrialize something as human as creator recommendations, what are the kind of the pluses and minuses of that from your vantage point?

Arthur (12:29)
it's interesting you share that and ask that. Agentia was the title sponsor of the Forbes CMO Summit this year. And we had an amazing conversation on stage about the programmatic buying of creator media. And a couple of the folks in the audience challenged, if you make something as special as creator programmatic, don't you lose the magic. And it was a

Good opportunity for all us to remember that there's a difference between the content itself being done by a creator who has this deep understanding of their audience and who can so effectively storytell on behalf of brand. They figured out how to hack the algorithm and the entire buying flow that historically has made the space so constrained. We are not commoditizing or programatizing the end content.

we are making the buying process entirely programmatic in the same way that getting an Uber is entirely programmatic. But the end result is a better ride to your destination more comfortably without having to wait outside in the rain. So when you make the challenging part programmatic, that means that teams can focus on strategy. It means they can focus on creative.

is it can really focus on building the business rather than everything that has held back the space previously.

Sri (13:57)
Very well said indeed. And also I want to congratulate you for being the lead event sponsor leader for the CMO Forbes Council Aspen, right? That's where you guys were? Yes. Back in September. So well done. That does matter a lot 'cause then I think you can influence the conversation in the direction the industry needs to go, which is creator for sure. So you talked about infrastructure being the biggest challenge and you're overcoming that barrier. So take us through what it takes, right? So let's just take a challenger food brand or a beverage brand, you pick

any what does a brand do? What does a platform do? And then what does the human in the loop actually need to do on the infrastructure?

Arthur (14:34)
The platform works with the brand, the agents work with the brand to identify what is it that the brand is trying to accomplish? What are the strategies to get there? And then who are the creators across which channels that can most effectively communicate

a brand's message. So what that means in practice is a brand will onboard, they share context with the platform, and because of LLMs, because of the tens of millions of videos that we have access to, we can understand, we can semantically align a creator with the right brand. And that is something interesting, but it's also getting to a point where it's somewhat commoditized, right? With enough...

tokens you could understand a creator through all their content. What is most important now is we have millions of transactions and data points and feedback loops across thousands of campaigns.

tens of thousands of creators in different channels and different interactions that help us understand how can we properly price creators to ensure that the creator is going to accept the bid and the brand is going to see the best outcome. How can we predict which creators can drive the best outcomes on behalf of brands? So now you have this compounding data mode with this two-sided marketplace that solves the cold-start problem for a brand. A brand can join and say, this is what I want to accomplish. I think these are the strateges.

these are the types of creators or audiences I want to target. And the platform says yes and. And so often you find these non-obvious matches and strategies that really helps a brand identify and explore and expand into a new audience. Before LLMs.

somewhat of an impossible task, right? It's really hard for a to go. task. A forever task, right. It's hard for a brand to go from, hey, we have an idea in our weekly meeting. Now we want to go explore that idea. Well, now it's instantaneous. And the average day for a brand to go from brief to content live is usually a couple weeks, something that historically would take many, many months.

PVSB (16:43)
Agentio's performance data suggests brands testing 10 or more creator verticals find winners more often? So if you're a challenger CPG brand with limited budget, how do you balance breadth of testing against putting real money behind what's working? Yeah.

Arthur (16:59)
And for brands today, they need to approach creator as they would any media channel. historically, creator has lived in smaller influencer teams with less budget, less scrutiny from CFOs, CMOs.

And because of that, it hasn't been measured in the same way. And it's important for a brand to say, OK, we can now scale and measure this in the same way that we would any paid channel. Therefore, we need to ensure that we're working with enough creators and there's enough spend where it's going to hit our MMM that we're able to explore enough creators and strategies to then get to a point where we've gone around the monopoly board enough times and we've been able to buy enough real estate where we can explore all these new audiences. Getting to 10 different verticals

sometimes that that happens for a brand immediately when they launch but typically we like for a brand to do slightly less usually around somewhere between like four and seven different verticals that they can test into and from there they can build a foundation we can get learnings very quickly and then you know try new new verticals or build on top of the ones that are already working and that is fully programmatic this allocation of new spend to new verticals.

PVSB (18:15)
And what I heard you say is that you will help guide the brands on what their minimum requirements are such that an MMM is going to pick that up in its measurement because that's important for them to understand, is it actually performing?

Arthur (18:30)
Yes, and oftentimes it's a matter of how their MMM works. But where their team becomes most impactful is making those decisions, helping with the briefing, helping identify, we have a new product that we want to bring to market. Who are the best types of creators or what are the best types of strategies we want to potentially explore? And then quickly making decisions when you have these feedback loops of, know what, this CTA or this way of explaining, you

this brand talking point is actually resonating really well with younger moms or with baseball players. Well, all of a sudden, you have a focus group and now you can double down in those audiences with updated messaging. That provides a level of clarity and exploration that historically would take large focus groups. It would take these long lead cycles. And that, of course, has completely changed now.

Sri (19:23)
So when Peter introduced you right up front, he talked about the scale you all have achieved with olipop, with Graza and with Suri. I'm tempted to ask, you look at these three companies and many of the others you've achieved scale with, these are all smaller challenger brands, but they're obviously doing something right that the larger ones are struggling. What do you think these people are doing that makes them successful and what makes others fizzle out when they try?

Arthur (19:52)
they've committed to being where the attention is.

Sri (19:55)
I think that's a major that's a very important statement. We've made quite a few times on this episode. Arthur has said it quite a few times. I don't feel large brands really chase attention where attention is. They use a playbook that's twenty years old based on what they've known for twenty years and which are risk averse, safe bets. They fear creators. But tell us more, what are these brands doing right?

Arthur (20:19)
Yeah,

they realize that today consumption is happening predominantly on social platforms or social adjacent. because of that, they need to leverage trusted voices.

Sri (20:32)
What do you mean by social adjacent?

Arthur (20:34)
YouTube. Yeah, I got you. And because of that, they realized they need to leverage these trusted voices and people that have built like real equity with their audiences over time. And I'll share with you a story that, when we were first starting the company was this like, holy shit, aha moment.

in why creator is so powerful. The former CMO of Athletic Greens was sharing with us how he initially pitched his CEO to go all in on creator. was 8 or 10 years ago. And he said, I helped my CEO sort of understand this vision of us standing in an aisle.

at a grocery store and there's seven or eight different products and they're all sort of just like flashing at you and flashing at you. And then all of a sudden there's this ninth product and you're looking at it, looks a little bit different and then the person that you trust the most, somebody who you are consistently watching, or consistently listening to, maybe it's paparazzi, comes up next to you, puts their arm around you and says, this product, number nine,

has changed my life and here's why I love it and here's why I think it's going to be so great. So now as a consumer, which product are you going to buy?

And when you think about the power of content and the ability to distribute, not across one too many through just channels, but through these micro niches, these mid-sized niches, these creators who have built real equity, real authority within their niches, then all of sudden it becomes very clear that like,

why wouldn't a brand who's initially starting or looking to take large market share have the majority of their spend moving towards that area? And that's why whether it's David Protein or Gruns or Ollipop or Graza, you these brands on the CPG side that have grown so quickly and done so on Agentio, it becomes very clear that there's a reason why they're taking market share and...

Of course, the larger brands are starting to follow suit. They realize that there's such an opportunity here.

Sri (22:44)
loving this conversation Peter you know this is in my wheelhouse

PVSB (22:48)
I I know it is Sri,. Let me remind our audience that Sri, and I today are speaking with Arthur Leopold. He is the CEO and co-founder of Agentio. I want to double click on measurement one more time. Arthur, several of your case studies argue that Media Mix modeling shows far more impact than last-click attribution. How should a CPG marketer prove creator spend works when so much of the sales happens at retail and not on a D2C site?

Yeah.

Arthur (23:18)
Two ways. Number one.

You need to be able to properly test the space. And that is one of the challenges why CMOs for a long time said, don't want to shift too much of my budget here because I can't test it. You can only test it if you can very quickly invest in it and scale within the space. But if it takes weeks or months just to get a very small percentage of your spend to be allocated towards the channel, you're not going to be able to see a level of efficiency.

going to show up in your measurement stack. Number two is MMM. We see that brand partners who use MMMs, which is the majority today, they'll usually see anywhere between a 3x to a 5x better ROAS than just Last Touch. We all know that we've bought CPG products, any product, because of creators. And there's a high likelihood that we didn't do it

the second that we saw the piece of content. So in the same way that brands measure all their marketing, right? And that's where the MMM comes into place. And then for their paid spend, if they're running partnership ads on Meta, if they're running partnership ads on YouTube through YouTube Shorts leveraging creators, we get to build on top of the rails that...

the most important advertising platforms have built. So the brands, of course, can measure their spend through those platforms.

Sri (24:43)
You know, Peter and I are peripherally aware that the largest retail engines, you know, I'm thinking Walmart here, Target, Amazon, they're already driving a sell through at retail through Creator, but we're peripherally aware we'd love to get your take on it, as well as creating campaigns in retail media to drive creator based outcomes at the end of the day, retail sell things. You've

already mentioned programmatic, so that's gonna help a lot.

Arthur (25:12)
Yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity there. the end of the day, consumers, if they see a creator that they recognize, regardless of the platform, regardless of the surface, if it's a creator's recommendation to your early point in career around AI, AEO and GEO, creator recommendations, especially through YouTube, they are indexing, they are being mentioned far more than any other piece of content on YouTube. So all of that, of course, can help inform the models, but it also helps

is build trust for the consumer who's about to make a decision. If they see that there's their favorite Unilever product or their favorite P&G product or whatever it might be within Target, within Amazon, within Walmart, and it's a creator sharing how they use the product, why they love the product, that content's gonna resonate. These are the most creative people in the world at the end of the day. And because of that, giving them the opportunity to become that content engine for every brand.

regardless of platform, I think is the future state that the great brands who've cracked it have figured out and most brands want to march towards.

Sri (26:16)
I'll tell you in independent research I've done in some of my other ventures, a third of all shoppers already shopping AI for grocery today. One of the things they're looking for is a trust badge, trust and authenticity badge. And I don't think the industry's moved where it needs to. Could this be the solve, Peter?

PVSB (26:36)
Might be Sri,. One thing I want to talk to you about, Arthur, is Agentio has expanded from YouTube to Meta partnership ads. My question is do creators perform differently when the ad runs as native YouTube integration versus a boosted post on meta and how should brands think about allocating their budget around these different choices?

Arthur (27:02)
Yeah, two entirely different surfaces. We started the business focused on YouTube. the belief was that YouTube, and these are 90 second creator integrations like a podcast host read, YouTube was misunderstood and underrepresented in the overall media mix.

Because of that, it presented an amazing opportunity for us to say, let's go crack this. Let's enable every brand to buy these YouTube integrations as easily as they buy meta ads or Google ads. And we saw a ton of success there. Brands.

today still have a hard time understanding how to properly buy YouTube and what's the most efficient ad unit on YouTube. We then expanded to meta partnership ads. TikTok's going to be later this year. And eventually, Agentio is going to enable a brand to come onto the platform and allocate their spend across the channels that are going to drive the best outcomes,

where the brand wants to show up. And that's a really exciting feature because it means the dollar shift to the most creative people who understand the algorithms and understand those platforms uniquely. The ad units are different across each platform, but we are seeing that if somebody who is very successful on YouTube will also be really successful in meta partnership ads, YouTube is a harder platform to be a creator. therefore, those creators often are sort of the creme de la

creme of creators and now they understand how to make really effective short form content as well because of YouTube shorts because of the other platforms.

PVSB (28:37)
Sri,, we're on MySpace. Is that is that creme de la creme is maybe that's that's another class. I think you might be sure.

Arthur (28:46)
percent

Sri (28:47)
Half a

million is what I've reached. I I need to get to a million before I start thinking in that direction at all. But I want to talk about YouTube and one very important change they made this year. They've kind of stated that they will now count a click on an ad as a view as opposed to the twenty-second. I forget exactly how much. It was twenty seconds or more, something like that. And that therefore it's pretty clear they're gonna move much more into brand creator

that space. It's like obvious at this point, right? I would call it brand created deals itself. Have you what are your thoughts about those platforms versus what you you're building? Do they overlap? What what do you think the future holds?

Arthur (29:25)
Yeah, YouTube made the change from what historically had been an engaged view. while it's not, well, there's no like true documentation around this. People have inferred that an engaged view is about a 30 second view. So for the last 10ish years, a view on YouTube was considered an engaged view and it means somebody watched for 30 seconds, which is incredible watch time compared to the other platforms. They've since moved to equilibrium in the market, which is

of views, of views. It could be a second, maybe it's a few seconds, maybe it's 30 seconds or more. And that makes sense for larger media plans and for people to understand apples to apples, or media buyers to understand apples to apples.

We still only look at Engaged View. We think it's really important for brands on YouTube who are trying to get that arbitrage to buy based on the equity that the creator has built with their audience over time. And that is most reflected through an Engaged View. The platforms have

attempted and built and started and stopped these marketplaces for three years now. And I think it's amazing for the space because it gets creators more comfortable with maybe accepting more brand deals, understanding what the market is. But as marketplace operators, we understand how challenging it is to balance supply and demand.

Bill Gurley from Benchmark, Benchmark Led our Series A is one of the greatest voices around marketplaces and this understanding like supply plus one or demand plus one can lead to marketplace collapse. So oftentimes with the platforms, you're to have.

a large percentage of supply, creators, join the platform and then they're gonna sit idle because there isn't liquidity or there isn't enough investment from the platforms. And because of that, if you speak to creators or you speak to brands who have worked through these platforms, it's been really challenging because the creators aren't responding or the platforms or the brands aren't seeing the level of success that they need. And that's not just the social platforms, but that's even looking at the legacy tech in the creator space that's been

around for 15 years, right? And those marketplaces were never able to hit a true level scale because...

Technology wasn't solving the hard problem, which was how do you enable this end-to-end transaction? How do you do so in a frictionless way? That's exactly what we're solving for, and we're really excited about the platforms continuing to invest there. We know that the third-party ecosystem is so critical to the overall advertising and marketing landscape. We're sitting here at Omnicom, right? And because of that, we also understand that brands want to be able to buy across each platform.

And that is the reason why at the end of this year we will be across all three major platforms and we will continue to build across them. So all that data, of course, can help inform decisions and strategies for other platforms. So we're really excited about that feature.

PVSB (32:28)
You know, Sri

it it reminded me we were looking at our Apple podcast stats the other day and it said that people who listen to our podcast on average listen to seventy five percent of it. That's a pretty good status. Forty

Sri (32:39)
Doing pretty well, man.

PVSB (32:42)
five minute show, the fact we got them engaged. So That's a really interesting.

Arthur (32:45)
get retired.

PVSB (32:46)
I think we need to be I think

Sri (32:47)
It's the head.

PVSB (32:48)
Sri, whether we like it or not, we're creators. There we go. We're creators. All right. Absolutely.

What do creators get from a marketplace like yours that they can't get from a talent agent who's pushing them or direct deals that a brand has reached out to them? And how do you keep a program from feeling like an ad network to their audiences?

Arthur (33:08)
creators want to live off their work.

And on Agentio today, when a creator onboards, typically within six months, the average creator doubles their sell through rate, doubles the amount of brands that they're working with. And that's only possible because we've tapped into paid media budgets, not influencer budgets. So think of the pre-Agentio days if you're a creator or a manager or an agent trying to get in front of Uber or DoorDash or Ollipop or Quince.

Any of these brands, right? You're pitching your one creator. You're pitching your roster of three or five or ten creators. And every one of those creators has to go through a procurement cycle, has to go through vetting. And then the brand is communicating with you on these one-off emails.

tracking everything through Google Sheets, you this very broken fragmented process. we very much view like fragmentation as the enemy. And with Agentio, we're not selling any specific talent. We're not pitching a creator. We're pitching

PVSB (34:15)
Yeah.

Arthur (34:15)
a It's so critical, right?

Sri (34:17)
Providing programmatic based choice. Exactly.

Arthur (34:20)
Exactly. We're not selling a

TV show or an hour within a TV show

PVSB (34:25)
democizing access to creators.

Arthur (34:28)
Exactly exactly like by the channel and you will have access to the most creative people with the best audiences and that will lead of course to The best outcomes when the dollar shift to attention. Yeah

Sri (34:42)
See if the industry understands this well.

I'm anticipating three, four years out, 2030, which is only three, four years out at this point. The share of spend investments in creators should have significantly shifted from two percent. It should be well north of that number. And then the other thing is the CMO's team should look differently so that they're investing more time where as you've already said multiple times today. Advertising should follow audience at the end of it. I'd love to get your views on both of those. What percent of the share do you think it'll be? How do you think the CMO

look like, Especially as AI does in the operational stuff and brain power, human brain power really goes and creative strategy.

Arthur (35:22)
Yeah,

think creative, just on creative and strategy, have Vinit Mera, the CMO of Chime, shared this at the Forbes CMO Center.

Sri (35:32)
Really

twenty sixteen.

Arthur (35:35)
He's he is truly brilliant and a great partner. He shared with the group that taste and creativity becomes all the more important for CMO and frankly their teams, right? When there's this level of like sameness across the board and that's why we're so excited about the future of creators as well. Like you empower the most creative humans. As we think about the future of

creator and the opportunity with brands and shifting their spend. A lot of that's going to happen when brands see the performance and they're able to properly measure it because they've made the right investment. The investment happens to be the right infrastructure. So in two years, four years, six years,

I believe that across the board we'll see what we see today with the best, most forward thinking challenger brands where 20, 30, 40, 50 % of their spend is starting to shift to creators and that's a really exciting future. I also think in a few years time there's gonna be a concentration of dollars in trust to creators because there's gonna be so much AI content around us. And because of that, brands are gonna wanna tap into the equity. They're wanna tap into

the name and image and likeness that a creator has really built with their audiences over time. So that's what we're marching towards and that's the infrastructure that we're building every single day. We're excited about it. Creators on the platform are excited. Brands are so excited that they're leveraging the platform and it means hopefully you guys get a ton more brand deals and more brands are able to partner.

Sri (37:13)
Important

question for you on that one. Are you saying I can't replace Peter with an AI agent?

PVSB (37:18)
don't go

down this road again, Sri,.

Arthur (37:21)
It sounds like that needs to be its own episode.

PVSB (37:23)
I

think it does. wow, this was a very insightful conversation. Sri,, what is your big takeaway from what Arthur was telling

Sri (37:32)
This

episode is gonna get some extra love from me and you know why because it's addressing a pet peeve of mine when it comes to oversized market cap large brands. They fear creator based content. And I typically would say they fear it because they're outdated, lethargy, lack of change. But Arthur kinda hit upon a very important topic today, so I stand somewhat course corrected. The infrastructure piece of being able to do this matters a lot. So what what does it actually mean? He broke that down into segments of why the

First, advertising should go where the audience goes. Pretty

PVSB (38:07)
Yeah.

Sri (38:08)
clear. How much time do consumers today spend on social media? Doesn't matter what age, what job, what qualification, does really doesn't matter.

PVSB (38:17)
They're doom scrolling.

Arthur (38:18)
Thank

Sri (38:18)
You call it whatever

you want, that's where the eyeballs are, right? Yeah. So solving for that is pretty important. The programmatic nature of providing creators based on your needs for a brand is another big one. The ability to test and scale mu I think you use the word multi category. So you can do scale. Another very important thing we discussed was how fast you can move from ideation to actual content. Two weeks is what we discussed. What used to be months or a never ending cycle of approvals and this and that.

for six months, eight months, a year, things of that nature. And then the measurement aspect, especially being part of the MMM, very important. What retail media missed is being part of the MMM. If author is going to get that in from day one, I think he's going to have a little bit of a hallelujah moment. What do you think?

PVSB (39:06)
for me it's what we talked about earlier, which is democratizing the access to a vast creator network that's going to help advocate for the brand and to do so requires a frictionless end to end campaign management platform. And

Arthur (39:22)
Thank

PVSB (39:23)
that is what Agentio has built. I'm really impressed with what Arthur and his team have brought to market. Arthur,

Thank you for taking time out of your day to come over that that long two-block walk from your office to have this chat with us. We really appreciate it.

Arthur (39:40)
This is great. Thank you both so much.

PVSB (39:42)
And we'll tell everybody, make sure to go to Agentio's website. There's a link in the digital show notes of this episode. Arthur and his team can help you learn more about

Sri (39:51)
As well as Art as Lincoln.

PVSB (39:52)
And his LinkedIn profile is there, so reach out to him. I'm sure he and his team will be more than happy to help get you started on this journey for frictionless end-to-end campaign management. Sri, thank you as all for joining me. If today's conversation sparks something for you in the audience, maybe a new idea, a fresh perspective, or just a reminder of why this industry is so worth showing up for every day, share it, tag us, tell a colleague.

The more voices we bring into this community, the sharper all of us get to the over 48,000 followers on LinkedIn that trust us to inform, educate, and entertain you about our industry. Thank you for your trust and encouragement. We really don't take it for granted. We are so appreciative. Till next time, keep pushing the conversation forward. I am PBSB on behalf of my co-host, Papa Raj, This has been the CPG Guys Podcast.