Steve Wetmore – James Creech, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. James is Co Founder and CEO of Paladin Software. And James, can you please fill us all in on who you are and what you do?
James Creech – Thanks, Steve. Happy to be here. appreciate you having me. I started the business with two partners about four years ago, all of us had come from originally the paid media world and then we’re early into influencer marketing, working at talent agencies and influencer networks and saw firsthand the problems in the early days of running influencer campaigns, whether it was finding the right talent, managing those relationships, reporting on the campaign to the brand’s paying people on time, there’s a lot of manual work and so out of necessity, we started building some tools really just to make our lives easier. And then through You know, meetings, coffees, conference attendance, chatting with other folks in the industry, we quickly realized, well, hey, we’re not the only ones with this issue. We should be focused on this full time. So we quit the day jobs and launched Paladin and it’s been quite a journey. So we focus today on building the complete influencer marketing solution. We focused on the supply side of the market so catering specifically to influencer marketing agencies and talent management companies. And we’ve got best in class tools to help them find manage and report on campaigns across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Twitch.
Steve Wetmore – Well, awesome. That’s, that’s a mouthful, a lot of time a lot of great information to digest. So yeah. So tell us a little bit about what your role is and what you do at Paladin software.
James Creech – So my background is in strategy and corporate development, sales, business development, I spent a lot of my time focused on growing the business, I think about the future Paladin and, and Thomas, our CEO, make sure the train runs on time and focuses on Paladin present. So it’s a good balance there. And so, you know right now i am thinking a lot about going into 2020; What’s our plan? And what’s our strategy? How do we continue to evangelize the platform and bring in more awesome agencies and talent management groups on board? How do we continue to listen to our customers and share that feedback with the product team, so they know what to build. Everything that we develop is really based on real time market feedback. We don’t just sit around in an ivory tower and say, you know, I really think that we should make it easier for people to track Instagram stories and report on that activity. It’s all coming directly from customers saying, you know, hey, we’re running these campaigns every day. This is what’s challenging for us. This is where we still have tedious manual work. Can you automate this for us? Have you thought about that? That’s what goes into improving the platform.
Steve Wetmore – So it’s all customer driven. What would you describe being the most challenging; working with the agency or the influencers?
James Creech – I’d say the biggest challenge we run up against is just keeping on top of the constantly changing platform landscape, I mentioned, we support five key global platforms, we are taking a keen eye to Snapchat and Tic Tok and others. But of course, they don’t have public a robust API’s that allow us to grab data in the same way that we can from the from the other platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, change things all the time, we have to be responsive to that, they’re constantly rolling out new formats, whether it’s Facebook watch, or HGTV, both of which aren’t supported from an API standpoint today. So we try and make the platform as flexible as possible and account for those things when we can and then of course, lean heavily on our partnerships and relationships with the platforms to say, Hey, can we get this an API support? Or, is there a roadmap for development on that, that front? Aside from that, I’d say most of the agencies we work with are really a pleasure. I think they know the market really well. And they’re on the front lines dealing with influencers and brands. So from our standpoint, we’re kind of preaching to the converted, right? We know that these agencies understand why influencer marketing is important and they’re shouldering the heavy lifting of going out and telling brands why they should be investing more dollars in social and influencer and then going to the influencers and saying, Well, we really need authenticated data and we need you to kind of cooperate with us in order to run effective campaigns and report on those successfully. So we’ve had for the most part, really good luck working with both of those segments.
Steve Wetmore – Ok to clarify your customer communication is directly with agencies not with influencers?
James Creech – Correct we don’t work with any influencers directly. We do provide some tools which are white label to the agencies so they can offer a dashboard or resources for the influencers to log in. So that’s Paladin powering everything behind the scenes; when a creator logs in, they’re seeing, the agency brand front and center.
Steve Wetmore – Okay, that’s that sounds like a great model. Can we touch a little bit on your, personal work history, your credibility in the industry? Let’s say it’s bragging rights time now.
James Creech – So as I mentioned, I started in paid media and was one of the early employees at a company called Channel Factory that was focused initially on running branded content campaigns specifically in the early days of video. We did a lot of work around YouTube, the business has since grown and evolved significantly since I left. And in fact, I know they do a little bit of influencer work today. But in the early days, we were promoting content for brands and media agencies to help their videos perform very well on YouTube and other video platforms. So we had a lot of experience on the demand side of the ecosystem from that role, then transition to an early MC n. So, you know, caught up in the heyday of MC and fever here in Los Angeles worked for Ben pixels, which started out of Las Vegas, and I helped open the LA office and lead growth initiatives for the business, which is how we got to start, tinkering with software and what ignited my interest and give me the experience in the influencer space that just kept tugging at me and my partners and eventually convinced us that we gotta strike out on our own and we need to focus on these problems firsthand. We need to launch some tools for this. And aside from that I do a number of things. I advise and coach a number of startups which is fun working with early stage companies and helping pass on the lessons we’ve learned along the way. And oftentimes I learned just as much from them. So that’s great and enriching. And then I also am the creator and host of a podcast of All Things Video. It’s been around for actually four or five years now, I have a chance to sit down and interview entrepreneurs and innovators in the digital media space. And, you know, it spans from music to gaming to influencer marketing to, tech platforms and beyond. And that’s really started out of my interest in connecting with these people and getting the chance to meet smart folks all over the world and just saying, I really wish I could ask you more questions, learn about your career and kind of share the lessons learned from your journey. And that’s how the podcast got started. So here we are, four and a half years later and still still loving it.
Steve Wetmore – Very good. Maybe you could send me the link and I’ll include it in the course. Yeah, fantastic. Okay. And I also see that you have done are doing a tremendous amount of speaking. Public speak, right?
James Creech – Yeah, so I guess, you know, whether it’s just from the podcast or or I’ve done some writing for various platforms like video and Q and later the rap post acquisition, you know, posting articles on LinkedIn, people usually reach out and I’ve spoken at a number of events and conferences. You know, I do a lot with VidCon and just got asked to join the Vid Con Mexico advisory board so it’s fun to continue to shape that awesome conference that is it expands internationally. I’ve also spoken at you know, social media week LA and various events, you know, they’re focused on different categories. I have some experience in eSports. And gaming’s has spoken at, you know, more of those gaming focus conferences, done some work in the kids entertainment space, which is always in flux. And so talking about trends and you know, the future of content strategies and children’s entertainment at a few specialty conferences, so yeah, always good to always enjoy getting to do that work as well.
Steve Wetmore – Yes it sounds very busy. And I like your bio here where you talk about the elusive notion of free time. I love that and yes, I may borrow that. Now can you outline what your company vision or initiatives are for SEO going into 2020?
James Creech – We always try to do the best we can from an SEO standpoint and our business, admittedly marketing is where we fall down sometimes. So we, we can certainly improve there and do a lot to drive more web traffic. I find that a lot of our business is referrals. So it’s word of mouth, it’s inbound, it’s going to events and conferences. And I joke that you know, historically held as an enterprise software sale, everything’s hand to hand combat, right? So our team is out talking to people, engaging customers learning about their pain points, set them up with trial access, and then going from there. We need to be doing more on the marketing front because, as we gear up for 2020, that’s that’s a big initiative. And we’re also launching a new product called Measure Studio, which is a business intelligence tool for social publishers and individual content creators to help them understand how their contents performing on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. And that’s much more of a SAS approach. And so the goal is build a big funnel drive traffic, the marketing activity and then let people discover engage with the product on their own convert to a paid customer if you know the tool is valuable and useful for them. So admittedly, that’s that’s an area where investing more and trying to improve.
Steve Wetmore – So can you describe what your day to day activities are relative to SEO?
James Creech – So you know, to be honest, I am not working on SEO on a day to day basis. For the website itself. We’ve outsourced it to a consultant who does a phenomenal job. And my partner or co founder and CEO Thomas comes from mobile, much richer SEO background than myself. He Ran optimization and data strategy for Maker Studios just acquired by The Walt Disney Company. And so he’s a little bit more in the weeds on that stuff but you know where I have a lot more experiences particular to Video SEO and we have a deep long standing partnership with a company called to buddy which is one of the leading you know, Video SEO tools in the industry particularly for YouTube channel management and audience development. So we’re the exclusive enterprise sales partner for to buddy you know, we’re experts when it comes to applying the to buddy tool and leveraging it for video SEO. And we help a number of you know, broadcasters, publishers, studios, independent creators take advantage of that tool.
Steve Wetmore – I have some friends in the space and I have to admit that probably my weakest knowledge area is video and I need to change that
James Creech – Yes video; it’s a whole different ball game. And for whatever reason, traditional text SEO tends to differ. I mean, there’s common principles and the knowledge base is somewhat transferable between the two. But the video SEO is kind of its own beast.
Steve Wetmore – Can you share what tools your team is using with respect to SEO?
James Creech – Yes back in my paid media days, I leaned heavily on Google AdWords, keyword planner and Google Trends. I know, we still take advantage of those tools. We look at web SEO for our site on a day to day basis and it’s more focused on video SEO. And so again, TubeBuddy.com is certainly what I lean on.
Steve Wetmore – James thank you for this fast moving interview and insightful information about Video SEO and your activities at Paladin Software.
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