Adam Gausepohl
💼 CEO and Head of Creative
PopShorts
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🏢 Agency
📍 Los Angeles, CA
Adam is an author of multiple award-winning campaigns for the world’s largest brands, studios, and agencies, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Finalist in the Marketing and Advertising category.
How do you typically find new influencers to work with?
There are a few main ways we typically find new influencers to work with: 1. Whenever a client reaches out to us about a campaign, our talent and creative teams discuss the brief and the creator archetypes that would be most impactful. Our talent team then does extensive research and outreach to identify suitable creators. This occurs via influencer identification tools like CreatorIQ, internet research, on-platform social media research, and targeted outreach to known managers who are likely to represent suitable talent. 2. Managers send us updated lists of talent and we add them to our network. 3. We use the social platforms we activate creators on and we stay up-to-date with industry news. We are constantly adding new creators to our network who we think could be suitable for future campaigns.
Do you prioritize influencers with a large following, or do you also consider micro-influencers?
This entirely depends on the client and the appropriate strategy to achieve their goals, along with their budget. We’ve worked with companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 100 brands, but typically we work with larger companies who prefer to activate creators with larger followings.
How much does engagement rate factor into your decision to partner with an influencer, or are you primarily focused on views?
Engagement rate factors heavily into our decision-making, as does the mean and median view counts of creators. Following itself is less important than the mean and median number of views and engagements of a creator, as this is more indicative of their influence and ability to create engaging content.
Do you leave complete freedom to influencers when producing videos or do you prefer to be more in control?
As an agency, it’s our job to help brands get the most out of their influencer partnerships. We do take a very hands-on approach to creative, but it’s also very strategic. We research each influencer we work with extensively and design creative concepts that respect an influencer’s natural content style that has allowed them to authentically connect with their audience while also coming up with creative concepts that can organically integrate the brand and its desired messaging. This approach appeals to brands and influencers while achieving results that consistently surpass industry benchmarks.
How does collaborating directly with a brand differ from working with an agency like yours?
This answer could take up an entire chapter, but I’ll keep it brief. In short, a great influencer marketing agency will have experts who have worked on hundreds of influencer campaigns, have worked with thousands of influencers, and deeply understand how to set up and manage a campaign to achieve success. Agencies will also have tools at their disposal to identify suitable creators and measure/analyze the success of campaigns. For creators, they can speak more freely with an agency than a brand, as they don’t need to worry about offending us and we can choose what to communicate to the client. We understand when and how to fight for creators and push back on brands’ creative overreach. In my opinion, the vast majority of brands would benefit from using an agency for their influencer marketing, but there are some rare brands who excel at working directly with creators and benefit from taking a direct-to-influencer approach.
What do you wish every influencer knew when collaborating with an agency?
I’m not sure if this will be commonplace in the next 5 years, but I can see companies establishing creator equity pools similar to how they establish employee equity pools. There are mismatched incentives for brands and creators currently which has created a transactional and less authentic brand/influencer relationship, and I imagine that the future of influencer marketing will look to better align incentives. I’m currently working on a solution to get us there.
How do you think the role of influencers in marketing will change over the next 5 years?
I’m not sure if this will be commonplace in the next 5 years, but I can see companies establishing creator equity pools similar to how they establish employee equity pools. There are mismatched incentives for brands and creators currently which has created a transactional and less authentic brand/influencer relationship, and I imagine that the future of influencer marketing will look to better align incentives. I’m currently working on a solution to get us there.
PopShorts
PopShorts is a leading, data-driven social media strategy and influencer marketing agency that has delivered award-winning campaigns for over 10 years.
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