Influencers are very important to marketers, but how to assess the pros and cons of different follower counts is a topic of great discussion. What is the optimal number of followers for an influencer to have?

Today we’re speaking with Simone Wies, Alexander Bleier and Alexander Edeling.  Our conversation discusses their research and explores the answers to this question and more.

Topics include:

• The optimal number of followers for an influencer, if you’re working with them for an Instagram post or story.
• Which operational choices might change this ‘goldilocks’ inflection point - and influence marketers’ ROI.
• If it is possible to extrapolate these results to other platforms.

Today we’re speaking with Matthew Leising a book author and reporter who has been covering crypto since 2015. Last year founded DeCential to highlight the stories of the people creating the new blockchain fueled internet and financial system.

Our conversation explores blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs and Web 3.0.

Topics include:

• Why blockchain is important.
• Why many blockchains take a tremendous amount of energy to run and why ‘proof of stake’ could change this.
• Why NFTs have value.
• Why there’s scarcity of digital real estate in Web 3.0.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, discusses the different diagnostics they use to assess a brand’s performance with young consumer audiences.

Topics include:

• The different factors that they measure when assessing brand love.
• Why being cool is different from being hot – and why it matters.
• Why a wholistic approach, across diagnostics, is necessary to achieve peak brand performance.

Gaming has been smashing Hollywood’s earnings and in 2021 the global ‘games market’ posted $180 billion in revenue – which is more than Hollywood and music combined.

Suffice it to say:  Gaming is huge.

Today we’re speaking with Jamin Warren, CEO and founder of Twofivesix, about how brands can engage with audiences in the world of gaming.

Topics include:

• Why understanding your audience's gaming affinity, activity and identity is core to success.
• The questions businesses need to ask if they’re engaging a company to create a campaign that targets gamers.
• Why brands don’t necessarily have to be in a game to effectively reach gamers.

Marketing is the business of understanding marketplace competitors as well as defining, positioning, and promoting products to target customers. Marketers are tasked with developing the strategy to boost sales and revenue, and one of the ways they can do this is through customer base analysis.

Today we’re speaking with Jan Valendin. 

Our conversation explores how he and his colleagues have used recurrent neural networks to innovate the process of customer base analysis.

Topics include:

• How their deep learning model leverages observed behavior and auto feature extraction to predict future behavior.
• Why having a large starting data set and at least a thousand customers is necessary to take advantage of the promise of this approach.
• How using this approach can help marketers ranging from charities to streaming entertainment providers proactively manage their customer base.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, shares their recent research into the way young consumers feel about TikTok and the impact that TikTok has had on the larger social media context.

Topics include:

• How young consumers feel about TikTok vis-à-vis other social platforms and media companies.
• How young consumers’ experience on TikTok is influencing their expectations about other platforms.
• What young consumers expect from brands if they want to engage with them on TikTok.

In today’s podcast Alyssa Gelbard discusses how the recruiting process and your employees’ communication behaviors impact your brand.

Topics include:

• How what you post on LinkedIn impacts your company’s brand.
• The ways in which you can (and can’t) leverage your teams’ LinkedIn profiles and posts.
• Why the experience of all job candidates (and not just the people you end up hiring) matters to your brand.

Brands are increasingly leaning into influencer marketing. As with most things, digital regulations lag real world scenarios and the guidelines around advertising content disclosure vary.    

Today we’re speaking with Alexander Edeling and Zeynep Karagür about their research in to how, why and when ad disclosure matters for influencer marketing.

Topics include:

• How ad disclosure impacts consumer engagement with branded content.
• The factors that marketing practitioners should consider when selecting one influencer over another.
• What the data means for how marketing practitioners work with influencers.

In today’s podcast Nick Zeckets, founder, and CEO of Air Traffic Control, discusses how machine learning has allowed his business to mine qualitative information from a businesses’ first party data and power true personalization.

Topics include:

• The difference between personalization and hyper segmentation.
• How AI and natural language processing is powering a 1:1 connection between marketers & their audiences.
• Why first party data is still a largely untapped resource … and the future of marketing.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, unpacks the apparent disconnect between young consumers’ environmentalism and their penchant for low-cost, high-volume goods.

Topics include:

• The percentage of young consumers who feel that climate change represents an existential threat to existence.
• The factors that go into young consumers’ purchase decisions.
• Why price point is a critical part of any brand’s sustainable product offering and marketing message.

In today’s podcast Alyssa Gelbard shares the ins and outs of serving on a nonprofit board and how this work can fit into the larger arc of one’s career. 

Topics include:

• Why serving on a nonprofit board can not only do good, but also be good – for your own career development.
• How to prepare yourself to be an attractive nonprofit board candidate.
• What to expect when serving on a nonprofit board.

Communication is challenging. Management books abound to help professionals, who have advanced degrees and understand the complex context that surrounds their words, communicate more effectively.

Can a machine wade into this space and convincingly communicate with a person?

Today we’re speaking with Praveen Kopallé whose research uses natural language processing, deep learning and machine generated content to explore this question.

Topics include:

• If machines can write human-like reviews.
• If machines can synthesize user-generated reviews into useful summaries.
• The practical implications and ethical challenges associated with automatic content generation.

In today’s podcast Alyssa Gelbard shares the skinny on some of the biggest career and job search mistakes that people make – and how you can avoid them.

Topics include:

• The three worst networking mistakes you can make.
• The things you should never, ever, put on your LinkedIn profile (looking at you, you magic-working ninjas).
• Why dressing for success – and staying hungry – is important, if you want to make a good impression.

In today’s podcast Gabriella Mirabelli interviews Alyssa Gelbard about the power (and mechanics) of effective networking.

 Topics include:

• How to think about networking when you’re not actively looking for a job opportunity.
• How to effectively network on LinkedIn and one approach that you should never, ever, use.
• The etiquette around making introductions (for both the seeker and the giver).

In this podcast Gabriella Mirabelli interviews MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, about how young consumers’ culture is feeding into food and changing what it means to be a foodie.

Topics include:

• The ways Gen Z’s relationship to food culture is different from Millennials.
• What Gen Z is eating, where they’re eating and how they feel about food content.
• What the evolution of foodie culture might be signaling about other cultural passions strongly linked with the Millennial generation.

In today’s podcast Carolyn Stern discusses her new book, the Emotionally Strong Leader, and outlines how understanding and embracing emotions can help leaders to better manage their people and organizations. 

 Topics include:

• The difference between having emotions and being emotional.
• How understanding your own emotions can help you to manage other people more effectively.
• How to be an empathetic leader without getting enmeshed in your team members’ challenges.
• Why being an emotionally strong leader is especially important when managing GenZ team members.

Marketers know that consumers use attribute information to help them make their purchasing decision, but a lot of advertising doesn’t include this information. Are these marketers making a mistake or are they winning market share … by sharing less?

Today we’re speaking with Professor David Soberman about how the model he and his colleague, Professor Yi Xiang can help marketers to better understand how to make decisions about whether or not to include product attribute information in their advertising.

Topics include:

• Why a less differentiated market sometimes leads to an increase in content rich advertising.
• How uninformative advertising can be used to create ‘artificial’ differentiation.
• Why the insights from this research might be even more relevant for high involvement products.

Click here for the Research Article  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811621000483

The script breakdown process is used to figure out the shooting requirements of every scene within a script.

The process generates budget, schedule and prep work. It is done to help filmmakers assess their creative, technical and, most importantly, budgetary needs.

In today’s podcast Ruslan Khamidullin, the CTO at Filmustage, discusses how his company has used a neural network and natural language processing to revolutionize this process.

Topics include:

• How they trained their AI to break down scripts.
• What Filmustage subscribers can expect when they use the product.
• The Filmustage product roadmap.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, discuss how young consumers are thinking about ‘wellness’ and what it means for the brands who want to engage with them on this topic.

Topics include:

• The evolving definition of 'wellness''.
• Why we might be seeing a gender difference between how men and women feel about their own well-being.
• How brands can participate in the 'wellness' conversation.

In today’s podcast Tim Tortora discusses how film and TV writers, directors, actors, producers & crew can get connected to the real producers in Hollywood, build their careers and network effectively. The ideas Tim shares are rooted in the entertainment industry, but apply across verticals and can be put to use by anyone who wants to stop working a job and start strategically building a career.

Topics include:

• The five mindset shifts you need to put into action to achieve your career goals.
• The one (and only) question you should ask during an informational interview.
• The same trick everyone can use to completely differentiate themselves when networking.
• How to separate the real opportunities from those that will not move things forward.

Online behavior is tracked and used by marketers to tailor advertisements and offers. As consumers start to use voice assistants to help them purchase the things they want, do their voices give away more about them than their keystrokes do?

Today we’re speaking with Martin Klarmann about research he and Ingo Halbauer conducted into the potential for voice retailers to predict consumer mood and how knowledge of a consumer’s mood could be used by those same retailers. 

Topics include:

• The critical ways in which the retail experience through a voice assistant is different from traditional online shopping.
• The aspects of our speech that signal our moods.
• Why a retailer’s ability to know a consumer’s mood creates an ethical conundrum.

Gamification taps into our innate impulse to play. Practically speaking, it is the application of the game elements such as competition, ranking or scoring into what are traditionally non-gaming contexts. It is also one of the most promising trends in marketing.

In today’s podcast Margee Hocking, head of enterprise accounts for the engagement and gamification platform CataBoom, discusses gamification and how it is being used to level up the effectiveness of today’s marketing campaigns.

Topics include:

• The three elements that every gamification effort should consider.
• How gamification can be integrated into different parts of the marketing funnel.
• Why gamification works across demographics and industry verticals.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, maps out the landscape that surrounds the intersection of fashion, social media and young consumers. She shares where trends originate, how they are amplified and why “dress for success,” might just start to involve sweats.

Topics include:

• The social platforms influencing Gen Z and Millennial style discovery.
• Why TikTok’s unique algorithm further democratizes fashion and elevates the importance of hashtags.
• How IRL choices and social feed outfits diverge (and why this expands the opportunities available for brands).

In today’s podcast Alyssa Gelbard discusses personal branding, older job hunters and how to approach the third act of your career.

Topics include:

• The truth about ageism – and what you can do about it.
• How senior level job hunters should their approach their job search.
• The importance of LinkedIn and how to leverage it to your advantage
• The words you need to remove from your resume and emails.

Alyssa Gelbard is the Founder and CEO of Point Road Group, a unique branding firm that helps companies make better brand impressions through their people. Point Road Group, a woman-owned and woman-led company, also strengthens personal brands of executives to support a job or board search.

Leading a talented team that advises diverse companies, executives and board directors,

Alyssa is passionate about strategically improving brand impressions to drive business and

career success. She is an expert and frequent speaker on personal branding, LinkedIn, communications and marketing yourself for a board seat.

People compare themselves with other people. It’s human nature.

Today we’re speaking with Professor Jing Xu about how these comparisons with others impact people’s subsequent purchasing decisions. 

Our conversation explores the different feelings elicited by upward and downward comparisons, the mechanisms that drive these feelings, the subsequent impact of these comparisons and the factors that modify these outcomes.

Topics include:

• The difference between competence and warmth-oriented products.
• The two fundamental needs that are activated when people compare themselves to others.
• How a brand might operationalize this insight into human behavior.