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.