Even before the phrase “influencer marketing” was around, Upfluence was essentially running an influencer marketing company.
Founded in 2013, Upfluence’s origin is “a little bit of an embarrassing story,” Co-Founder and CEO Vivien Garnès told AdExchanger. Before founding Upfluence, Garnès and his co-founder, Kevin Creusy, had started a number of ecommerce companies, including a men’s apparel brand that was, according to Garnès, “doomed to fail.”
The brand was struggling to get rid of its inventory. Pay-per-click ads weren’t working. Email marketing wasn’t working. The only thing that worked, according to Garnès, was reaching out to bloggers whose reviews drove traffic to the site.
Connecting with bloggers was a time-consuming process that involved finding someone who was a good fit, digging up their email address and then persuading them to post a review of the brand. “That’s when we were like, yeah, it would be nice to have a technological response to this problem,” said Garnès.
Enter Upfluence: an influencer marketing platform born before the term “influencer marketing” existed.
Howdy, partner(ship)
But it’s not 2013 anymore, and simply offering to be the conduit between brands and creators is no longer a unique selling point.
So, earlier this year, Upfluence shifted to a fully agentic business, powered by its agentic system, Jaice. (The name is a riff on the name of a character from Magic: The Gathering because, “with all the love in my heart,” said Garnès, “Kevin [Creusy] is a little bit of a nerd.”)
Jaice now assists brands through the entire process of finding and executing creator partnerships, from writing a brief to contacting relevant creators and negotiating rates.
Campaign creation is made up of dozens of “micro decisions,” including determining what audience to reach, finding the right creators to work with and what value proposition you’re offering them, Garnès said. Oftentimes, he added, “there’s an objective best answer” that an AI tool can determine – so Upfluence unified the process into a single chat-based experience.
Marketers upload their brand’s website to Upfluence, and Jaice scrapes the site and any publicly available historical data to understand details like the brand’s audience and how much a collaboration with a given creator might cost. Anything that it can’t determine from the link and existing data, it asks the advertiser about directly through a chat interface.
Jaice is trained on thousands of past collaborations in Upfluence’s historical data and is able to “contextualize” raw data from social media platforms. Jaice can “understand” what drives prices up or down (such as whether the creator made one longer piece of content that they broke down into shorter reels and TikToks, versus an ongoing series of new content shared over a longer period of time).
Value props
Unlike some other creator marketing platforms, Upfluence is a two-way marketplace, so marketers can reach out to the creators who catch their eye or vice versa.
When a creator reaches out to a brand, that means the brief and product are already intriguing to them. But when the brand reaches out first (or when Jaice reaches out on their behalf, since that’s one of the steps that can now be automated), the brand’s value proposition needs to be obvious and compelling off the bat.
An upfront payment to the creator – rather than just a commission on sales – tends to be more appealing to creators and indicates a willingness of the brand to bear the risk if the campaign doesn’t pan out, Garnès said.
But, of course, Upfluence aims to ensure as high a likelihood as possible that the campaign will pan out – so one of Jaice’s primary goals is to match the right creators to the right brands.
The best partnerships occur when the brand’s interests and the creator’s interests are “aligned,” said Garnès – but there’s more to alignment than meets the eye. There’s “a lazy way” to match a creator to a brand, he added, like a meal service company who is eager to advertise on any food-focused media.
Jaice, on the other hand, might be able to pinpoint exactly what subcategory of consumers, like new parents, would find a meal delivery service most compelling. From there, it would develop the brief accordingly and reach out to creators whose audience has a large number of those consumers.
Less is more
It’s easy to know if the campaign is working.
Upfluence has native integrations with most of the major ecommerce platforms, including Shopify and WooCommerce, which gives Upfluence an eye into performance and measurement. It can track how often buyers use a creator’s unique content code and trace those purchases back to their content.
Like many creator platforms, Upfluence’s focus is on quality, rather than quantity, when it comes to finding creators to represent brands. With millions of online creators to choose from, Upfluence’s goal is to selectively find the best fit for a brand’s product, rather than just striking as many partnerships as possible and seeing what sticks.
“Our job is not to have a bigger haystack,” said Garnès. “It’s to find the needles.”
