Brad Hoos — What 50,000 influencer campaigns tell us about what brands really care about

**Brad Hoos** (0:00)
It is very hard for me to imagine a consumer facing brand where influencer marketing isn't going to be a critical part of your marketing mix.

**Jay Clouse** (0:25)
Hello, my friend, welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. My guest today is Brad Hoos, CEO of the Outloud Group, one of the leading influencer marketing agencies in the United States. They've run campaigns for global brands like AG1, Chomps, KitchenAid and Whirlpool, and they've done it across tens of thousands of creator partnerships. Now, I actually came across Brad when I was doing research for my book proposal on the topic of trust. I was trying to find the agency that represented AG1 because it had become so ubiquitous in podcast marketing, and I wanted to talk about that. Brad sits at one of the most interesting vantage points in the entire creator economy, right in the middle between the brands who need credibility and the creators who have built it. So in this conversation, we get into what brands actually want when they come to an agency like his, how they think about brand voice versus brand advocacy, what it takes to be a creator that brands keep coming back to, and why the creators who say no the most often are actually the most valuable. We'll get to my full conversation with Brad right after this.
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When brands come to work with you and you work with big brands, AG1, Chomps, KitchenAid, Whirlpool, when they come to Outloud, what do you think they really want from that campaign? Is it purely transactional or are they coming with a lot of big campaign ideas? Like what is the starting point often?

**Brad Hoos** (4:18)
Ideally, they're coming with really clear objectives that we can help them meet.
Whether that's awareness, whether that's brand sentiment, whether that's conversion or whether that's consideration, right? And we can dial in the very specific metrics for all of those. But I think a lot of times, they want something a little bit softer and we have to translate that into metrics. And what they often want is relevancy.