Episode 176: Alex Chatfield on How Influencers are Leveraging Data Technology

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is At Tech God, and I command you to listen to this house ad. So if you're listening to this show, just know that you've really stumbled upon a giant network of content across advertising, marketing, media, publishing, and of course, the people that work in this great advertising industry.
So go to marketecturemedia.com, check out all of our brands. We have multitude of shows from the brand forum, the advertising forum, the monopoly report, the ad tech god pod, the Marketecture pod, and more. We are bringing more podcasts to our network. We are consistently and constantly bringing on new shows. So check it out, marketecturemedia.com, or search for any of those brands in the app that you use to listen to this podcast. Enjoy the show and see you all soon.

**Ari Paparo** (0:58)
All right, welcome to the Marketecture Podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm here with Eric Franchi. How are you doing, Eric?

**Eric Franchi** (1:03)
Doing well. How are you, my friend?

**Ari Paparo** (1:05)
I'm very good. So Eric and I have very complicated schedules in the weeks leading up to Cannes. So we're gonna mix it up a little bit. Like I think we're, I'm doing some interviews without Eric, and then Eric and I are doing the news, and maybe, I think I'll be able to do the news the next couple of weeks. But if I can, Eric will do the news by himself.
We're all adults. All the listeners are adults. They can handle it. A little change, a little mix up, they'll be okay. Don't you think?

**Eric Franchi** (1:30)
I don't know, man. I think some of the people just love the back and forth, the banter, the, you know, the Ari and Eric show. But we'll do our best.

**Ari Paparo** (1:41)
Well, today, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Chatfield, who many of you probably know, long time person at AppNexus, who I worked with closely during my time there, and he started a company. It was called Ad-Volution, but now it has a better name called Endorseable. And it's kind of in the middle of Influencer, but with like an ad tech data overlay.
So it's pretty interesting stuff. I learned a lot from the conversation. And so we'll hear that. And then Eric and I will come back with the news of the week where we've got the liftoff IPO, the Walmart announcements, and some just other pretty interesting things that are going on in the industry. So it should be a good conversation.

**Eric Franchi** (2:27)
Yes. A geo company was acquired.
And the names have completely escaped Ari and Eric.

**Ari Paparo** (2:33)
Stay tuned for it. It'll be a mystery to us when we find out who got acquired. All right. Stay tuned for Alex Chatfield.
So congrats on getting out of AppNexus, Microsoft, for a long stint and doing your own thing. You're the co-founder and president of this company we're calling Endorseable, new name. Tell me a little bit about it.

**Alex Chatfield** (2:55)
Well, yeah. Thanks, Ari. It took almost 15 years to finally leave the nest, but I've spread my wings and I'm trying to fly here on my own thing, which has been really an exciting journey. It's evolved significantly since the beginning, I think like any good startup. But what we're building is what we call a fandom intelligence engine.

**Ari Paparo** (3:16)
Okay. What does that mean?
Fandom intelligence agent. So this is like influencer, it's called Endorseable. So that kind of tells us a little bit, but give us the elevator pitch.

**Alex Chatfield** (3:25)
Yeah. Really what we do is we partner and enable talent. So actors, athletes, influencers, creators, to translate their social capital into new lines of growth and to empower brands to build both more authentic and more effective endorsement partnerships.

**Ari Paparo** (3:44)
Right. That makes sense. I mean, there's the statistics out there that, you know, influencers are the number one source of Virgin Z finding new brands, and they're trusted more than paid media and all that sort of stuff.
So is this an influencer play? Because there have been other influencer plays, influential, that acquired a bunch of other companies like that. How is this different?

**Alex Chatfield** (4:05)
Yeah. So it's a great question. The influencer market is very hot, as you said, growing 30 plus percent year over year, depending on what you're looking at. It's already a sizable market.
What's unique about our play is that we're really focusing on fandom and the fans of the spokesperson or of the influencer, where traditionally the focus has really just been on what we would call talent data, meaning the own personal preferences, interests of the talent themselves, the products and services that they personally use.