Michael Kuzminov: Our vision is to set high industry standards which enable organizations and influencers to get mutually beneficial results with ethical principles in mind.

January 9, 2024

We are the Global Cutting-edge Influencer Marketing Agency where performance meets creativity. Our AI tool named HypeDetect consists of 73 million influencers across the globe on 5 platforms – TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch. When launching campaigns we analyze the whole database by more than 55 metrics including fraud activity detection.

Being powered by AI is cool, but without human touch we’re nothing. Our Team constantly keeps an eye on social media trends and updates in order to implement new changes and creative hooks into brands strategies quickly.

Actually, we strive to set new standards in the industry by providing a data-driven approach and increasing the level of client service with transparency, diving deep into brand business goals, transparency and performance-oriented.

We are not interested in standing still and watching how the industry develops from the outside, we are interested in being in the thick of things and developing it ourselves.

Tell us about yourself?

I have always gravitated towards the exact sciences, I was very fond of mathematics. I even got a higher education in mathematics. I have always liked this science with accuracy, logic and … creativity. I have always been looking for a job that would contain these same qualities at the same time.

This is exactly what the marketing and advertising industry is like – you need to think fast and agile, but keep a cool mind and remember to look at the numbers. I started my journey at GroupM as Head of Digital Special Projects and then continued my career at several global advertising holding companies, such as IPG Mediabrands, Omnicom helding C-level positions.

For 15 years in the marketing industry in big-name companies I’ve managed to grow and successfully re-brand dozens of agencies. This has been a long journey full of learnings, small and big wins, and, of course, mistakes, which I use in HypeFactory, a fast-growing ad tech marketing agency as a CGO.

The values of me and the agency absolutely coincide, one of which is the desire for growth. For me, as a CGO, it is very important to drive business and reach new digital horizons. Inside the agency are young and ambitious guys who fully share my desire for growth and contribute to it by putting forward ideas and participating in projects not only in their own specifics.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

If I could go back in time a year or two, I would advise myself to be more proactive in implementing new services in the company while also adopting a “test and learn” mindset.

One specific example that comes to mind is the launch of a Consulting Service for clients who were new to influencer marketing and wanted to dip their toes in without investing too much right away. Although the team did a great job in building a strategy and launching the service in early 2023, we spent way more time than necessary on discussing and fine-tuning the details.

Looking back, I realized that sometimes having a good understanding of customer insights and needs can be sufficient to launch a product successfully. Instead of always double-checking and overthinking, we could have saved months of work and resources by adopting a more agile and customer-focused approach.

What problem does your business solve?

We help brands grow their business with influencers and in a diverse geos. Influencers’ content is authentic and sounds like the advice of a kind friend. In the era of no cookies world and striving for transparency and trust, this channel proves its efficacy.

Also, one of the popular issues right now is the creator economy. As we closely work with influencers, we know how many difficulties they face in monetizing their work, struggling creative blocks and other difficulties. This inspired us to launch Talent Management Service in February 2023 to make our contribution to help creators invest their precious time in content creation while paper work and legal issues are solved by us. Nonetheless, the creative economy is growing in figure and accessibility, which is great news and we genuinely hope it will keep accelerating. That being said, we truly empathize with their struggles and understand them deeply–artists not being able to monetize their work is tale as old as time, and we hope that will change.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

We saw that it is a challenge for many clients to execute campaigns which bring consistent and predictable results which are in line with business objectives. We saw that there is also a gap in automation of such campaigns. At that time, there were so many influencers that it became impossible to analyze all of them and select the right ones manually. In addition, we wanted to create a unique client-oriented service that is focused on achieving the clients’ business goals in an agile approach and commit to KOIs without sacrificing quality.

Since then, we have been improving and promoting the AI approach to influencer marketing to the masses, launching campaigns from Korea to America together with big brands, delivering them a quick wow-result.

What is your magic sauce?

My breadth of experience allowed me to see the ins and outs of the advertising world and dive deep into brands. All this I brought to the work of CGO. I like that no matter how big or small a business is, I can make the most of their marketing and advertising strategies. It is I who train with a team that delights me with youth and ambition. The guys are deep experts in the industry, easy-going and open to experimentation.

It is the depth of expertise in various industries from gaming to beauty, experience in working with all geos and a focus on growth that distinguish us from our competitors. I can’t say enough about the AI tool HypeDetect. The base of 73 million is truly unique. It improves daily, appearing on 15,000 influencers a day and developing new metrics for analytics. I have not yet seen companies in our field that can boast of such technology.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

Our ambition is to become leaders on global influencer marketing market with broad expertise across geos and business verticals.

Our vision is to set high industry standards which enable organizations and influencers to get mutually beneficial results with ethical principles in mind.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

One of the problems in our industry is the lack of awareness about the effectiveness of the influencer marketing channel. There are very few such regions, but one of them is SEA. We assumed that with our technology and customer service we could grow the business as quickly as in other regions, but in this case, we need to change plan A to plan B and, first of all, introduce marketers to the benefits of IM and offer them new platforms that were previously not used in the region. Only by raising awareness about influencer marketing as an efficient instrument of marketing strategy will we be able to fly at high speeds in this geo, because we already have everything we need to do this.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

I think that our passion for growing the business of our clients is written in our eyes. To be serious, we indeed have a strong expertise in influence marketing which is powered by HypeDetect AI-tool. I think that this Human-to-Data approach makes us an attractive service-provider and a reliable employer.

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