At Winfluence, we like to talk to people who have multiple perspectives on the influencer marketing space. Someone who is an influencer but who also does marketing consulting and understands having to select and manage other influencers for brands. Or someone on the brand side who makes those decisions, but is also an influencer for some interest of theirs.
Kelly Olexa brings more than a couple of perspectives to the table. She is probably best known for starting Fitfluential, the first real network of fitness influencers. So in that role she was both a fitness influencer, but also a talent manager of sorts, connecting brands and agencies to the influencers in her network. She also has experience on the agency side where she was before Fitfluential, then again as an agency entrepreneur with Socially Fit services.
Now Kelly heads up sales and business development for Lumanu, an influencer marketing software company that helps influencers and the brands they partner with white list the influencer’s account with the brand. This enables the brand to put paid spend behind the influencer’s content which turns the influencer marketing channel for the brand into a paid social channel complete with targeting, look a like audiences and beyond.
We talk about the opportunity and challenges with Lumanu, her perspective on the influencer marketing space and a whole lot more.
This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we’ve been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be “influence” marketing makes us smarter marketers.
Order Winfluence now!
This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we’ve been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be “influence” marketing makes us smarter marketers.
Winfluence Transcript – Kelly Olexa – Lumanu
Jason Falls
Hello again friends thanks for listening to Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast. Those of you who listen regularly to the big show here may have picked up on the fact I like to talk to people who have multiple perspectives on the influencer marketing space. Someone who is an influencer but who also does marketing consulting and understands having to select and manage other influencers for brands or someone on the brand side who makes those decisions, but is also an influencer for some interest of theirs.
Jason Falls
Kelly Olexa brings more than a couple of perspectives to the table. She’s probably best known for starting to fitfluential the first real network of fitness influencers. So in that role, she was both a fitness influencer but also a talent manager of sorts, connecting brands and agencies to the influencers in her network. She also has experience on the agency side where she was before fitfluential then again as an agency entrepreneur with social events services. Now Kelly heads up sales and business development for Lumanu, an influencer marketing software company that helps influencers and the brands they partner with whitelist the influencers account with the brand. This enables the brand to put paid spin behind the influencers content, which turns the influencer marketing channel for the brand into a paid social channel complete with targeting look alike audiences and more.
Jason Falls
We talked about the opportunity and challenges with Lumanu, her perspective on the influencer marketing space and a whole lot more. Learn from a smarty today Kelly Olexa is next on Winfluence.
Jason Falls
This is normally the point in the program where someone jumps in and says, “Support for today’s podcast …” Well support for today’s episode of Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Winfluence the book! Winfluence – Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand is available now from Entrepreneur Press. You can find it in bookstores everywhere, but I’ll have a special place to go online and get a discount in just a second so get ready to jot down a note. Winfluence the book is not just a strategic blueprint to help you employ smart influence marketing strategies for your business or clients. But it explains why our common perception of influencer marketing is all wrong. I take you through how to rethink and reframe the concepts to turn influencer marketing into influence marketing, broaden the perspective and open new avenues of leveraging influential people online and offline to grow your business. Here’s the special URL and discount code just for you the listeners of this podcast go to jasonfalls.co/buywinfluence. That’s jasonfalls.co/buywinfluence. That takes you to the book on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore, buy the book and use the code FALLS20 – all caps – F-A-L-L-S-2-0 and get 20% off the retail price. The address again is jasonfalls.co/buywinfluence. Leave a review on Amazon after you read it because select reviews will be read here on the show. Winfluence – Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand is available now. Go to jasonfalls.co/buywinfluence. and use the code FALLS20 today.
Jason Falls
So I want to get to your new role and talk about Lumanu — is that how you pronounce it. Lumanu?
Kelly Olexa
You’re very good because working at the company are probably two months before really pronounce it effectively.
Jason Falls
Well, there you go. So I nailed it. That’s good. So I want to get to your role there. But I think we need to set the context a little bit. I think most people know you for being the founder and CEO of Fitfluential, which was the really the first ever influencer network in the fitness space. Give the folks listening a bit of context around that effort, like sighs what you did, what was the model there?
Kelly Olexa
With Fitfluential? I just want to make sure.
Jason Falls
Yes.
Kelly Olexa
Okay. Um, yeah, with Fitfluential It’s so funny. I always call myself the most unexpected and reluctant entrepreneur because, you know, and we were just talking about David Armano. Before we go on this call, and he is a big part. both him and Gary Vaynerchuk are a big part of why I ended up starting that company because Gary inspired me to you know, quit my job and see my potential. But I had been talking to David about how much I hated my agency job at the time, and I said, I just see that there is a need for a fit. You know, it seems like all these agencies or agencies are coming to me and brands are coming to me going. We’re doing campaigns and we need to find fitness people where we find fitness people are healthy people like you. And it was just this thing where I realized the only thing that existed back then, you know, like 2009 2010 was mommy networks. And that was the thing mommy blogger or coupon bloggers. And I’m thinking like, Mommy is such a broad term. And so I saw the saw the need for something that was such a niche focus, right with fitness. And I started reaching out to bloggers that I knew and these were people that I’ve developed friendships with, because I’d started blogging back in 2007. So we started just another blogger and myself reaching out to other fitness bloggers and YouTubers, and asking them like, hey, do you want to opt in to my my little club, my community, I didn’t really think that it would take off. But very quickly, after reaching out to bloggers, we went from zero to having, you know, 500 bloggers and we were reaching 5 million people a month. And Fast Forward six or seven years later, we’d executed over 750 successful influencer campaigns back then we didn’t call them influencer campaigns now you would call them influencer campaigns back then, there were blogger campaigns. And we worked for agencies and brands, big brands, small brands, pretty much everybody in the fitness space, a lot of technology brands, some lifestyle brands, CPG brands. And it was a crazy wild ride. But I learned a ton. And it’s funny, Jason, because when I shut that business down in 2018, I said, I wash my hands of this, I’m never going to be involved in influencer marketing again. And now I’m working at Lumanu and I honestly, I’ve never been more convinced that influencer marketing is more important, more relevant, and more legitimate than ever.
Jason Falls
Well, and you bring a really good perspective to it. Because not only did you run, you know, an influencer network, but you you know, had influenced yourself, you know, in the fitness space, but then also really in the social media marketing space, too. So you bring in an interesting perspective to it. I know that, that that what you were doing before Lumanu morphed itself, and you had the Kelly-O show and, and kind of your own brand name. I know you also, you know, use your parent company and incubate some other ideas, like Socially Fit Services and whatnot, which is a consulting company, I think, or was a consulting company. So what made you gravitate toward a new opportunity with Lumanu, and is the Kelly-O brand on hold? Or is it still a juggle for you?
Kelly Olexa
It you know, it’s it’s definitely a juggle in that I definitely have a tendency to towards workaholism. And that just is because I really enjoy what I do. So if I had it my way, I would have a 48 hour day, I would be able to run my podcast, run my blog, relaunch my YouTube channel, work full time at Lumanu also run Socially Fit Services take clients on there, I mean, that’s just it’s a weakness. It’s it’s maybe a weakness and a strength of mine at the same time. So I will say that, interestingly enough, the in Q4 of 2020, I took a break I because I realized that I was trying to do too many things. And it’s very easy to to just allow your health to just get destroyed when you’re burning the candle at both ends. So I’ll try to answer your questions in order. But yeah, I took a break from my personal brand stuff, if you will, I shut down. I didn’t, I didn’t shut down my podcast, I just, I was recording four shows a week with my full time job. And, you know, again, doing that, and blogging and the social media amplification was just too much. And I realized, like, I need to give myself a break, I’m getting married, I want to enjoy the holidays with my new husband. And so that was really good. How I ended up making the transfer, if you will, from running my own businesses to coming back and working for somebody else. It really was kind of you got to look at it in the context of COVID. I launched socially fit services right after I shut down Fitfluential. And very quickly, that was January of 2019. And I brought on a ton of clients and we were a profitable six figure business within I think four weeks. And it was great. But I realized about eight months into the year, I was doing social media management. And that’s not the best use of my talents and my experience and I honestly I hated my life. Even my husband’s like, I every time I come home, you you’re like Pour me a drink. And so I decided that I was going to you know, make a shift. And then interestingly enough at that point, I ended up with a serious health issue probably from working too much but I had chronic migraines. I think I told you about this, I have chronic migraines for seven months, and I couldn’t work. And so that brings us to the year of COVID. I got back to work in February of last year. So 2020 started bringing on clients for socially fit services, and brought on for clients with all excited and COVID hit. And they all had to they either went out of business or just had to cancel their contracts. And it got to the point where truthfully, Jason, I just, I’d been working and trying to hustle and do the entrepreneur thing that I’ve been used to, and I couldn’t gain any traction. And sometimes, you just have to say, Okay, if nothing’s working, it’s time to make a sharp right hand turn. And I really, I said to my husband, at the beginning of April, I said, here’s the deal, I am going back to work for someone else, I’m going to interview, I’m going to put my name out there, I’m going to have a job. And you know, literally, as soon as I said it, I was able to network and work my way into an opportunity. And the truth is I did actually work at an agency for a brief time before Lumanu. But I ended up at Lumanu because I’ve known the founder for years, Tony. And he’s an extraordinarily talented individual. And he had asked my advice just on the influencer space, what he’s doing with the creator economy. And it turned out that I was getting ready to accept another job. And he’s like, can I have you talk to my head of growth, because I really think there’s an opportunity here. So it wasn’t planned. I didn’t apply for it. But it’s one of the best decisions I ever made. Because I think what they’re doing with, you know, helping brands and agencies scale whitelisting and dark posting. And if you don’t know what that is, you will understand how powerful it is. The ability to scale those efforts is game changing for any brand. And so I had to join them, because I’m like, this is the place to be.
Jason Falls
So let’s let’s start there, then Lumanu it took me a minute to understand what Lumanu is and does as I was poking around and doing my research. Why don’t you give us the elevator pitch since I’m bound to muck it up?
Kelly Olexa
Sure. Well, for those that are listening, that haven’t yet gone down the path of whitelisting with influencers to gain permissions to create what we call dark posts, which sounds kind of shady or influencer ads, what the lumen whose software solution does is it allows brands to scale those efforts. And trust me, when you start those efforts, you’re going to want to scale. So if you don’t understand what whitelisting and dark posting is very simply, if you’ve worked with influencers, you know, you send them product, you let them experience a service or a product, and they review it they talk about it on their channels. The problem with influencer marketing historically, is there’s really been no ability for precise targeting no ability to predict what you’re going to get with those influencers and what kind of reach how many comments what kind of engagement, how many conversions. It was always, as I used to say experimental marketing, it’s kind of like wait and see, let’s let’s give all these influencers some stuff and hope it performs for us, right. And that’s why a lot of brands aren’t going to put a substantial amount of spend in that area versus digital advertising, right. And digital, you know, the media buying department always has all the money because it’s such a precise science. With whitelisting permissions, you’re able to go to influencers that you’re working with, even if they’re just affiliate partners for you, they don’t have to be paid influencers. And you gain their whitelisting permissions so that you can use their content, which historically, it it converts three times higher than brand content rights than your own traditional stock photography. So they give you permission to use their content to create ads. And then you can not only use their content, but you can target their audiences. And then you can create unlimited look alike audiences. And so once you understand that you have Hey, I can use these the influencers content, it’s going to convert higher than my own content three times higher. I’m going to use their content, and then I get to target their audiences. And then I get to target unlimited clones of those audiences. And then I can scale this, we literally at Lumanu have brands that are spending, you know, five, six figures a month towards these look alike audiences. And they’re maintaining a five times row as I mean, you can’t beat that it really what whitelisting and dark posting does is it turns your influencer marketing into a paid performance channel. And let me tell you, if I would have had that when I was running Fitfluential every campaign would have been different. I wish I can retro actively dream that we would have had that but you know, wishful thinking, right?
Jason Falls
Sure. So I’m curious with all the soup to nuts, software’s out there, where does Lumanu fit? It seems like it solves one specific problem rather than provide a larger solution. If I’m a brand manager, an agency, I might hear your pitch and say, wait a minute, I have to pay for another software. So how do you combat that objection? And where does Lumanu fit in the in the in the SaaS, you know, platform or landscape?
Kelly Olexa
Well, interestingly enough, and I will be I’ll be upfront, you know, this is the first time I’ve ever worked for a SaaS platform. So I’m very new. And I’ve been at the company just, what, three months now. So you’re asking questions from a newbie, but I’ll do the best I can. One of the things that I think is an advantage is the fact that Lumanu is very simple and very direct with their entry into the market, like this is what we do, when you are doing whitelisting. And gaining those whitelisting permissions and dark posts. Once you get to the point where you’re working with, let’s say 10 influencers or more. It’s becoming such an administrative nightmare. And anybody who’s on the, you know, the media buying side of things, knows it is I actually had a meeting right before talking with you with a woman and she’s like, this is my nightmare, going back and forth, gaining permissions, dealing with all of the, you know, individual influencers, assets, it is a nightmare. And it can also be a staffing consideration. You can I mean, we’ve got a lot of agencies that have come to us and said, I’ve got two full time people handling this, and I’m looking at a third or fourth, that’s very costly. So what I like about Lumanu is that they’re like, here’s what we’re doing. We’re not trying to be a soup to nuts solution. We’re not trying to do influencer recruiting, campaign management. In other words, a lot of the stuff that I did at Fitfluential, they don’t even play in those waters. I hear where you’re coming from when you say an agency or a brand is like, Oh, great, because because that is an objection, it comes up a lot. Well, it’s just another software. The great thing is what we’re seeing, you might have heard, we’ve launched probably a couple months ago, a partnership with grin, which is one of the influencer platforms out there. And we’ve we’re fully integrated with them. And once that press release came out, I mean, the number of agencies that are coming to our door, saying we need to do the same thing. Because when we partner with those folks, we make their lives easier. And incidentally, they did just also this month go live or excuse me, it’s February of last month, we have a payment solution. And so the goal of Lumanu is not to just stick with the basic SAS service that helps with whitelisting and dark posting. Because as that becomes mainstream, there’s going to be other solutions that are much more competitive to us correct. But we’re just continuing continuing to add on complimentary services that are going to help and payments is the first taking that boatload of next away from both the influencers who are paying high fees, and the brands and the agencies who are paying high fees, but also dealing with the tax wars and the 1099 is in the back and forth with influencers and when they’re going to get paid. That’s adding, you know, just another layer of convenience. So to me, I actually think it’s better that we’re not trying to be that all encompassing solution. I think, to me, that’s a differentiating factor because I see more people trying to do the other.
Jason Falls
Okay, so first off, I noticed that you have the choice on your site to select whether you are a brand or a creator. So when you say manage influence whitelisting for Facebook and Instagram ad creative that sounds to me like a brand centric tool, which is how most influence marketing tools are built. And give me a use case for a creator or an influencer coming to Lumanu and initiating the contact. Why would an individual inlfuencer use this?
Kelly Olexa
Exactly. And this is another thing too, that is quite unique about Lumanu. So Tony Tran the founder really considers us to be a creator first platform. So we he’s built I say we I didn’t do anything. He’s built this platform and this company with the creator in mind first, so everything they do is about how do we make this good for the creator. And then the brands and the agencies are second. So while those brands and agencies are customer, what we’re here to do is really make the whole experience between these parties a lot more seamless, a lot more of a wonderful collaboration. Because if you really take a step back and think about influencers, creators, bloggers, YouTubers, whatever you want to call them, historically, and I can speak to this from my own experience, the relationship between them and agencies or brands, it’s it’s not always been an equal partnership. But in my opinion, you should be looking at these creators as an extension of your sales force because when you consider how their content will convert for you and drive, you know, not only brand awareness, but conversions. You should be looking at these people as real partners versus I remember in the early days of Fitfluential, you know, I always have to explain to people, you know, the brands or the agencies that we get, you know, look, what are these guys do they just sit around on Instagram all day, and they kind of had this attitude that everybody was a Paris Hilton, you know, they had unlimited wealth, they were bored. And they were just creating content versus These are people that really spend a lot of money in their craft. And while some of them might be wild and crazy, ultimately, they have an audience that you want to reach, and you should be willing to pay for that. So the creators come to Lumanu. Typically, I would say in the past, they came to Lumanu, because they were working with a brand and the brand would invite them. So we we don’t have designs on becoming an influencer database where brands discover influencers through Lumanu. Typically, again, in the in the past, they’ve come to us because brand a is working with 20 influencers a month, and they onboard those influencers. And they only those influencers are only working with that brand, but then another brand might work with three of those same influencers. And if they’re going to onboard all of their influencers, there might be some overlap. So we’ve got a lot of influencers in our platform, about 11,000 of them. And they might work with multiple brands. Now that we have the payment solution, we’ve got influencers approaching us going, Okay, I want to come on board, I’ve heard about you guys, I’ve heard that you really do a lot for influencers, they have their own dashboard, when they’re part of Lumanu, they get to see any ad that is created on their behalf, they get analytics. So there’s a level of transparency and respect for the community, excuse me, for the creators that they wouldn’t get anywhere else. And now that they’ve got payments and everybody’s hearing, like, wow, I’m only going to pay $10 per transaction versus 2.3%, or whatever percent you might pay elsewhere, if you’re using PayPal or stripe or something similar. That’s how they’re finding out about us now and going forward.
Jason Falls
Nice. Okay, so let’s go back to the brand side use case now, I’m not going to use Lumanu necessarily to find influencers or even outreach to them, I’m using this platform, specifically to streamline whitelisting, and enabling their creative in my Facebook and Instagram advertising. So I’m connected, I’ve invited my influencers to authorize using this tool, I can grab their content that’s focused on my brand, I can put ad spin behind the creative. I can run campaigns using creator content versus my own. Is that kind of sum it up a little bit?
Kelly Olexa
I think you said it very well. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, most brands or agencies on behalf of brands will have started whitelisting and dark posting, or creating influencer ads on their own. And they’re doing it for you know, two or three, four influencers. And then again, typically, where we see them losing their mind with work and not being able to scale is when they get to about 10 influencers. So when they come to us, they are ready to scale. They’ve seen the return on using that influencer content, they’re seeing how it’s converting for them, and they’re ready to scale and go big.
Jason Falls
So in this scenario, the influencer becomes the ad creative. And now I know the answer to this question. You’ve you’ve hinted at it and said it a little bit, but I want you to underline it for everybody. Why wouldn’t the brand just create have their own creatives come up with that content?
Kelly Olexa
You know, it’s funny, I literally and you know, I don’t make stuff like this up, I had this conversation this week, I’m trying to think it was a brand in the cosmetic space, it was hair, because I remember thinking I need to buy everything on this website. But she said, we cannot keep up with today’s consumer and their demand for fresh content. And she said, If I had it my way, I just have a photographer a full time videographer and models in here. And she goes, I’d have influencers in here because we can’t, you know, I almost think about it in a different context of look at how we used to read magazines, you know, I used to get Shape magazine or Fitness magazine, and it’d be it would get delivered to my doorstep once a month. And those organizations, those magazines have had to take their publications, digital and those digital publications if you go to shape. This is used to be the kind of stuff I would amplify for partners. And I would go to shape calm ago, they don’t have anything new. There’s nothing new today, there needs to be something new. And I think it’s very similar with brands where today’s expectation with Facebook and Instagram as every time you go, you’re seeing something fresh and new, as a brand or as an agency on behalf of a brand. How else are you going to get that outside of user generated content? It’s just to me that’s just another solution that this is or another problem that this is providing the solution for and it’s brilliant. It saves so much time and frankly money on the brand side.
Jason Falls
So what would you say to someone who argues that turning an influencers piece of content into basically an ad just strips away the the genuineness of that people look to influencers for?
Kelly Olexa
You know, that’s a good point. I think you know, this is this is just my personal opinion. I don’t want to say that this there’s science back to this. But once I joined Lumanu, and I learned what dark posting was because truthfully, I’ve never heard of it until I until I joined the company. And once I understood it, every second that I went on my Instagram and Facebook, particularly I started to realize I had been converting on dark posts for a long time. And I didn’t even realize it. I mean, certainly I realized, Oh, I’m watching this influencer, I actually have a folder on my desktop here. And when I see this stuff that draws me in that I typically convert on. I’ve saved it in this file, because I’m like, I’m starting to go this. This is why I think consumers, it does the the genuine-ness. It does translate that a word genuineness. I think I might have just made up a word.
Jason FallsI think I said it that way a minute ago. So you probably just had it top of mind, because I just said I don’t think it’s a word. But I think the word we’re looking for is ingenuity. But I interpret that a different way. So go ahead. Genuineness I approve
Kelly Olexait’s like one of the other words I misuse all the time is duplicitous, you know, when really I mean, redundant. But anyway, so I think that, you know, everybody says, What’s great about influencers? Is their genuine, you can see that they’re real people, right? And if you’re creating an ad using their stuff, is that going to change to me? On one hand, you’ve got sponsored on it, you’ve got your disclosure, if you see a dark post, it’s going to be the influencers handle. So it’s going to appear as an influencer post. But as a consumer, you’re gonna see that sponsor, so you’re going to know right away, okay, this is there’s some kind of collaboration here, there’s some kind of payment. But typically, the brands that are doing this really well are altering as much of the influencer content there because they know that the more it looks like the way Kelly Olexa had it on her channel, that’s what’s going to draw people in is the fact that it’s not a really polished Cindy Crawford ad. Kelly Olexa is going to draw more people in I’m not comparing myself to Cindy Crawford, by the way, Kelly Olexa is going to draw more people and why? Because with Cindy Crawford, we know that she’s in a studio with 1000 makeup artists, and a big crew and and it’s just, it’s been worked on with an ad budget of millions when it’s Kelly Olexa, you’re going to click through to my page, watch my stories and see that I’m a real person just like you. And you can, you know, follow me for a month before you convert. But it just to me, I think it does translate. Because if you’re a smart brand, you’re not going to edit that content so that it’s unrecognizable from the original influencer. And so that it would look completely different than what you’d see when you click through to see that influencers original content. That’s my take on it. I don’t know if it if it bodes true, but I think so.
Jason Falls
Well, I can I can validate that it does because I share some research in the book that’s coming out on February 23. That that actually suggests that influence content that is sponsored does not have a diminished effect on the audience. In fact, especially with younger consumers. They think an influencer having a collab with a brand is cool. And so that’s something that the you know, Gen Z and whatnot, they they like the fact that brands are supporting their favorite influencer. So it actually has the opposite effect that some of us old fogies think that it might.
Kelly Olexa
I the way you said “collab.” I love it.
Jason Falls
Yeah, collab. I mean I get it I’ve heard my daughter use it before and I understand that but it’s one of those young young people terms that I’m like just get off my lawn really.
Jason Falls
So Kelly, how do the brands and agencies out there listening find out more and connect with you online?
Kelly Olexa
Well, certainly I would be more than happy to answer any business related questions about you know what we’ve talked about here with whitelisting and dark posting, you can email me directly Kelly.Olexa O-L-E-X-A @lumanu.com. And that’s L-U-M as in Mary-a-N as in Nancy -U.com. As far as just Kelly Olexa, the the brand or Kelly Olexa the individual that you can find everything about me my blog, my podcast, my YouTube channel, Instagram, everything’s just Kelly Olexa if you just go to KellyOlexa.com which is soon relaunching with a brand new look … heavy plug … you’ll find all of my contact information there.
Jason Falls
Awesome. Kelly-O an O-G here on the show. Thanks for stopping by.
Kelly Olexa
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks, Jason.
Transcribed by otter.ai
The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.
Order Winfluence now!
This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we’ve been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be “influence” marketing makes us smarter marketers.