Millions and millions of eyes are viewing what we call “influencers” on a daily basis. Unlike your boring ads, these people are actually paid attention to. The only problem is that it takes a long time to use these influencers for your business, and you don’t know what each one targets. HyPR is helping you fix this problem! With their target first marketing platform, you can choose between all of the influencers and have them sell your product for you.
CEO Gil Eyal tells AlleyWatch how their company is different from similar ideas and how they are making targeting easier.
Tell us about the product or service.
HyPR is building the world’s first programmatic marketplace for social media influencer marketing. Available today, HyPR’s robust search engine allows brands and agencies the ability to easily search for social media influencers by their audience demographics and interests across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Vine and more.
How is it different?
First of all it’s about targeting. Without targeting, marketing is just a shot in the dark and targeting capabilities are everywhere except in influencer marketing. Our Proprietary technology allows us to analyze every social influencer’s audience thus enabling brands to reach their target audience through the right influencers. There aren’t any other players that enable targeting in influencer marketing.
We developed a talent-agnostic tool that brands and agencies can use for identifying influencers by the audiences that follow them. HyPR distinguishes itself by not requiring influencers to opt-in so we are able to offer a more comprehensive database. There are more than 300,000 influencers in HyPR’s database and we will analyze over a million influencers by the end of 2015, (benefits of a self-learning platform).
Analyzing social influencer profiles takes agencies weeks. We cut the research time down to seconds.
All other companies in the space try to be a “new media talent agency”, signing up influencers and trying to get them deals. So when they approach brands, they only have their own roster to offer. We don’t need to sign up anyone. Once the brand decides to work with specific influencers, they get an offer, whether directly or through their managers (depending on size).
This method lets us enable brands to reach multiple influencers ranging from really small to A-listers within minutes. And we help smaller influencers be rewarded for cultivating and curating their community.
Hasn’t this been tried before?
Yes, programmatic has been tried before, but it can’t be successfully achieved without audience analysis and targeting.
We’ve set ourselves apart by first identifying where the actual influence lies and then we’re automating the engagement with relevant influencers without actually requiring any work from the influencer to opt into our platform.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
It’s quite clear that advertising on both Google and Facebook is declining with the surge of ad-blocking. So in addition to the $8 billion influencer marketing industry, I’d say that our technology can take a bigger piece of the pie — especially as we move closer to programmatic.
What is the business model?
We sell subscriptions to our search engine, and we run campaigns. Similar to Adwords, we retain a percentage of the fees for each campaign.
What inspired you to start this business?
I’ve been working in tech for about seven years now, leading marketing and growth at companies like Dell, Playdom, and Mobli. During that time, I devised and executed numerous strategies that focused on working with celebrities and social influencers — sometimes it worked really well, and other times, it didn’t work well at all.
I realized that success was unpredictable because we didn’t really have the data or targeting tools we needed to make better decisions. Rather than just using a ‘gut feeling’, or surface level data, I wanted to develop a scientific-based approach for determining true influence and use this data to help brands find the best celebrities to partner with to reach their end-audience.
Two years ago, I started building HyPR with the vision of creating a tool that would automate influencer marketing on social media and today, we’re launching our closed beta to roll out the first phase of HyPR’s platform: a talent-agnostic tool for brands to access the most robust audience analytics on over 300,000 influencers that are growing by the hour.
You recently completed a funding. Tell us about it.
Our $5 million seed round of financing was led by Edgewater Capital, with participation from Silvertech Ventures, Star Farm, Klingenstein Fields and a number of strategic angel investors.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
We’re constantly improving our platform and automating parts of it that are still unfinished. We’re introducing new clients on a daily basis and our financial growth has been significant.
We’re steadily making progress toward a goal of completely automating our platform in the next six months.
If you could be put in touch with one investor in the New York community who would it be?
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures and Charlie O’Donnell, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.
Why did you launch in New York?
New York stands at the intersection of finance, marketing and entertainment, making it the perfect place for HyPR.
