Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is not at all easy now. First of all, influencer's approaches to marketing are unconventional and there is no standard way to engage them. Meanwhile, marketing agencies that employ many people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by the number of influencers they can be involved at any time.
Simply put, the Creator Marketing Ecosystem is suppressed in many ways by the old world advertising/marketing agency model. If AI chatbots can do all the heavy lifting, wouldn't it be easy to interact with influencers through a platform that can scale across hundreds of ad campaigns?
This is the idea behind Agent Marketing Technology (AMT), a company that raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round led by San Francisco-based VC NFX.
AMT works by assisting an AI agent called Lyra with tasks such as talking to influencers using natural language, booking campaigns, tracking results, paying, and answering queries. The company claims that Lyra can autonomously find influencers who fit their campaign goals.
AMT co-founder and CEO Tom Hollands told TechCrunch he was familiar with the challenge after managing his influencer marketing budget. Co-founder Christian Johnston (CTO) previously built the AdTech data infrastructure.
“The problem with today's market is that the way to expand influencer marketing is to hire a 22-year-old who works 20 hours a day and have as many partnerships as possible until it breaks,” says Hollands. “They can't remember the names of the influencers they send messages to, and they follow up every time manually,” Holland said.
AMT employs a combination of AI models such as Openai for general use, Google's Gemini (i.e., creator's video analysis), and “Tone” HumeAI. Hollands said, “We use the best model for each task, independent of our provider.”
The Netherlands claims that AI can actually “monitor” and “understand” the influencer's content to some extent, thus providing a much more personalized experience.
“[AI] You can actually understand the tone of each influencer's voice,” Holland said. [a] Because Partnership Managers have a relationship history for all these different conversations. ”
Released three months ago, AMT has moved from London to San Francisco, but says it has already attracted customers such as Le Petit Lunetier, Neoplants and Wild.
The influencer market is projected to be worth $2669.2 billion this year, and not only markets like Shopmy and Agentio, but traditional influencer marketing SaaS platforms like Grin and Upfluence require human involvement to run the campaign. These are usually charged per seat. AMT's AI-driven approach clearly has a dramatically different economics, given that there are far fewer people.
According to AMT, it usually takes nine hours of manual work to secure a single influencer partnership, but only five minutes on the platform.
In a statement, NFX general partner Pete Flint added: “AI is fundamentally restructuring the industry, and marketing is no exception. AMT's approach is unique in that it not only builds tools, but also replaces human work with AI, making it an inevitable part of the marketing stack of brands around the world.”