Summary

Chris Kastenholz, co-founder and CEO of Pulse Advertising, explains that influencer marketing leverages content creators with established audiences to deliver brand messages through organic, native social media communication rather than traditional interruption-based advertising.

 

Key Points

  • Influencer marketing represents a shift to people-to-people communication, where creators who have built loyal audiences become brand spokespeople through native content that integrates seamlessly into users' social media consumption [1:33] [1:20] [2:32].
  • The agency selection process prioritises brand fit and personality alignment before analysing audience demographics and engagement metrics to ensure creators can effectively reach target customers [3:52] [4:10] [4:20].
  • All paid partnerships must be transparently labelled with hashtags such as #advertising or #partnership, though the content should feel natural and consistent with the creator's established style and audience expectations [5:41] [6:25] [5:55].
  • Reputational risks exist but are outweighed by opportunities; brands cannot control user conversations about them regardless of their social media presence, making proactive engagement through credible third-party voices advantageous [6:48] [7:13] [7:38] [8:30].
  • Influencer marketing extends beyond B2C and young audiences on TikTok, with significant B2B opportunities through platforms like LinkedIn and mature demographics—over 50% of TikTok users are aged 25 and older [13:59] [14:31] [13:11] [13:31] [15:00].

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships at marketingcollege.com. 


Kiran Kapur, Host (00:13):
Hello and welcome. This week we are talking about influencer marketing and my guest is Chris Kastenholz, co-founder and CEO of Pulse Advertising. Chris, welcome. We have to start with where are you geographically?


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (00:26):
Thanks for having me. I'm in Berlin today and I'm heading to Hamburg soon.


Kiran Kapur, Host (00:31):
Sounds very exotic when you're stuck in Cambridge, I have to say. So can we start a little bit about what Pulse Advertising does?


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (00:39):
Of course. Pulse Advertising, we do advertising. We focus on social media and we do influencer marketing, we do paid social ads, and we run brand accounts on TikTok, Instagram, and the likes.


Kiran Kapur, Host (00:54):
I did a little bit of audience research and there was a lot of confusion about influencer marketing. So can we start with the basics? What is influencer marketing and how do people use it?


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (01:03):
Of course, happy to. Well, we started in 2014 and we started in Germany and have expanded to the UK, to Italy, to a few markets. And what really changed over that time is on one side, media consumption. Traditional media are down, digital media up, specifically social media. And influencer marketing is kind of a back to the roots, people to people communication. So it's people telling brand stories. It is someone who has a YouTube account about cooking and has a big audience in that or someone who talks about something on Instagram that could be fashion or it could be beauty on TikTok, but somebody who is a personality, a character that has grown with their content, an audience who listens to them day by day. And influencer marketing is working with such creators who have built an audience who will talk about a brand or a product to that audience.


(02:02):
So they become the spokesperson of the brand. And that is what we do day by day. So it's a very organic communication. It's really native to how people consume social media. You are not breaking content as you would on TV where somebody's watching a movie and you're saying, "Okay, please stop for the next five minutes. You're going to watch ads now." That's in the past. What influencer marketing is, we are in that movie. We would place a brand within that movie in that sense on YouTube without asking the user to interrupt. So it's very natural from a communication perspective.


Kiran Kapur, Host (02:35):
Okay. So from what you said, these are people that already have built up a following. And then, so is your agency going out and finding them in order to be able to employ them in some way for influencer marketing?


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (02:47):
Yes, that's part of it. So most often when we work with brands, it is about strategy, why influencer marketing and how, then the creative of what will be the storytelling, what's the narrative that will resonate with those audiences. And it's about realising that which is then finding and working with those creators. And what we do at the beginning is really understand what is the brand's business goal? What do they want to achieve? Is it new customers? Is it more retention with existing customers? And who are the customers they want to target? And that can have implications for, should we be on TikTok, which is a younger platform from an audience perspective or is it Facebook maybe that's very mature and maybe more for a paid perspective? So it informs the media strategy in a way. Then we talk about, okay, what is that product? What is that brand?


(03:41):
What makes it different? And what is the storytelling that can convey the message? And we find out, okay, who are the creators that we think will be able to transmit that message? And that starts from first really a brand perspective, a brand fit, brand personality. So we look at does somebody resonate with the brand values as a person first in terms of their content, in terms of their personality, their tone of voice and the likes. And that gives us a subset of creators who we think would be a potential match. We then look at who is their audience. So the people actually listening to them, are they the ones that the brand wants to reach? And when we go into the data, how actively are they listening? Do they consume content daily? Do they click when the creator includes a link? So what will be the media KPIs and deliverables we'll get working with someone?


(04:29):
And once we have a set of creators that confirm all of the criteria we have, we'll confirm with the brand, of course, do they agree? These are our recommendations, they approve. And then we go out to the creators and talk to them and say, "Hey, this is the project. This the brand that's the topic we want to talk about. We'd love to work with you. We believe this could be a great match. What do you think? And do you know this brand? Do you know this product? Do you have any context for that?" And that starts a conversation. And then we would engage them, meaning we would contract them for a certain number of content pieces. Let's say they would do that YouTube video and a TikTok post. We would agree on key pieces of the storyline or key milestones, key things to mention, but we would leave them a lot of freedom in how long will the video be?


(05:15):
What is their content style? Because we want to work with creators in the way that they talk to their audience day by day, which has made them successful, which is what the audiences expect.


Kiran Kapur, Host (05:26):
That's really interesting. So how do you distinguish between the paid work that people are doing and people just doing their normal content work for the audience's perspective?


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (05:41):
Yeah, it's a good question. So in general, we distinguish in a way that everything we contract creators for will be labelled with hashtag advertising or partnership with that brand. So it will be transparent that there is a partnership. But from a communication perspective, the objective is that we only work with creators and brands when they align in terms of storytelling. So let's say that person who has that strong YouTube account for cooking, it would be natural perhaps to talk to Barilla as a pasta brand, talk about their products and how to do the ideal pasta. And that way from that perspective, from an audience perspective, it shouldn't surprise you that they're talking about pasta. If they would suddenly start talking about a car, that would probably seem unnatural and so we wouldn't go for it. So yes, we distinguish and we make it transparent that there's a partnership, but from a content perspective, it should feel natural.


Kiran Kapur, Host (06:38):
So are there any reputational risks for a brand to be getting involved with an influencer? That was one of the biggest questions I got back from my audience research.


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (06:48):
For sure. But I think the opportunities and the need to do so outweigh the risks. From a risk perspective, you're working with people, right? In case you do a traditional production, you would engage models, photographers, videographers for your content and you would direct it. So you have complete control over what happens. That is different with creators. You can give guidance, you can give context, but it's still up to them on what they produce. And more importantly, it's up to the audiences how they respond, what they will share and comments and ask. The key point for me is whether a brand is on TikTok or not, doesn't change the people will talk about the brand. When you think about that logistics company that delivers your holiday gifts, people will post about packages being late or arriving scruffed, whether the brand is on TikTok or not. So the opportunity you have is to become part of the conversation as the brand with your social media account and to have people who really speak about you and share your tone of voice, your messages that are maybe more credible in a way when they don't come from you as a brand who says, "My products are the best," but it's people as consumers who talk to other consumers.


(07:59):
That's why, yes, there is a reputational risk of your work with you. It's natural to work with people, but these people aren't your brand. They are those individuals. And it's okay for them from our perspective to talk about the brand, to give it the freedom of their own perspective. It will not be the same as a catalogue ad because they will pick, and maybe for their chef, there are some aspects of pasta that matter more to him and the brand might have a different kind of storytelling. So yes, there's a risk, but it's more of an opportunity, I think, of people telling that brand story.


Kiran Kapur, Host (08:37):
Okay. Thank you. And one of the other things you said was you set up KPIs with your influencers. So what sort of KPIs would you be setting up?


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (08:45):
Yeah, that's a good question. So when you think about marketing and advertising, over 60, 70% of total budget now goes to digital. And a key opportunity within the digital space is that you know what you buy. With influencer marketing, in the past, it used to be that you bought that YouTube video, that TikTok content, and you wouldn't really know who is the audience behind it, how many people have seen that content, who has clicked, but that has changed. And when we work with brands, we give that perspective of, okay, we will work on TikTok to target this audience with that objective. And that could be an awareness focused campaign. It could be more consideration, could be conversion focused campaigns. So the KPIs would vary. For awareness, we could probably say, okay, we want a certain exposure in that target group, which we can track in terms of impressions of the content we deliver.


(09:38):
For consideration, maybe we want clicks. We want people to go either to the brand account or to the website. So website traffic perhaps. And for conversion, we could say, okay, we will track orders and maybe even new customer rates. How many people that order are new customers that we deliver for you? And to be able to track that data, we need to understand the direct metrics of TikTok itself, of Instagram itself. So we go with first party data of the networks and we don't just track what we do, but we even set a goal at the beginning. So we will look at a creator account on TikTok and say on average they achieve 100,000 views with their content. Here are the engagements, the clicks we expect. And so we have a prediction for that campaign that we'll run. That is what we sell to the client.


(10:23):
So we guarantee the client these media KPIs. We contract the creators even based on those impressions because we say, well, we want that beautiful video, but in the end we work together because you have an audience that cares about you, that listens to you and we want to track a media KPI. So we contract based on impressions and that's what we report on then with the brand. How have we done against the goal that we set? Why did some things go better? Why did some things maybe not deliver? What implications does that have for the next TikTok campaign? So we inform and optimise and continue to optimise in cycles in that way, any activities we do.


Kiran Kapur, Host (10:59):
Gosh, I don't think I picked up quite what a partnership it was between you and the content creator.


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (11:07):
Yeah. When we started in 2014, it was very early days. I remember contracting creators without really knowing what would happen because you wouldn't see who their audience was. There was no data that Instagram would share. You wouldn't see how many people would click because there was no option to integrate links. So back then it was really this storytelling and logic from my perspective that we said, well, if you have to interrupt people watching that movie to place your ad, that seems like a compromise from the start, no matter how good your ad is, maybe at the Super Bowl they listen, but when I am interrupted on the TV, which I don't watch anymore even, but I would go to the kitchen and not listen to the ad. So back then it was more a subjective reasoning.


(11:53):
Perhaps, but now it has become a media channel. And when you think about brands investing five, 10, 15% of their total media spend into this channel, they need to know why and they need to be able to prove the return and they need to be able to compare to other channels. And that's why it needs to be this data driven. But that is something that we really develop as an agency. I mean, across all the markets that we are in, it started really in the US when we started speaking with brands in New York in 2018, 19, that was the time that we really started going deeper into the data aspect of things. Then it came to the UK, to Germany, to Italy, across Europe. And it feels natural to me because when I go to the supermarket, I want to know how much milk is in that bottle and then I know if the price is okay.


(12:41):
If we'll be buying something I don't know, it would feel strange. So it feels natural for us that we focus on influencer marketing as a media category rather than marketing or public relations.


Kiran Kapur, Host (12:55):
The other preconception I got from a bit of research was that influencer marketing was very much just TikTok and it was just for young people and it was very B2C. I suspect that's completely not the case.


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (13:11):
Well, in case we think about ourselves, I think from a B2B perspective, what influences what I buy, where I buy? There will be a lot of brands who reach out to me and tell me that their new customer CRM system, let's say, is the best and I can review them, but I want to have references. So I'll talk to people that I trust. Maybe that's on LinkedIn, maybe I see who talks about that solution, what is their feedback? Maybe I'll reach out. So in case somebody would start talking about a solution on LinkedIn from a B2B perspective, it would get my attention. And that's something I would probably give credibility to. It would be part of the sources I want to review. And in the same way, when I buy the new TV, I want to see customer references, not just that brand telling me how good their TV is.


(13:59):
So it is B2B. t has a B2B opportunity which is currently less leveraged because it's what you say, the perception is often it's more B2C, but there is a B2B opportunity. In practise, it is primarily used from a B2C perspective. And when you think about maturity of audiences, are younger people more likely to engage with influencer marketing? Yes, because of social media consumption behaviour. So you get a higher percentage of the younger audiences actually being on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube. So you have a wider media opportunity in that sense, but it is all maturities. And when you think about TikTok, more than 50% of TikTok users are 25 years and older. So it's not true that TikTok is teenagers primarily. Actually it's primarily not teenagers when you think about the age spread. So yes, TikTok plays a big role. Instagram plays a big role. Twitch does. Twitter does.


(15:00):
Podcasts do what you're doing here. So there is a variety and there's no one size fits all approach, but there is such a wide variety and such a big growth, both in the platforms themselves and the way content is produced that the opportunities grow in line with the pressure that maybe comes with less and less cookies being available to target people through search engine ads, maybe ChatGPT now makes it easier to ask it things that you would have otherwise asked Google. So I think there's a need to change your media strategy and influencer marketing and social media can be one core area that now is an opportunity.


Kiran Kapur, Host (15:42):
Thank you. I'm still very intrigued by how you find the influencers. You said such cheerfully that you looked for audiences and personalities, but where do you stop? Because there's a plethora of people there who are producing content and who have followers.


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (15:58):
You're right. Yeah. You would have to ask our teams. They are the experts because we work with thousands of creators and on one side, it's people that we've worked with in the past where we know not just how strong performing their accounts are, but also their personalities with relationships. But it only works when we constantly go out and find new creators. And you can do that either very manually. If you're a brand or someone who's interested, you just go and look at hashtags that pasta chef probably is going to tag a lot of hashtags. So when you browse Google, you're going to find, when you go from one account to the next, you're going to find new accounts that could be interesting. And there is a more strategic or a structured approach with tools such as the TikTok Creator Marketplace, which is a marketplace owned and shared and offered by TikTok where creators can enlist and you can search by features.


(16:58):
So you could say where is somebody from? So geography, you could go by audience maturity, you can go by interests. Is it fashion, beauty, categories and size of accounts? So what growth, what's the scale of the account you're looking for? And that will give you similar to when you go online and you search for BlueJeans, give you options and criteria with which you can filter. And there are tools like that for all platforms.


Kiran Kapur, Host (17:25):
Wow. Okay. So yes, I can see why you said talk to the team because that must be a huge amount of work to find and research and look for what you need.


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (17:37):
I guess there are many elements to it. We try to be very close. We work very closely with TikTok, with Instagram and the platforms about product development to see what are the features that are coming up. We engage very closely with the creators. We do even our events ourselves so that we really connect as a community because it's a lot about trust. It's not a Facebook ad you buy. It's a partnership with someone, with that individual that we really want to build. And it's very long term. It's not that we book one YouTube video once, but it's often really relationships that span years. And it's of course working with both the creators and the brands about growing that media perspective because it's also part of the creators maybe saying, "Well, I deliver content. Sometimes maybe some people are not so sure what delivers the views, so how can I guarantee that?" So it's also working with them to understand what drives the use, what helps them.


(18:38):
So we work for brands of course. Those are our clients, but it's important for us that we see influencers not as media outlets, but as personalities that will only be successful when we are all aligned. So it's a big process. It's a huge opportunity because working with people can also be really fun. And so we're happy to be in this space. And at the same time, what we realise is that influencer marketing and paid social ads are an opportunity you can relatively easy engage either yourself or through an agency, but there are a lot of methods and strategies to do so. What's often going into the background is actually running your own brand account because people want to see your brand personality, want you to be relatable, want you to take a stand on topics, even on politics. And what will make your brand account win is the same kind of content.


(19:31):
It's very native content. So that's why we sometimes marry the two and actually integrate creators into brand accounts so that they start speaking on behalf of the brand on the brand account itself too. So it's a very integrated social media approach from that perspective, from the organic of the brand and owned accounts to third party creator accounts and paid and all working in alignment.


Kiran Kapur, Host (19:52):
Chris Kastenholtz, co-founder and CEO of Pulse Advertising. Thank you very much. That was an amazing insight into the world of influencer marketing. Thank you so much.


Chris Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising (20:01):
Thanks for having me. Have a great day.


Announcer (20:03):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College, training marketing and PR professionals across the globe.