Will you help us identify that right influencers based on the demographics we want to hit, go contract with them, organize the campaign, make sure the influencers do what they’re supposed to do on the time they’re supposed to do it, report back to us, the metrics, et cetera. That’s paid. And typically, Socialyte takes a percentage of the overall campaign. So 20%, 30% of $1 million. The Be Social does organic campaigns where the brands may come to them and say, hey, we don’t have money to spend on the influencers, but we’ll give out sample products, free products. If you can get them to try it and post about it, and we’ll pay you a fee of $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 for each of those campaigns and do more volume of them. The reason why it’s highly complementary besides now owning a leading agency — if not the leading agency for each type of influencer campaign, is that not just can you offer both services now in-house, but many brands run both types of influencer campaigns within the same campaign.
They could have both paid and organic to support their fall launch. Certainly, almost every brand runs each type of campaign at some point throughout a year. So you get longer client relationships, deeper client relationships, as they say, a bigger share of client’s wallet, and you just have a lot more ways to cross-sell in the influencers as well. So — and we’re now fully bicoastal. Be Social is only in the West Coast. Now we have New York as well, we have Miami, we have Nashville. So everywhere where our PR firms have offices, we now actually have on the ground, influencer marketing people as well. And that shouldn’t be understated. And in today’s world where breaking marketing down into 2 buckets, paid media and earned media, earned media is the province of public relations and influencer marketing.
They are the 2 legs that you stand on in earned media. And as long-time listeners have heard, for every company that can afford a paid media campaign, there are 9 companies, I think, that can’t — and so these brands that launch will need PR and influencer marketing to get their word out and get their products and services noticed. And so you really want to have influencer marketing to complement PR. And if you have both, you have a powerhouse. And that’s what we think we’ve built. Hopefully, that gave you a sense of the strategy of why Socialyte — what Socialyte and Be Social together have is formidable.
Allen Klee : When I look at the other PR and marketing firms that you have in your portfolio, what are the drivers for organic growth in ’23?
William O’Dowd : Well, a couple of things. And we’re starting to see it. One, the cross-selling just keeps going, right? So that’s what’s driving our organic growth. When we — even before Socialyte in ’21, many of you remember, how fast we are growing just organically from — I think it was $7.2 million in Q1 to $8.6 million in Q2, to $9.4 million in Q3 and $10.5 million in Q4, and that’s all organic. There was no acquisition in there. With that — that happens because we’re getting better at creating synergies between our companies. But then secondly, you can go after different types of clients. So PayPal has been one for a while, but we’ve signed other clients now that are, let’s call it, traditional Fortune 500s or large companies that don’t have a direct tie to entertainment, but they want to use pop culture to get the word out about their product.
