Ryan Detert, CEO at Influential, a technology firm focused on social intelligence, believes his company has the secret behind measuring performance for influencer campaigns and delivering the insights to CPG brands.  

Detert created Influential in 2014 after spending years as an influencer and realizing that the media lacked a good way to monetize and measure performance.

“Between 2011 and 2012, I had about 30 million social media followers,” he said. “I’m not a singer or dancer, but I own several handles on Twitter such as @travel, @usa, @automotive, kind of like dot-coms, but only on Twitter.”

He brought on a technology team to create the apps and dashboard for brands and agencies. Then in 2015, he integrated the IBM Watson partnership into the platform. The technology is the backbone of the company.

On Wednesday, Influential announced that it has partnered with Atlas Technology Group, a data acquisition and analytics company under the parent company Advantage Solutions. It makes inventory and demography targeting possible.

Atlas has all the point-of-sale data at Walmart and other retailers, which is extremely valuable, he said.

Heading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the midst of COVID-19, the partnership will enable consumers to determine whether the products are in the stores and on the shelves. The information gives influencers the fodder to drive people into stores, he said.

CPG brands are increasingly looking for ways to understand and measure the effectiveness of their influencer campaigns.

Influential provides return-on-investment data for online and offline, leveraging Atlas’ in-stock and off-shelf POS data to drive performance metrics on all social media campaigns, optimizing media and content strategies while mitigating advertising waste.

Campaigns are delivered on guaranteed CPMs.

Through Atlas’ accelerated Insight-to-Impact Cycle, Influential gains inventory targeting, demographic targeting, and performance measurement, in order to streamline the flow of information from data collection to decision-making. 

“Brands still think influencer marketing is a PR play,” he said. “This partnership solves how to measure influencer campaigns especially at big retailers like Walmart. It also makes sure every dollar they spend goes to delivering results based on the stores that have the brand’s products.”