Smartfluence Founder Sid Kumar Discusses Agency Growth and The Future of Influencer Marketing and Artificial Intelligence

It may seem cliched, but the future is seriously here. Influence has been consistently important throughout history but technology has made it rapidly evolve.

We have been wondering, conceptualizing, and planning for a world of robots and Artificial Intelligence. It has arrived and many of us are either looking from afar or adapting. 

Sid Kumar is spearheading this societal adaptation. His platform Smarfluence has figured out a sweet spot between Influencer Marketing and Artificial Intelligence. Recently, they closed a major investment partnership that is now amplifying this market-moving strategy. This has now positioned them as one of the most promising performance ad agencies in the world.

We were given the blessing to pick his brain to find how he got to this point of leadership, how to navigate it, and how Smartfluence is the conduit for amplifying this experience.

How did you get into this industry?

Before we started Smartfluence, my co-founder, David, and I both worked in finance. I was working in private equity in LatAm and he was working in asset management for Goldman Sachs, so it certainly was quite a departure from our prior experience! I used to be quite active on Instagram myself and built my personal page around my passion for fitness. As a powerlifter, I would share content around my workouts, highlighting routines and key lifts. 

Enough people found it interesting that I grew a bit of a following and started receiving sponsored post requests. In theory that’s great, but in practice that wasn’t the case. I was receiving requests from brands in unrelated industries to start. Then I received requests from South American fitness companies assuming my audience was in LatAm, but really it was in New York and Chicago. 

Finally, when American fitness brands reached out, they didn’t know what to pay me and I didn’t know what to charge. I complained to David in one of our daily chats and he said we would be able to solve the problem if we put our heads together. Funny enough, he was already working on an influencer search algorithm for fun anyway. A couple of weeks later after we had discussed our initial idea, we quit our jobs and took the plunge!

How did you find your partnership with your Co-founder?

I was lucky enough to meet David on the first day of high school. We shared our homeroom together and took every math and physics class together every year. We happened to have a bunch of shared interests from investing to cars to tech and everything in between and have remained best friends ever since. 

We tried a bunch of different small business ideas over the years on the side – trading, flipping watches, and various e-commerce experiments with varying degrees of success, but nothing was interesting enough or big enough for us to fully commit. Once we started planting the seeds of what would later become Smartfluence, we realized we were on to something special and decided to focus all our efforts on that alone. 

What is Smartfluence?

Smartfluence is a platform that uses machine-learning algorithms to help consumer brands identify, manage, and activate social media influencers across multiple platforms. Our agency arm helps scale our clients’ influencer campaigns through paid social and display advertising, allowing clients to remain in control of their ad spend while achieving greater reach and results.

Problem that need to be solved in the influencer marketing and/or native advertising industry?

The initial problem we set out to solve was search and pricing. Brands were often using influencers with inauthentic audiences, with no transparency into their insights, and no set pricing mechanism to determine the value of an influence. Once we tackled those effectively, we started looking at problems faced by larger brands. 

These brands already knew which influencers to use, but had a tough time managing them in one place. As a result, we built some great tools to allow brands to communicate with influencers, pay them through various means, and track logistics and performance. 

Our latest challenge has been helping brands achieve scale. Once you have the right influencers and manage them effectively, the next problem becomes scaling their content and performance in a systematic way. That’s where our push to use influencer generated content in paid ads in various forms comes in.

What do you predict is the future of advertising and AI?

Several great tools are coming out that allow advertisers to scale and test their creatives rapidly. From bots that generate text-based copy to platforms that use AI to create videos without real people, I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to compete in the ads space. Content itself is becoming trickier to differentiate. The main reason we believe in influencer marketing always revolves around content. 

Consumers trust influencers since their content speaks to them on a deeper level. It’s more authentic, the creator already has an interest in the product or industry, and most importantly, it’s more relatable. Combine that content with AI-generated copy and you’ll have plenty of options to test and scale. 

With traditional advertising platforms becoming more expensive year over year, brands will have to differentiate themselves and test more in order to sustainably achieve a decent ROAS, and I’m convinced that the combination of these factors is where the real value will be given that environment.

Key features of the current platform?

We have a few features that nobody else has at the moment. Our comparison profiles allow us to generate lookalike influencers in a matter of seconds. Brands simply input their ideal influencer along with a few key demographic variables and our platform creates a list of influencers that fit the criteria. 

Our Promote feature completely automates the influencer discovery and outreach process by leveraging comparison profiles to allow brands to scale their outreach rapidly. 

Our agency helps convert influencer-generated content into paid ads, particularly across paid social channels like Instagram and TikTok, in addition to programmatic native and display ads across the web.

Tell us a little bit about the Native Ads Pilot Platform and some key features.

We have proven our strategies work in paid social and decided to try similar strategies on display and native ads. We’ve always been huge fans of any sort of programmatic advertising and figured we would experiment using our own content as a test. 

By building out our engine in conjunction with some key integrations, we’ve built pre-set strategies to help our clients convert influencer content into native and display ads. The best part is we can use contextual AI to precisely target audiences based on keywords while avoiding false positives that plague most other platforms. 

We’re currently piloting this with a handful of select clients before we automate the entire process and make it just a few button clicks.

What would you say are the best use cases for brands using the platform? What action items have you seen that work best?

Our most successful clients come to us to aggregate influencer content and scale through ads above anything else. Typically, they will use 10 to 20 influencers in a campaign and select the best performers in terms of clickthrough rates for content and sales. 

They then turn over that information to our agency team which uses a combination of our AI and our pre-defined strategies to scale that content and those audiences beyond the initial activation, blasting it across social media and the rest of the internet, much like in this case study here.

What’s next for the platform and for your personal goals?

We have just released an update that allows our customers to directly integrate Shopify into the platform, allowing them to sync product catalogs and efficiently allow information to flow between Smartfluence and Shopify, improving both logistics and tracking. 

In The End

While social media marketing has its perks, Native Advertising is an overlooked strategy that has untapped value. We suggest taking advantage of this insane opportunity of utilizing targeted influencer content in more verticals. 
Take a look at one of their recent campaigns.

Do you envision your brand seeing this type of success? No need to guess, Smartfluence has proven that it can do the same for you. Give them a try.