Viral Nation is known for being one of the biggest digital talent agencies in the world. But it does a lot more than representation.
Viral Nation is one of the biggest talent agencies in the digital content industry. With a roster of over 900 creators in dozens of categories across long-form, short-form, and livestreaming, it’s perhaps best known for its work growing said content creators–getting them brand deals, helping them launch their own bespoke products, and giving them solid biz dev guidance.
But there’s a lot more to Viral Nation. Yes, when best friends Joe Gagliese and Mat Micheli co-founded the agency in 2014, they initially planned for it to focus on repping people who made YouTube videos–a profession that, at the time, was barely out of infancy.
Instead, as content creation garnered mainstream attention and rapidly grew into a multibillion-dollar business full of creators with diverse needs and brands seeking connection with digital-savvy audiences, Viral Nation flexed to meet its needs.
Now, 11 years later, Gagliese and Micheli’s talent agency has scaled into a full-blown social media marketing company, encompassing what Chief Commercial Officer Nicholas Spiro describes as a neverending “flywheel” of talent, marketing, creative studio, and technology divisions that constantly feed one another to help clients reach their desired audiences.
Flywheel vs silo
Depending on individual brand clients’ needs, Viral Nation provides influencer marketing, social content production, community management, social-experiential marketing, performance marketing, and business intelligence at all stages, from ideation and strategy to execution and measurement. It says that regardless of each campaign’s specific components, Viral Nation’s offerings–and the social media experts working to provide them–“support one another, strengthening the final deliverable beyond what is possible from siloed social media services.”
“If I were to describe Viral Nation in a succinct way, we started as this mom-and-pop talent shop that has since absolutely blossomed, becoming the global leader for digital media and technology where we power both brands and creators,” Madison Gaudry-Routledge, the head of Viral Nation’s Social Strategy & Community Management arm, tells Tubefilter.
She adds that Viral Nation accomplishes this “through our full staff ecosystem, where we combine influencer marketing, social-first strategies, our proprietary tech and AI-driven brand safety, which I think is a huge differentiator for us to drive engagement and protection at scale.”
When Viral Nation partners with a brand client, its Social Studio can produce two tracks of content for their marketing campaign: (1) agency-led content, which is brand-focused and produced in-house by the studio, specifically for the brand’s owned channels; and (2) creator-led content, where vetted creators make sponsored promotional content.
Depending on the strategy the campaign’s goals call for, Viral Nation’s divisions come together to manage all aspects of the campaign from start to finish.
Going beyond brand safety
When a campaign calls for creator-led content, Viral Nation not only sources talent from its roster, but from social media platforms at large. Its Viral Nation Secure system scans creators’ entire public profiles for overall brand safety and for data like their growth trajectories, audience demographics, and how their content niche fits into our space’s current trends.
This process takes around ~48 hours, and is built on the bones of Google’s Gemini AI. It’s also “highly customizable,” says Nicolas Doyen, VP, Product and Data Strategy at Viral Nation.
That’s because, “For example, what a family brand considers safe will not be the same as what an alcoholic beverage brand does,” he says. “The scale of this tool allows us to match brands with the exact right fit for them, out of over 28,000 creators and growing.”
“I think we are the most brand-safe social media company, period,” CCO Spiro chimes in. “We work with some of the world’s biggest brands, and they’ve spent decades and millions or billions building out their brand equity, and they want to protect it.”
Can Ahtam, Viral Nation’s Head of Creator Relations, tells Tubefilter that his team looks for creators who can build long-lasting partnerships with brands, even to the point of becoming ambassadors. “We empower the creator economy through those financial means with creators anywhere from nano to mega celebrity tier,” he says. “How we go about this is we strongly align ourselves and make ourselves an extension of the brand partners we work with.”
Viral Nation’s tech side continues its work once a creator x brand partnership has begun, returning a constant flow of data about campaign performance. The company is “continuously collecting, processing, and feeding insights for every marketing effort,” Doyen says.
Viral Nation’s Business Intelligence & Data Strategy department, headed by VP Richelle Batuigas, “works hand in hand with our tech side of the business,” she says. “Through our tech, we collect a lot of data, and one of the key things that we share back to clients is a daily stream of how we do every single day. With that insight, we’re able to identify how to optimize your campaign in real time, so that we can actually control for outcomes.”
She adds that “we get a steady stream of data so you can actually, in a moment, identify which creator’s performing, which post is performing, and hypothesize why or why not.”
All that data gives Viral Nation “insight into the landscape of the entire industry,” Batuigas says. “We spend time looking at all the data and are able to surface trends in the industry that let us produce thought leadership and forecast what’s happening in this space.”
Neverending insights
As the flywheel turns, this vast trove of data is used on a similarly continuous basis by Gaudry-Routledge’s team.
“Community management and social strategy together are really the backbone of the creator economy,” she says. “When I look at social media strategy, they’re setting the why, the what, the where, and the when behind every post we do in the creator space and in campaigns. It’s about really making intentional, data-driven decisions.”
If social strategy is all data, then community management is “all about the human connection aspect,” she says.
“It’s at the heart and soul of all our engagements, turning these audiences into little communities,” she adds. “Community insights are something we turn to time and time again to really fuel a better strategy, to ensure that we’re able to refine our messaging and our overall content direction. So if we’re looking at a creator’s content, we’re able to be in there alongside the creator, and then we have the strategy that amplifies these community moments.”
Ultimately, “Together, both brands and creators see more engagement, loyalty, and monetization when we know that the content is well planned, optimized, and well managed,” Gaudry-Routledge says.
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