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Reading a celebrity Tweet promoting a product? There's a good chance that Beverly Hills-based Adly was behind it. The company uses celebrity platforms to promote brands.
Adly started off as a sponsored assistance company, in other words, they helped brands partner with a celebrity. But with the rise of Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms, over the past 12-18 months the company started the transition to a data technology company. This means they use their extensive data on celebrities and brands to best target a given segment.
But celebrity Tweets aren’t as simple as signing up a celebrity and having them post about their new favorite product. If you think the business model is simple, Addison has a few words for you: “We aren’t just Tweets, we do more than that.” Here are the top three things Addison wants you to know about this growing business:
1. There’s data behind the Tweets. When a client approaches Adly, their data team gets to work sorting through data on the product, celebrity and the brand. Celebrities, the brand and the target consumer all need to match up. Addison said they look for a celebrity that indexes high in the brand area before pitching him or her. Adly has scores of data it uses to make a recommendation.
2. It’s complicated. After all, Adly is dealing with big brands and big celebrities. Between getting a celebrity on board for a product to crafting the Tweet, some campaigns can take weeks or months (although when pressed, Adly can craft and execute a campaign in under 24 hours).
3. Celebrities say no. And celebrities delete Tweets. Imagine the panic that a deleted Tweet could cause. Picture it: a major brand spends thousands of dollars (if not more) on an advertising campaign to promote their product through Celebrity X, who then goes on to change her mind and delete the Tweet. Unimaginable? It happens, Addison said. Brands need to feel comfortable with who is promoting their product and that can take a lot of work. Still, Adly crafts the messages for the celebrity and Tweets on their behalf, taking out any uncertainty that the celebrity will follow-through or will misspell the brand’s name.
4. It's always changing - and that makes it a good industry to be in. Adly’s watched the rise of celebrities on instagram, how they have a high following and that they post lots of pictures that evoke high engagement from followers. They are moving towards more visuals to take advantage of the high engagement.
The 14-person company is also looking at the mobile application market. They want to figure out how to best use that segment for their customers. Right now, their focus is around data and figuring out exactly what brands needs. Addison says the combination of working with celebrities and brands is pretty unique and makes the job fun. Adly even had a surprise celebrity pop in their office the other day to bring them cupcakes.
