Marvel at our new Influencer League
As a woman, as an actor, as a minority race, I was exploited. My colleagues were exploited. My friends were exploited.
We worked effortlessly, bearing our creative souls. And yet, we were exploited.
You see, not all performers can achieve the superstardom and cashola that oozes out of Hollywood. For every success, there’s 100s struggling in the background.
In starting SushiVid you could say that I wanted justice. That I wanted to avenge the exploitation of my fellow creatives. And to a degree, you would be right.
Ensuring fairness for those who create content has always been dear to my heart. But a one-sided equation never works — we all know what happened when the Green Lantern went rogue.
That’s why SushiVid has always strived to help businesses make better bottom lines through influencer marketing activities while at the same time empowering influencers to be properly compensated for content they create.
And while we’ve been hugely successful in doing that, there comes a time where you realise you can’t keep doing these things alone. That you need to join forces to faces challenges in the influencer space and deliver the greatest results; our very own “Justice League” so to speak. (Okay, so the Justice League might hail from DC and not Marvel, but you can see where we’re going with this, right?)
So, ladies, gentlemen and comic book fans, it’s time to introduce you to our influencer league and welcome Sociabuzz and Blogapalooza to the fold.
The Sociabuzz and Blogapalooza back story
Sociabuzz was founded in Indonesia by Rade Tampubolon in 2012. At the time Rade was a digital marketing manger in an FMCG company, trying to execute influencer campaigns manually (i.e. totally unbefitting of a superhero). So, he reached out to his friend Eddy and together the two drew on the best of technology to automate searches, contacts, negotiations and payments.
Filipino juggernaut, Blogapalooza, had a different start to life. Originally a gathering of bloggers and businesses, Ace Gapuz worked to evolve Blogapalooza to an influencer marketing platform in 2015. It’s main aim, to help improve transparency in the business-influencer relationship. Like SushiVid, a major focus has also been tracking performance through analytics.
Why the need for an influencer league?
Just 2.5 years ago each of us were pioneers — some of the first in our countries to get on board with influencer marketing in Asia. Flash forward to today and the market is now saturated. With over 250 influencer marketplace players on the scene, it’s becoming increasingly hard to raise the funds we need to further develop our platform to deliver exactly what our brands and influencers need.
While we could have kept forging along alone, we would have been competing and diluting our talents, each trying to reign supreme. As Peter Thiel wrote in Zero to One, competition always results in a losing party (just look at Grab and Uber). In explaining the decision to merge with Elon Musk and form Paypal he noted that together, they would be unrivalled (like the Justice League).
For SushiVid, Sociabuzz and Blogapalooza, the partnership will also help us to expand beyond our respective borders. Without one another, we’d be facing a couple of years to establish ourselves in new countries, and with the pace of technology, that simply wasn’t an option.
What we plan to achieve
It’s all about solidifying our presence across South East Asia. And excitingly, we are now the largest influencer marketplace in the region.
Should things continue to grow as we hope, we’ll then look at fundraising and maybe even listing together (a start-up can dream, right?).
And, of course, we’re going to continue to strive for justice for everybody.
