Startup aims to connect small firms with influencers
Hamiltonians Yuri Kaplan, Daniel Lasek launched AdMass last spring to make advertising with social media personalities more affordable, accessible
From Instagram influencers and YouTube content creators to TikTok collectives, social media has given rise to a new league of celebrity. It also hatched a lucrative ecosystem for advertising, with major brands tapping into massive audiences of internet personalities through sponsored posts or paid ads.
AdMass Inc., a Hamiltonbased startup, is setting out to make this marketing strategy more accessible to local businesses through its platform, which helps connect companies to social media influencers and creators in their area.
The company built a tool that “scrapes” social media and uses the data to create a search engine of influencers, says cofounder Yuri Kaplan. More than 150,000 influencers across North America are on AdMass so far, with about 20,000 in Canada.
“Why shouldn’t anybody on social media be able to recommend local businesses?” Kaplan said. “Social media users with smaller amounts of followers actually have a way larger reach, so it’s a bigger bang for your buck,” he added, referring to an often higher engagement rate — a measure of how an audience interacts through a post by liking, sharing or commenting on it — on accounts with fewer followers.
“While you’re going to pay a lot more (to advertise), you’re actually getting a lot less out of it,” said Kaplan, who launched AdMass last June with cofounder Daniel Lasek.
With a marketing campaign in mind, small businesses can match with a social media influencer that suits their advertising goals, budget, target audience and location.
“That’s why we wanted to create something simpler that anybody with any amount of followers in Hamilton (and elsewhere) can actually do,” he said.
The duo decided to remove monthly subscription fees charged by their competitors to make the product more accessible to small businesses, Kaplan said, and is also launching a rewards program that businesses can tailor to the influencers and customers. When it comes to larger brands, AdMass charges a commission of up to 10 per cent to creators when doing direct outreach and a payment processing fee.
According to an analysis of the future of social media, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, one Instagram post by pop star Selena Gomez had a value of $3.4 million in 2018, when she had about 144 million followers (she now has more than 214 million). Posting an ad with her, at the time, could run a brand upwards of $800,000.
The 2019 research article notes that smaller companies are relying on “micro-influencers,” who are “considered to be more trustworthy and authentic than traditional celebrities.”