 More people than ever are posting content of themselves online. 30% of Gen Z consider themselves creators, as do 38% of millennials, according to a 2022 HubSpot survey. TikTok has helped proliferate the creator boom, ushering an age of social media, where people post to become known to strangers, rather than posting for the people they know in real life. All of the ephemera we upload to the internet is called user-generated content, or UGC. From thought-out YouTube videos to descriptions of our breakfast on Twitter. But as more people live their lives online, including recommending products, brands are seeing this homemade content as an asset. UGC is really brand advocacy. I mean, that is like the purest expression of brand love. The one thing that pretty much everyone knows and believes from a consumer standpoint and from a brand standpoint is that word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful form of marketing of all time. It's what we want to consume as consumers, and it's what brands want to deliver. As the digital world further collapses the line between the famous and regular person, some marketing entrepreneurs see an opportunity. The idea of micro influencers really became a way of helping brands try to justify very small budgets. What we saw at the end of the day was if you had more than 10,000 followers, but less than 100,000, you had a great ability to create content at scale and high-quality content. But also the brands were able to benefit from testing lots of audiences and owning a large amount of that content at the end of the day. Social studies and influencer agency and tech firm has tapped into the growth of creators by making it easier for brands to find micro influencers. Startup Sway Pay, which was founded in November 2021, helps people get cash back for products they buy regularly by posting about it. The company has nearly 12,000 users and has partnered with 53 brands such as Taco Bell, American Eagle and Starbucks. Short-form video content is the way young consumers communicate. And so really what you're talking about is a vehicle of communication and relationship between brands and their consumers. And so for Sway Pay, we have users with 5 million followers. We have users with no followers and everything in between. But the one thing that keeps us entirely grounded and the one anchor for all of us is that it's authentic customers, authenticated purchases, verified advocacy. As long as people want to continue spending money, they're going to want to discover brands. And the way they want to discover brands is word of marketing. It's not so much that we're looking for just anyone to talk about our product or brand or our initiative. It's about the act of finding those influential people that truly align with your brand mission, with your brand vision, that support what you're doing because they're going to be able to deliver an authentic message because I think consumers are extremely savvy. They can smell it immediately if someone is being inauthentic. It actually makes a lot of sense to be incentivizing actual consumers to advocate for their products. They expect to capture the value they create. For marketers working with influencers, bigger isn't always better. There are advantages in working with micro influencers and even smaller creators. With these smaller influencers or smaller creators, you can be a lot more nimble. The production times are a lot faster. When you're working with larger influencers, you're also talking then about dependencies like, are we going to be using their own channels for promoting any of this content? Are we going to be using any paid to boost from those channels? You're also talking about overall ownership of that content. With a creator, you're literally hiring a creator to make something on the behalf of your brand. Content now that you own within your library. Working with micro influencers can also come with disadvantages for marketers. When influencer marketing, we're still very much like, I know this is doing something. I know it has ancillary benefits. I know I can get more content. I can reduce my cost per acquisition on paid media. I know that I can hitch my brand wagon to an influencer wagon and now I can benefit from their audience as well as them benefiting from my audience but getting to the verifiable proof positive that this is working dollar for dollar from an ROI perspective. We're getting closer there. Like with any influencer program, I mean you are talking about seeding some level of control over to the influencer or the creator. Some of the limitations are things like quality control. The overall like brand look and feel or perhaps some brands are uncomfortable with creative fidelity. It can be difficult to moderate. It can be difficult to even track. If regular people continue to live online and hawk products on the internet, one could imagine a future where the internet is all based on recommendations or digital word of mouth marketing and advertisements are no longer necessary. Maybe. I like the idea of a homogenous world where any recommendation is available but it still would have to be categorized, sorted, tax-automized and then there would still have to be some ability by which you can surface top recommendations in a world where there was no influencer marketing or no ability to pay for recommendations that there would still have to be a way where the best recommendations got surfaced in some sort of egalitarian way. For now, micro influencers have met more marketing, not less. The relationship between brand and consumer is more than just a transaction. As UGC content proliferates on the internet and smart brands tap into it, every regular Joe is increasingly becoming part of a brand's marketing arsenal.