Before
Payment terms up to 90 or 120 days due to client AP policies
Hours spent supporting vendor questions on payment status due to limited visibility
Campaign scaling and vendor relationships hindered by inefficient payment processes
after
Vendors are given the option to get immediate access to funds with instant pay
Minimized vendor support due to payment transparency and automated onboarding
Scalable payment processing for 10,000+ payments
Can you tell us about the journey of Village Marketing from its founding in 2013 to your acquisition by WPP in 2023? And congratulations on the success so far!
Thank you! Village Marketing is going into our tenth, almost eleventh year of our journey. The business has changed the way that influencer marketing as a whole has evolved - very rapidly. In the beginning of Village, we didn't pay influencers at all because the industry was mostly gifting. This was back when we called influencers and creators bloggers. Everything grew out of the affiliate marketing model built on connecting with influencers via affiliate platforms.
And then somewhere in the murky middle as I like to call it, when the business was still the wild west, and it still is to some degree, I was paying influencers individually via PayPal… This was one of the messier times we went through because we were just trying to figure it out and influencers were not set up as businesses. We launched before all the tech platforms had taken off. We used a mix of tech that wasn't really made for or designed for our space, and hired a ton of people to just manually solve things, and we had to do at scale.
A big reason why Village broke out as a successful agency was because of our ability to scale. We built strong operational processes and a team that just was willing to put in the time and the hours to make sure everything worked and we could execute.
Fast forward to the WPP acquisition. It’s been an amazing partnership because we now have the resources and more sophisticated processes and operations that we really needed to move to the next level. Now we're able to execute hundreds of thousands of posts over the course of a year instead of tens of thousands of posts. WPP has given us the ability to scale globally, the ability to think bigger, the ability to have more knowledge and understanding and structure around finances, around legal, around vertical expertise that we needed to really move to the next stage of scale.
Are there any fundamental values or core beliefs that guide how Village works with influencers and talent management?
I would say that any agency doing well in the influencer marketing space has to build good relationships with their clients and great relationships with creators and talent management. That has been our belief from the onset. First and foremost, we actually speak to and interview creators and screen for people who are genuinely nice and kind, which maybe seems like a silly thing but our entire industry is relationship based.
Relationships are more than just being nice. Relationships are about knowing that people have your back and that you are going to work in a way that's not going to waste their time or yours. You have to have mutual respect. The way we work with creators is always under this fundamental belief and respect of their craft and their creativity and what they do.
In the beginning, and I'm sure this is an HR “no no” now, we used to sign every single email to creators off with XO or XX. and… We’d focus on that personal touch. We started as a 100 percent female agency. This is an industry that was built in large part by women and moms. And we have really close relationships with that core group.
Early on influencer marketing was an experimental channel and we needed to over deliver on the job our clients hired us to do which was to actually drive sales via collaborations with all of these creators. And even though there are a lot of negotiations with talent, we strive to be fair while delivering value and ROI to our clients, and those don’t need to be at odds.
What does Village look for when working with creators?
It comes down to 3 things.
Sometimes we approach creators we know will do a great job on a campaign and they're like, no, I actually don't ever use that brand nor would I use that brand. I always laugh when people say, you know, you're just convincing creators to post for money. And I'm like, no, no, we can't convince a creator to use a toothbrush they don't use. Great creators just know who they are and they are and always have been very strong willed.
I think that that's always been a large misconception in the influencer space that you are trying to convince people of something. No, you're not, you are informing people of something you are already convinced of and that's it's our job to find the people who are authentic. It is not our job to try to convince creators to participate in a product or campaign they don't believe in.
From when we started Village to today, we went from still photography to video being the main source of content. And I watched people who couldn't transition and it was sad. I was like, oh, I love this creator. She was so great in still photography and that was her aesthetic. And then video exploded, it requires completely different creative and storytelling.
You have to be great at storytelling and you have to be great at speaking to the camera and you have to understand editorial. TikTok alongside Instagram stories are becoming the or are the most important channels.
We look for creators that are staying current and we really understand who is performing given today’s landscape which will be different from the future landscape as we continue to shift to in platform shopping and as AI increases in adoption.
It’s critical to understand how creators perform across channels, how they perform across different types of video video content.
Obviously, we look at a lot of data points, their engagement rate, their relationship with their followers, the data is really important.
We are ultimately a performance agency. A lot of what we are brought in for is bottom of funnel conversion. It's really critical that we have an understanding which influencers drive action. And thankfully, having, you know, mapped to 120 data points from every single post over the last 11 years we have a TON of data. We have so much data now that we have a really strong sense of who drives the most action for, what types of brands and what verticals and categories.
Looking at it from the creator perspective, what do they care most about?
The number of represented creators has just exploded. Any special advice for brands or agencies WHEN working with talent management?
Thinking back to thE early days, what were the biggest challenges in managing operations and payments to creators?
Speaking of Lumanu, why did Village Marketing choose Lumanu to handle payments?
We’ve used and evaluated several payment platforms, and we talk to influencer platforms regularly from a larger tech standpoint so we have heard all their payment pitches. Lumanu is the only option that could give us the functionality we wanted and the flexibility we needed. We needed a platform to support our scale and Lumanu was the answer.
Suzanne Roaf
Group director, Marketing & Business Affairs
What impact has Lumanu had on payment operations?
I oversee all things accounting. We went from receiving creator invoices and semi-manually entering each invoice into our system. We’ve eliminated our AP processing time pretty significantly, using Lumanu’s upload functionality. Realistically we are saving around 40 hours per week, massively improving efficiency and eliminating a very large amount of busy work.
Kerry White
Controller
Have you heard any direct feedback from creators or talent managers about Lumanu?
I have met with talent agencies and they’ve told me they were very happy with the switch to Lumanu. Many were already familiar and it’s been really seamless for them. It was really great to hear that people were happy with how Village improved our payment process with Lumanu.
Vanessa Supino
Director
