Building Billion-Dollar Brands in the AI Era | Zeta Global & Cameo Founders 🌍 EP141

What this episode is about

The discussion highlights the strategies for building billion-dollar brands in the AI-driven landscape, as presented by David Steinberg, the founder of Zeta Global. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance customer engagement and monetization for large enterprises, while also sharing insights on balancing corporate responsibilities with philanthropic efforts amidst running a multi-billion dollar company.

Key takeaways

• AI's charm: Athena redefines marketing, freeing up 567 enterprises from data scientists—a cool revolution.
• Serendipity rules: Even in AI's embrace, chance encounters inspire innovation more than algorithms predict.
• Bell rings louder at NYSE: David Steinberg juggles monumental tasks with aplomb and a dash of humor.
• Epic mergers: $325M acquisition shows ambition, Zeta Global ain't playing small—it's a marketing giant.
• Athena's magic: Voice-driven marketing seamlessly replaces complex roles in Fortune 100 firms—talk about disruption!

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Athena, Serendipity, Zeta Global, Zeta Live
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Celligent, Cheetah Digital, David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation, Investment bank
3. 10:00 – 15:00: David Steinberg, Lone Survivor, Martin Blenco, Money Mondays
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Selfie, Brandon Boon, Cashes Marsh, Euphoria
5. 20:00 – 25:00: Adam Q, Andre Drummond, Ari Emanuel, Detroit Pistons
6. 25:00 – 30:00: Butterfly effect, Hurricane Harvey, Logan Paul, Pledge
7. 30:00 – 31:40: Dude Wipes, How I Built This, Lifeway Kefir, Money Mondays

Notable quotes from "Building Billion-Dollar Brands in the AI Era | Zeta Global & Cameo Founders 🌍 EP141"

• Of my dear friend here, we're at his conference called Zeta Live. His company Zeta Global, it's a multi-billion dollar corporation, and he decides to put a lot of time, energy…

  about Zeta Global · at 0:14

• So Athena which is the biggest product launch in our corporate history.

  about Athena · at 2:33

• Well, first of all, I find that even in an artificial intelligence world, serendipity plays a big part of innovation.

  about Serendipity · at 3:55

• Of M&A the number one pillar is we have to be able to fully integrate them into our tech stack within 12 months of purchasing. Rollups generally run a lot of individual businesses and they can work but that's not what we are.

  about Tech stack · at 6:17

• Operating people off of their day jobs to go do M&A. So we built effectively a boutique investment bank inside of Zeta.

  about Investment bank · at 8:26

• Not giving back to society, I don't know what you're doing. So, I started the David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation a number of years ago. And one of the things I love about…

  about David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation · at 9:31

• Concerts, festivals, basketball games to get an autograph. And then about seven or eight years ago, the selfie became the autograph.

  about Selfie · at 15:41

• And really about the last half a decade in particular I've been wanting to tell you about the butterfly effect. So in 2019 I actually went to visit you in Chicago and you took…

  about Butterfly effect · at 24:59

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Devon (Cameo founding CTO) — Person · 5 mentions
• Cody Ko — Person · 4 mentions
• David Steinberg — Person · 2 mentions · first at 0:45
  It away to charity. He's done all the above. He's very philanthropic. So we're without further ado, David Steinberg, give us the quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to…
• Tim Armstrong — Person · 1 mention · first at 4:39
  He's the former CEO of AOL former head of global sales for Google Tim is probably I mean Tim Armstrong is one of the most accomplished individuals in the marketing ecosystem…
• Kristen Steinberg — Person · 1 mention · first at 9:36
  Not giving back to society, I don't know what you're doing. So, I started the David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation a number of years ago. And one of the things I love about…
• Martin Blenco — Person · 1 mention · first at 13:39
  The guys that he produced movies with came in for the day for the funeral from Los Angeles. One of those guys is Martin Blenco who ended up becoming my co-founder at Cameo. At…
• Brandon Boon — Person · 1 mention · first at 15:00
  All the way back in O'Hare, just gridlock traffic. pulls out the video and in it he's getting his buddy Brandon Boon who I think now is the chief marketing officer at Wingstop…
• Maverick — Person · 1 mention · first at 15:09
  Marketing officer at Wingstop and Brandon literally like had just had a son and he named his son Maverick because he was you know very close with Mav Carter and a bunch of the…
• Mav Carter — Person · 1 mention · first at 15:13
  Son and he named his son Maverick because he was you know very close with Mav Carter and a bunch of the guys in LeBron's camp but he loves the Seattle Seahawks and in it Cashes…
• Cashes Marsh — Person · 1 mention · first at 15:17
  Mav Carter and a bunch of the guys in LeBron's camp but he loves the Seattle Seahawks and in it Cashes Marsh who was playing for the Seahawks at the time goes hey…
• Ari Emanuel — Person · 1 mention · first at 21:44
  Team specifically had my co-founder Martin was an NFL agent and movie producer. Now, if he was Ari Emanuel or if he was Jerry Brookheimimer, he would have been too big that he…
• Adam Q — Person · 1 mention · first at 22:24
  Year before we started Cameo, I went to the Mayweather Pacquiao fight with Devon, Cody, and our friend Adam Q. And I'll never forget Cody ended up tagging a picture of me of…
• Andre Drummond — Person · 1 mention · first at 23:54
  5040 hour weeks, and then find out what they made per minute. So when we on when we onboarded Andre Drummond from the Detroit Pistons, who was a $25 million max salary player…
• Logan Paul — Person · 1 mention · first at 26:00
  Call. Bring people on that have no cards, but bring interesting characters. So I invite Logan Paul, Steve Aayoki, Lewis House, Rob G, guys that are now having tens of millions…
• Rob G — Person · 1 mention · first at 26:02
  Cards, but bring interesting characters. So I invite Logan Paul, Steve Aayoki, Lewis House, Rob G, guys that are now having tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of…
• Tony Hawk — Person · 1 mention · first at 29:51
  Don't make money from it. And that's been a really big driver. People like Tony Hawk, have been able to raise a ton of money on Cameo and it's just it's another like fun way…
• Dwyane Wade — Person · 1 mention
• Floyd Mayweather Jr. — Person · 1 mention
• Heather Rae Young — Person · 1 mention
• Manny Pacquiao — Person · 1 mention
• Mickey Mantle — Person · 1 mention
• TK — Person · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

• Zeta Global — Company · 5 mentions · first at 0:18
• The National Sports Collectors Convention — Company · 5 mentions
• Money Mondays — Company · 4 mentions · first at 0:07
  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very, very, very special edition of the Money Mondays podcast, where normally I'm inside of an RV motor home driving around the country. But today, because of my dear friend here, we're at his.
• National Football League (NFL) — Company · 4 mentions
• Zeta Live — Company · 2 mentions · first at 0:16
  Around the country. But today, because of my dear friend here, we're at his conference called Zeta Live. His company Zeta Global, it's a multi-billion dollar corporation, and…
• Marigold — Company · 2 mentions
• Celligent — Company · 1 mention · first at 6:52
  Cloud and our clients data. We picked up one of the most important messaging platforms for publishers in Celligent, which we're going to merge into our publisher cloud. We…
• Cheetah Digital — Company · 1 mention · first at 7:01
  Publisher cloud. We picked up a very large footprint in Europe and AMIA which is Cellagent and we picked up Cheetah digital which is one of the premier platforms in the…
• David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation — Company · 1 mention · first at 9:36
• Wizards of the Coast — Company · 1 mention · first at 14:13
  Minimum contract. And yet, even though he is an NFL player that made them go viral, he couldn't get Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Magic the Gathering, to get any…
• Euphoria — Company · 1 mention · first at 18:32
  Thousands of people that we had missed like maybe they were going to get cast in euphoria and becoming the biggest model in the world now they have 60,000 right or they have…
• Detroit Pistons — Company · 1 mention · first at 23:56
  They made per minute. So when we on when we onboarded Andre Drummond from the Detroit Pistons, who was a $25 million max salary player at the time, we did that equation and…
• Pledge — Company · 1 mention · first at 29:36
  Realized that was there and all the way today now. we announced a landmark partnership with Pledge at Super Bowl this year and anybody that does Cameo for charity, it's a 955…
• The Zeitgeist Podcast — Company · 1 mention · first at 30:30
  Socials. I think maybe book Cameo on X. and then outside of Cameo, I started a podcast this year called the Zeitgeist podcast where think of it as how I built this for consumer brands.
• How I Built This — Company · 1 mention · first at 30:34
  Started a podcast this year called the Zeitgeist podcast where think of it as how I built this for consumer brands.
• Dude Wipes — Company · 1 mention · first at 30:40
  So, we've had companies like Dude Wipes on and Lifeway Kefir and just a lot of really fun brands this year. and we tell the stories of like how especially in really crowded spaces and.
• Lifeway Kefir — Company · 1 mention · first at 30:42
  So, we've had companies like Dude Wipes on and Lifeway Kefir and just a lot of really fun brands this year. and we tell the stories of like how especially in really crowded spaces and without a lot of money, people built.
• ARIA Resort & Casino — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

• Athena — Product · 3 mentions · first at 2:31
• Conan the Barbarian — Product · 2 mentions
• Rambo — Product · 2 mentions
• Lone Survivor — Product · 1 mention · first at 13:32
  My u on my mom's side is a movie producer and he had done movies like Rambo Conan Lone Survivor and a bunch of the guys that he produced movies with came in for the day for the…

Concepts & topics

• Serendipity — Concept · 3 mentions · first at 4:01
• Selfie — Concept · 3 mentions · first at 15:45
• Butterfly effect — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 25:02
• Roll-up (business) — Concept · 2 mentions
• Marketing cloud — Concept · 1 mention · first at 0:58
  Taken two public. I'm chairman of another. Zeta Global is the premier artificial intelligence-driven marketing cloud. Today, we help very large enterprises to create, maintain…
• Conversational artificial intelligence — Concept · 1 mention · first at 2:39
  Is a conversational artificial intelligence super agent. So you can speak to Athena like you were speaking to me right now and you could ask it any question you want about your business.
• Tech stack — Concept · 1 mention · first at 6:23
• Investment bank — Concept · 1 mention · first at 8:32
• Mayweather–Pacquiao fight — Concept · 1 mention · first at 22:22
  The stories I'll never forget is the year before we started Cameo, I went to the Mayweather Pacquiao fight with Devon, Cody, and our friend Adam Q. And I'll never forget Cody…
• Options trader — Concept · 1 mention · first at 23:23
  Got brought to the table. And then lastly, like I'm a marketplace guy. I'm a ex options trader. So, thinking about pricing was big. And one of the things that we were able to…
• Hurricane Harvey — Concept · 1 mention · first at 29:12
  Happened at Cameo, one of the first ones that really stood out to me was Hurricane Harvey hit in Houston and we probably had 20, 30 people on Cameo. I think it was over…
• QR code — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

• EMEA — Place · 1 mention
• O'Hare International Airport — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

0:05 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very, very, very special edition of the Money Mondays podcast, where normally I'm inside of an RV motor home driving around the country. But today, because of my dear friend here, we're at his conference called Zeta Live. His company Zeta Global, it's a multi-billion dollar corporation, and he decides to put a lot of time, energy, and effort to throw an event for over 1,000 guests. And the number might be 1100, 12, 2,000 people. So last year was like 11, 1200. Now there's 2,000 executives that are here inside the building. And luckily I got him for the next 15 minutes. So we're going to keep this podcast very short and straightforward. As you guys know, we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. He's done all the above. He's very philanthropic. So we're without further ado, David Steinberg, give us the quick two-minute bio so we

0:48 can get straight to the money. Uh a I'm a serial entrepreneur. I, you know, founded seven companies, sold four, taken two public. I'm chairman of another. Uh, Zeta Global is the premier artificial intelligence-driven marketing cloud. Today, we help very large enterprises to create, maintain, and monetize customers at a substantially lower cost by using our AI and our data.

1:11 Wow. Got dialed in. That was great. I've never said that before. Right. All right. When you're running a multi-billion dollar company, how do you make the time and energy for this to have 2,000 executives here in New York City? How do you do it? How do you pull it off? Well, if it was just this, it would be easy. We started on Monday. Monday morning or Sunday, I flew from LA to New York. Monday morning at 7 a.m. Eastern time, I was on Bloomberg. Uh we then had a crazy day. We closed the New York Stock Exchange and rang the bell.

1:42 Ding ding. It is really loud. It is louder than you expect it to be. And you're p and you push it for longer.

1:49 And I almost pushed it at the wrong time. The guy freaked out. So, it was good I didn't. But we did that. And then Tuesday we had our global town hall for our 2200 global employees. And then I flew to Dallas to give a speech. I gave a speech at my friend Khan's conf uh conference. Then after that speech I flew back to New York, landed around 12:30, got to bed at 1:00. 6:00 a.m. was up on Wednesday. Yesterday we did our customer advisory board meeting. We did our bian byianual investor day. And then we took 150 people including you to dinner. Y and then today is Zeta Live.

2:26 Oh my goodness gracious. And then a few minutes ago I heard you debuted something really big.

2:31 We did. Who is Athena? What is it? So Athena which is the biggest product launch in our corporate history.

2:38 Wow. Is a conversational artificial intelligence super agent. So you can speak to Athena like you were speaking to me right now and you could ask it any question you want about your business about marketing. It will then tell you the answers and it can automatically control the Zeta marketing platform in real time and run marketing and then give attribution all in one user interface.

3:07 I have so many questions. Yeah. Well, ask Athena. Wow, that's magical. So who uses Athena? Who is it perfect for?

3:15 Athena's to really help marketers today to no longer need data scientists, no longer need operating uh people to run their marketing. Everything can now be done via Athena. So we have 567 global enterprise clients today including 44% of the Fortune 100 largest companies in the world and they are going to have Athena fully integrated into their platform that everything goes voice enabled by Q1.

3:49 Wow. Why do you like to create these experiences? Why bring these 2,000 people together? Why do you create this? Well, first of all, I find that even in an artificial intelligence world, serendipity plays a big part of innovation.

4:05 This in Yes. Just getting people together and learning from each other and spending time. I mean, nobody does this better than you, right? We throw an event, we plan for 12,300 people, we end up with 2,000. You throw an event, you have 50,000 people show up. It's it's by the way it's amazing

4:23 the serendipity what you did last night was serendipity last night it was so fascinating you had Heather Ray Young and TK sitting next to me and you replace them with the CEO of AOL well he's the former CEO of AOL former head of global sales for Google Tim is probably I mean Tim Armstrong is one of the most accomplished individuals in the marketing ecosystem today he runs an incredible company around helping businesses is to connect digitally with the real world with a special edition QR codes.

4:56 Yeah, it was fascinating. It was two hours. So, the serendipity was fascinating because my mind was blown by just listening to him. Okay, so you're running a publicly traded company. You're on the news all the time. How are you juggling the world? You've got beautiful family. You're traveling around. You've got, you said 2,000 plus employees. Like, this is a lot going on. How do you, David, manage all this?

5:15 Well, first of all, it comes down to having one of the world's greatest teams. If you look at our executive leadership team, which is the 14 people that sort of work with me and I I meet with every Monday, each one of them could be CEO of another company. And if you look at our senior leadership team, which is 66 67 people, they are some of the most accomplished executives in the world. In fact, Dan, one of the things I'm personally most proud of is the individuals who have bet their careers

5:46 on working with Zeta. Yeah, it's it's you know that they feed their families, they build their future based on what we do as an organization and we take that we take it very seriously.

5:59 So you recently bought another really big company. Yeah. I think you spent a couple hundred million like

6:04 325 million to be exact. Yes. Why did you buy that company? Why are you in the rollup phase? You bought another big company earlier.

6:09 We don't we're not in the rollup phase just so we're on the same page. We that's uh that's not a term we use. We in fact if you look at our four pillars of M&A the number one pillar is we have to be able to fully integrate them into our tech stack within 12 months of purchasing. Rollups generally run a lot of individual businesses and and they can work but that's not what we are.

6:31 We bought Maragold's enterprise business for a number of reasons. One, we picked up one of the largest enterprisegrade loyalty programs for very large enterprises, which allows our models, our algorithms to now train on that loyalty data in addition to our data cloud and our clients data. We picked up one of the most important messaging platforms for publishers in Celligent, which we're going to merge into our publisher cloud. We picked up a very large footprint in Europe and AMIA which uh is Cellagent and we picked up Cheetah digital which is one of the premier platforms in the marketing automation space. We we got an additional 40 Fortune 500 customers and over a 100red additional enterprise clients to cross-ell our products and services into to make their businesses better. So we and and by the way we bought the business at a substantial discount to the multiple at which we trade. So the

7:31 deal is accretive from the day we do it. Wow. Cool. Now we haven't closed yet. We expect to close sometime in the fourth quarter.

7:39 So how do you decide when you can say let's say you have the pick of the litter, right? You're out there. You're working with so many thousands of companies as your clients and you have a lot of relationships because you're throwing these large conferences. So you have a lot of options. What do you think about when you're deciding I want to acquire that company that'd be a good fit for us at Zeta Global?

7:55 It's a great question, Dan, which is not to say your other questions weren't great, but that was a good one. Uh, so this is, as I said, I've been doing this. I've been CEO and founder of seven companies over 35 years. When I started my first company, I was the youngest person in the room for the first 20 years I was CEO.

8:12 I am now universally, Dan, the oldest person in the room when I walk in. No, it's okay. But some of the things you build these incredible lessons along the way. And one of the lessons I learned as it relates to M&A is don't take your operating people off of their day jobs to go do M&A. So we built effectively a boutique investment bank inside of Zeta.

8:35 And we look at a hundred different companies a year seriously to buy one. Wow. because it has to hit all five of our criteria. One, we have to be able to integrate it in 12 months. Two, we have to be able to sell them our their clients, our products or vice versa. Three, the deal has to be accreative from the day we do it. Four, there have to be additional synergies to drive incremental profit and we have to be able to grow it at at least our own organic growth rate, which is greater than 20% a year now for four years in a row. And number five, we have to pick up incredible people.

9:16 Wow. All right. So, I know you're going have to be running back shortly, so I just want to ask you one last question on the philanthropy side. Why do you think that companies or corporations should have some type of charity component for either their employees or their customers to like to see it? You know, if you're successful and you're not giving back to society, I don't know what you're doing. So, I started the David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation a number of years ago. And you know, one of the things I love about what you do, Dan, is your focus on children. Our biggest focus is disadvantaged children, around education, around nutrition, and around helping them to move up to the next level of success. And it's something that honestly it brings me so much joy to do it. And you know, I I I often say that the charitable giving that my wife Kristen and I do is almost selfish

10:13 in that it makes me feel so good to do it. And I think it's in all frankness, when you and I first got to know each other, it was the thing that I think bonded us the fastest.

10:24 Okay. So, where can people find David Steinberg SATA Global? Where can they find your world, your ecosystem if they're out there listening? Well, uh, first of all, we can go to zetaglobal.com. Second, I'm on Instagram and X, uh, and, uh, you know, post there pretty regularly and, uh, very excited to have, uh, people join me.

10:44 All right, I'm going to let you get back to your conference. As you guys know, on the money Mondays, we want you to have these discussions with your friends, family, and followers. It's not just about yourself that needs to understand about money. You might have to have a discussion with people from your past, present, and future. Have a discussion, talk about money. It's not rude to talk about it. We need it in our lives. There's loans, credit, financing, taxes. These are real things, part of your daily life. So, have a discussion. We'll see you guys next Monday here at the moneymunddays.com.

11:13 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the MoneyMunddays podcast. Normally, we're inside of an RV motor home travel around the country, but today we're at the Zeta Global Live Conference. Been coming here for the last three years. It's so impressive. They bring in over,00 chief marketing officers, CEOs and our guest today is just like that. He has actually built one of the biggest brands in the space. It's been fascinating to watch him grow over the years. I think it's I think he's on year nine of this company and building something that everyone around the world has talked about because he's combined celebrities, influencers, athletes, comedians all into one platform. I'm fascinated by it. So, what we're going to do is cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. And this episode, we're going to keep it much shorter. There's around 20 to 25

11:58 minutes. Normally, the episodes are 40 minutes because the average commute to work is 45 minutes. The average workout is 45 minutes. This episode will be around 20 to 25 minutes for your listening pleasure. So, without further ado, Steven Glattis from Cameo, give us your quick two-minute bio. So, we get straight to the money. Hey, I'm Steven Glattis, the co-founder and CEO of Cameo. Cameo is a marketplace where you can book over 60,000 of the most influential people in pop culture to create either personalized video shoutouts for you or to become brand endorsers for your brands. So, we have this marketplace. People can come on, search by what they like, and then find the people that are uh there. Uh I'm based out of Chicago um and I'm in Miami as well. Uh we've been at it 9 years as you mentioned. It's been a crazy blessed story. We actually had the idea at my grandmother's funeral of all places. And

12:45 the problem we were trying to start from solve from the very beginning was the internet was creating a new world where there was this gap between fame and monetization. So for the first time, people were kind of more famous than rich. And we were really thinking about what if we could create a platform that helped people get paid to become more famous, get paid to become more beloved. Because if you get a cameo from somebody, you like them more than you liked them before. You'll buy more of their merch. You'll listen to their podcasts. you become a go from a casual fan to a rabid super fan.

13:14 Okay. You mentioned it happened at grandma's funeral. How did that come to be? People are crying. This is a big moment in your life and how all of a sudden you become this zillion dollar company idea in this moment.

13:24 Yeah, it was crazy. So my uh my uncle on my u on my mom's side is a movie producer and he had done movies like Rambo Conan Lone Survivor and a bunch of the guys that he produced movies with came in for the day for the funeral from Los Angeles. One of those guys is Martin Blenco who ended up becoming my co-founder at Cameo. At the time, Martin had become an NFL agent near one client, uh, Cash's Marsh, a good buddy of both of ours, and Cash had just recently gone viral for having his Magic the Gathering card stolen.

13:58 Martin was trying to find any marketing deal for him because as the agent, you make a higher percentage of marketing deals than you do for like a rookie minimum contract. And yet, even though he is an NFL player that made them go viral, he couldn't get Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Magic the Gathering, to get any type of money. So, we were really thinking about this big gap. And he was really down on his luck. He had just sold his watch to pay for his kids' private schools. He's like, "Stephen, I'm losing money flying up to Seattle every month. I don't know what to do." But he's like, "I know this guy's a star." And one of his ideas was if he found a big defensive lineman with like big aura and a personality, maybe that guy could be the next Jason Mamoa or the next Rock. And he thought that my uncle could cast cashes as a Rambo or a Conan. So that was his whole idea in finding him. And you know him, he's got

14:48 that he's got that look. So he pulls his phone out and he shows me this video as we're stuck in traffic driving from, you know, downtown Chicago all the way back in O'Hare, just gridlock traffic. pulls out the video and in it he's getting his buddy Brandon Boon uh who I think now is the chief marketing officer at Wingstop and Brandon literally like uh had just had a son and he named his son Maverick because he was you know very close with Mav Carter and a bunch of the guys in LeBron's camp but he loves the Seattle Seahawks and in it Cashes Marsh who was playing for the Seahawks at the time goes hey congratulations Brandon on Maverick if he gets your athletic ability I know he'll be playing for the Seahawks one day go Hawks. Wow. And I saw this and immediately there was that Eureka moment. I'm like, "Dude, we should sell those. That's the new autograph.

15:34 Sell those." Okay. So, when you say that's the new autograph, what's really interesting about that is a lot of people for many many years would wait outside of concerts, festivals, basketball games to get an autograph. And then about seven or eight years ago, the selfie became the autograph.

15:48 Correct. That's right around the time obviously Cameo started to become big. Yep. Walk us through the concept where the selfie is the autograph.

15:54 Yeah. I mean, I think it's just simple. when you know when I was a kid growing up in Chicago uh you know 98 Bulls like that that whole Michael Jordan Scotty Pippen era if you saw a Dennis Rodman at a restaurant what did you do you grab the you grab the menu you grab the napkin they signed it like they signed your hat today if you see somebody famous what do you do you go up take a selfie and one of the things we were thinking about is in the digital world where your Instagram wall where your Facebook wall or your Instagram grid is kind of the equivalent of like your office what your office wall used to be instead of getting the signed jersey that's sitting in your office like you need know people want that kind of that digital experience that's on their grid post or it's on their Facebook wall at the time and that's really again selfies the new autograph okay so on the how to make money side with the money Mondays

16:40 podcast you have 60,000 creators influencers athletes comedians etc that on the platform let's say someone is one of those they are an influencer celebrity athlete and obviously you have other categories how do they sign up how do they come to you how do they find out how do they make money

16:54 yeah three main ways is the first is we have a team of people that are constantly DMing uh people that we think could be good. One of the cool things about Cameo at this scale now is is our search bar is kind of a a window to the zeitgeist. So all of a sudden like we'll see these names that are popping on the trending list that we never heard of and it may be somebody just went viral for starting a new Tik Tok trend or some new show on Hulu came out that we wasn't on our radar yet. So the second we see that our team will go attack and go get those people on the platform. Secondly, we have a talentto talent referral system.

17:25 So that allowed us once we got into the locker room. So when we got Cashious Marsh on the Seahawks, anyone else on his team that he referred, he got 5% of their bookings for a year out of our cut. And those referrals were 17% of our marketplace were referred by other talent. And they've done 65% of the lifetime GMV. So a lot of the biggest people we ever got came from our really happy talent on our marketplace referring their friends and getting them on. And then third, uh, and this is something we changed a few years ago.

17:55 Uh, when we first started the business, you had to have about 25,000 followers to come on. That's just the level where we thought you could be making money.

18:02 But what we're noticing when we looked at like the beginning of co all the way to Mother's Day 23, we looked at all the people that had applied that we hadn't let on. And it's kind of it was a static thing, right? If you apply and you're like, I have 7,000 followers on Instagram. we don't follow like we weren't tracking every single one of the people that applied so they just ended up in kind of a a no man's land and

18:26 one of the things when we looked at the purgatory we realized there were thousands of people that we had missed like maybe they were going to get cast in euphoria and becoming the biggest model in the world now they have 60,000

18:36 right or or they have six you know they have 6 million um you know somebody goes viral on TikTok someone was in the minor leagues and now they're starting for the Yankees like we miss some really big people so what we decided to do a couple years ago is open it up. So now anyone in the world can just go to cameo.com/enroll, join Cameo as talent and if you get booked, the algorithms will push you up and and make you searchable. But the cool thing about that, if you join through enrollments, you can only get booked by sharing your link. So ultimately what you're doing is you're enabling all these people to do influencer marketing for you and then those who there's demand for will end up kind of rising up in our system.

19:11 Wow. Okay. So someone comes on there, they got approved. Bam, I'm approved on Cameo. They're excited. How do they now make money? How do they tell the people? Is it all through social? Does it email, text? They mention it on stage. Like when how do they promote it?

19:24 Yeah, all the above. I think obviously most people on the internet like their biggest followings on the internet. So we always tell people like play where your fans are. And in this case, like what one of the things that happened just technologically right when we were coming up, the Instagram story swipe up ended up being a huge thing that kind of happened like right as cameo was going. So at that time only, you know, verified accounts originally could post a link in their um Instagram story and there were way less stories. So what would happen is first we would tell people like hey you have this link in bio space, go put that there. So like to this day you still see so many people w.cameo/ Cameo Dan that are just like right there.

20:06 Secondly, they'll be like, "Hey, you know, I'm on this thing. Cameo, swipe up. Come book me." And then third, you know, people have gotten really creative. Uh if they have a newsletter, if they have an email list, if they're doing a tour, like they found ways to integrate that into the other Marco marketing that they're doing to their fans already. And it's pretty organic. But by far the most important driver of Cameo's marketing is actually the fact that these videos all get shared, right? So 85% of videos in our marketplace are booked for other people. So if I book a cameo for you and you think it's funny, what do you do? You put it in the group chat and suddenly all these other people know about it and that's really how we grow.

20:44 So there's been a lot of competitors that have come and gone and faded away. What do you think made Cameo stand out? Let's let's step outside. Obviously you're the CEO and founder. Let's actually like look at it pragmatically. Why do you think that Cameo stood out versus all the other ones that came in wins?

20:56 I think it was a variety of things. Number one, I think the timing was really important. Um there had been people and you know about all about this like that had tried to do this earlier but until Snapchat became what it was the people self uh filming a a selfie video was still like if you tried to do it 5 years before like nobody had really done that before. So I think by the time we started in 2017 everybody was pretty comfortable filming a selfie video. So I think that meant a lot and the iPhone camera had kind of gotten good enough to go do it. Secondly, there's a lot of teams out there around the world that either could build the tech to do Cameo or they could had the talent relationships, but there were very few people that could do both. And when I look at the founder market fit that our team specifically had uh my co-founder Martin was an NFL agent and movie producer. Now, if he was Ari Emanuel or

21:46 if he was Jerry Brookheimimer, he would have been too big that he wouldn't have cared to go do this, if that makes sense. So the fact that he was like in the space, he knew enough to get he knew enough to get,

21:56 you know, but he wasn't successful enough at that point to go do it. That was big. Secondly, my co-founder, uh, Devon, who was our founding CTO,

22:05 actually was one of the first people in the world on Vine with over a billion loops. Really?

22:10 Right. So he was like a top hundred Viner in the world. His best friend Cody Co was like a top of course

22:15 top 30 Viner in the world. And one of the stories I'll never forget is the year before we started Cameo, I went to the Mayweather Pacquiao fight with Devon, Cody, and our friend Adam Q. And I'll never forget Cody ended up tagging a picture of me uh of our group, the four of us, like in the in the hotel lobby of the Arya. And I didn't know to have my notifications off. And suddenly like my phone was charged for a whole night out in Vegas. There were so many likes and comments that my phone overheated and died in my pocket. And that was the moment where I'm like, "Holy." And I'd known Cody since college. I'm like, "Holy like this Vine thing's huge." Like, and and keep in mind, even with those likes, the two of them had not made a dollar on social media yet at this point. So,

22:58 I literally am getting stopped more from Cody and Devon than I am from my buddies that are in the NBA or the NFL. And that was a big unlock to me because they hadn't been able to make money. And I think Devon being a creator and fundamentally understanding that as our founding, you know, CTO, like that's a really really unique uh skill set that got brought to the table. And then lastly, like I'm a marketplace guy. I'm a ex options trader. So, you know, thinking about pricing was big. And one of the things that we were able to do really early was find an equation to help people price themselves because when Cameo started, nobody knew what it should be. Should it be $1,000? Should it be that? And I had this idea of you're basically getting a minute of their time. So take their salary, which for NBA and NFL players, which we started with, were publicly available, divide by 2,000 hours in a work year,

23:49 5040 hour weeks, and then find out what they made per minute. So when we on when we onboarded Andre Drummond from the Detroit Pistons, who was a $25 million max salary player at the time, we did that equation and first he thought he needed to be 40 grand or 10 grand to do a cameo cuz he's like I got paid 40 grand to go to a bar mitzvah. But for me I was like that's

24:09 I'm like dude like the math's actually saying you know 25 million divided by 2,000 hours in a work year divided by 60 you make $28 a minute. So, if you're charging $100 and you do two videos per minute,

24:22 you're making the same effective rate as you are playing in the NBA on a max salary. And that was a really big I think that pricing ended up being a really big unlock. And then once we had that set and the price was cheap enough that people could go buy, then you started getting the reviews because a lot of the early competitors we saw, yeah, they had Dwayne Wade, but he was $5,000 and nobody ever tried it. So starting with and also I think a lot of people too tried to start with the A+ list and we really had this idea of solving the problem for the 99% of talent that really needed the money. All right. So there's a story I've been wanting to tell you for six years now and really about the last half a decade in particular I've been wanting to tell you about the butterfly effect. So in 2019 I actually went to visit you in Chicago and you took me to a restaurant across the street and I got this message

25:11 from Gary Vee. He was at the national at the sports card convention. I didn't know what the national was.

25:16 He said, "Come over to the card show before you fly out." So, I thought I was gonna go there for three hours and I'm there to see you. So, you're the butterfly effect for hundreds of millions of dollars of sales. By the way, what's gives you gets you the punch line. So, I go to see Gary Vee. I go to the show and I'm walking around with this son and three hours turns into three days.

25:32 I just like I happen to have $9,200 in cash on me. I know that number because I spent all of it with his kid with Gary's kid. I became Uncle Dan. And we went around and bought sports cards, right? Get back from the show and I can't stop thinking about sports cards. And Gary and I start a group chat with called the National. Get 36 people in the group chat. It gets too full, start another group chat. Start another group chat. And then Gary says, "Oh, let's do a Zoom call. Bring people on that have no cards, but bring interesting characters." So I invite Logan Paul, Steve Aayoki, Lewis House, Rob G, guys that are now having tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of cards on the Zoom call had zero. Rob G bought the most expensive, you know, like the Mickey Man card, Babe Ruth card, etc.

26:14 And so from that Zoom call, that group chat still exists. Now Logan Paul obviously has tens of millions of dollars in cards. Aoki's got tens of millions of dollars in cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, etc. And it's all because of you. It's literal butterfly effect is because you took me to a ton restaurant. Well, first off, that's an amazing that's an amazing story. Uh, I wish I, you know, I should have got my referral fee on that. No, no, but I, you know, the the thing, Dan, that I like really have appreciated watching your whole from the second we met, like I remember you coming in and telling me at 17 years old, you had the trademarks and like just all the businesses that you built. You're such a force of nature.

26:50 And I think that's why, you know, people just when you when you add there's a lot of people that can start a group chat. there's not a lot of people that could get the people in the group chat to go do that thing and it's been uh incredible to watch from the sidelines of how you've taken this community and you've really elevated like a whole category

27:08 you know at that point like I collected baseball cards and stuff when I was a kid but like you know I didn't understand that world either and now you know the national week in Chicago is such a big one it's usually it's usually right around LA when we do our big cameo pla so we have a lot of our athletes in town coming in and that whole space has just blown up and you know I really appreciate the community building that you've done there and uh it's just funny like you know last night Chip and I I know you're going to interview Chip later but we love talking about eeky guy which is finding the intersection of what do you love to do what are you great at what does the world need and what what you can make money doing and from the outside looking in it's so obvious that this passion and this you know the the hobby has become that thing that you're able to like mobilize your your own unique talent the network you

27:55 have, the rolodex, the trust that people have in you, and it's such a fun it's just been fun to watch. So, I'm really proud of you and I'm I'm uh I'm I'm flattered. Uh but, you know, those hundreds of those hundreds of millions of cards, guys. Uh that was you. I you know, I put you in the position, I guess, but like you know, you can only lead the horse to water and it's it's just awesome to see what you built. So, congratulations on that.

28:19 So, on the charity side of this, we like to talk about charity and philanthropy. Why do you think it's important to have charity involved in personal brands or corporations? Is there a charity component to Cameo? Can people donate to charity? Like talk us through why should there be some type of trading component in people's lives or companies?

28:33 Yeah, I think at the very beginning when we started Cameo, a lot of people were like that athletes are not going to join unless it's for charity because it's a bad look. And in fact, when Cashes sent the tweet out that launched Cameo, despite him being a rookie making, I don't know, a couple few hundred thousand dollars a year, people are like, I can't. you're a millionaire athlete. You know, you're charging people $20 to talk to you. Like, basically, you're a scumbag. And Cash has almost quit before it started because the the feedback was so poor when we originally launched. But at the same time, when you look at when you look at like some of the moments that happened at Cameo, one of the first ones that really stood out to me was Hurricane Harvey hit in Houston and we probably had 20, 30 people on Cameo. I think it was over Memorial Day weekend if I remember correctly. And what we decided to do is to give a 100% of all

29:22 of our proceeds to to Hurricane Harvey relief fund. At that point, we got all of our talent to opt in and like it was the biggest booking we we had. So, we realized that was there and all the way today now. Um, you know, we we announced a landmark partnership with Pledge at Super Bowl this year and anybody that does Cameo for charity, it's a 955 split their way. So, all that's coming out is really like our fees to pledge. Like, we don't make money from it. And that's been a really big driver. People like Tony Hawk, you know, have been able to raise a ton of money on Cameo and and it's just it's another like fun way for people to go and, you know, when they have a give or they've got, you know, they want to give back. They have a foundation, they have a cause to go do that, you know, and and we have a lot of talent that that raise money for charity every day on Cameo.

30:09 So, I need to get you back on to do a longer episode. I got to do back to back to back today. We got the founder of Zeta Global coming in here in a few minutes. Can you give people where can they find you? Where can they find Cameo? Tell us all about where they can track you guys down and get a part of this company.

30:22 Yeah, my um we're Cameo on our our socials. I think maybe book Cameo on on X. Um and then outside of Cameo, I started a podcast this year called the Zeitgeist podcast where think of it as how I built this for consumer brands. And I'm interviewing the founders of really interesting consumer companies. So, we've had companies like Dude Wipes on um and Lifeway Kefir and uh just a lot of really fun brands this year. and we tell the stories of like how especially in really crowded spaces and without a lot of money, people built iconic brands. So, uh, check that out.

30:55 You know, we're still early, but I think it's pretty good. Awesome. All right, guys. You're listening to the Money Mondays. Check out Stephen Glennis and Cameo across social media. And this is really important. Have discussions with your friends, family, and followers about money. We all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. We have to have these talks in our society because it leads to talking about credit. Should I take a loan? Should I lease? Should I buy? Should I purchase? How much should I my salary be? We think it's rude to talk about it. We need to talk about it because if your kid doesn't know what to ask for salary and they asked for 48,000, they could have got 58,000. That could change the course of their career by that simple question of just being able to ask their parents or their friends about simple things like that.

31:29 We'll see you guys next Monday. Check us out on moneymoneys.com. Check out Cameo. We'll see you guys soon.

Questions about this episode

What is "Building Billion-Dollar Brands in the AI Era | Zeta Global & Cameo Founders 🌍 EP141" about?

The discussion highlights the strategies for building billion-dollar brands in the AI-driven landscape, as presented by David Steinberg, the founder of Zeta Global. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance customer engagement and monetization for large enterprises, while also sharing insights on balancing corporate responsibilities with philanthropic efforts…

What is mentioned in this The Money Mondays Podcast episode?

58 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Zeta Global, Devon (Cameo founding CTO), The National Sports Collectors Convention, Money Mondays, Cody Ko, National Football League (NFL). Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Building Billion-Dollar Brands in the AI Era | Zeta Global & Cameo Founders 🌍 EP141"?

The episode runs 32 min; the transcript is about 6,698 words in 74 timestamped sections.

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