I just decided to start doing all the crazy, scary things that I never thought I could do. One of my life rules is “say yes and figure the rest out afterwards”.

The primary reason for moving from agency to specialising in influencer marketing was because I could see the entire landscape of marketing in front of me. I learned the huge scope and potential there was for this and also all the things that you can do wrong - how you can compromise brand safety, how you can compromise a creative and their business in the process with a misalignment. What Humanz does is to create a platform and a tool that is basically a landscape of safety.

Mental health is a massive topic in the creative community and for good reason, because you're putting yourself vulnerably on a public platform, open to public critique. You can also see yourself, which is not a normal thing. Anxiety, by definition, is repetitive negative thought (RNT). These thought patterns are like a downward spiral that you latch on to an idea or a thought that is not in a good, healthy direction.

The biggest tactic that I have is not taking myself too seriously. I know that's not a habit. It's a belief. When you don’t take yourself too seriously, your mistakes don't become massive obstacles and your actions that are perceived by others in a negative light and criticised publicly then are really okay.

I think the first secret to anybody who likes to do multiple things at once is to increase your capacity because you can actually fit more into your day. You can. The other thing you can do is to just stop the stereotypes and labels. You don't have to put yourself in a box that says, I am this.

You have to analyse the influencer’s audience to determine brand fit. What are their audience demographics? What are the splits? How many males and females? Are they going to represent your brand properly? Are they consistent on social media? What are their average views and their average engagement? Only with this information can you assess if this is somebody that will be a brand fit, not just, “Well, they're famous, we’ll have a lot of followers”.

As a brand, you have to vet the influencer you want to work with. And it's all in the data and data is the new oil. As much as we're making this personal, saying it's authenticity and about each individual human - which it is - if you want to scale it and call it marketing, it actually has to be based on real data.

As a startup or an entrepreneur, influencer marketing offers you 10 times more value, for 10 times less investment.

The results have to be measurable. Brands and agencies are done with people saying they’ve created hype. They want to know what the results are. What is your ROI? How are you measuring your return on ad spend? What do your impressions look like? Are they qualified impressions?  Are your engagements those of your target audience? Are you measuring click throughs? Are you able to actually measure and reverse engineer UTMs on websites? 

Your creator economy is almost like a pyramid. At the top you've got your celebrities and public figures who are really great for garnering credibility and trustworthiness for brands. Towards the base are your micro and nano influencers.