Q&A with Gil Eyal, Founder at HYPR & Managing Partner at Starfund

Gil Eyal, Founder at HYPR & Managing Partner at Starfund, has revolutionized the way many of the world’s biggest agencies and brands are running influencer marketing by focusing on the same data, analytics, and audience demographic information relevant to traditional digital marketing. He was recently selected at #30 on the list of the most influential people in Influencer Marketing.

Gil is an accomplished public speaker and has delivered keynotes at notable influencer marketing conferences, including Influencer Marketing Days in New York and Influencer Marketing Hub in London. He was selected as the 2017 recipient of the Digiday Top Boss Award in the technology industry, as one of 10 Israelis impacting the New York Tech Scene, as well as one of 40 must-follow digital media influencers. Gil is also a two-time winner of the MarCom Awards for Excellence in Marketing and Communications.

If you don’t have a clear understanding of who your audience is and which messaging resonates with them, you will never be truly successful.



MEDIA 7: Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and what made you choose this career path?
GIL EYAL:
I think many of us have a moment that inspires us in a way that changes our direction. For me, it was sometime around the year 2005 when I came across a book titled, “Buzzmarketing” by Mark Hughes, where he detailed a variety of marketing campaigns that leveraged the concept of getting a conversation going around a subject. At the time I was working in a job that bored me to death as an attorney and thought I would be doing it for the rest of my career.

I couldn’t get that book out of my head. Mind you there was no Facebook and there were no viral online channels you could leverage to market. This was old-school marketing and it required a level of creativity and sophistication that fascinated me. 4 years later, I was done with law and studying for my MBA at the Kellogg School of Management where reality hit hard.

No one had any interest in hiring a former attorney for marketing jobs even if they did get their MBA from a respected program. I was probably the last in my class to find an internship after my first year and I was determined to figure out things before I came back for the second. I spent the summer in two places. The first was Austin, Texas, where I worked for Dell. It was a wonderful experience, but the second half of the summer really got me going. I worked for Playdom, at the time, the largest game developer on MySpace and the fourth biggest on Facebook. I learned how meaningful leveraging creative marketing channels and methods (while paying attention to the fundamentals) were to get the company to hundreds of millions of users. More importantly, I got a front seat to a $750M exit and realized I will be in tech for the rest of my life because nothing could compete with the excitement of building something so amazing that someone is willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for it. I came back for my second year but I wasn’t interviewing. I was all set to figure things out in the startup world and started working with founders who needed help with marketing. Though it was early, I recognized the opportunity, that visibility and credibility generated by celebrities would provide these companies and quickly carved myself a niche.

Within 3 years, I had done over 200 deals with celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Lance Armstrong, Serena Williams, Kevin Hart, Zendaya, Lil Wayne, and more. In 2013 I decided to build technology around identifying the influential people online and that led to the birth of HYPR.

M7: What tools do you use for influencer marketing? How do you find influencers in a specific niche?
GE:
I sold HYPR to Julius in April 2020. We combined our platforms to build an amazing tool that helps sift through millions of influencers based on their audience characteristics, demographics, and topics where they are influential. The tool makes discovery easy.


I don’t believe in hiring influencers just because of their audience size. When I work with celebrities or influencers, it's primarily for the credibility they can generate for the product I want to promote.



M7: What are the most promising channels for campaign management and why?
GE:
I think influencer marketing is struggling to make things less manual and the solutions in the market today are limited. I think how you choose to activate influencers really varies based on the type of brand you represent. Certain brands need to vet each post and ensure they work with influencers who are perfectly on-brand. Others just need reach and conversions. The result is that one solution doesn’t fit all. The first type needs vetting tools, content approval, and time management tools while the other needs automation and performance tracking. My guess is that you won’t see one winner in the space – different solutions will prove to be the best for different customers.

M7: How do you define content personalization? Which technologies are garnering the maximum mileage in this sector?
GE:
As privacy awareness is gaining more attention due to explicit violations of privacy rights by some of the largest players in the space, content personalization is becoming more challenging. Requiring users to opt-in is not as simple as it was in the early days of the internet where you just hid code in another program and assumed people won’t read your terms of service. The new regulations are a positive move in my opinion but in the short run, they definitely reduce the quality of user experience.

Companies like Target have been so focused on the personalization of marketing content that they sometimes forget it can be really creepy or even harmful. In Target’s case, there was a story of a father who found out his daughter was pregnant because Target sent her emails targeted at moms-to-be. I invested in a company called itsmydata which helps consumers protect their privacy when online stores don’t.

The result is that personalization is going to take a backseat until brands can really figure it out. Technologies that can get people to willingly opt into data sharing and content optimization will come out victorious here but I’m still not sure I have seen the proper solution.


As privacy awareness is gaining more attention due to explicit violations of privacy rights by some of the largest players in the space, content personalization is becoming more challenging.



M7: What do you believe are the top three product marketing challenges in the post COVID-19 era?
GE: 1. A change in consumer behavior. If I’m not going out, do I really need to dress nicely? Do I need to smell good? Should I be spending a lot of money on new shoes? Which products are gone for good and which are just taking a hiatus until we are all vaccinated?

2. With people spending even more time online, are marketers even more confined to the programmatic marketing channels that companies like Facebook and Google provide? If so, how do you deal with the price increases as these companies optimize their process to make sure they can squeeze as much money as possible out of marketers?

3. As companies like Hulu and Netflix demonstrate that people are willing to pay for content, often pay in order not to see your ads, how do you gain their attention? Can you afford to remain uncreative with your marketing attempts?

M7: In the era of Fake News and Malvertising, how do you stay on top of your business model?
GE:
I don’t believe in hiring influencers just because of their audience size. When I work with celebrities or influencers, it's primarily for the credibility they can generate for the product I want to promote. When Michael Jordan wore his first Nike shoes, the message was broader than just reaching all of the people who were interested in him. It was about the fact that these shoes were so good that he would wear them in a professional game against the best athletes in the world and he would come out on top. I want to work with influencers and celebrities that convey an authentic and believable story of why this product is superior.

M7: What is your marketing mantra to stand out in an overly saturated MarTech space?
GE:
Traditional fundamentals still apply. It doesn’t matter what kind of marketing you are doing, if you don’t have a clear understanding of who your audience is, how to reach them and which messaging resonates with them, you will never be truly successful. Influencers are just another channel but they need to be able to do more than just reach an audience. They need to be able to believably convey a message that will resonate with an audience. When you see an influencer marketing campaign fail, it’s almost always because the influencers do not do that, and not because they’re being fraudulent or have a weak following.

ABOUT HYPR

HYPR is an influencer marketing platform focused on leveraging data to automate smart decision making and identify micro-influencers and activate them at scale. HYPR was sold to Julius in April 2020.

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Machine Learning

InterSystems Introduces Two New Cloud-Native Smart Data Services to Accelerate Database and Machine Learning Application Development

InterSystems | January 12, 2024

InterSystems, a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve their most critical scalability, interoperability, and speed problems, today announced general availability of the InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL and InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML® services. These fully managed cloud-native smart data services empower developers to build cloud-native database and machine learning (ML) applications in SQL environments with ease. With Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML, developers can access a next generation relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that is fast and easy to provision and use. Embedded AutoML capabilities allow developers to easily develop and execute machine learning models with just a few SQL-like commands in a fully-managed, elastic cloud-native environment. Shaping a complete data management portfolio for mission-critical applications As part of the InterSystems Cloud portfolio of smart data services, Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML provide application developers with access to InterSystems proven enterprise-class capabilities as self-service, fully managed offerings on Amazon Web Services (AWS), while providing a fast and seamless on-ramp to the full suite of capabilities in InterSystems IRIS® data platform. InterSystems IRIS is a next-generation data platform designed for organizations implementing smart data fabrics that provide powerful database management, integration, and application development capabilities. By consolidating these capabilities into a single product, InterSystems IRIS accelerates the time it takes to realize value from data, simplifies overall system architectures, and reduces both maintenance effort and costs. “We are excited for the capabilities of InterSystems IRIS to be exposed through these new, easy to deploy and easy to use services,” said Scott Gnau, Global Head of Data Platforms at InterSystems. “With native support for AutoML, we give developers the power to build comprehensive, predictive, and prescriptive applications.” Fully managed, enterprise-class reliability with InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL Cloud SQL makes it easy for application developers to leverage advanced relational database capabilities as a fully managed, secure, scalable, high performance, highly available cloud-native database-as-a-service (DBaaS). Cloud SQL delivers the following benefits for SQL developers: Extremely high performance, especially for ingesting and processing incoming data and performing SQL queries on the data with low latency at scale Fast and easy to provision and use Ability to easily connect client applications via JDBC, ODBC, DB-API, and ADO.NET drivers Automated security, data encryption, and backups Automation of machine learning tasks with InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML Available as an additional cloud managed service for InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL customers, Cloud IntegratedML extends the capabilities of Cloud SQL to enable SQL developers to quickly build, tune, and execute machine learning models with just a few SQL-like commands, without moving or copying data to a different environment. A significant advantage of Cloud IntegratedML is the elimination of the need to transfer or replicate data to an external platform to build ML models, or to move ML models to a different environment for execution. Cloud IntegratedML delivers the following benefits for SQL developers: Automation of machine learning processes and resource-intensive tasks such as feature engineering, model development, and fine-tuning Seamless integration of models developed and trained with Cloud IntegratedML within Cloud SQL, facilitating real-time predictive insights and prescriptive actions in response to events and transactions This comprehensive suite of smart data services establishes the InterSystems Cloud portfolio of smart data services as an optimal choice for SQL developers seeking a robust, high-performance database solution tailored to their needs. The new Cloud SQL and Cloud IntegratedML services are available through InterSystems Developer Hub. About InterSystems Established in 1978, InterSystems is the leading provider of next-generation solutions for enterprise digital transformations in the healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and supply chain sectors. Its cloud-first data platforms solve interoperability, speed, and scalability problems for large organizations around the globe. InterSystems is committed to excellence through its award-winning, 24×7 support for customers and partners in more than 80 countries. Privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems has 38 offices in 28 countries worldwide. For more information, please visit InterSystems.com.

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