Month: April 2022

By July 1 that year, she hit 1 million followers on her TikTok page, @KallMeKris. Once that number quadrupled to 4 million, she decided to add YouTube into the mix to try and diversify her audience and give fans more long-form content. 

“After that first million I thought it was going to stop [but] then it just kept going,” said Collins on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. “I think I was in a constant state of denial until I was over 10 million [followers] on TikTok.”

Now Collins has over 43 million followers on TikTok, 5.7 million subscribers on YouTube and almost 2 million followers on Instagram. Collins built her following without qualifying (as a Canadian) for TikTok’s creator fund, which made it all that more pressing to have direct brand deals across all three platforms. Those deals have become Collins’ primary source of income though she didn’t say how much she earns from brand deals, she discusses why she takes a calculated approach to which brands she works with and how many sponsored posts go up per week.

For the second episode in a limited series covering creators, Collins discussed how TikTok helped her rapid rise to stardom, how she’s been able to strategically balance brand deals with original content, and why jumping on TikTok trends isn’t the only means of building an audience.

Below are highlights from the conversation, lightly edited and condensed for readability. 

Creating an intentional TikTok strategy

I always write scripts, at least rough scripts, for TikTok especially, just because I do more sketch formats there, whether it’s like one to two or three-minute sketches. But usually, I’ll have somewhat of a schedule [and] I’ll try to space it out because I have around 30 to 35 characters and I have different storylines going on. One of my characters is Riley so if I do a Riley Tiktok, then the next one’s not going to be Riley, it’ll be onto a different character. And then I’ll do Riley in like a week or two.

And then the scriptwriting is a lot of brainstorming. I can’t even tell you how many voice memos and Post-it notes I have everywhere of random ideas I have. I have a Post-it note that says “sock” on it somewhere in my room, and I don’t even know what that means. But I’ll just base the script off of usually one punch line or one joke, and I’ll write it off of that. But yeah, it’s a lot of sitting around and looking at a wall because you can’t even watch TV or listen to anything while you’re trying to think of it. 

Crowdsourcing ideas from the comments

I was a hairdresser before [TikTok] so I had all kinds of people walking through the door. That definitely gave me some ideas for characters. But people commenting, I go through my comments every day to see what people are liking, what people aren’t liking, what people are asking for and how I can represent people. I’d say probably half of my characters at least have come from my audience where somebody suggests, “Oh my god, you totally need a bro character,” and I’m like, “OK, I’ll make this character.” My audience has absolutely helped me get to where I am with my character development.

A TikToker that doesn’t use TikTok 

I don’t do the trends too often — I usually focus on completely original content — but if there’s a trend that I think I can fit in or there’s a creator I want to highlight and duet, then then it’s good for me. As long as I can put some sort of original twist on it, I’ll do it. But honestly, and people might come at me for saying this, but I actually don’t watch TikTok that often because it’s my job and because I’m fully in it all the time. The only time I’m scrolling is if I literally have nothing else to do or it’s the wee hours of the night or just reading my comments or if people send stuff to me. Thank god for my friends because they’ll [share with me what’s] trending right now. But you get stuck in that hole and I know that the TikTok hole is not healthy.

Some brands are still choosing YouTube over TikTok 

I do get a lot of brand deals where they want a TikTok and then they want a YouTube short or they want a 60-second YouTube integration and then they also want three-story frames and an Instagram post to kind of get everything. But then there are some brands that just want a 60-second YouTube integration and they’ll just keep coming back for that YouTube integration just because that’s what they’re used to. 

A lot of brands haven’t experimented with TikTok or even Instagram. I find that a lot of brands are more attracted to YouTube. But I like making ads most for TikTok because I usually ask for full creative freedom with TikTok and I just make it into one of my skits essentially. YouTube is a little bit more difficult because I don’t really play with my characters on there as much so it needs to somehow be connected to the video in some regard.

Magnite bought Carbon. TripleLift snapped up 1plusX. Parsec was acquired by Kargo. Tatari swooped in for TheViewPoint. OpenWeb and Adyoulike. Not a week seems to go by at the moment without this alphabet soup of idiosyncratic ad tech names getting messier. 

And it’s going to continue to do so for a while yet. 

With a public market increasingly hostile to ad tech vendors and potential courters flush with cheap money, ad tech entrepreneurs are leaning toward selling up instead of IPOs. That’s easier said than done, of course. M&A activity in ad tech declined 25% in the first quarter of 2022 compared to the previous one, per investment bank LUMA Partners. Still, it’s unlikely this slowdown grinds to a halt anytime soon. On the contrary, deals look set to continue at a steady pace. 

Not only have private equity investors raised money for the right deals, but recently minted public companies also have the balance sheets to make moves. And they’re both looking for similar targets: ad tech upstarts building for worst-case scenarios once third-party cookies go away for good.

These targets are, for all intents and purposes, potential lifelines for ad tech bosses — the ones that don’t want to be viewed as a slow-growth, legacy dumb pipe and have decided it would be well-served to expand vertically. Even so, these deals are usually far from transformative; they’re essentially tuck-in acquisitions, smaller, less attention-grabbing deals than so-called mega ones that are potentially more value accretive.

“We’re in the market to buy companies to support our organic growth,” said Joost Merks, group chief investment officer at gaming platform Azerion, which has concluded 50 acquisitions over the last seven years. “Everything we do supports that so we look at the geographies of companies as well as the gaps in our technological capability.”

TripleLift’s $150 million swoop for 1plusX is a case in point. It was done in the belief that any business that brings a genuine scalable solution to post-cookie targeting and measurement will thrive. Pitches like that are catnip to the likes of TripleLift — an ad tech vendor that has built a sizable media business on the back of fading third-party cookies. It’s not hard to see how a data management platform with the ability to help clients reach audiences using first-party data makes life without those cookies more palatable (and potentially profitable) for TripleLift.

“It’s unclear what will happen with the identity market, but what is clear is it isn’t a comprehensive solution for publishers and brands,” said TripleLift’s chief strategy officer Ari Lewine. “Companies like TripleLift and 1plusX are ID agnostic and support the identifiers customers want to use, but our focus is on building technology that allows the open web to be enriched with valuable, privacy-compliant data.”

Sound familiar? Magnite’s Adam Soroca, chief product officer at Magnite, made the same noises when explaining the rationale behind the Carbon acquisition. Magnite sees itself as the ad tech vendor to bring together multiple publisher’s first-party data so that marketers can buy specific audience segments across the open web — all without mixing those sets together in these privacy-conscious times. To do so, however, the ad tech vendor had to go shopping. For a business looking to shift from helping publishers sell impressions to helping them sell data, it’s a lot easier to buy a business like Carbon that already does it than build it. 

“There’s no single replacement for third-party cookies and so we’ve taken a portfolio approach in pursuing multiple techniques that let publishers and marketers together to have targeting and measurement in a privacy-compliant way,” said Soroca. “The team at Carbon had really focused on first-party publisher data and being in tune with the General Data Protection sustain given they’re based in London. The depth of businesses in this part of the world is strong.”

In the last six months alone, M&A deals across Europe have chalked up over $4 billion, of which 15 were over $50 million, according to specialist venture fund First Party Capital. The growing importance of first-party data, particularly when owned by publishers, will only intensify interest in companies that keep it secure and private as certain aspects of it are shared.

This is to say it’s a good time to be a publisher-centric data company — particularly in Europe. Actually, it’s a good time to be a functional ad tech business in Europe full stop. Companies there have a head start on their American counterparts due to it being ground zero for ground-breaking privacy legislation. So they’re a safer bet for would-be buyers. And a safer bet for sellers too — many of whom aren’t companies with a unicorn or bust mindset. Instead, they’re more likely to say yes to a multi-million euro exit. The investor mindset in Europe is different to America where going public is seen as a necessary step to access a large volume or relatively inexpensive capital. But even if it wasn’t, it would still be hard for any European ad tech CEOs to get their business to the point needed to become a publicly-traded one.

“There are a lot of ad tech companies being bought within the €100 million ($108 million) to €200 million ($216.3 million) range, which is probably an order of magnitude below what is needed to do an IPO — certainly on the London or New York stock exchanges,” said Rich Aston, managing partner at First Party Capital. “That’s why there aren’t many ad tech companies going public in Europe.”

It’s also why there are more investors circling for bargains. 

“Corporate development teams at public ad tech companies don’t want to spend €500 million ($540.9) or €600 million ($649 million) on acquisitions because that’s a lot of money they’re going to have to draw down in debt to have enough cash to get deals over the line,” said Aston’s business partner at First Party Capital’s Ciaran O’Kane.  

Exhausted dealmakers might like a dry stretch but worry about just how dry things could get. The last ad tech boom a decade ago ended not with a whimper but a bang. History could very well repeat itself. 

“The stuff that’s happening in public markets will start filtering down into private companies and funding and valuations,” warned O’Kane. “I think what we’re going to see is a repricing of the ad tech market in the next year or so.” 

Regardless of what happens, some ad tech CEOs are doing the work to be ready for when the IPO window opens again. Whether that’s 2022, or 2023, they care more about going at the right time than going within the fiscal year — that’s the plan at Permutive at least. 

“We think there’s an opportunity to build a lasting company and have never been more bullish on eventually taking Permutive public — everything adds up now that didn’t two years ago,” said CEO Joe Root. “Investors see us as underpinning an ecosystem, which has compounding value in the sense that each new publisher or advertiser that joins our infrastructure is part of a bigger ecosystem. That grows the value of the ecosystem in a non-linear way.”