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Hi friends 👋🏻,
The previous essay on logistics was the last time I’d be starting with the opening:
Welcome to another episode On Today’s Episode (sorry we’re not talking about movies, no pun intended:).
I think I finally realised that every time I put pen to paper to share and discuss African businesses, it was about creating an Open Africa for people not familiar with the tech ecosystem, to learn more about the strategy behind the decisions they make.
So starting with this essay, the intro is going to change a bit.
Also, this is going to be the last essay of the year. Someone once told me that 90% of blogs/podcasts have less than 5 posts/episodes. Luckily, after 7 essays and 15,000+ words later, I have been able to pass that stat and 38 of you have found my essays to be worth your time and attention. I am deeply grateful🙏🏽.
But just before the year runs out and the festivities begin, I have just one more essay to carry you into the new year. Bear with me.
Welcome to another essay on Open Africa.
Today, the influencer marketing space is filled with so much opportunity, but brands have found it hard to deal with influencers. If you’re in advertising or marketing, this hits home so well. Brands spend a lot of time and money identifying relevant influencers, aligning on objectives, tracking campaigns and finalising payments.
Wowzi wants to help CMOs do the things they’d love to be doing if they weren’t always dealing with influencers and getting messy campaign reports.
To achieve this mission, Wowzi has today secured a total of $3.2 million from investors over the last few months, part of which includes a recently concluded $2 million seed round that was led by the Africa-focused venture capital firm 4DX Ventures. Other investors in the seed round were To.org, Golden Palm Investments, LoftyInc Capital, Afropreneur Angels and Future Africa. Andela co-founder Christina Sass and former Andela executives Jessica Chervin as well as Justin Ziegler. This was preceded by a $1.2 million pre-seed round.
To understand the scale of this opportunity, we’ll cover:
Meet Wowzi: The Clearing House for Brand Campaigns
The Influencer Marketing Market
Risks
Wowzi’s Big Vision
So let's begin.
Meet Wowzi: The Clearing House for Brand Campaigns
As I read Wowzi’s deck, I was very sceptical. As a “hard guy”, I always believed I was impervious to influence, but it took less than an hour into our call for the team to help me see that I am an influencer, and have been influenced in many ways.
Here’s an example. Junior came to my home wearing a very beautiful pair of footwear. Since I didn’t want to ask him where he bought them, I took a picture of it when he wasn’t looking to search for it later. I later found it on Aliexpress, ordered it, and one month later, it landed at my door. Then, I sent a picture of the shoes, grinning from ear to ear to leave Junior surprised at how I got the replica of his shoes.
In this example, Junior got no benefit out of helping me indirectly purchase the shoes, and he misses out in two ways.
He receives no rewards from his influence other than vague social capital.
Brands are forced to pay Facebook and Google to acquire customers.
If he had been prompted to use an affiliate link, he would have gotten paid while sharing the shoes he loved. This kind of generous marketing happens at a greater scale across Whatsapp chats, Facebook groups, Twitter DMs, Instagram feeds etc.
People are influencing others without knowing how to reap any rewards for it.
Wowzi wants to help individuals like you and me earn a commission on sharing products that we love. Wowzi is a product for the 99% of people who don’t have celebrity-level status to command the attention of brands but have relevant amounts of social capital that they can exercise.
As an influencer, it takes three steps to connect with brands on Wowzi.
Download & sign up. Download the Wowzi app, add your details, and smile for the camera.
Connect social accounts. Link the social media accounts you'd like to receive jobs for. Jobs on Wowzi are platform-specific.
Opt into job offers. You get invited to accept jobs that have been offered based on your brand "fit".
For brands and agencies, it is just as easy to start a campaign.
Create your campaign by selecting your influencer mix based on different preferences such as key demographic factors, location, and campaign goals.
Enter the tasks you’d like them to complete and schedule the campaign dates.
Choose the way you want to pay influencers after job completion.
That’s it and you’re ready to go. Wowzi then matches the right type of influencers to the requirements of the brands.
The ease in creating a profile and setting up quick campaigns have shown that the Wowzi platform works. In September 2021, Safaricom engaged a small “army” of influencers to create TikTok videos for a #bongayakoyotena444 TikTok challenge. The result? The hashtag got 3 MILLION VIEWS in 7 HOURS in Kenya.
Substack doesn’t support the embedding of TikTok videos, but here’s a link to a video that has gotten 16.3 million views since the campaign started: 'bongayakoyotena444' on TikTok
See other posts here: https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=bongayakoyotena444&t=1640042376139
With this proof point, Wowzi has been able to acquire more brands like Coca-Cola, Netflix, Diageo, P&G and Absa Bank. They are using this latest round of funding to set eyes on Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa beyond Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania where it has a physical presence.
Wowzi also knew that to be the clearinghouse for brand campaigns, it would need to be the largest aggregator of influencers across any channel. So here’s the question: Who else needs a constant stream of content and a high value that works in marketing?
You might have guessed correctly; Agencies.
Brian and his team reached out and signed up ad agencies like Dentsu. The reasoning behind this is quite simple: Agencies are also desperate to generate content, especially today where hyper-personalized messages are needed. This means, for example, to promote 100 products, you would probably need 100 unique pieces of content.
Agencies can’t always supply that at the scale brands need.
The impact of this strategy is that: Wowzi is the central place to leverage social capital and trust through unique online and offline communities to launch high-impact, targeted campaigns.
Within 15 months of launching as a Covid Baby, they have:
Worked with 200 brands📈
Carried out over 15,000 campaigns.😵
Delivered over 200,000 paid gigs to date. 😱
Grown 20x over the last year.🤯
To understand the scale of the problem Wowzi is targeting, let’s take a step back and understand the market leading up to Wowzi’s founding.
The Influencer Marketing market.
In the old days before influencer marketing was a thing, brands would use TV commercials, radio, billboards and other forms of media to reach their audience. Then came social media. Platforms like Facebook and Google gave brands the ability to reach users through ads. As social media grew, people aggregated and began to form communities.
Some people had higher followers than others, and social media stars and celebrities like the Kardashians were the winners leveraging their reach and audience to promote products and services for brands.
But there was a flaw. According to the 4Ps of Marketing, also known as marketing mix, it is believed that at the right price, at the right place, with the right product and level of promotion, brands can create a solid marketing strategy that will yield returns.
Still, for the work brands had to go through, from managing influencers to ensuring that content is delivered and following up on payment, they wanted more authentic engagements or product endorsements, from people who use and love them, and can talk about real practical applications.
There was a problem with Promotions.
This desire from brands suggests that Size doesn’t always matter, at least in marketing.
That is where influencer marketing comes in.
According to Markets and Markets, the influencer marketing space is a $6 billion market growing at an annual rate of 32%. BusinessInsider projects that the influencer marketing industry will be worth $15 billion in 2022, up from $8 billion in 2019.
It is exploding at the moment.
The factors causing this high growth according to them include:
A shift toward video-based content
An increase in the adoption of ad-blocking software
Another factor that I think is pushing this trend is the rise of the Creator economy. According to SignalFire, there are now over 50 million Creators globally. Today, the nature of influence has changed and evolved. People are no longer influenced by brands and aggregated media.
People follow people and Wowzi is betting that Nano-Influencers, anyone with at least 250 connections on social media, can deliver better sales leads because of the higher trust with their following.
No longer is the internet, and all its upside is limited to big-name stars and celebrities. You and I can now participate in this and brands are willing to pay us for sharing products and services that we love.
It's the democratization of social media.
Influencers by nature are multi-platform, choosing to cast their nets far to reach as many people as possible. It could be long-form content, as in Youtube and Linkedin; or short-form, as in Twitter or TikTok. Because of this multi-platform nature, measuring impact has become so hard for brands and agencies.
Brands don’t want to spend money on marketing that won't work. However, they know that most of the marketing budget gets eaten up by Facebook and Google. All the companies are competing for similar audiences using higher bids as their only advantage. Let’s not even get into their content creation struggles.
Wowzi is a product that is very much needed in the CMO suite today. It also wants to solve the ROI headache and let them get value for their investment.
Luckily, a team of ex-management consultants and a member of the Andela mafia saw this opportunity and are going after it with all their might.
The Wowzi Team
Brian Mogeni leads the Wowzi team as CEO. He got his B.Sc in International Business Administration with a double concentration in Management & Entrepreneurship from the United States International University in 2015. He was part of the team that built the OPay service in Africa before it was launched.
Mike Otieno who acts as the VP of Strategy & Partnerships studied Business Information Systems at Moi University. He worked in various roles at Mckinsey&Company, Palladium and Growth Africa before joining Brian to start Wowzi.
Brian's vision was so ambitious that Johnny Falla, who was initially a customer, invested and asked to join the team. He now serves as the Chief Development and Growth Officer. Johnny is an interesting fellow as well. As a member of the Andela mafia, he led growth and development for both Andela and Lori Systems- a company that had raised over $30m in funding.
Risks
Influencer marketing is still very nascent in Africa and it still comes with major risks, and Wowzi is no different. Here are a few Wowzi-specific risks:
Cash-only campaigns. Currently, there is no way for brands to share products with influencers to sample, post about and get early, honest feedback on products. This may chase away brands and early-stage SMEs who are just getting their feet out of water or have different campaign goals that are not influenced by cash.
Influencer Retention. People may only be willing to share once or twice.
Security and data breaches. Wowzi needs to invest in data protection and verification to prevent bots from getting through and diluting the experience for both brands and other influencers.
Influencer scandal. Wowzi grows as influencers grow. Once something bad like posting questionable and distasteful content goes through, it can be a reputational risk to Wowzi.
There are other risks that neither I nor Wowzi is currently aware of that could impact the business. If you are an investor looking at a similar company, this is not investment advice. Please do your diligence before deciding whether to invest.
Wowzi’s vision and opportunity
Wowzi is on a mission to create 1 million jobs for GenZ African creators.
Today, they have created a wedge starting with influencer marketing. But even though Wowzi is playing in the influencer marketing space, it is very much a technology company.
Providing a million jobs to creators goes way beyond influencer marketing. Wowzi believes that influencers deserve to have agency, flexibility, and freedom to choose how much or little they want to be in the spotlight at any given time.
In the future, think about using your reach for surveys or polls that inform research. There is a lot that can be done as they become jobs aggregators. I can’t share the plans they have, but I am excited about Wowzi’s plans for 2022 and beyond.
The beautiful thing about Wowzi is that it grows as more influencers are successful. As more influencers join and more jobs get completed, Wowzi becomes a better product for both brands and influencers.
Here is Wowzi’s Flywheel.
Having a complete picture of an influencer, the composition of their audience and their performance makes Wowzi a better product for CMOs, Brands and agencies. Wowzi becomes a better tool for understanding the conversion journey.
If Wowzi works, we could be looking at a product that could play a big role in the Creator Economy.
The founders are more excited about building Wowzi than I am. If you’re a Creator/Influencer of any kind, visit Wowzi here to earn with your influence.
If you enjoyed this piece, please try to share it with your friends, bosses, journalists, co-workers and anyone else that could benefit from this piece.
Also, If you’re an early-stage startup in Africa that wants to share your story with a wider audience, I’d love to chat about what you’re working on. You can reach out to me at kamsonwani@yahoo.com or on Twitter: @gerald_wan.
What did you love about today's essay? Your feedback helps me make this great. Good, Meh, Great?
Thanks for reading and sharing your feedback and insights.
See you in 2022.
Kamso.