Influencer marketing agency Whalar has brought in two new board members: Encantos cofounder and CEO Steven Wolfe Pereira, and longtime Facebook exec Brad Smallwood.
They join current board members Bob Greenberg, Sir John Hegarty, Roxanne Taylor, and Andrew Wong.
Karyn Spencer, Whalar’s CMO, tells Tubefilter that Wolfe Pereira is “an iconic thought leader in the Latinx space,” and that Whalar plans to partner with him on efforts to support the Latinx community.
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The agency is doubling down on diversity efforts because it spent the past half year working with Bloomberg to research the stark differences in brands’ treatment of Black and white influencers.
“We’d been trying for a while to pitch these big ideas with brand clients about projects that are specifically targeted towards diversity and inclusion so that we can combat both the algorithmic and the societal issues that we have with systemic racism,” she says. “And what we kept finding was we would pitch these ideas and nobody would pull the trigger.”
Spencer adds, “We’ve really spent the last six months focusing on how we can over-index in support for the Black community. Now we’re looking to do the same for the Latinx community. And what we know is that you have to have representation at every level of your company, starting with board representation.”
Prior to joining education technology company Encantos, Wolfe Pereira served as CMO at Datalogix, Neustar, and Quantcast. He also held executive roles at Publicis Group, Univision, and Akamai Technologies.
“I am proud to join a company which dedicated itself to lifting up the whole influencer community–diverse creators, artists, and entrepreneurs–while simultaneously helping brands connect with customers in more culturally-authentic ways,” Wolfe Pereira said in a statement.
Smallwood comes to Whalar with more than 12 years of experience at Facebook, most recently as the social network’s VP of marketing science. In that role, he oversaw more than 500 people, and was instrumental in designing Facebook’s early advertising products, including its audience measurement systems and features like polling, Nielsen Brandlift, Nielsen DAR/TAR, and Datalogix/Oracle Data Cloud ROI measurement.
Before his time at Facebook, Smallwood held executive and senior roles at Yahoo, Namezero, AllAdvantage, and Revcube.
“I’m excited to join the Whalar board to work with a company leading the charge towards helping brands measure effectiveness with influencers,” he said in a statement. “Similar to the early days of Facebook, Whalar is helping brands across a broad spectrum of social campaigns.”
