We are firmly in the age of Claude and ChatGPT. Seemingly every business is using AI–whether that means developing new tools or rebranding old ones to highlight LLM usage in hopes of attracting AI-curious customers.
Viral Nation has SocialAI. But it wants people to know: It was already doing this years ago.
“For many years, we’ve had a version of AI,” Nicholas Spiro, Viral Nation’s Chief Commercial Officer, tells Tubefilter. “We’ve always had a version of analysis and insights.” Over the last 18 months, he says, Viral Nation has used advancements in AI to “rebuild entire products that our team, organization, and customers use. We took heavy feedback from the market.”
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Chief among those products is SocialAI, which Spiro describes as a “decision-led intelligence module” that helps the various arms of Viral Nation’s business. For example, Viral Nation uses it to monitor a “universe of a few hundred thousand creators” to ensure it’s on top of what creators are currently making and talking about, Spiro says.
“Our ethos and our belief is that creators are tastemakers–so by monitoring them, you can learn even before the general population has an interest in something,” he explains.
One big component of SocialAI is Viral Nation Secure, which scans creators’ entire public profiles for overall brand safety and for data like their growth trajectories, audience demographics, and how their content niche fits in with the aforementioned trends.
Spiro says SocialAI (and, more specifically, Viral Nation Secure) is unique because “a lot of technologies right now that monitor social media look at text. We analyze every frame of video content, even on long-form platforms like YouTube.”
He adds that SocialAI can “look at full historical” for potential creator partners, which means “when a creator enters our program, we can go back 22 years” and see data from as early as 2004, when Facebook launched.
This obviously helps when Viral Nation–which is known as one of the biggest talent agencies in our space, but also offers a “flywheel” of talent, marketing, creative studio, and technology divisions–is matching up creators with brands. Viral Nation works with thousands of content creators, and pulls from that pool to design campaigns with brands like e.l.f., Uber, Samsung, Jack Daniel’s, and The Cheesecake Factory.
Spiro mentions again that Viral Nation has “always been doing an evolving version of this, but what I think we realized as we were doing scans with AI for brand safety is that there’s a lot more insight.”
SocialAI can “find when brands are mentioned, and take post observations faster than most brands can get the data,” Spiro says. “We could look at every single day and get a time-sensitive construction of results. And for economies of scale, with our talent arm, it helps us know what they should be priced at, because we can understand the competitive pricing marketplace. So some brands come to us for our pricing data.”
So the potential upsides for brands are clear. What about creators?
“The benefit for creators is that a safe ecosystem raises all boats,” Spiro says. “Think of it like this: If you’re on a platform like Facebook or Twitter and the conversation’s bad, brands don’t go there. Creators don’t go there. Deals aren’t struck. Right? It’s like that, but not at a platform level–at a whole industry level. I think the cultural conversation online is hugely important to the economic aspects of millions of creators who have this as their job.”
Basically, the more Viral Nation can use systems like SocialAI to prove that creators are not only safe, but savvy for brands to work with, the more deals we’ll see across the entire digital economy–which means more cash flowing in our ever-growing industry, and more money in creators’ pockets.
“Authenticity is always going to be the superpower of creators,” Spiro says. “It does matter that they can be connected with the right brand, and I think brands will feel comfortable operating in an environment that gives fair, competitive, transparent prices. That’s something I think is worth talking about.”
Viral Nation is a Tubefilter partner.
