Last year, Zorka.Agency — a Digital Marketing Agency — launched a new project Zorka.Comments. The video series captures emerging insights into the question “What is Influencer Marking and how does it work?”. Here, we catch a flashback on our conversation with Oli Davis from WrestleTalk YouTube-channel.

How do you choose which agency to collaborate or not?

Not really. We do get a lot of incoming emails and inquiries. And I always check out the agency before agreeing to something or taking those conversations further. We get a lot of inquiries from people with just Gmail addresses or websites that don’t seem to be of a certain level. So, we do prioritize replying to agencies that look quite professional because that indicates that they’ll be easier to deal with.

What might a blogger not like about working with an agency?

A blogger working with an agency could have a push-back against the creative brief that’s given to them. They’re often a lot of points in the brief to hit, and we always say 45 seconds to a minute is an integration length. But there’s so much stuff to talk about in the briefs that this can often go to 1.25, 1.30. We do that because, you know, we want to satisfy the client. But at the same time that isn’t the best viewer experience, I think. It’ll actually be counterproductive for that to be the case.

How do you find advertisers?

In general, we’ve been quite lucky. It’s always very easy to work with agencies. I’d say agencies are actually easier to work with than directly with the clients. When we worked directly with people they’re just not as organized. And that does really create a bottleneck for the whole process.

Do you work with a manager or on your own?

We’ve tried both. We started off just on our own. Last year we got in a head of brand partnerships for our companies because we’ve not just WrestleTalk to run and that was ok. But we realized that we’re not big enough to have someone solely dedicated to that. And they got in a few bits of extra business but that is mostly just incoming stuff that we could have filled in ourselves. So, we’re back on our own now.

Do you make creatives by yourself? How long does it take you to do this?

I come up with all the sponsorship spots currently. We’re a team of five or six, we’ve had a lot of creatives this month. So I’d probably start to delegate those tasks to other people in the team. How long it takes… It’s difficult to say. Because coming up with an idea, if the client wants an idea that is a little sketch or something, can take just a couple of days of background thinking. But once that’s in place, it’s a full day of production in terms of writing, shooting, editing. But when we speak about more standard integrations, where we just put them as a quick bit in the rest of the news — like for RAID, cause we’ve worked with RAID a few times now, — we roughly know what the client wants and it’s very easy to turn that around. That probably top to bottom takes about half a day, three-quarters of the day.

@WrestleTalk

What creative formats are the most popular among subscribers?

WrestleTalk News is the most popular series we have that gets the most views, I suppose. But we also have the WrestleTalk Podcast which has a lower number of views but because it’s a longer show. That gets a more dedicated kind of fans. We found that those bits sponsored in the WrestleTalk Podcast can actually be more effective for clients than the WrestleTalk News just because of the type of viewer it’s reaching.

How does your audience react to advertising?

It depends. We’re very careful now. You have to put a lot of thought into each advert so it shows it’s not just a cash grab. Because the viewer wants to feel valued. And I think we’ve got it to a point now when we run an integration in our episodes a lot of feedback is ”WrestleTalk have to do these things for the money” which is, you know, a nicer way of saying “WrestleTalk is sold out”. Going by the thumbs up-thumbs down, we probably have a ratio at anything with an integration on gets a 95% thumbs up-thumbs down ratio. Whereas stuff without is usually 97% and above.

Do you have any top advertisers you would love to work with?

Well, I’m a big film nerd. I would like to work with some movie integrations. We never really get anything from Marvel or DC or any of the big blockbusters. I think we’re quite well placed with our audience (97% male 18–45) to reach the people they want. But we never really get those opportunities which is a shame. So, I guess movies, TV, that sort of stuff.

What determines the cost of an advertising post?

We’ve got a little formula where it’s the amount of how much it’ll cost which is, you know, in-house, sort of a flat fee. Then we figure out how many views it’s gonna get. And then we charge a premium on top of that. So it’s kinda 3 points to work-out on cost. Now we’ve done so many posts and kind of standardized the amount 2.500$-2.600$, around that.

More often advertisers apply directly or through agencies?

It’s really a mixture. We’ve probably get 50/50: people who contact us directly and those who come through agencies.

Which influencers do you personally follow?

I’m not a Big Internet Guy. I don’t really follow many influencers. So I can’t answer that. I don’t even have Instagram installed on my phone. But I technically own a digital media company. I’m gonna go extinct.

What kind of content are you interested in following on social networks?

Wrestling obviously, movies, comic books stuff, a lot of news current affairs, Tech Industry stuff.

Subscribe and watch the full Zorka.Comments episodes now:
Q&A with a blogger | Oli Davis