Spartan Ryan Schram leads premier provider of influencer marketing services for leading brands

“I had the really fortunate opportunity to go to undergrad during what is now considered Web 1.0, Russ,” says Schram. It was the time when we all took our AOL dial-up internet experience and brought it to broadband. And actually, that's one of the reasons I chose to live at Holden Hall in South Campus. At that time, it was, I think, the first or second residence hall on campus to get wired ethernet, high-speed internet. And by high speed, I think it was at one or two megabytes at the time, but that was incredible at the time. I actually spent my experience in East Lansing working full-time.

“I grew up in a media family. A lot of my dad's contemporaries who ran radio and TV stations were looking for people to build them these new-fangled web pages. I had taught myself in high school very basic HTML and JavaScript and was fortunate to have this confluence of high-speed internet where I lived and worked. I was able to do that remotely. So way before this COVID economy, when we're all at home, I was doing it remotely. And I grew up in an industry that I loved, but I realized that I wasn't going to be the person to be behind the mic like my dad used to be when he was growing up in the business and that I could actually forge a new path by really embracing my history and marrying it with this future opportunity.”

Schram recalls how smartphones came online and we no longer had to be behind a laptop or desktop to interact with the internet.

“To be able to have these brand relationships with consumers that were on the go and harness all those tools just fascinated me and really stoked my curiosity. So after an incredible seven-and-a-half year run at ePrize, I met Ted Murphy from IZEA. And Ted actually was a partner of ours. He was talking early about social media endorsements. There wasn't a name for it yet. It wasn't called influencer marketing back then.”

Schram eventually decided to join Murphy at IZEA.

”We talked about what today in 2021 we would call The Creator Economy. We talked about this mass opportunity for democratization of storytelling and advertising messaging and how the proliferation of social networks would change all of this. The inefficiency of traditional advertising and marketing can benefit our company. And so in the fall of 2011, I was named the firm's first ever Chief Marketing Officer. And that's brought me to where I am today. And it's been an amazing nine year run.”

Schram defines influencer marketing and talks about its origins and evolution.

“I draw from my background growing up in broadcasting. The most valuable inventory is when a personality opens a mic in a stop set, breaks the norm from the reported commercials, and talks to you about a local dealership, or their favorite restaurant, or something they've seen or done with their family. That is a paid endorsement deal. In radio, the combination of that storytelling and the theater of the mind makes it the most single valuable inventory in the entire arsenal of what those stations sell to advertisers. So if you think about modern influencer marketing, it's the same idea.

“But instead of having one morning show personality doing it, it can be hundreds or thousands of different individuals from all walks of life, all shapes and sizes of a follower base, across all multitudes of social platforms. But the basics are the same. They're being compensated in cash, product, or both by brands to create that content. That content can be written word on a blog. It can be video on YouTube or Twitch. It can be an Instagram story. It can be all those things. But the idea is what's happening from an outcomes perspective is incredible amounts of reach and engagements and authenticity that transforms what would normally be a one-to-many marketing message that a brand would traditionally do to many perspectives in modern influencer marketing.”

What are some trends in influencer marketing?

“The first is the continued advancement of diversity and inclusion in the work that we're doing. And it's not only people of color. It's really embracing the entire spectrum of diversity and bringing more equality to the influencer marketing space. Because very fairly, the industry has a bad rap. We’re thought of as young white girls making duck faces on Instagram; that’s kind of what people think influencer marketing is. But the very best influencer marketing is a broad range of voices and perspectives across a complex matrix of societal norms and un-norms.

“And we've seen over the last several years, not only the recognition from our brand partners that this was so critical, but we also see it where the rubber hits the road, which is the average cost per post, meaning what someone's being paid for that sponsored endorsement. People of color, in fact, African American females earned more than all other race types here in 2021, which is the first time it's ever happened before on average. I like to believe that we're starting to see the evidence well that while we have a long way to go, the industry is trying to really understand what does inclusivity look like, and how do you make that part of the fiber of what makes this industry great?”

Schram talks about the “elastic workplace” of the future. And he wonders how the social media can and will evolve.

“The challenge we're having right now, post election in this COVID economy, is the fact that we have a lot of people who have a lot of time on their hands who are very apt to be behind those keyboards or thumbing through their phones and saying or doing things that they wouldn't ordinarily either have the time to do, the thought to do, or both. And so the platforms are really trying to figure out what is their role in all of this without limiting free speech, but also at the same time, not being a vector for promoting hate. And the good news is we're talking about some of the most valuable well-resourced organizations on the face of this earth with some of the smartest people in our space. And I think that there will be a path forward to doing that.

“What the last 12 months or so have taught us as a society of human beings on this planet is that there is some good in all of this. There's the connective fiber that we've had while being so lonely and being by ourselves at home that, at least for myself, has been very good for my mental health. To be able to still talk to people and interact with them like you and I are doing over Zoom right now in recording this podcast, I wouldn't have the chance to be able to see you or talk to you in real time if it weren't for these types of tools. And for that, I'm grateful. I think about even Christmas day in our family, I ended up buying Facebook Portal TV devices for members of our family that couldn't safely travel to Michigan for the holidays.”

What’s your advice for today’s Spartans who may be interested in a career in influencer marketing?

“You need to be hungry and humble from the start. Those who really succeed the best don't form a sense of entitlement. They realize that there's tremendous equity in being able to be self-starters. And I think that Spartans are really well equipped for this. Spartans tend to be people who are a little bit more entrepreneurial in nature, a little bit more focused on the substance versus the sizzle.

“And ultimately, in an industry like mine, where there's plenty of frothiness and plenty of shiny coins going on, at the end of the day, the types of young professionals that we're looking for are those who can really separate the wheat from the chaff and say, ‘Great. Our business is elevated by some of those frothiness types of things, but it doesn't change the fact that we need individuals who...