When I get contacted by a highly successful serial entrepreneur with a new endeavour coming out of stealth mode, I get interested.
Jan Rezab is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry. He is currently the CEO and Co-founder of Ravineo, a digital marketing analytics platform focused on making digital media safer and more transparent.
Before Ravineo, Rezab founded and led several successful companies. His entrepreneurial journey began with the mobile entertainment and games company Redboss, which he founded at age 14 and led as CEO for 7 years.
He also founded the employee experience and engagement SaaS platform Time is Ltd. Still, he is probably most well known for Socialbaker which Rezab grew into one of the world's largest social media analytics companies. Under his leadership, Socialbakers secured $34 million in funding and acquired over 2,500 clients. It was sold to bEmplifi in 2021.
Ravineo is engaged in various projects—both commercial and for NGOs—related to media research, transparency in digital media, and social media platforms.
According to Rezab:
"Social media has become less transparent than ever before. Regulations around spreading false information and fake content make it more important to understand digital media than ever before."
This is particularly crucial in the realm of advertising and marketing.
Rezab asserts:
"We wanted to revisit the space because everybody stopped innovating analytics around social media about four years ago.
The best influencer analytics tools out there can track brand mentions, the number of follows, and the number of impressions that a piece of sponsored content received. But none of this really matters.
We want to bring in and build a new Nielsen 2 0 that creates and writes the book on standards in social media."
The opportunities around this are vast. Remember when Elon Musk brought X and he started manipulating the algorithms to ensure that his posts were visible to the most number of viewers?
And then there's population profiling. I remember when I first saw Alexander Nym speak about his work at Cambridge Analytica a few years back at a conference in Ukraine.
He went into such great detail, displaying slides and metrics, about how his company was able to created targeting political campaigns, that when the whole scandal involved the unauthorised collection and misuse of personal data from millions of Facebook users went public, I was surprised, assuming everyone knew about the practice.
For Rezab, one of the key focus areas is social media influencers. He asserts, only 20 per cent of brands partnerships are publicly declared by the influencers.
Many existing influencer analytics tools are cumbersome, requiring significant time and effort to extract meaningful insights.
"In contrast, we've developed the first plug-and-play influencer analytics solution. By simply uploading a list of influencers, brands and campaign managers gain immediate access to all necessary data. This system provides near real-time data, updating within hours."
Detecting the seemingly undetectable
Ravineo uses AI to detect these partnerships in videos, photos, and text.
Generative video AI analytics can process visual and audible mentions of brands frame by frame, but up until now has never really been used in media and content research.
For example, the AI can detect a brand's presence in a video and assign an "index of prominence." Simply wearing a Nike shirt might result in a low index, while actively displaying and discussing Nike products would yield a high index. This distinction is crucial for understanding the true impact of brand placements, especially in subtly paid partnerships.
This technology is particularly valuable for monitoring influencers, even those with whom brands have existing relationships. It helps ensure alignment with brand values and detects any potentially damaging behaviour.
According to Rezab,
"Two key questions drive influencer analysis: First, are the chosen influencers delivering the anticipated impact? This is typically measured using standard metrics like views and engagement. However, relying solely on these "vanity metrics" is insufficient."
Savvy marketers also track sales through methods like test promotions with sign-ups or discounts.
While ROI-driven campaigns shouldn't be the sole focus—as this can devalue influencers — a balanced approach is recommended. Depending on the influencer's size, a small portion (e.g., 10 per cent) of their activity should be dedicated to conversion-focused initiatives. This provides valuable data on ROI and helps establish a more accurate media value for influencer collaborations.
Given the constant evolution of influencer trends, continuous monitoring is essential.
Transparency in the rise of virtual AI influencers
This is also important with the rise of the use of AI-generated social media influencers in marketing. One of the most popular is Lu do Magalu (@magazineluiza), the Brazillian creation of Frederico Trajano, the CEO of Magazine, whose reach includes 14 million followers on Facebook, 7.3 million followers on TikTok, 7.1 million followers on Instagram.
She even partnered with Intel and Microsoft.
Fellow contemporaries have partnered in campaigns with brands including Ikea, and H&M.
A cheaper option than human influencers, AI influencers can offer global appeal, transcending language barriers. An AI influence can be programmed to produce content tailored to specific audiences, demographics, and interests, increasing their relevance and engagement.
While most of us can identify an AI-generated influencer— especially those that are closer to resembling avatars than videos — it's certainly not a universal reality with the rise of deepfake videos and images.
According to Rezzab, the public's perception of AI influencers is complex.
"Some view them with scepticism and scrutiny, while others accept them without much thought. This acceptance is likely due to the shift in social media usage, where people now spend significantly more time engaging with strangers and celebrities than with their own social circles."
This normalisation of interacting with unfamiliar figures, coupled with the content strategies employed to game social media algorithms, may lead people to view AI influencers as a form of entertainment, similar to reality TV.
For example, Mr Beast, known for his outlandish stunts, launched a chocolate bar last year that quickly captured 20 per cent of Hershey's market share — a testament to the power of influencer marketing. This demonstrates a shift in how brands view influencers.
Previously seen as campaign tools, influencers are now capable of building entire private labels, as seen with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's partnership with Under Armour.
But at the other end of the spectrum, nefarious campaigns can use AI-generated content without proper disclosure, reporting fake news as real. An influence can purchase fake followers, inflate its user follower counts and engagement rates, deceive brands, and skew campaign performance metrics.
As a company, Raveno plans to enhance its software and offer it to non-profits, researchers, and journalists to study the impact of social media.
Rezab asserts:
"That's always been my dream at Socialbakers, to build a platform that can guard the system a little bit. But previously, you would have needed thousands of researchers and journalists to not only do the work but build it. AI makes it possible.""
Ultimately, while there's plenty to be cautious about when it comes to social media challenges, Rezab believes that "to address the problem, we start with really understanding the ecosystem."
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