Soon you could live the life of an Instagram influencer and you don’t have to be Kylie Jenner to do it. An upcoming startup could pave the way for you to get paid just by using companies’ products and telling people about it.
Reppr is a new site where companies in search of innovative marketing channels can meet highly social millennials looking for quick, easy compensation – and vice versa.
Manny and Ron Lubin – two brothers who co-founded Reppr (pictured above from left to right) – have picked up on the fact that advertising is evolving. People mute or fast-forward through commercials, and ad-blockers are an Internet-user’s best friend. At the same time, social media is hot right now, so businesses are starting to center their marketing strategies on their presence on networks like Instagram and Facebook.
But their own accounts aren’t enough. Brand ambassador programs – through which students and young professionals are compensated to promote companies’ products – have begun to pop up. The problem is there’s no consolidated site where businesses and potential brand ambassadors can easily find one another.
Reppr is going to be the one-stop shop to find and become brand ambassadors. Businesses can post their brand ambassador jobs and receive applications from users. If they already have a brand ambassador program set up, they can take advantage of a freemium account, but Reppr will charge companies that are starting from scratch.
“That’s when it hit me: This could be a way to market a product.”
On the other end, millennial users can peruse positions and find brands that they’d like to represent. There’s only one, thorough and uniform application that they have to fill out, so they can apply to multiple jobs without the tedious task of completing individual forms. An added plus: All of the companies posting jobs on the site (except for nonprofits) are required to compensate their brand ambassadors in some capacity. So users can expect money, products or steep discounts in exchange for representing brands. It’s a win-win.
Manny experienced the struggle of finding a brand ambassador position firsthand. While he was still a student at Northeastern, he realized he should get some work experience that would help him secure a job. He told me that he had nothing on his resume and, seeing as many employers want to hire applicants with a couple of years of exposure to fields like marketing and sales, he needed to find work that would give him an edge but wouldn’t detract from his student schedule. Manny explained:
One of my good friends was an ambassador for a company and I remember talking to him about that so I thought that would be a great place to get involved. I went on the internet…and started searching for ambassador programs and I realized I don’t know where to look. I went on some job board websites, I’d type in ‘Brand Ambassador’ and those were polluted with sales roles that were titled ‘Brand Ambassador’ or ‘Brand Representative’. I went to some individual brand pages and poked around there for a while, but then I didn’t really know where I wanted to be a brand ambassador, I just knew I wanted to be one…The only reason I was filling out applications for brands was that I had friends who were ambassadors for those brands and I knew they had programs. I didn’t necessarily want to represent that brand.
After his initial search was a bust, Manny gave up his ambassador pursuits for a while to focus on being an involved leader in several campus organizations. But the failed quest to find a brand he could represent planted a seed in his head.
“The idea just kind of stuck with me,” he said. “I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mind and always wanted to start a business of my own and that was one of the concepts I wrote down to keep in my back pocket.”
Following graduation last May, Manny got into the real estate game in Boston. During the post-September 1 lull, he started thinking again about a project he could work on. And, following a fateful night out with his friends, he knew he had to get after the brand ambassador idea he had put on the back burner.
Manny recounted the night he realized the concept of Reppr was worth pursuing:
I was out getting dinner with a friend of mine and his brother, and his brother had this hat on that said ‘LOCO Taqueria & Oyster Bar’ on it…That night, I wore this hat. It was kind of goofy looking, the way I was wearing it. It definitely stood out and it said ‘LOCO’ on it in large yellow text. I ended up going out that night…I was wearing this hat and that night, 6 different people asked me what it was, 4 I had never met before…That’s when it hit me: This could be a way to market a product. There are 6 people now – whether they go to LOCO or don’t – who know what it is just because I was walking around Boston wearing a hat.
At Thanksgiving, his brother Ron was home from Los Angeles, where he was a creative director and had done years of work in advertising. From his experience, Ron felt that there has been a decline in traditional advertising and sensed that companies’ focuses were about to shift to social and personalized marketing efforts. When Manny shared his idea with his brother, it clicked. Ron had been thinking of the exact concept, but just hadn’t been sure about how to make it into a business.
Since that brotherly epiphany, the Lubin duo has been working on Reppr with NorthOut, an engineering studio that helps early stage startups. Ron has moved back to Boston and the venture is taking names – both brands and millennials – for their beta, which will launch in a month or so. At that time, Reppr hopes to give students and young professionals a tool where they can find brands, use and post about their products, be compensated and build their resumes. Meanwhile, businesses will have the innovative means to reach their consumer audiences and make an actual impression on them.
“I think there’s a huge correlation between the rise of social media and the fall of traditional advertising,” Manny shared. “Today, if you’re talking about television ads, people fast-forward through them a lot of the time. It costs X amount of dollars to have that ad that’s seen by less people than intended.”
Instead, Reppr is giving companies the power of word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM), which could be the key to advertising in the modern age. According to Nielsen, 77% of consumers reported being influenced to buy a new product if they’ve heard about it from friends or family. There’s a sense of trust among people with a personal bond and it trust transcends into the world of consumerism, making brand ambassadors a smart marketing tactic for companies nowadays.
“If you can speak to someone about a product, the chances are they’re more likely to listen to you if you’re looking them in the eye,” Manny said.
Image via Reppr.
