People are doubting it and believe it’s a scam: Wyld's Rij Eappen

Wyld is aiming to take the influencer marketing game one step higher through its social currency payment card, for which it has partnered with Visa.

 

The idea behind this card is to get nano influencers as Instagram users with as little as 1,000 followers can leverage their social media clout to earn cashback on everyday spending.

 

Entry to this platform is by invitation only and according to Raj Eappen, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Wyld, the platform has 2,00,000 people on our waitlist.

 

We caught up with Rij Eappen, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Wyld, to learn more about how this works, whether users have to use the ASCI ‘sponsored’ tag and more…

 

What’s the idea behind this? 

 

We started working on this only in October 2021 but went live only about a month and a half ago. 

 

Back then in 2021, the idea was that every person is an influencer knowingly or unknowingly. The influencer marketing industry is focused on people with large numbers. Nobody looks at those with a lower number of followers. But we have seen that increasingly, brands are looking at nano creators.

 

While creators are the backbone of the influencer marketing industry, people with 1,000-10,000 followers are also valuable. But they aren’t discovered by brands and haven’t actively pursued this. We wanted to incentivise this and monetise social media networks. 

 

There are a very small number of people who are valuable to the brands. Here, every transaction is an endorsement. If every customer spoke about brands, then they don’t need marketing campaigns.

 

So we built Wyld as a platform that allows anyone to use their clout. We are tracking where customers go and incentivise them and pay them. We’ve launched a prepaid version right now and subject to RBI approvals we should be able to get the credit card version running by next year. 

 

How does this work? If it’s only 1,000 followers needed there will be plenty who just end up buying them to avail these benefits…

 

We want quality users so we look to understand the number of followers and the engagement rate. 

 

We developed an algorithm which is the Wyld Score. We want to see how engaged the audience of the social media user is.

 

Somebody with 1,00,000 followers with a low engagement rate could have a lower score than someone with 3,000 followers who has friends and family engaging with him/her. The cashback is determined by this Wyld score. The higher the score, the higher the payouts. 

 

With the ASCI guidelines in place on influencers requiring to add 'sponsored' to their posts - does this expose that?

 

This doesn’t fall under the purview. To use the benefits, a full-price purchase has to be made. The benefits come after the shout-out. In that journey, they’re a customer of the brand first and then tell people about it on social media. We’ll ask them to put up a #hashtag but it’s an option.

 

Which places have you tied up with?

 

We are working with around 250 brands right now. We have a brand team that is signing up new brands every day. F&B is our largest avenue but we have fashion, beauty and entertainment brands.

 

For us, the card is a medium but we are selling the idea of social currency and one can earn more social currency every day. We have tied up with the likes of Sunburn. For the Rema concert that happened in May, we told our users to put up a story about the concert. In return, they got a free VIP ticket. Those posts helped drive sales for Rema. So this means everyone wins. 

 

The event got 150 people with over 1,000 followers with some also reaching a million followers posting about it. It was great for the concert organisers too. We’ll be looking to have such activations regularly because in the end, it’s about the influence.

 

Are you looking to add other social media platforms too?

 

We’ll be adding other platforms as we grow. Instagram in India has 280 million users out of which 100 million users have more than 1,000 followers.

 

Who are your marketing partners?

 

One of the advantages we have is that we have been in the space. I was at a firm that was creating content for luxury brands. We are very deep in the ecosystem and some of our investors are also from the industry. We have investors from Pocket Aces, Boat, the founder of The Glitch and content creators like Miss Malini too.

 

We are looking at deeper integrations with modelling and influencer marketing agencies who want to offer this as value to their clients. 

 

Would education be the biggest challenge? 

 

We keep getting asked ‘is this for real’. People in our DMs are doubting it and believe it’s a scam. 

 

It’s a simple journey – purchase, post and earn cashback. We offer cashback of 15-50% for Instagram Stories and 30%-100% for posts.

 

We have content creators working on the education bit. One of those Reels by a content creator went viral and that got us around 1,30,000 people on our waitlist.