Founder Story: Meet Neil Waller, Co-Founder of Whalar
With over 100 companies in the R/GA Ventures portfolio or what we like to call our “ecosystem of solutions”, we are sharing the incredible stories from a diverse range of founders tackling problems in industries like healthcare, blockchain, pet care, advertising and more.
For our first founder story of the year, we talked to Neil Waller, the Co-Founder of Whalar, a company that has established itself as a truly dominant force within the influencer marketing space as official partners with Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Whalar built a technology platform to provide a new operating model for producing high-quality creative work, accessing engaged audiences, and gaining diverse consumer insights. They do this globally, with full transparency in a fraction of the cost and time it has traditionally taken. To date, they’ve worked with global brands like Unilever, Diageo, Estee Lauder, Nike, Apple, and Ralph Lauren.
Keep reading to learn more about the influencer marketing industry, advice for early-stage founders, and the story behind the Whalar name.
What problem is Whalar solving?
“Whalar exists to help professionalize the entire process of collaboration between influencers and brands. Before Whalar, there were no standardized structures, processes, rules, pricing or reporting mechanisms across multiple platforms. So, we bring expertise to the workflow and a degree of independent mediation between the two parties.
Essentially, the activity of influencers working with brands was already taking place. We didn’t invent that but we built a managed service business around it. Whalar is helping influencer marketing be done in a far more professional, verifiable, responsible manner that allows it to be easier for both parties. That’s the heartbeat of the company.
Influencer marketing is a new and exciting method of distribution. Influencers are publishers and it’s no different from the publishing industry. They have audiences that follow, read, engage, watch everything they do. They represent opportunities for brands to reach into these publications and speak directly to their diverse audiences.
Since there are so many influencers with global audiences, it’s diverse in every way, shape or form you could imagine. That’s why our grand mission statement is: liberating the creative voice. We aim to make advertising more personable, more relevant, and more inclusive. Therefore, these creative voices are more powerful and more effective because it just creates better, more curated advertising for the brands who work with them.”
Tell us the story of how Whalar came to life.
“Founding Whalar was an unexpected journey. Before Whalar, my co-founders and I were running our own direct to consumer brand.
We were already immersed in the world of influencer marketing and in 2015, we won a Shopify competition called Build a Business. We were the top-selling fashion and apparel brand on Shopify at that time. And in essence, that led to meet other category winners from other industries.
In talking with the other category winners that year, we learned that each of our companies had the same marketing strategy focused on digital community building. It was targeting ads to audiences with the idea of personalization at scale and influencers being used as a distribution channel. The ads naturally felt more authentic because they were coming from the consumers we were trying to talk to.
For all those businesses, that strategy was wildly successful. Yet, ironically, all of us were talking about the same pain points. It was a highly manual process. There weren’t really any tools or people doing it well. And we literally just decided, well, we have ideas about how to solve it. So let’s go build Whalar. We started working on it and five months later we launched.”
And what’s the story behind the name?
“So, a whale can travel 10,000 miles under the ocean and other whales can still hear them. The whole idea around influencer marketing is that they can have an impact on anyone, anywhere.
Now you can publish content online and someone in London can impact someone in Singapore, in Cape Town, in Alaska, all because someone has chosen to follow an influencer across the world based on some kind of shared similarity or interest. It’s bridging connections. Through influencer marketing, messages are being impacted and heard by people all over the world. That was why Whalar was chosen as the name.”
What are some key trends around influencer marketing that brands should be aware of? Is there anything that you feel is a big takeaway as we enter this new decade?
“I think one of the things that we’re definitely starting to see in the influencer economy is influencers creating brands, products, and services of their own. Influencers have their finger on the pulse of any specific industry, theme, and/or interest so they can help brands understand what people want to buy. The best influencers are broadcasting this information out and also engaging and getting feedback to share with brands. In turn, they are the best-positioned people to predict what will be popular with a built-in audience to create their own new brand.
In addition, the conversation around regulation will be interesting to see unfold. When YouTube first launched, that’s when we started to see the first wave of influencers. Every time a new platform comes along that really gets traction, it creates an opportunity for new influencers to join in since the market isn’t yet saturated.
From there, we saw Vine, then TikTok. I see TikTok as the newest opportunity in influencer marketing. We should expect to see increased regulation and standardization of success metrics for this industry. I think these are all good steps to making influencer marketing more accountable and comparable to existing media metrics.
Speaking of regulation, we just launched the R/GA Data Venture Studio. How do you think data regulation is going to affect influencer marketing in the future?
“I think it already has affected it by driving transparency in an attempt to stop it from being the wild west it was before. I recall a time where brands were saying, “Can you just not have the influencer to say that it’s an ad” which, of course, now is completely not allowed. I’m glad to see this change, the rules are now very clear that ads have to be declared as ads. This has done a lot to clean up the industry and stop people from doing things that weren’t truly suitable for an audience before. Most of the regulation is just driving that protection of making sure things are done for the right reasons.
Data is allowing for measurement that was never possible before and it is going to bring more effectiveness to the industry. We know so much more than we did a year ago about what makes influencer marketing work because we know so much more about what successful ads look like because we can measure them.
We’re finding that it’s actually becoming more expensive too because as you get to become more scientific and prove more on what works, the price goes up because the risk goes down. Which is why, for example, TikTok is the cheapest place for influencer marketer reach right now because it’s so young. Yet there are many brands that won’t claim that because they want more measurement data. And we’ve seen it again with Instagram and YouTube. Ads probably cost double what it did two years ago.”
What advice would you give to early-stage founders making their way through the entrepreneurial journey?
“There is so much advice I have picked up over the years. One of my favorites is: ‘try and attack a business opportunity from solving a problem’. It sounds so simple and obvious, but James and I have done things in the past that been about creating a business in a category because we thought it was just an interesting opportunity but not truly trying to solve a problem. For us at Whalar, we set about solving our own problems. And if you can do that, it’s a lot easier.
The second piece is more philosophical: ‘mountains look like molehills in the rearview mirror.’ As an entrepreneur, the number of times that you’re faced with difficult challenges, things not going your way; it can feel insurmountable. I look back on all of those moments and they look tiny now. It’s like driving a car. You see a mountain and then you drive past it and you look in your rearview mirror and it looks tiny.
These two pieces of advice have allowed us to be very methodical, steady, unfazed about going through business challenges, knowing that they’re meant to look big and overly ambitious at times but you work your way through them. It gives a calmness to operate within. Whereas when we started, you’d wear your heart on your sleeve.”
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