Tech entrepreneur connects brands with top fans

Tech entrepreneur connects brands with top fans

SeattlePI.com

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NEW YORK (AP) — When Amber Atherton hit celebrity status as the co-creator and star of of British reality TV show “Made in Chelsea" in 2012, companies making everything from cream cheese to leggings wanted to pay her big bucks to promote their products.

That happened despite the fact that she didn't even use most of the stuff.

That experience ended up being a teaching moment for Atherton, now 28. She also struggled to figure out who her influential customers were at her online jewelry company called My Flash Trash, which she sold in 2016. That inspired her to start a software company called Zyper a year later that connects brands like Kellogg, Nestle and cosmetics maker Rituals with “super fans,” instead of paid professional influencers.

Zyper, which relocated to San Francisco from London in 2018, identifies the top 1% of a label’s fans by analyzing data from public social media. Brands can then chat with those fans and can enlist them to serve as brand ambassadors on social sites in exchange for new products and access to events. So far, Atherton is seeing these “super fans” drive twice the average order value than other traffic sources for many brands.

Zyper has raised $8 million in financial backing, and Atherton is looking at expanding her clients — primarily consumer goods companies — to include automobiles and banks.

Atherton's message comes as the influencer economy has been increasingly fraught with deceit and fraud. Influencers have been criticized for inflating the number of their followers or not even using the products they endorse. HyperAuditor, an analytics firm, investigated nearly 2 million Instagram accounts and discovered that more than half fraudulently pumped up the number of followers. Such influencer deception cost advertisers an estimated $1.3 billion last year, according to...

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