Most brands know they need more content. Very few have a real plan to produce it, protect it, and actually use it across every channel that matters.

In this episode of Inside the Blurb, host Sean Simon sits down with Tom Logan, CEO of Cohley, to break down how mid-market and enterprise consumer brands are turning user-generated content into a true content engine—not just a series of disconnected campaigns.

We cover:

• How Cohley thinks about pricing, pilots, and de-risking the decision to invest in a content engine
• Why content demand has exploded across TikTok, Amazon, Walmart, retail, email, and beyond
• How Cohley uses creator data + AI (Cohley Cognition, AI Asset Analysis) to match the right creators and flag off-brief assets at scale
• Why Cohley gives clients perpetual content rights and how that eliminates usage-tracking chaos
• A deep dive into Zak Designs and how they use Cohley to power content from first touch to post-purchase
• How Cohley thinks about pricing, pilots, and de-risking the decision to invest in a content engine

If you’re a marketer, eCom leader, or agency partner trying to keep up with content demand while maintaining quality and control, this episode is for you.

Listen and Subscribe from Your Favorite Podcast Platform

Takeaways

• Brands don’t just need more content—they need a content engine. Cohley is built to power content across the entire consumer journey, not just one-off campaigns.
• Cohley is built for mid-market and enterprise consumer brands. Below ~$10M in revenue, most brands don’t yet feel the full intensity of the content problem Cohley solves.
• Creator matching is data-driven, not just a marketplace free-for-all. Cohley uses deep creator data and workflows to prioritize fit and quality over volume.
• AI is embedded in the workflow, not bolted on. Tools like AI Asset Analysis and Cohley Cognition learn brand preferences, flag off-brief content, and guide briefs over time.
• Perpetual content rights remove a massive operational headache. Brands own their assets forever, avoiding complex usage windows and “this ad is working but we’re out of rights” moments.
• Customer success is a strategic function, not just support. Dedicated CSMs provide channel-specific content strategy, quarterly check-ins, and in-person relationship building.
• Pilots de-risk adoption for the right brands. 90-day pilots with flexible brief structures let Cohley prove value before a long-term commitment.

Chapters

1. 00:00 – Intro
2. 00:55 – Meet Cohley
3. 01:12 – Why brands have never needed this much content
4. 02:46 – Who Cohley is really for (and who it isn’t)
5. 04:35 – From early UGC to building Cohley
6. 06:36 – Beyond point solutions: powering the whole journey
7. 07:17 – Cohley vs competitors: where they truly differ
8. 09:08 – Using AI to enforce creative “non-negotiables”
9. 11:16 – Why customer success is Cohley’s backbone
10. 13:41 – Diversity of content and creator matching at scale
11. 15:19 – Who gets into the creator network (and how it self-regulates)
12. 17:51 – Perpetual rights and killing usage-tracking headaches
13. 19:31 – Case Study: Zak Designs and content for every touchpoint
14. 22:55 – Which verticals Cohley wins in (and which are harder)
15. 24:17 – What working with Cohley actually looks like
16. 27:56 – How brands measure success with Cohley content
17. 31:31 – Inside Cohley Cognition: the AI brain
18. 34:33 – Distributing content across Amazon, TikTok, Yotpo & more
19. 36:18 – Pricing, pilots, and de-risking the decision
20. 37:50 – How to explore Cohley on Blurbs & what’s next

UGC Is Having a Moment. Most Brands Still Don’t Know How to Use It.

Marketers love to say “content is oxygen.”

But if you talk to most teams, they don’t sound like they’re breathing easy. They sound winded.

There’s TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, Walmart, Target, retailer dot-coms, email, SMS, in-store screens, marketplaces, and internal channels—all hungry for creative. If you’re a mid-market or enterprise brand, you don’t just need “more content.” You need a system for creating, governing, and scaling content that actually moves the needle.

That’s where user-generated content (UGC) comes in—and where a lot of brands quietly stall out.

Recently on Inside the Blurb, I sat down with Tom Logan, CEO of Cohley, to talk about how leading brands are making UGC both scalable and strategic. This post isn’t a recap of that episode. Instead, it’s a look at what “mature” UGC really looks like, using Cohley as a proof point for where the category is heading.

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1. UGC is no longer a campaign—it’s infrastructure

A lot of brands still treat UGC as a campaign lever:

“Let’s spin up some creators for Q4.”

“Let’s get a few UGC-style TikToks to test against our brand spots.”

That’s fine as a starting point, but it’s not how the leaders are thinking.

Tom described something different: brands using UGC as infrastructure—a content engine that feeds multiple touchpoints across the entire consumer journey.

Think about where UGC (or creator-generated content) can live today:

• TikTok and Reels for top-funnel discovery
• Amazon, Walmart, and Target for social proof and product education
• PDPs and retailer pages for video reviews and lifestyle imagery
• Email and SMS for post-purchase engagement and cross-sell
• Paid social for thumb-stopping performance creative
• Even internal sales decks and enablement

For brands like Zak Designs, Cohley isn’t just “the vendor that gives us influencer videos.” It’s the engine behind content for:

• First touch
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Post-purchase
• Retention

That’s the mental shift: from “we need more UGC” to “we need a UGC-powered content system.”

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2. Volume without control is just chaos

Most brands learn this the hard way:

1. They prove that UGC works.
2. They throw more creators and more briefs at the problem.
3. They wake up six months later with:
   • a messy Google Drive
   • unclear usage rights
   • content that sort of fits the brand
   • no real sense of which assets are actually working

Tom’s take was clear: the real constraint isn’t “finding creators”—it’s controlling quality and risk at scale.

Cohley tackles that in a few ways that are good patterns for any UGC program:

• Creator data, not just creator lists 130k+ creators is meaningless if all you know is follower count. Cohley tracks volunteered info, surveys, performance history, and brand feedback. That lets them prioritize fit over volume.
• Workflow that matches how teams actually operate Content isn’t just “uploaded.” It’s briefed, reviewed, edited, approved, and then routed to different teams and partners. The process has to match the reality of marketing, eCom, and agency collaboration.
• AI as a guardrail, not a toy Their AI Asset Analysis doesn’t try to “create” the content. It scans what creators submit against the brand’s non-negotiables and flags anything off-brief or risky. That matters when you’re processing thousands of assets a month.

If your UGC program is generating assets faster than your team can approve, tag, and deploy them, you don’t have a UGC strategy—you have a UGC backlog.

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3. Rights are the silent killer of UGC programs

On the episode, we went into something unglamorous but incredibly important: usage rights.

In a traditional model, once agents get involved with talent, every variable becomes negotiable:

• Platform (social vs TV vs print)
• Geography
• Duration (3 months, 6 months, 1 year)
• Placement (organic vs paid, etc.)

That’s all manageable in theory. In practice, Tom described the reality:

“This asset is performing great in our Facebook ad… but technically the usage is up. What are we supposed to do now?”

So Cohley made a decision early on: clients own the content in perpetuity. No ticking clock, no spreadsheet gymnastics across 47 assets and five campaigns.

You don’t have to work with Cohley to steal the logic:

• Push your partners to simplify usage wherever possible
• Treat perpetual or long-term rights as part of the strategic value, not just a legal line item
• Build your own internal rules so your media and eCom teams aren’t constantly afraid to scale something that works

The brands that win with UGC remove as much friction as possible between “this content works” and “we can keep using it.”

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4. AI’s real role: knowing the brand better than the brief

Most UGC conversations right now include some hand-wavy mention of AI. What stood out in my conversation with Tom was how specific the use cases were.

Cohley’s Cohley Cognition is essentially an AI brain trained on:

• Brand guidelines
• Product info
• Target audiences
• Past performance
• What has and hasn’t worked in content tests

That system doesn’t just sit there. It acts as an agentic guide inside the platform:

• Suggesting tweaks to briefs before they go live
• Rewording sections to align with what tends to perform
• Eventually recommending the types of creators most likely to succeed for a specific brand and use case

The vision Tom laid out was simple but powerful:

The platform should eventually know the brand so well it can run almost on autopilot—while humans play the role of strategist and conductor.

If you’re running any kind of UGC program today, ask yourself:

• Where could AI help us enforce non-negotiables?
• Where could it learn from performance data and feed back into how we brief, choose creators, and place assets?
• Where are humans doing repetitive review work that software should be doing first-pass?

AI isn’t here to replace creative judgment. It’s here to make sure you’re not wasting it on things a system could have caught or suggested earlier.

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5. Relationships still matter—even in an AI-heavy world

One of my favorite parts of the conversation had nothing to do with AI at all.

Tom called Cohley’s customer success team his favorite team in the company. Not because they “handle tickets,” but because they:

• Are fluent in content strategy by channel
• Bring successful patterns from one client or vertical to others
• Maintain real, human relationships with customers (to the point of knowing their dogs’ names)
• Still visit every customer in person annually

In a world where more and more vendors are leaning on bots and automation only, that level of relationship-building stands out.

It also matters for UGC specifically because:

• Content is subjective
• Every brand has its own internal politics and risk tolerance
• Teams need a partner who can say “Here’s what we’re seeing work across similar brands and channels”

If you’re evaluating UGC/creator partners, it’s worth asking:

• “Who will own strategy and success on your side?”
• “How often will we actually meet?”
• “Do you visit customers? Do you get close enough to really understand our context?”

Tools can scale content. People still scale trust.

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6. Pilots as a filter, not just a sales tactic

One last pattern I liked from Tom: structured pilots.

Cohley leans into 90-day pilots with the right brands, with a few important characteristics:

• Enough briefs and use cases to get a real read
• Clear expectations on what “success” looks like
• A straightforward path into either an annual or month-to-month relationship afterward

That does two things:

• It de-risks the decision for the brand
• It forces both sides to treat UGC as a serious strategic initiative, not a one-off experiment

If you’re building or rebuilding your own UGC motion, you can borrow this structure even internally:

• Pick a 90-day window
• Choose 2–3 core use cases (e.g., Amazon PDPs, TikTok ads, and email post-purchase flows)
• Define what “good” looks like for each
• Treat it as the foundation of a content engine, not just “let’s see what happens”

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Where UGC goes from here

UGC is no longer just about “authenticity” or “getting creators on the cheap.” For mature brands, it’s becoming:

• A content infrastructure layer
• A way to scale storytelling across channels
• A system where creator data + AI + workflow + rights all have to line up

Cohley is one example of what that future looks like in practice. There are others. The point isn’t which logo you pick; it’s whether you’re designing your UGC program to:

• Power the entire journey
• Protect the brand
• Respect your team’s time
• Learn and improve over time

If your content still feels like oxygen you’re gasping for rather than a system you can rely on, it might be time to rethink how you’re approaching UGC.

And if you want to see how one vendor is tackling that problem head-on, you can explore Cohley’s full profile, claims, and case studies—plus even ask them anonymous questions—on Blurbs.

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Full Transcript of the conversation with Tom Logan

Sean Simon (00:01.282)
Marketers talk about content like it’s oxygen, but most teams still struggle to breathe. Budgets are tighter, channels move faster, and the demand for high-performing creative keeps climbing. Welcome to Inside the Blurb, where we skip the sales pitch and go straight to the value. I am Sean Simon, and today we’re diving into user-generated content, how brands make it both scalable and strategic. Here’s how we describe Cohley on TrustBlurbs.com.

Cohley simplifies content creation by connecting brands with a vast creator network, enabling the generation of diverse media assets. This efficient matching and management process makes engaging on-brand content more accessible, streamlining marketing efforts across multiple platforms. You can follow along and explore their page at trustblurbs.com slash cohley, C-O-H-L-E-Y dot com. Tom, welcome into the Matrix.

Tom Logan (00:55.544)
Couldn’t have said any of that better myself. That was beautifully said. Great to be here with you, Sean.

Sean Simon (01:00.86)
Excellent. Love it. Love it. So let’s start with the blurb that you just heard. How can you expand on it? In other words, what does that look like in practice and what does it mean for the brands you work with?

Tom Logan (01:06.116)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Logan (01:12.674)
Yeah, what it means in practice is that at no time in history have brands needed as much content as they need today. It is really, really overwhelming and constantly challenging to keep up with the content needs that they have. That’s partially because new channels have emerged, like TikTok is relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Content opportunities have opened up on retailers like Amazon, like Walmart, like Target.

So they’re also hungry for content. Sales teams are hungry for content. Ecom teams are hungry for content. Ads teams are perhaps the hungriest for content. But the problem is that content has to be really high quality. It has to be aligned with general brand guidelines. And it has to be brand safe as well. You’re introducing content that’s created externally, not directly under the nose of the creative director or the CMO.

there is going to be inherent risk there. So what we aim to do is with top consumer brands and the agencies that represent them, help turn content, when I say content, photos, videos, product reviews, turn it from a real pain point into just a bona fide strength for them. So we want to be their content engine that powers every single touch point that’s critical throughout the consumer journey for brands as they interact with the consumers.

Sean Simon (02:38.668)
Excellent. So when should a brand start thinking about working with someone like Cohley? Like at what point in their journey does it make sense?

Tom Logan (02:46.808)
Yeah, we’re certainly not a spot solution and we’re not an inexpensive player in the place, tend to be in the space, tend to be a more premium type of offering that’s very well suited for mid-market and enterprise consumer brands and again, the agencies that represent them. if a brand is sub 10 million a year in revenue, then it’s likely that

They don’t necessarily have the team, the resources, or the overall volume of content need to where they’ve really felt this pain point. Their spend levels on paid social acquisition aren’t quite there. The investment in retail channels probably hasn’t quite matured. And their needs are going to be a little bit more limited. There are great solutions for those brands. And we’re always very

very friendly, always try to offer resources, help as much as possible. It’s not that we think we’re better than them, it’s just that we very much, we understand the market really well and who we’re best suited for and who has the most success with our offering. And we can’t be everything to everyone.

Sean Simon (03:56.408)
Yeah, totally fair. So on a Blurbs page, have a what makes you remarkable statement. And yours reads, and I think this was written by you, Cohley builds software that enables brands to connect with influencers, photographers, and videographers to produce authentic and engaging content that propels the brand’s growth. Cohley is built by innovators and team players who want to change the way brands create content, all the while having fun doing it.

It’s got some nice heart to it. So what does that mean in practice? Like for your customers and your team, how does that, what does that look like?

Tom Logan (04:25.76)
That’s nice that I said that. I guess so.

Tom Logan (04:35.8)
Yeah, well, so from day one, we’ve always had a little bit of a different take on this space. So we entered the world of user generated content sort of via influencer marketing. So my co-founder and I have a background in sort of early UGC where we were helping brands at a previous company, helping brands find photos primarily that ordinary people were taking on their behalf.

Around the time that that company gets acquired, we see influencer marketing becoming this like table stakes, highly successful strategy for brands. And through, you know, our shared experience at this previous company, we were like, these influencers are creating really high quality content that brands are, are going to need more of. And we believe that this space is going to continue to grow the world of user generated content, but really it’s just like.

Brands overall need for content, their willingness to incorporate content that’s not created directly by their team. So we come into the space with a slightly different perspective, an obsession with content, with helping brands tell really authentic stories. And then from there, as we know, a startup pivots 100 different times. And we’re essentially trying to solve the same thing that we were way back then.

We’ve just continued to introduce various content offerings so that we can meet client demands where they are. And again, go from being like a point solution. We do short form UGC video to, oh wait, now we can power your influencer campaigns. We can do professional photography. We can do product reviews. So I think partly as like, as marketers have had fatigue around having all of these different platforms up, we’ve aimed to try to be a little bit more of a one-stop shop and

do everything best in class as opposed to just piecemealing things together. Yeah.

Sean Simon (06:36.334)
Yeah, it makes sense. So it’s more than a platform. It’s really about how do you make content energizing, right? How do you pay you and cohesive, right? And my not being a point solution or a project based solution, you can learn and iterate rather than just kind of complete a brief.

Tom Logan (06:45.86)
Yep.

Tom Logan (06:54.836)
And different channels call for different types of content, which of course requires different types of creators who have different core competencies, different skill sets. So what works with video review on Amazon, that’s obviously a much different video than something that’s sort of aspirational, top funnel on TikTok.

Sean Simon (07:17.486)
Okay, let’s talk competition because every vendor on Blurbs has an opportunity to list their direct competitors because it creates clarity, right? And the reality is if you’re on Blurbs, you’re comparing vendors. So don’t shy away from it. Take it head on. Find the best clients for you, right? I think you have that same philosophy. But on your list, it includes Billo, Creator IQ, Grandskippers, Kale, Later, Incense, and Symfony.

I’m not telling people anything they couldn’t find on your page. So when buyers compare you to those names, how do you help them understand where Cohley fits and what truly sets you apart from them and when they should work with you versus working with them?

Tom Logan (07:49.827)
Yeah.

Tom Logan (08:01.508)
My answer to this has changed a little bit. So I used to talk a lot about content quality with Cohley and how that leaps and bounds above some of our competitors. But I think the better explanation here is how we actually get to that. So the way that we actually get to higher quality content, content that’s more in line with what the brand is actually looking for, brand safe content, et cetera, is via

a variety of different workflows that allow for collaboration amongst teams, a lot of data, first party data on creators that allows us to have better matching mechanisms. So we understand our creators like down to a T. I mean, it’s not just volunteered information, it’s information that they volunteered in chats. It’s survey questions that they answer. So.

You know, we have really dynamic data on these individuals and what they can actually create and what they can deliver for brands. So that’s really helpful. Collaborative tools, like I mentioned, huge. AI is becoming a differentiator for us as cliche as that sounds. We’re able to do things that are actually extremely valuable for our clients with AI, where the system can start to learn that brand’s preferences, what they like, what they don’t like. They can actually flag.

We have a tool called AI Asset Analysis that can flag anything within the submitted creator content that’s counter to the non-negotiables in the brief that the actual team has laid out, sort of allowing the ecosystem to like course correct itself and allowing brands to scale because we’re talking about, you know, with our most active clients, we’re talking about thousands of assets that they may be generating in a given, you know, monthly period. So.

Yeah, so it’s very, very high volume and it’s hard to keep up with hard to manage. So if we can have AI come in and streamline these things, that’s critical. And I think, you know, on the quality piece, thinking about it from the other side, you know, because I hate to use like how long we’ve been in market as a, as a selling point, but what that actually means for our clients is that after 10 years of doing this, we have a lot of industry wherewithal we’ve attracted, you know, our,

Tom Logan (10:18.914)
more than our fair share of top brands, which then tends to act as a magnetic force for top talent, top creators. And those two things kind of just create like a network effect that ends up being highly beneficial to the client in their quest to create really great content at scale.

Sean Simon (10:37.166)
Yeah, I think being around the wild makes sense. It makes you wise, right? It’s just like getting older, we’re wiser.

Tom Logan (10:42.212)
wise and again there’s just like benefits that start to snowball over time so it’s you that in and of itself is not not valuable but what comes with it if you’re executing well and you’re innovating is is very positive.

Sean Simon (10:54.932)
Yeah, true partnership. All right, let’s talk about a few of the claims that are on your page. This says a lot about how you operate, right? So the first one is, Collie’s dedicated customer success manager provides strategic support, maximizing your content investment. So tell me about that relationship between the customer and the customer success manager.

Tom Logan (11:12.132)
Mm.

Tom Logan (11:16.962)
Yeah, the customer success team is I make, I’m not shy about saying this, they’re my favorite team at Cohley because they’re the connective piece between the product and the client, really. And they kind of bring everything together, they’re backbone of the org. They are extremely well-versed in content strategy as it pertains to different channels. They’re very,

good at being able to take success that they add with one client and for one specific use case or within one specific vertical and parlaying that success into more success for similar clients and similar use cases. They’re great there. They’re also just, I mentioned this in my initial blur, but they’re just a really friendly bunch that are just great people to.

to know and to work with day in and day out. And I think there’s real value in just like having really good people represent the company and people who really care about what the brand is trying to achieve. you know, that goes a long way. So I think that the counter to or the bad side of AI can be more automation, less relationships, more chat bots. We have

sort of gone the other way in the sense that we think that human relationships are critical. We still visit every single one of our customers in person every year, which is something I’m proud of as a team. So we actually know them. And many times, the way that we’ll start working with a new client is someone who used to work with us at a previous company goes to a new company and they’re like, hey, building out my tech stack or I have this need.

I’m going to go back to Cohley because, and sure the platform is great, the value you derived is great, but the relationships also matter and carry through.

Sean Simon (13:20.302)
It’s so important. It’s really about the partnership and not just here’s some software go to work. The next one, Cohley creates more diverse content than the competition, including UGC influencer activations and professional photography. So how do you maintain that level of variety?

Tom Logan (13:25.816)
Early.

Tom Logan (13:41.668)
Yeah, a diverse and really every sense of the word, but what that’s referring to there is these different types of content that we can help generate. So I mentioned how content for Amazon specifically is very different than content for TikTok. But within that, there’s even there’s even different levels of focus areas. Some people are great at creating unboxing videos.

Some people are great at more lifestyle videos where a product is being incorporated into their daily routine, for example, or the recipes that they cook for their kids, whatever. So people have different strengths. And because we have so much data on our actual creator base and the creators themselves, it’s dynamic, it’s constantly being updated, we’re able to better match those individuals with the right projects. So diversity of content that we can actually do.

That also means that we have to, again, segment the creator base properly. So of the 130,000 plus creators that maintain portfolios on the Quoly platform, only a small cohort will actually see a project, depending on what the brand’s looking for. Because for us, it’s more about quality and fit rather than, hey, 10,000 people applied to work with me on this project. We want the right people.

Sean Simon (15:01.836)
Yeah. How do you choose, this is just in addition to this question, how do you decide that someone’s qualified to be in your network? What’s the standard? Do they just apply? Do they have to go through a vetting process? How does that work?

Tom Logan (15:08.537)
Tactical.

Tom Logan (15:19.906)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We used to put people through a heavier vetting process. Now the vetting process is actually a little bit lighter as counterintuitive as that sounds because, you know, we’ve realized that again, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And sometimes it’s that like more raw, really human feeling content that moves the needle. And to use Amazon as an example, again, video reviews on Amazon.

Ascends our product pages are becoming more and more critical to the buyer journey. You can obviously ask Rufus. So there’s this interactive component as well. I mean, people, people trust other people, people trust other consumers. And that’s kind of like the new age complimentary product review. It’s not replacing what a text review is, but it’s bringing to life the process of actually buying a product.

What was this person thinking about when they bought it? What need are they trying to address? What was important to them in their buying process? How easy was set up? All of these, those videos are all about addressing customer concerns head on, as opposed to trying to sweep them under the rug. So all that’s to say, a very normal person without cap cut or post production editing skills can do that video.

that person has a place on our platform. Same thing with reviewing products and leaving a text review. So long as they’re not wading into offensive territories or creating content with AI that’s just fraudulent or misrepresentative of what they’re actually, what they’re claiming to say, then they can have a place on our platform. It also kind of self-regulates, right? So like,

Brands give ratings to creators after working with them. They build up work portfolios of things they’ve done for other brands. And in order to be accepted into a project, they have to answer the gated questions, put forth content samples. So it’s self-refines, I would say, as we go as well.

Sean Simon (17:34.124)
Okay. So all this is the third one on your page. All content generated is owned by the customer forever, eliminating worries about usage rights. So why was perpetual ownership so important for Cohley when you set out?

Tom Logan (17:51.33)
Yeah, in working with, as, it’s funny, this was our default from the very beginning. And being content first, we knew it was going to be critical for brands to be able to actually take in this content and put it to work everywhere that content was important to them. The truth of the industry is that when agents get involved with talent, they will oftentimes negotiate different rates.

for duration of usage or the actual type of usage. So if it’s being used in an ad, it’s one thing. If it’s being used on TV, it’s another thing. If it’s used in print, that’s another thing. And we’re like, this is creating such a headache for brands to try to track this in their digital asset management tools. hey, this asset’s performing great in our Facebook ad, but.

Technically the usage is up now, so what are we supposed to do now? Or between a rock and a hard place, we’re like, let’s just remove this frustration and let’s just streamline this so that brands can just remove any doubt and hesitancy and just move forward confidently with the content.

Sean Simon (19:07.246)
And you imagine like back in the 90s, if Ryan Reynolds signed a contract with a brand when he was a nobody, and then, know, fast forward and you’re like, you’re the brand and you have complete ownership of those pieces, that’d be something interesting to deal with. So let’s move into the sort of the case study. You’ve got a few on the website, or on blurb, I should say, you have a lot more on your website.

Tom Logan (19:14.339)
Yeah.

Tom Logan (19:24.067)
Yeah.

Sean Simon (19:31.951)
And let’s so let’s look at let’s take a deep dive into Zach designs. I’m sure you’re familiar with that one and let’s bring it to life. So it’s how Zach scale digital acquisition with Cohley is sort of the headline and you helped Zach produce content for everything that they do from content from a content perspective from acquisition to retention and everything in between. So how did that brief come together and what made the output so efficient compared to

Tom Logan (19:38.052)
Yeah.

Tom Logan (19:46.649)
Hmm.

Sean Simon (20:01.892)
maybe their traditional strategy before they came to you.

Tom Logan (20:05.464)
Yeah, fast growing company. So when they started working with us and they were, they were in the 20 or 30 million in annual revenue type of range, and now they’re well over a hundred. And with that growth, comes the need for a lot more content. So for them, the reason I really love that case study is because we work with them to power, content generation for basically every touch point of their consumer journey. So all the way from.

from initial introduction of the brand through post purchase retention. So they’re thinking about content really holistically and we are the engine for that, for that content focus, that content push. They sell products like, you know, Disney themed, water bottles for three year olds. Like my daughter has some Moana one. She has the snow white one, the Mickey, the Minnie Mouse one, like.

These products are both nostalgic for parents and the focus of so much obsession and joy for kids. So for them, content is critical because it tells that story from an emotional standpoint. It takes consumers into the real lives of families with kids who love these movies or…

You know, just love their pink water bottle. doesn’t even have to be Disney themed to have an emotional connection. But kids love their water bottles and through us able to generate the content that actually like properly conveys that story. You know, in selling a water bottle, it’s not about like, well, you know, I’m sure you want to say it’s like BPA free and safe and all that, but you’re not saying like, like the straw is wide or like it carries, you know, this much water. Like, sure. Again, great.

important to know, but like these are emotional thoughts. Like anyone can buy an old water bottle at any store they go to, but like to seek it out means that there’s like some sort of emotional connection and trust and relationship between what the brand is selling and what a consumer is actually spending their hard earned money on. So the content that we help them generate tells that story at every part of the funnel.

Sean Simon (22:29.448)
any different content for different stages, right? One to get them in, one to move them along, it’s more technical, and maybe one for a resell. Okay, so moving on to the next segment of the show, on the Blurbs page, we ask vendors 10 operational questions and 10.

category specific questions. So I picked out a few of each and I wanted to get sort of more thought from you on them if you could just elaborate on those answers. So the first question was, who are your typical customers and what verticals do they represent?

Tom Logan (22:55.416)
you

Tom Logan (23:10.404)
Who are our top customers and what verticals they represent? It’s funny, you when I would say like, you can’t pick your verticals. We, my co-founder and I had worked primarily with fashion companies at the previous company we were at. I was focusing on UGC and we just assumed that fashion would be one of our top verticals here. Not the case. Primarily CPG. Beauty is huge for us. Do a lot with vitamins and supplements. Those are really the main categories for us.

consumer package goods certainly being huge, really any consumer product. But fashion’s been tough. CBD has been tough. Apps and things like that have been tough. Again, not that we don’t love those types of companies, it’s just that’s who’s tended to need our services the most and tended to have the most long-term success with us.

Sean Simon (24:03.822)
Okay. So how is customer service delivery? You mentioned it before about your relationships are really important, but how, if I’m a customer working with you, how do I engage? What are my options?

Tom Logan (24:09.506)
Yeah.

Tom Logan (24:17.592)
Yeah. So the onboarding process is the most, is the most, hands on from our team. It’s really where we’re, trying to get you riding, riding the bike, but first we got to be on the training wheel. So let’s go through the process of actually crafting a creative brief together. There’s like a brief builder within the platform, a lot of different ways that we can like ingest outside materials to help create that baseline.

It’s not hard, we want to make sure that it’s dialed in and that it’s set up to help generate the types of assets that are so important for the actual client. After that, you have the creator selection process. you have typically anywhere from 100 to 300 people who are very well aligned with your brief, who are raising their hand and saying, yes, I want to work with you. Here’s some sample content. Here’s some specs about me. Here’s why you should pick me.

And then we have a variety of different tools or filtration systems within the platform to help get them to the actual right creators and ultimately accept them. So once they’re accepting them, then they’re using an integration on the platform, typically a Shopify integration, but it can be done manually to get the actual product, assuming there is one, in the hands of the creators in a timely manner. From there, the creators then submitting content for approval to the actual brand.

Again, Brand is using some safeguards that they have within the platform to collaborate as a team and to lean on that AI to make sure that everything checks the boxes in terms of meeting non-negotiables. And then from there, they’re acquiring assets that are stored and organized within their content libraries, can then be shared out to sort of the necessary people, the necessary teams. Sometimes it’s shared out with their agency or other partners of theirs. So the job’s not done once the asset’s approved.

Content only has value if it’s actually being put to work at those critical junctures of the consumer journey. So the platform makes facilitating that very easy. But yeah, that’s generally how it works from top to bottom. creators can oftentimes, you can save lists of your favorites and things like that if you want to continue to work with someone on an ongoing basis, kind of in more of an ambassador capacity. But typically brands will save a few.

Tom Logan (26:40.632)
have a few people that they can consistently rely on and then mix in fresh talent as they go.

Sean Simon (26:46.262)
Makes sense. So they’re never really alone. They have the platform they can log into, but if they ever need help, it’s there.

Tom Logan (26:52.994)
Yeah, we do quarterly strategy calls, hop on with them whenever, you know, ideally we’re at a point where we know their dog’s name, have their cell phone numbers and, part of what does contribute to that is the in-person piece as well. Like being able to just like visit people and be in, in their office, at their local diner, their bar. Like it just, it brings, it brings everything to life. It like helps remind you why you’re.

you answering those late night emails or why you’re grinding over, um, know, strategy for a product launch or a big, you know, Black Friday, cyber Monday push with them. It’s like, Oh, these people like have aspirations. They have, they have dreams. They’re part of a, they’re part of a team that functions really well together. Like, it’s just cool. It makes everything like, uh, it just gives everything so much more meaning. So that, that team is very relationship driven, uh, very strategy driven and, um, you know,

takes the time to actually train people up so that they can be autonomous, but with the support of really great people on the other end.

Sean Simon (27:56.535)
Yeah, so obviously relationships are important, but at the end of the day, it has to work, right? So what does work mean? So how do brands measure success when they’re working with Koli?

Tom Logan (28:08.642)
Yeah, it depends. It really depends on what the use cases are. success really at a very basic level is are they getting the content that they need. At a more complex level, is, is this, are these videos on our Amazon product pages leading to greater consumer education, which means higher conversion rate on page and lower returns.

Is the short form video that we have continued to test and mix into our TikTok ad strategy, is it resonating with people? Is it well aligned with the platform? Are we capturing a larger share of voice here? Do we see sort of a general halo effect on our sales where we may not have last click that’s off the charts from social, but people are

converting and they’re saying, hey, they heard about you on TikTok. So all these things matter in the overall consumer journey. Consumers have a lot of choices and the content is pretty important to that.

Sean Simon (29:20.238)
Yeah, I mean, if you’re working with a marketer though, they probably have a tendency to fall back on those marketing metrics, right? Whether it’s engagement or return on ad spend or, you know, whatever it is that they’re targeting. Do they come to you and do they try and set up tests? Like holdout groups that will put your videos on some products, but not other products on Amazon. Like, are they doing things like they would do in a normal marketing campaign?

Tom Logan (29:28.676)
Hmm.

Tom Logan (29:49.474)
Yeah, it’s very rarely Cohley content versus their other content. We don’t like that test because we can generate really any type of content that they want. And most of the time when we’ve started working with a company, they’ve already proved out that user generated content is successful to them. When we first started the company, we had to educate a lot on what UGC was and why it was important. Now, if we were to go forward and pitch that,

people would be like, yeah, obviously, but let’s talk execution, let’s talk strategy. So thankfully we don’t have to educate the market on what UGC is and why it’s valuable anymore. yeah, all those metrics can matter. If we’re talking influencer, we want to see really high engagement rate, high earned media value, strong reach. If we’re talking about

If we’re talking about product reviews, we want to see that we’ve been able to positively impact star ratings, volume of reviews, and ultimately conversion rates on those pages. again, just depends on the metrics, depend on what the ultimate application of the content is and what we’re using as a baseline. The more data we can get on performance, the more we can feed that.

information back into the platform and create like a feedback.

Sean Simon (31:19.074)
Makes sense. Okay. So earlier in the conversation, you mentioned AI a couple of times. One of the category specific questions is how does AI enhance UGC creation and optimization?

Tom Logan (31:31.78)
Oh yeah, yeah. mean, it starts with this concept of an AI brain that we have. Cohley Cognition is what we call it. So basically as a part of your onboarding process, you are uploading key brand materials, product information, guidelines, past performance data, anything that can basically tell the Cohley system.

This is who we are. This is what performs well for us. This is our target audience. From there, suggesting all that information and then kind of using that as like a, as like a agentic guide within the platform. So you build out a brief, you click submit and it’ll say, Hey, based on your brand materials or based on what we know about you, you may want to tweak this information.

maybe reword this or include this blurb or even down the road, we’ll be able to say like, pick these types of creators because of X, Y, Z. We know this about you. know they’re capable of creating this type of content and it’s highly likely to perform. So much that we can do to start to like guide the process and to take uncertainty out of it. Truthfully, I’d like to get the platform to a place where it can run fully on autopilot.

and that it knows the brand almost better than the brand knows itself. Do I think that that’s in the immediate future? No, because it’s people just generally want to be involved in decision making when it comes to content creation. And then they want to function more like a traditional sort of like mad men type of character rather than like a quant trader that’s totally hands off the keyboard. But I do think that marketing is heading in that direction where

where AI is capable of making better decisions in terms of what content to create and where to use it, how to use it, then they are. And that’s okay, they just turn into overall strategists who are pointing in a specific direction, running a variety of different tests and kind of refining from there. They’re the chief strategist of the lead of the orchestra rather than the one playing the violin.

Sean Simon (33:56.355)
Yeah, I’m tempted to ask questions about marketing automation and AI, but that’s an episode all by itself. So we’re going to move on. Throughout the conversation, you mentioned places that your company is the branch you work with place the content that they’re sourcing from Cohley. So how are, guess first, can they manage the distribution across multiple channels like from Cohley or is it, do they download and have to go have their own relationships? How does that work when you’re thinking about

Tom Logan (34:02.03)
Yeah, there’s something about that, don’t

Sean Simon (34:26.636)
the TikToks and the Amazons and the Yoppos and Power Reviews and all these different channels that they probably want to place the content. How does that distribution work?

Tom Logan (34:33.656)
Mm-hmm.

Uh, it depends on, on what they’re trying to do. we have like a Yoppo integration, for example, that very cleanly takes the product review, pushes to the Yoppos backend. And from there, they can very easily syndicate it out to Walmart, for example, very, very common use case. If we’re talking about a TikTok, you can push that asset directly to TikTok business manager. Although oftentimes people will prefer to download it and then have their team do post-production work on it.

They have rights in perpetuity as we talked about, so they can do whatever they want to manipulate it, stitch it into more of a mashup type of video, add their own sort of text overlays, things like that. So it depends on what the actual use case is. Obviously from a Cohley perspective, we’d like to be able to gather as much data on how that content is actually impacting performance because again, we want that information to be able to feed the feedback loop.

and help them better create content that’s going to perform best. But sometimes we lose that thread because they need to edit in post-production. So totally fine with us. mean, ultimately, again, we’re the engine behind all this. The more information we have on performance and brand, on preference and behavior, the better. But the nature of content is that sometimes it just needs to be edited by the team, and they want a little bit more hands-on control.

Sean Simon (36:06.158)
Yeah, makes sense. All right. So before we wrap, can you give us an overview of how pricing works? Not necessarily the numbers of what you charge clients, but like how you think about it for each brand.

Tom Logan (36:18.808)
Yeah, so we’re very pro pilots, which is a fairly new thing for us. But I think we realized over time that when we put our solution in the hands of the right brands and agencies, they have success with it. So if we can de-risk the decision to work with us and say yes to us and get started, then we feel confident in being able to build a really long-term successful relationship off of that.

So pricing, another change that we’ve made is offering more like flexible packages that allow for a variety of different briefs and brief testing as opposed to immediately capping them in terms of how many briefs that they can run. So typically the way that a client will work with us is to get started on a 90 day pilot.

at one rate and then they can either opt into a discounted annual rate or continue on with a month-to-month type of subscription. That works too. But we lean on giving them more and hoping that we become as much of a part of their internal systems and how they think about content and how they think about feeding these channels as possible.

Sean Simon (37:42.68)
I love it. Simple, scalable, and predictable. Exactly what I heard you want.

Tom Logan (37:45.028)
That’s perfect. Yes, that’s a great description of what we’re going for with this.

Sean Simon (37:50.958)
All right, Tom, thanks for taking us inside the blurb and giving us transparency as we look at Cohley. For everyone listening, you can explore Cohley’s full profile, read the Zach case study, and even ask them questions anonymously at trustblurbs.com slash cohley.com.

That’s the beauty of Blurbs No sales decks, no fluff, just real insights curated by experts powered by Vinny, our AI agent who actually understands your tech stack and your needs. I’m Sean Simon and this was Inside the Blurb. See you next time.