The power of social media is such that there’s no going back. Its reach is wider than advertising and PR put together, and the burning question for businesses is how best to leverage this new commercial asset.
Stepping up to put its powers of persuasion more easily within the reach of marketeers and brand managers is Greta Dunne, founder of Marker Video. It is a content marketplace that collects short product videos made by consumers and sells them for promotional use. The brands buying the videos pay Marker, and it pays the citizen reviewers for their content.
“Brands need authentic, trustworthy content at scale as consumers have become sceptical about scripted ads and inauthentic content pretending to be genuine,” Dunne says.
“Personally, I didn’t like the idea that people are gifted free products and told to say that they like them when, in fact, they just end up in the bin. We don’t give anyone free products. We enable consumers to review the products they love from their kitchen or bathroom cabinets, and our customers can use these videos as marketing fuel with fresh content coming on stream all the time.”
Brands that register with Marker purchase its videos for use on websites, as social media ads or posts, for email marketing or YouTube shorts. What will make the company’s solution particularly attractive to brands, Dunne says, is that they don’t have to negotiate individually for every video they buy. Instead, they can get multiple videos from a single source at a competitive price compared with the cost of influencer videos.
Companies can buy once or as often as they like, and the pricing is pay-as-you-go. Videos can be purchased individually or in bundles, with a sliding price and earnings scale for the buyer and reviewer based on volume. A single video costs €200 to buy, and the reviewer gets half of this payment. The same applies to bundle deals, where pricing starts at €100 per video: content creators always get 50 per cent of the video sale. Typically, a video from an influencer can cost anything from €500 to thousands of euro.
“We are also launching a premium membership model,” Dunne says. “A business pays €120 a month and will be given a logo place on our brand page [where every reviewer is sent when they sign up] as well as a tracked QR code link they can use in multiple locations and places. They will get a 50 per cent discount on all videos for their first year,” Dunne says.
The process of selling the videos is two-way. A brand can ask Marker for specific clips, or Marker can contact the brand if a suitable clip is created. The company’s customer base is wide and growing and spans beauty and cosmetic products, hospitality, retail, commercial services, food and drink, lifestyle and travel.
Dunne set up Marker Video in 2023, but due to the complexity of the back-room operation underpinning the platform, it has taken time to get to the point of a full commercial launch. For example, Marker is responsible for verifying the age and identity of consumers to ensure the person in the video is the account holder. It also oversees the quality of the clips it makes available for sale, and about 60 per cent of the videos it receives are rejected.
Dunne is no stranger to the start-up world, having previously scaled and sold two online media platforms, College Times and Teen Times. “I grew the platforms to four million monthly readers and attracted brands like Netflix, Red Bull and Universal. I subsequently founded Marker Content in 2021, but later pivoted to become Marker Video when AI began disrupting written content,” says Dunne, who adds that Marker Video has now built up a bank of nearly 9,000 reviewers.
Dunne’s original idea was to create a marketplace to monetise blogs, but as AI started proving itself capable of writing content, she had to regroup. “I was trying to provide the best content possible, but most people are happy with ‘good enough content’ and AI was ‘good enough,’ so I had to step back and figure out where to go next,” she says.
“I’ve always been interested in the psychology of what makes people buy and what advertising works, and with the next generation of shoppers largely coming from social media, I saw an opportunity for ‘real’ people to talk about the products and brands they use and for brands to benefit commercially because this kind of ‘real’ content works.”
Enterprise Ireland had backed Marker Content, and when Dunne flagged her concerns about the approaching AI headwinds, her advisers there were quick to offer whatever support she needed to pivot. “Having listened to my proposal, it was very much ‘how can we help’ and I’m very grateful for that,” says Dunne, who estimates the development costs for Marker Video at about €250,000, which was raised from a group of angel investors, including entrepreneur and venture capitalist Brian Caufield, and tech founder Andrew O’Shaughnessy. Two new investors with strong social media credentials have also recently come on board.
“The next round of funding [€2 million] will be used to build the tech around ‘guaranteed human’ so that businesses are assured they are not buying an AI video and can proudly state that,” Dunne says.
“It will also be used to develop business insight dashboards where customers can see different data points around the people using and reviewing their products and services. Things like the user’s relationship status, their dietary preferences and their hormonal stage in life, for example,” says Dunne who adds that Marker Video will make it much easier for brands to get the precise demographic they want to target.
