“House of brands is a way that large digital-led conglomerates of the future are being built”: Priyanka Gill, The Good Glamm Group

Priyanka Gill’s fashion and lifestyle blog ‘Estylista’, became POPxo in 2015. That is when she moved from London to Delhi, because the startup’s audience was primarily in India.

In 2018, Gill launched Plixxo, an influencer management platform that has now onboarded 1.5 lakh influencers in India. In 2020, POPxo-Plixxo merged with MyGlamm, a beauty conglomerate co-founded by Gill, who also became its president.

In September 2021, the company consolidated its strategy and announced the formation of The Good Glamm Group, co-founded by Gill yet again.

In an interview with afaqs!, at the recently held third edition of Digipub 2022, Gill spoke about how The Good Glamm Group is helping brands under its umbrella to leverage its network of influencers and digital mediums, among other things.

Edited excerpts:

How big was influencer marketing and content when you started ‘Estylista’?

The fashion lifestyle blog was there for a very brief time and eventually became POPxo - the brand that we all know now. When POPxo started, influencer marketing didn't exist. It came many years after that. POPxo was a community and a digital destination, where women could read the most engaging content.

At that time, brands had just started working with digital publishers. In 2017-18, we noticed that influencer marketing was becoming a big thing. That is when Plixxo was launched. It then scaled up really well.

In 2020, POPxo had 60 million monthly active users across platforms. We were then acquired by a makeup brand, called MyGlamm. After that POPxo, Plixxo and MyGlamm collectively became The MyGlamm Group.

Back then, brands were not investing as much in influencer marketing, as they are now. But today, both content and influencer marketing form a large piece of the marketing mix that brands use to reach out to audiences.

How do brands benefit once they take the content route, or start leveraging influencer marketing?

Brands need to reach out to the users where they spend most of their time. Hence, brands need to talk to the users through mobile phones and social media platforms.

That’s where POPxo comes into play. We have a large social media presence and reach out to our users where they are. We are able to talk about brands in a context that the users find interesting. And, that's content marketing.

Similarly, users love following influencers and listening to what they say. Brands recognise this and invest in getting influencers onboard. This is a very effective way to create deep and engaging conversations with the users about the product that the brands are selling.

Does the customer acquisition cost (CAC) come down once brands take the content route to commerce?

If a brand isn’t a part of the The Good Glamm Group, they will have to pay us to create the articles, and for the reach that they want. This only adds to their CAC, because they’re paying a third-party platform to do it. But external brands can’t use content as an organic channel, because they don't have the audience.

However, The Good Glamm Group uses the power of content and its creators to dramatically reduce the CAC for brands that are a part of the group. This is because we own all three channels - the brands, digital media platforms like POPxo, ScoopWhoop, Miss Malini, Baby Chakra, and we have The Good Creator Co. app on which we track 1.5 million creators across India.

Tell us about the house of brands concept. There are several brands within The MyGlamm Group that leverage its content channels. How crucial is it to diversify and add more brands?

Do you want to build one brand that's valued at $100 million or do you want to build a bouquet of brands that are valued at a $100 million each? The answer, for us, is obviously the latter. Our user acquisition and conversion funnels are unique to us. That can be leveraged across a whole bouquet of brands. This powers our ambition to be a beauty and personal care conglomerate.

We have makeup, personal care, skincare and haircare brands that cater to different kinds of price points and user aspirations. We are a proud house of brands. And, I think it’s a way that large digital-led conglomerates of the future are being built. And, The MyGlamm Group is at the forefront of that.

Content to commerce, within the digital ecosystem, is easy to understand. But what role does offline play here?

The Good Glamm Group works on an omnichannel approach. We are present wherever the user is. The user is not just spending most of her time on the phone, but she’s also going to her local market and the mall. We want to be present at all the user touchpoints. The moment we know who the user is, she gets onboarded within our system. Then, she starts getting CRM messages.

It starts with an offline touchpoint, but we quickly get into the digital world and give her an online identity as well. The idea is to recognise that the users are coming offline as well, and come up with clever strategies to bring them within The Good Glamm Group.

How hard is it to choose the right kind of content creators to be part of your ecosystem and create content for your brands?

The Good Creator Co. is powered by a platform called Vidooly. It is a data tracking technology stack that tracks 1.5 million creators across all tiers - from nano to mega influencers and celebs. We know the content they're creating, and who's engaging with the content and their engagement rates. We don't see whether the content is good or bad, but we analyse the data. We’re able to segment them into meaningful cohorts and analyse their engagement.

It is not about a good or bad content creator, because creators are good at creating content, which their followers respond to. The Good Creator Co. wants to be the backbone of The Good Glamm Group in a way that we identify and match the cohort of creators with the brand. And, we do it through data science and technology.

Watch the full interview here:

Digipub Week 2022 is supported by MGID (Presenting Partner) and AndBeyond.Media (Associate Partner)

MGID:

MGID is a global advertising platform helping brands reach unique local audiences at scale. It uses privacy-first, AI-based technology to serve high-quality, relevant ads in brand-safe environments. The company offers a variety of ad formats, including native, display, and video to deliver a positive user experience. This enables advertisers to drive performance and awareness, and publishers to retain and monetize their audiences.

Every month, MGID reaches 900 million unique readers, with 200 billion ad impressions, across 25 thousand trusted publishers. For more information, please visit: www.mgid.com

AndBeyond.Media:

AndBeyond.Media is a global SSP providing new-age ad tech solutions to publishers. Our holistic platform with technology at its epicentre caters to more than 1000 media publishers & content creators. Being in the industry for over 7 years, our sole aim is to optimize operational efficiencies, maximize yields and provide programmatic solutions in order to monetize and generate incremental revenue through advanced and varied adtech solutions.