Antina van der Veen, left, and Naomi Bacon, co-founders of the new ChallyPop platform. Image: ChallyPop
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Bacon: ‘Huge Value Lies With Micr0-Influencers’
Our Publishing Perspectives readers are familiar with the seven-year-old digital marketing agency called Tandem Collective, created by Naomi Bacon and hired by publishers to create social media-driven campaigns for films, books, television and more.
When she spoke to publishers last year at the 31st Taipei International Book Exhibition in its professional program for publishers, she described the “fortuitous accident” that pivoted her and the company’s work toward being “focused entirely on community-building.” And that, of course, is what we talk about when we’re all going on about the potential role of various social media in reaching consumers in a book market. What social platforms do is build communities. What social-media involvement really is, is community engagement. What it’s really about is a feeling of belonging, of being part of something, of being included, not left out. Powerful stuff.
Bacon and her colleagues have spoken at publishing conferences including Madrid’s Readmagine from Luis González, FGEE managing director José Manuel Anta, and Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez (FGSR), and at trade events in several world markets, including at Frankfurter Buchmesse, and their presence on the scene has grown.
Having served as a kind of Virgil to many companies in their tours of the social platforms—guiding them between cool success and the inferno of digital disaster—Bacon now has teamed up with Antina van der Veen to co-found a new platform of their own called ChallyPop. Still set in the framework of influencer marketing, ChallyPop is described as an online competition platform on which everyone has the potential to be a paid Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube content creator.
Said to be based on a music-industry model, a publisher can use ChallyPop to set up a “challenge” with guidelines and a price budget. Creative contenders, then, are invited to submit their ideas publicly on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts, and upload a link to ChallyPop. A panel of jurors then ranks the content on quality, creativity, and effort without knowing what level of followers or engagements the material is pulling.
The client sets a number of respondents to be awarded cash prizes that range from £10 to £250 for the winning entry.
Van der Veen: ‘The Community Needs Something New’
In a comment on the approach, Bacon takes the earnest, straightforward tack many appreciate in her work. Rather than functioning as a cheerleader, she says, “Influencer marketing needs a radical rethink. We’re seeing diminishing marketing budgets, creator fatigue, consumer cynicism, and lower ROI [return on investment].
“Influencer marketing needs a radical rethink. We’re seeing diminishing marketing budgets, creator fatigue, consumer cynicism, and lower ROI.”Naomi Bacon
“ChallyPop is our solution. While macro influencers still have an important place in marketing campaigns, and we don’t see this as a replacement for that, we believe huge value lies with micro influencers who should be rewarded for their creativity—and not the size of their following.
“We’ve seen it work brilliantly for the music industry and now it’s time for publishers to get on board.”
Van der Veen—who comes to the partnership as the founder, herself, of a three-year-old book-influencer platform called Bookinfluencers.com—says, “With ChallyPop, we’re challenging bookstagrammers, booktokers, and readers in general to get creative and make content that stands out from the crowd because we believe the bookish community needs something new. ChallyPop invites creators to rethink their content strategy while publishers get to see new content for their books as creators compete for the top ranks. It’s a win-win at both ends.”
In testing the site, Bacon and Van der Veen had at least 100 people engaged in a weeklong soft-launch “challenge” based on their anticipated reads for this year. The aggregate follower count was 428,000, accumulating 77,000 views, 16,000 likes, and 1,200 comments. An Instagram reel about the launch went viral in several hours, gathering 18,900 views, and confirmed what Van der Veen expected to learn about more efficient budget deployment in campaigns.
Winning entries can be seen here on the generously purple ChallyPop site.
Three Simon & Schuster releases used in a pilot for the ChallyPop framework. Image: ChallyPop
What’s more, the ChallyPop arrival has included simultaneous challenges for a trio of Simon & Schuster UK releases (a thriller, a romance, and a fantasy title), with Under Your Spell, Laura Woods’ romance, getting the most entries—perhaps not a surprise considering the spell that romance seems to have cast on so many consumers.
Commenting on the exercise, S&S UK’s marketing deputy head, Richard Vlietstra, is quoted, saying, “When the ChallyPop team presented their platform as a way to reward creators with followings of all sizes and level the playing field in favor of quality over quantity, we jumped at the chance to work with them.
“We were so impressed with the entries we received for the challenges across multiple platforms, as well as the views and engagement they generated. The ChallyPop model blended seamlessly with our existing influencer strategy and helped create tentpoles of activity around the launches of major titles. We also loved that we could use influencer content as part of our Meta ad creative, which has sparked exciting conversations about using ChallyPop to source and collaborate with cutting-edge creators across Instagram and TikTok.”
The companies that Bacon and Van der Veen started, continue working, with creative challenges at ChallyPop being designed to complement existing offers from both Tandem Collective and Bookinfluencers, using their original read-along approaches.
And there’s a personal connection here that’s interesting. In 2023, Van der Veen was diagnosed with lymphoma and Bacon took over her role as CEO of Bookinfluencers.com for six months so she could undergo lifesaving treatment. “A strong friendship was born,” the two report, leading to the creation of ChallyPop.
More from Publishing Perspectives on book marketing is here, more on social media is here, and more on the United Kingdom’s book market is here.
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