Reduced infrastructure costs by 92%
Reduced in-house engineering resources by 70%
Reduced brand risk by enabling analysis at scale, with 86k channels monitored daily
Powered analysis of 15 years of social content in 48 hours
Improved internal collaboration and efficiency
With Gemini, Viral Nation improves customer brand fit and safety, scanning 15 years of content in just 48 hours.
With Gemini, Viral Nation improves customer brand fit and safety, scanning 15 years of content in just 48 hours.
A new partner for a new era of creator marketing
In every factor we looked at, Google Cloud was the most competitive option for us.
Nicholas Spiro
Chief Commercial Officer, Viral Nation
Once considered a niche tactic, influencer marketing has quickly evolved into a sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar industry. As ad investment continues to grow in this space, brands want to know that their dollars are being spent wisely through proactive brand safety management.
But just one problematic social post can be all it takes to damage a brand's reputation and cost significant sums of money in market valuation.
Viral Nation, which manages the world's largest global creator roster and helps brands grow through influencer marketing and social transformation, provides best-in-class brand fit and safety solutions to its customers, powered by proprietary technology built on Google Cloud.
Two years ago, Viral Nation faced a critical issue: its technology partner was no longer meeting its evolving needs. Analyzing historical posts to identify content that didn't properly align with brand standards took too much time. The quality of the customer insights suffered because Viral Nation's data infrastructure couldn't keep up with its growing customer base. To make matters worse, the return on investment was getting smaller as cloud costs rose. Viral Nation needed to find a more scalable, flexible solution. So, in early 2024, it chose Google Cloud as its technology partner.
"In every factor we looked at, Google Cloud was the most competitive option for us," says Nicholas Spiro, chief commercial officer at Viral Nation.
Automating the auditing process
Secure is Viral Nation's social media monitoring and screening technology, delivering brand-creator fit analysis and protection. Powered by Gemini, Secure audits and analyzes historical social media content at scale — not only text, but also video, images, and audio — across all major platforms, with 86,000 channels monitored daily. Anything that goes against the customer's brand standards, such as a drug reference or hate speech, is automatically flagged.
"When we were evaluating the AI models on the market, we felt that the competitors were behind Gemini," says Spiro. "Other providers produced more false negatives and positives, incorrectly flagged appropriate content, or analyzed data incorrectly."
When we were evaluating the AI models on the market, we felt that the competitors were behind Gemini. Other providers produced more false negatives and positives, incorrectly flagged appropriate content, or analyzed data incorrectly.
Nicholas Spiro
Chief Commercial Officer, Viral Nation
Secure works rapidly, and can scan 15 years of content within 48 hours. One of Viral Nation's partners used over 100,000 creators in a single year, with all historical video content audited by Secure, and Gemini's summarization technology providing short written summaries. If a human had carried out the analysis, it would have taken 36 years.
"We work with some of the world's largest brands and they want a deep background of their creators' social activity," says Spiro. "But when a marketer wants to run a campaign, they don't always have weeks to look at brand safety. Our old technology couldn't handle that speed or volume."
With Gemini and Vertex AI, Secure also analyzes creators' content topics and styles, detects previous sponsorships, paid ads, and unpaid brand mentions, and evaluates how well that creator aligns with a brand's marketing goals. That data helps connect brands with creators who naturally match their values and tone, to drive greater engagement and, ultimately, ROI.
"The key for us is being able to combine this social intelligence insight with scanning every frame of video with Gemini," says Spiro. "We don't think anyone else can really do that right now."
Driving greater collaboration and communication
Being able to scale with a reliable partner like Google Cloud is incredibly valuable for us because we can keep exceeding customer expectations while continuing to grow.
Nicholas Spiro
Chief Commercial Officer, Viral Nation
Despite handling increasingly large volumes of content, Viral Nation has cut infrastructure costs by around 92% and reduced in-house engineering resources by 70% since migrating to Google Cloud from its previous technology partner. It has also implemented several Google Cloud tools to improve its internal and external operations.
"We basically go A to Z when it comes to Google Cloud," says Spiro. "We have a bunch of workstreams dedicated to making our agency more efficient, and we use Google for all of those."
BigQuery facilitates data access, assistance, and analysis for Viral Nation's technical and business teams.
"When advertisers want a controlled, statistically significant method to show how a channel is operating for them, we need to be able to move quickly, reliably, intuitively, and cost-efficiently through our systems and interfaces to analyze that for our customers," says Spiro. "BigQuery is the backbone of that infrastructure."
Viral Nation also uses Google Workspace to enable better collaboration across its teams. In addition to real-time sharing and communication, using Gemini in Google Sheets, Meet, Docs, and Gmail, Spiro says the agency has improved its ability to collaborate effectively. "I'd have happily used Excel my whole career," he says. "But the collaboration just wasn't there — there were too many user barriers and pain points. And I feel that Workspace is the landmark in collaboration tools."
Always looking for innovative solutions to enhance its services, Viral Nation is focusing on optimizing its data and AI pipeline to offer more customizable solutions to its partners, such as auto-generating campaign briefs and improving creator and post discoverability.
"Being able to scale with a reliable partner like Google Cloud is incredibly valuable for us because we can keep exceeding customer expectations while continuing to grow," says Spiro. "It really has become a beautiful story between our two companies."
Viral Nation is a global leader in social media innovation, uniting powerful marketing services, proprietary technology, and creator representation to deliver social media campaigns that convert.
Industry: Media and Entertainment
Location: United States
Products: BigQuery, Gemini, Google Cloud, Google Workspace, Vertex AI