Influencers Can't Talk About Your Product Like an Expert Can

01 /The Concept

The Desire Company's stated mission is "educating buyers through expert content."

That expert content comes in four video formats:

- Product recommendations for a specific activity – for instance, which yoga mats are actually worth buying.

- How-to demonstrations using a specific product – for instance, how to make a smoothie in three easy steps with a particular blender from a particular brand.

- Tutorial series: multi-video sets on a defined topic – such as training your dog, showcasing a range of products from a single brand.

- Founder stories, in which brand founders explain how their products came to exist and why they turned out the way they did.

The underlying goal of every video is to show off brand products in the context of real use and genuine personal expertise.

"Experts" here means actual experts – not influencers of the photogenic-blogger-gushing-about-a-product variety.

That's the core differentiator from the ocean of other online video content:

- 93% of The Desire Company's experts hold relevant degrees, advanced qualifications, or recognized certifications in their subject areas.

- 95% have more than 5 years of hands-on experience in their field; 65% have more than 10 years.

- The expert roster is deliberately diverse – curated to include faces and voices that resonate across a wide range of target audiences, spanning ethnicity, age, gender, personal style, and communication approach.

The Desire Company handles the full production cycle: concept development, scripting, expert matching, shooting, and editing. They also offer an embeddable widget platform for placing finished videos on web pages, with built-in analytics tracking video views, product interest, and engagement – via clicks online or QR code scans in physical retail settings.

Finished videos can go anywhere the client wants: their own website, social channels, paid advertising, or in-store displays.

Pricing is negotiated per client.

The company reports that:

- Adding their videos increases average time on site by 62%.

- People who watch a video buy at 5x the rate of non-viewers.

- That translates to a 39% reduction in customer acquisition cost.

The Desire Company counts well-known names among its clients, including HP, Sonos, Linksys, Best Buy, and Bose.

The startup has now raised a new undisclosed round that puts its valuation at $97M. Prior to this, it had raised a total of $19.4M.

02 /Why It Matters

Startuping [last covered The Desire Company](/review/chestnaja-reklama-bolshaja-glupost-ili-bolshaja-cel) at the end of last year, when it closed an $8.36M round. The most significant development since then isn't the new capital – it's a complete business model change. The actual work looks the same.

Previously, The Desire Company was B2C: a consumer site featuring expert video reviews of products. Revenue came from affiliate commissions when viewers bought featured items – provided the brand had an affiliate program or the startup had struck a deal.

The honesty was baked into the process. Experts received a batch of different products without being told which ones carried affiliate arrangements. They were paid for participation, not for favorable opinions, and chose what to feature based purely on their own assessment.

Now the company operates B2B: brands commission the same types of videos featuring their products, and pay for production upfront. The expert still has to stake their professional reputation on what they say about a specific product from a specific brand.

This pivot was deliberate. The Desire Company positioned itself in the rapidly expanding retail media market – advertising and content that lives not in traditional media (magazines, news sites, blogs) but at the point of retail: on e-commerce pages, marketplaces, and in physical stores. Retail media can be straight advertising, but it can also be something more substantive – like an expert how-to video.

The key feature of retail media is timing: it meets buyers during the shopping process itself, at exactly the moment a purchase decision is forming. That proximity lets it tip shoppers toward a specific product or trigger an entirely unplanned purchase.

And brands can place retail media not just on their own properties. They can buy placements on marketplaces and in retailers that carry their products alongside competing brands.

The scale here is striking. Amazon earned $47B in marketplace advertising in 2023 – up from $12.63B in 2019. On Instacart, advertising already accounts for 30% of revenue, and ad revenues are growing even as order volumes plateau. Those two trends are almost certainly connected.

Retail media is also growing faster than search or social advertising ever did. Search took 14 years to go from $1B to $30B. Social took 11. Retail media hit that same trajectory in 5 years.

The Desire Company's timing on this pivot was well-calibrated.

03 /Opportunities

A B2C startup targeting millions of consumers sounds more exciting than a B2B company selling to a few dozen enterprise buyers. All those consumers, all those potential sales. But attracting millions of individuals and converting enough of them to generate real revenue is brutally hard.

B2B is more grounded. Larger deal sizes mean real revenue can come from a manageable number of buyers – reachable within a reasonable timeframe with realistic resources.

So the first broad takeaway, especially for founders of B2C startups: can you flip to B2B? It's often a faster and cleaner path to meaningful revenue.

The more specific direction is retail media.

Content production for brands is one entry point – videos that brands use on their own properties and in retail advertising. The format can vary: purely promotional, expert-led like The Desire Company, or entertaining and shareable.

One interesting approach to AI-assisted brand content: Hive3, covered in late 2022. It takes brand briefs and runs creative contests among designers – with one rule: entries must be created with AI tools. The parent company Forum3 raised $10M on this.

For content discovery rather than creation, there's Catch+Release, [covered here](/review/oni-perestanut-sozdavat-ty-nachnjosh-nahodit) last summer. Its thesis: the most engaging video content isn't scripted – it just happens accidentally, to ordinary people. So the startup built a platform where video creators connect their feeds, and brands search that library by topic and keyword. When a brand finds a clip it wants, it can license it instantly through the platform for use in advertising – and optionally reshoot the same concept at higher production quality with professional talent and product placement. Catch+Release raised $31.3M.

Each of these approaches is interesting on its own terms. But the single most important observation is this: retail media is growing, which means brands will need ever more content of every type.

The companies that win here won't be the ones producing everything in-house. They'll be the ones who build the platform where others produce it – because only that model scales fast enough to matter.