Work with any major brand on a campaign, and one of the first things you’re going to have to come to the table with is the data. If data doesn’t support what you’re doing, you’re throwing shit at the wall and hoping it sticks.

Right now, the only data you can get from creating a room on Clubhouse is the total number of people currently in the room. Those numbers can fluctuate from 20 to 100 to thousands (5,000 is the room limit), yet there’s no way to know the total number of people that joined in on the conversation from start to finish. For brands to invest, they will want to see first-party data that goes far deeper than that.

A brand needs to know who is in the room before dropping a single penny on this type of branded solution. Otherwise, it’s just spray and pray of a brand’s messaging. Where do these listeners live? What are they interested in? What kind of rooms are they typically in? Are they passive listeners, or are they typically moderating and speaking?

When they are listening, what are they listening to? When they are speaking, what topics do they speak on? What do they do for a living? All of this data is completely accessible to Clubhouse, and I would be surprised if they aren’t already thinking about it. This is table stakes.

Every month it seems as though the app pivots to a new set of topics. The last few months were millionaire rooms, and the latest topic of interest is NFTs. The consistent theme, however, has been the endless conversation around who’s the racist of the week or who pulled off the latest scam.

These conversations can get messy, and they’re a brand safety problem. For instance, you might have a scammer bringing down the people they are on stage with for being a counterpart at the scene of the crime. A room might have thousands of listeners discussing drama about a previous room and calling out every individual that was on stage with the scammer as supporters of the scammer. Many times, these people have no idea they are on stages with someone who’s pulling scams on their listeners, or they simply didn’t use the opportunity to speak up in someone’s defense.

Imagine a brand holding a discussion and a known scammer ends up on stage next to that brand’s logo? Now imagine someone takes a screenshot and posts it elsewhere? Not a good look.

Brands want to know they are being represented in a safe space, and unless Clubhouse can fix some of these simple problems, it will not be a place brands can trust.

Throw a party and you want everyone to show up, right? On Clubhouse, it’s really hard to guarantee what your audience for a particular conversation may be. There’s no rhyme or reason to the content that resonates best.

Right now, Clubhouse audiences are totally dependent on who’s on stage — and that often means influencers with a significant following. Why? Similar to Instagram, as soon as a user gets on a stage to speak, their followers are notified that they are in a room speaking. Most rooms with 1,000 people or more will have numerous influencers on stage with hundreds of thousands of followers and, in some cases, millions. But like serving an ad to a user on a publisher’s site, that influencer needs to be highly relevant to your audience.

That being said, every speaker on Clubhouse is literally an ad. If you speak about design and have thousands of followers, then it’s likely that your followers are engaged in design content. Once you have the right size audience (a difficult enough task unless you’re jamming your stage with multiple influencers), you then have to think about how to keep them in the room. So how does a brand ensure that an influencer’s audience is the exact right audience for their brand? Again, that data is not accessible. And unless you are a megastar, you may only end up with a room of 10-20 people. It’s happened plenty of times.

Bots are also becoming increasingly problematic — a challenge that tech giants like Twitter and Facebook’s Instagram have been addressing for quite a while. Clearly, the bigger players have been getting a head start on brand safety and bot issues, while Clubhouse’s small team has been focusing primarily on addressing scalability issues, creating a huge opening for tech giants to acquire and monetize Clubhouse.

Here are a few simple answers:

• Users need to have full access to data around who their followers are.
• Moderators need the ability to pull data from any room they create to understand who is there and what they do (while maintaining data privacy).
• Identify scammers and bad users, and remove them from the platform.
• Identify how bots are being created, who they are and kick them off the platform quickly.

Clubhouse has developed a beautiful app and experience — it offers the opportunity to engage and interact in inspiring conversations, meet new people and establish relationships. If Clubhouse can get it right, there are huge opportunities for brands to connect with a highly engaged audience. But until the platform fixes these issues, it won’t be ready for brands. And let’s be clear, their window to address these issues is getting smaller by the week as Twitter and Facebook surge forward with their audio solutions.

That being said, would it be a wise decision for Clubhouse to simply sell to someone like Facebook or Twitter? It sure would speed up brand opportunities and make a small number of people very rich.

We can’t forget that in early March, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, hopped in a Clubhouse room to share that his team had been working on audio chat for quite some time. Shortly after that discussion, screenshots from their solution surfaced and looked a heck of a lot like — you guessed it, Clubhouse.

All of the issues outlined above are solutions that both Twitter and Facebook can address at a rapid pace, not only because of the amount of money they have but because of the size of the teams that they have available to work on them. It remains to be seen whether Clubhouse goes for a deal. Every brand will be paying close attention.

____

Walter Geer III is the Executive Creative Director of Experience Design at VMLY&R.