Konrad Cunha Dantas started his career as a 30-second commercial finisher and became the owner of the main funk music video production company in the country.
KondZilla is the main producer of funk videos in Brazil and was responsible for revealing artists such as Kevinho, Mc Kekel, MC Fioti, Lexa, MC Dede, Jottap, Mila, MC Hollywood, MC MM, among many others.
KondZilla’s YouTube channel currently has more than 65 million subscribers and is the largest YouTube channel in Brazil and Latin America, in addition to being the seventh largest music channel in the world. In addition to the millions of hits of music videos, the production company is also the creator of the series Sintonia, launched by Netflix in 2019. The series already has three seasons.
Currently, the production and record label manages more than 100 artists and is headed by the Brazilian creative director, producer and entrepreneur Konrad Cunha Dantas (33), known by the same name as the company, KondZilla.
Before becoming a producer, Konrad worked in advertising as a 30-second commercial finisher. Today, KondZilla is an advertising case, with campaigns for companies such as Nubank, Orloff and Yoki, and nominations in awards such as Cannes (2017) and Cabor, where it won the Production category in 2020.
“I wanted to attract the attention of the advertising market because I wanted to be an audiovisual director,” said Konrad.
Recently, KondZilla announced a partnership with Humanz in Brazil, which aims to democratize influencer marketing in the country. The partnership aims to offer opportunities for young people with more than a thousand followers who live on the periphery or who live outside large urban centers to produce content for brands.
KondZilla has become a successful case when it comes to the release of singers. How do you see this trajectory?
KondZilla was born helping to enhance the voice of a lot of talent from the periphery and today we have the opportunity to make a 360 gesture on top of the things I believe in. And today I only invest 100% in the things I believe in. If I have any doubts, if someone tries to convince me of something that doesn’t make sense to me, I don’t invest, I don’t put our team to dedicate themselves to that project. Today, I only do what I believe in and I have this opportunity to produce and invest only in things that make sense to me. So not having a partner gives me this chance to do everything in my heart and everything I believe in, I guess that’s the word.
How did KondZilla’s relationship with the brands begin and how did that impact the company?
In fact, the company started because I wanted to get the attention of advertisers. So in 2011, 2012, I wanted to attract the attention of the advertising market because I wanted to be an audiovisual director. At that time, the position that had the most prestige in Brazil was TVC director, director of a 30-second commercial to air on TV, so as I didn’t study at FAAP, Belas Artes, ESPM, at ECA, I wanted to draw the attention of someone way. So, zero prejudice about it, I even want that when I have children and they want to work with communication I have the opportunity to help them study in these places, but I didn’t study and I would compete with this whole class, so I I looked for a way to get the attention of advertisers and found the funk clips for that. If we take an interview with me from 2016, I was already saying that I would combine funk with advertising. We are in 2022, six years have passed. I’m super happy to be recognized for doing this, but it’s not something that started from now, something that started in 2011/2012, and in 2016 I had the first opportunity to say that I was going to do this, but before I started working with funk clip, I was a 30 second commercial finisher, I was already working in the advertising industry as an intern. So I got into advertising before getting into funk.
Influencers have become commonplace in advertisements, videos, etc. How do you see this?
If we cut out this word ‘influencer’, we will see that it is very broad. If the influencer has no social impact, I don’t know if it has to be called an influencer. They ended up trivializing that word. Did this person help change someone’s life? At the. So influencer of what? To buy a consumer good? So in the influencer, influence marketing, is different. For me, the biggest influencers in Brazil today are called: Preto Zez, Djamila Ribeiro, Emicida, Celso Athayde, Nina Silva, these people are influencers and are helping to transform Brazil. Someone who dances to a song for someone to buy some kind of product is influence marketing.
How do you work with the creative economy and what is its impact on your daily life?
I was born digital producing entertainment for digital, music, content, series. That’s the nature of the company, creative economy I’ve been doing for 15 years.
How long do you believe the Creative Economy will last? To be the, shall we say, ‘model of the future’?
I think it’s a little confusing when it comes to the model, but I believe that digital, entertainment and content production to distribute in any vehicle on the internet is an irreversible path.
Today, there are many platforms and trends emerging on them. How do you see this movement?
Today, who sets the trend is who delivers the most reach to the public base. This changes when the platform wants to charge the producer to pay for the delivery of the content. Let’s take all the platforms that were already number one in terms of consumption, in terms of usage time that the user spent within that application, for example. They were already number one and stopped being when they started charging to increase the scope of delivery. That hasn’t changed over these nearly 15 years of experience, it hasn’t changed that characteristic of the number one platform and the platform that drops from number one to number 10. The platform that respects this will continue to be number one, like TikTok today, but tomorrow I don’t know anymore.
You announced the partnership with Humanz recently, how will it impact the lives of the people who will be helped?
In the pandemic, we saw that we needed to work with other talents from the periphery who were not singers. I think that the role of Humanz within the periphery of Brazil and this new phase of KondZilla show this plurality of talents, that the favela doesn’t just have soccer players and funkers, it has a lot of other talents. There is no way for me to distribute on Spotify, for example, the work of someone who is not a singer, unless that person tries to sing or, suddenly, makes a podcast that is a product that Spotify has been investing in. But if you think about content production in general, there are a million other types of talents, so Humanz comes to connect the advertising market with these content creators and KondZilla does this role of aggregator very well, which plugs the producer of content, whether music or audiovisual content, with the channel. And Humanz is playing this role to plug the advertiser with the content producer, so Humanz is an aggregator too.
And what about the market itself? How should this partnership impact the sector?
Humanz is an opportunity for the advertising market to be more assertive as it is an artificial intelligence platform for influencer marketing. I need to communicate with the new housewife, I heard a lot about this in my first advertising project. My first advertising project on Conspiração, which I did in 2016, was to connect Nestl with the new housewife, who was no longer just a 45-year-old woman with two children, but the new housewife, who was an 18-year-old girl. years that she had just left her parents’ house and went to live alone. So, all of a sudden, I have to talk to the 18-year-old woman who has just moved out of her parents’ house, and through Humanz I can identify which talent connects with this target. We can be very assertive in terms of age, gender, geolocation, so there are projects that are regional, there are projects that make more sense to hire an influencer who, in theory, is smaller, but he has a higher conversion rate because engagement of him bigger. There are many people who have 20 million followers who do not convert sales, at the end of the day, we are talking about sales here, sales conversion. So Humanz will help advertisers connect with influencer marketing talent that will be able to convert into sales, because it’s no use being just famous and having a lot of followers.
