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- TikTok Grabs More Ad Dollars
- Instagram Ditching Affiliate Marketing Bonus
- YouTube Shorts, Has Over 1.5 Billion Monthly User Views
- Wendy’s Elevation to Influencer Status
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Great Reads
Co-Founders of Smooth Media on Building Media Companies with Creators
Smooth Media was founded by Josh Kaplan and Jenny Rothenberg who met while working at Morning Brew, another business media company. After three years of hard work at Morning Brew, they helped the company grow from six employees to 75 employees.
Smooth Media fulfills a huge need in the creator marketplace: capturing a creator’s value.
Josh explains, “Creators are incredible at building audiences, really incredible audiences on YouTube and TikTok and podcasts, and newsletters, but capturing the value they create is really hard.”
He shares that one reason for this is because “It’s a different skill set to build a strategy and operate a business than it is to create content and engage with fans and [reason] two is that you have to keep creating the content, you have to be in front of the camera, you have to write the word, and it doesn’t afford you much time to go hire people.”
Creator management services have been around for a long time, but often these services represent creators as talent, rather than helping them build a well-rounded company.
With Josh and Jenny’s background in building a media company, they decided that they could replicate that strategy and help creators build their own businesses.
Josh explains, “Our true customer is the creator themselves, and that’s a creator that really wants to build a business. Some people would prefer to run a community or they would prefer to be solo for a long time and that’s totally fine. That’s great. But the ones [creators] that are very interested in building a business, being entrepreneurial, and hiring and leading a team – those are traits we’re looking for.”
TikTok influencers say they're leaving its UK shopping platform over lack of payment and poor-quality products
Influencers making content for TikTok are leaving the company’s e-commerce programme, complaining of poor or non-existent pay, long hours and being forced to market cheap products, it has been reported.
The Chinese owners of the video platform, ByteDance, launched the “TikTok Shop” platform in the UK last year to allow brands and content creators to sell partners’ products on the app.
The platform promises to allow “merchants to build a rapidly scalable revenue stream” by hosting videos containing links to goods that can be bought or to take part in monthly promotional sales campaigns.
But several influencers with large followings have spoken out about the platform, saying that payments they were due have disappeared and products they were meant to be selling turned out to be of low quality, the Financial Times reports.
Products on the platform are sold with a heavy discount directly from manufacturers, often at a heavy discount.
Content creators are paid for netting a certain amount of sales, with bonuses worth thousands of pounds offered if they top a leadership board of top sellers.
Dr Carolina Are, who is both a content creator and an academic in the field of online moderation, has used TikTok since 2020 but abandoned the shop platform after making a video to sell socks that attracted 50,000 views. She did not receive any payment from TikTok, however.
“I started using TikTok because it helped me grow massively. I was curious to see if the Shop platform would be more lucrative for creators showing nudity, so I tried it to see if I could advertise things that were relevant to my viewers,” she said.
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Campaign Insights
TikToker Tatchi Partners With En Route For Unisex Jewlery
TikTok influencer Tatiana Ringsby aka Tatchi, has teamed up with mindful jewelry brand En Route for a gender-neutral collection of playful pieces.
Featuring funky mushroom necklaces and earrings, alongside nautical shark pendants, the unisex collection celebrates gender inclusivity this Pride Month. Tatchi, who goes by they/them pronouns, uses their social media platform to encourage others to be unapologetic in who they are.
Tatchi shares in an exclusive press release, “This collection wasn’t even supposed to launch in Pride. It just happened that way and it was beautiful. Each piece has a sentimental value like Frankie the shark. My shark necklace is actually a replica of my comfort toy, Frankie. I also had a connection with mushrooms. I love that it’s a gay thing now! They’re whimsical and fun — that’s what fashion should be. All pieces are about celebrating who you and who you love & feeling good about it.”
Reflecting on working with the social media superstar, Matilda Guo, CEO and Founder says, “We really do take pride in redefining creativity, giving Tatchi the space to explore their own creativity was an honor. Launching a gender inclusive collection during Pride was just a coincidence but that’s the whole point of the collection, being proud of who you are.”
Scrub Daddy uses TikTok to reach Gen Z
When Davis Miller and Kerrie Longo joined the social media team for Scrub Daddy—the cleaning brand known for its bright yellow, smiley-face-shaped sponges —they were presented with a monumental task: overhaul the brand’s TikTok strategy to appeal to the platform’s large Gen Z audience.
In just a little over a year, the two social media managers have led Scrub Daddy to become one of the most successful brands on TikTok, amassing over 1.8 million followers and 38 million likes across all of the brand’s videos. Miller and Longo agree that the biggest contributor to Scrub Daddy’s rapid growth on the platform has been their consistent focus on producing “self-aware” content that plays up the fact that their videos are advertisements for the brand and embracing Gen Z’s “almost absurdist” sense of humor.
“The idea of a self-aware ad has translated really well onto TikTok,” Longo said. “Gen Z is very aware of ads; they’re really savvy when it comes to ‘I’m being advertised to, and I don’t like that’ ... We know that you know that we’re advertising a product, and we’re going to throw it in your face.”
How Kristin Tormey Elevated Wendy’s to Influencer Status
Of all the major brands, Wendy’s has arguably created the most distinctive voice across its social media and other digital interactive channels. Known for a razor-sharp wit tinged with a bit of snark, “Wendy” has become a character in her own right.
“Referring to Wendy as ‘her’—that's our goal. We know we're a brand, but at the same time, we really more so look at Wendy as like this cultural influencer,” says Kristin Tormey. As social media and gaming manager for Wendy’s, Tormey is largely responsible for shaping that voice and persona across platforms, from Twitter and Facebook to TikTok and Twitch. She also manages multiple agency partnerships with the brand to ensure brand consistency throughout various campaigns.
“When it comes to matching the tone, that's a lot of work,” she says. “You just have to be aware of what's going on out there, whether it's what's in the news, what's in the industry, what's going on on each platform, and how that tone is.”
Case in point: Every January, Wendy’s hosts a Roast Day, where Wendy takes to Twitter to grill people. It’s become a fun tradition that engages fans, but at the height of the pandemic, the idea didn’t feel right.
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Interesting People
Jennifer Long: Using Instagram Reels And Authentic Reels To Grow On Instagram
Jennifer Long graduated from Boston University with a hospitality degree. During her senior year, she realized she enjoyed hospitality services but was more passionate about trying new foods. Her passion for food came through on her personal Instagram, and people began telling her that she should start a food page.
Jennifer notes that one of the trickiest parts of growing on Instagram is being flooded with invitations from restaurants and brands.
“It’s so easy to get consumed by all the paid sponsorships and all that stuff, like free food [and] free invites… Some places that were just average, I did post just because I felt bad that people were inviting me.”
However, Jennifer notes that a couple of months ago, she realized that she wasn’t “too happy with where my brand was going… I did end some of my partnerships with some brands that I felt I was posting too much of, or it didn’t go exactly with my brand. What I’m trying to do right now is try to be more authentic, basically bring back why I did this in the first place.”
As a result of this change, Jennifer shares that her following has improved, and people are enjoying her food content and posts showcasing her personality and life.
She notes, “I’m trying my best to be more authentic, which I think is the number one thing to a successful blog.”
Kyle Hjelmeseth: How Can Influencer Management Transform Your Income And Business?
Kyle Hjelmeseth is the CEO of Talent Management at G&B, the largest independently-owned telemanagement firm for digital influencers in the US. Today, G&B has over a hundred talents that they explicitly represent.
G&B was started after Kyle began helping his girlfriend, now wife, with her business emails, for her blogging business.
Kyle shares, “She [His wife] thought that because of my business experience, it would be helpful if I answered emails for her, like as a manager… I didn’t listen for a year and a half, but when I finally did, she made more than four times the amount of money she was making before.”
He shares that brands would offer his wife a hundred dollars, but because of his background in business, he had no problem asking for $500. This quickly paid off for his wife, and many of her friends saw the success his wife was having and wanted a similar service.
Kyle shares, “I started collecting influencers personally, just friends of friends. Everybody was a referral, and I did that all in secret while I had another full-time job. So, every day was like 7:00 AM to 1:00 AM doing both things.”
When he was managing around 12 to 15 influencers, Kyle went full-time.
College Sports’ ‘King Of NIL’ Is Racking Up Endorsement Deals At A Small HBCU
“At Power 5 schools, people might make almost $500,000, or more. I know that I’m at a small school, so I know that I’m not making that,” says Rayquan Smith, a 20-year-old rising senior with three years of playing eligibility remaining. “So I was like, okay, I know I can’t make this much [per deal], but how many deals can I make and add up to that?”
Smith hasn’t cracked six figures yet, says his marketing agent, Freddie Berry of Berry Athlete Representation, but his business has come a long way in the 12 months that NIL deals have been permissible for college athletes, who were previously barred from any form of endorsement under the NCAA’s definition of amateurism. He’s now signing contracts that pay him from $500 up to $1,500 or even $2,500 in exchange for promotional posts on social media, Berry says, for a five-figure sum over the past year.
How Feed Meimei Became the Bay Area’s First Boba Influencer
“Every week, I would have piano lessons, and if I did well, my teacher would give me a sticker. If I got a sticker, then my mom would take me to Tapioca Express, ” says Alyssa Wang, who goes by the online name Feed Meimei. “So I've always loved boba since I was a kid.”
For Asian Americans of a certain generation, this kind of childhood nostalgia is commonplace. But Wang, 27, is one of the only ones who has transformed her boba love into a career. She is the internet’s likely first full-time boba content creator.
Today, Feed Meimei boasts more than 605,000 subscribers on Youtube, 737,000 followers on her Tiktok and 242,000 followers on Instagram. Over the past five years, Wang has made more than 70 Youtube videos documenting her countless visits to Bay Area boba shops. Wang’s favorite boba shop in the Bay Area, Urban Ritual, even named a drink after her. The drink is currently one of the store’s top three sellers, according to founder David Zhou. Whenever Wang posts about Urban Ritual, the store usually sees a 10 percent uptick in sales.
In that sense, Wang has become one of the most powerful people in the Bay Area boba scene—a kingmaker of sorts whose videos, many which are filmed inside her car, often wind up having a real impact on a small shop’s business fortunes. It’s a future that Wang never could have imagined when she was a college student posting food recommendations just for fun.
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Industry News
Some of YouTube's biggest creators are missing from VidCon this year. So who is actually there?
In its first decade, VidCon, a conference for social media creators and their fans, was a celebration of all things YouTube. But in 2022, don't expect to see many of the OG YouTube stars at the Anaheim Convention Center.
The conference, which returned in-person on Wednesday and runs through Saturday, was created in 2010 by “Vlogbrothers” and authors John and Hank Green. It has since become the premiere destination for influencers and creators across all platforms.
This year, for the first time, TikTok is the primary sponsor of VidCon. Platforms like Twitch and Discord also have a large presence at the conference.
Here’s a look at which creators are actually going to be around and who is notably absent from this year's line-up.
YouTube Shorts, TikTok Rival, Has Over 1.5 Billion Monthly User Views
YouTube said today that more than 1.5 billion logged-in users are watching YouTube Shorts every month as it moves to cement its role as rival to short-form juggernaut TikTok.
Google’s YouTube launched Shorts in late 2020 to compete with the ubiquitous social media platform owned by ByteDance of China. TikTok, which saw its global popularity explode during the pandemic, had announced 1 billion monthly users in September of 2021, the last official data available, but was forecast to hit 1.5 billion this year, according to press reports.
To accelerate growth, YouTube has been adding new features to Shorts and offering creators rich cash bonuses including a $100 million fund for popular videos. It’s touting Shorts as a way to drive viewers to long-form video channels. And it’s stressing that it now caters to viewers across the spectrum of both short-form and more traditional longer-form content, leading to the “rise of the multiformat creator.” Its announcement Wednesday highlighted “interplay between Longform, Shorts, Live and Audio.”
Snap will pay 25 Black creators $120k in a new accelerator program
On stage at VidCon, Snap announced its first accelerator program for emerging Black creators. Over the course of a year, Snap will pay 25 selected applicants $10,000 a month ($120,000 total) to help launch their careers, marking a $3 million total investment.
This program is part of Snap’s 523 initiative, which aims to support underrepresented creators. Snap is also enlisting Google Pixel, UNCMMN and Westbrook Media as partners.
“Black creators face unique systemic barriers across the creator industry — from disparities in compensation and attribution, to toxic experiences and more,” the company wrote in a press release. “We believe one of the ways we can help remove some of those barriers is to provide mentorship and financial resources to emerging Black creators in the early stages of their professional career.”
Meta to roll out new monetization tools on Instagram and Facebook, including a creator marketplace
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the company is rolling out more ways for creators to make money on Facebook and Instagram, and is also expanding some of its current monetization tools to more creators. Zuckerberg also said in order to get more money directly to creators, Meta is going going to keep paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges and its upcoming independent news products free for creators until 2024. The company had previously said it was going to do this until 2023.
Zuckerberg announced that Meta is testing a designated place on Instagram where creators can get discovered and paid for content. Meta notes that the creator marketplace allows brands to share new partnership opportunities. Once a brand finds a creator that they want to partner with, they can send a project with the details to them, including information about deliverables and payment. Meta notes that there will be a partnership messaging folder within Instagram DMs where creators and brands will be able to filter through their offers and projects.
It’s worth noting that Meta’s take on its marketplace for creators seems to be similar to TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, which is the video app’s in-house influencer marketing platform. TikTok’s Creator Marketplace allows brands to discover top TikTok personalities for their marketing campaigns, which is what Meta looks to be aiming to do with its own creator marketplace. It’s clear that Meta’s Creator Marketplace will be part of its continued efforts to take on TikTok and woo more creators to its platform.
Meta is also launching interoperable subscriptions to let creators give their paying subscribers on other platforms access to subscriber-only Facebook Groups. The company notes that these exclusive groups are Meta’s first investment in interoperable monetization tools for creators, which lets creators receive payments from their fans on other platforms and offer access to exclusive features on Facebook.
TikTok and Oracle teamed up after all, but concerns about data privacy remain
On Friday, TikTok announced that it had started routing American users’ data to US-based servers owned by Oracle. But a timely report from BuzzFeed News calls into question what TikTok’s promise really delivers, claiming TikTok employees based in China have “repeatedly” accessed US users’ data over the course of at least several months.
In recordings of internal staff meetings and presentations obtained by BuzzFeed News, TikTok employees reportedly mentioned having to ask their colleagues in China to access US user data, as they weren’t able to access this data themselves. One member of TikTok’s trust and safety department team allegedly stated that “Everything is seen in China,” while another employee said a China-based engineer “had access to everything.”
These events reportedly occurred from at least September 2021 and January 2022, and follow similar allegations detailed by CNBC last year.
TikTok: We're an entertainment app, not a social network like Facebook
“Facebook is a social platform,” Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, told CNBC in an interview on Thursday. “They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph. That is their core competency. Ours is not.”
Chandlee, who spent 12 years at Facebook before joining TikTok in 2019, said his former employer will likely run into trouble if it tries to copy TikTok, and will end up offering an inferior experience to users and brands.
Facebook launched Instagram Reels in 2020 as its first real foray into the short-form video market. Last year, it brought the service over to its core Facebook app.
“We are an entertainment platform,” Chandlee said. “The difference is significant. It’s a massive difference.”
Facebook app chief Tom Alison told The Verge this week he sees TikTok increasingly stealing share from the world’s largest social network. Facebook plans to modify its primary feed to look more like TikTok by recommending more content regardless of whether it’s shared by friends.
“I think the thing we probably didn’t fully embrace or see is how social this format could be,” Alison told The Verge.
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Great Paywalled Content
Instagram Ditching Affiliate Marketing Bonus, Which Paid $400 a Month - Business Insider
Instagram Affiliate is ending its incentive program on June 30.
Instagram Affiliate, one of several monetization features that the Meta-owned platform has launched in the last year, is the platform's native affiliate marketing tool that allows creators to earn a commission off of sales they drive.
For several months, eligible creators were given the opportunity to earn extra cash on top of the affiliate commissions.
As with other products on Instagram — like Reels — the platform paid a bonus to select creators who used the new feature. Other platforms, like Amazon, have also leaned into this incentive model to get influencers to use their software.
Instagram offered to pay creators a maximum of $400 per month if they shared 10 in-feed posts or live videos using the tool — or $40 per use — according to the company's help desk. That's in addition to any commission earned from the brand. Meta also offered an ""approximate commission match"" for creators.
Meta declined to comment on the status of its affiliate incentives. However, Instagram's help center says the program will come to an end on June 30 and that all earnings made prior will be paid out.
TikTok Grabs More Ad Dollars, as Marketers Look to Attract Gen Z and Millennials - WSJ
Snack-bar maker Kind earlier this year enlisted the help of geo-targeted TikTok ads and TikTok influencers to help it attract consumers to a pop-up farmers market hidden behind a faux vending machine in New York City.
The Mars Inc.-owned brand credits the social-media app for a surge in attendance: Roughly 8,000 people showed up—a far cry from the 500 who attended a similar New York event Kind hosted in 2019, which the company promoted using Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram.
It “proved to us the power of engaging the TikTok community,” says Rachel Workstel, Kind’s manager of social media.
With its more than one billion monthly active users, the wildly popular video-sharing app from Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. has emerged as a darling of Madison Avenue, impressing big and small brands with the virality of the platform and its strong hold over Gen Z, millennials and influencers.
“If you want to reach Gen Z consumers, it’s got to be part of your portfolio,” says Chris Brandt, chief marketing officer of Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. The chain says it has doubled its spending on TikTok each of the past three years.
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