I interviewed 10 top influencer marketing agency execs last month for an upcoming study. Eight said they were increasing or always using paid amplification in creator campaigns. One even said (about brand clients), “if you don’t do paid, like I don’t even want to work with you.”  

eMarketer just validated this trend with a scary prediction: social amplification spend will surpass creator sponsorship revenue by 2028.  Good news for creators, as their posts will reach a wider audience.  But bad news for creators too: the dollars allocated to brand deals will shrink as more budget gets allocated to boosting. And audience size will matter less, which means smaller high-quality creators will gobble up more deals that would have accrued to larger creators.

Creators also need to include favorable content licensing terms in every contract.  And as boosting spend grows, platforms win again. (Emarketer)

Creators are landing C-suite jobs at companies big and small, and it’s accelerating. None of this is new… I still remember when Intel made will.i.am their Innovation Director, presumably because of his NAND gate expertise. More recently, MKBHD took a C-level role at tech wallet company Ridge. But according to a WaPo roundup from @Dylan Wells, the pace is picking up fast.

The EGC (Employee Generated Content) trend has been building for years, and we’ve been covering here regularly.  Companies are finally valuing creators as something beyond just media, talent or production services. Every creator who’s evolved past the hobby stage is essentially an entrepreneurial DTC (direct to community) CEO, with culture, product, and organizational skills that go well beyond the ability to look cute on camera. And with platforms like OWM from @Jeff Frommer, it’s even easier for companies and creators to hook up.  

Expect more alignment, and more acquisitions of creator-companies by non-media businesses. The OpenAI/TBPN acquisition is the tip of this spear for this emerging trend. It’s about time. (Verified, OWM)

Major retailer Target just overhauled its creator partnerships, killing broad affiliate and focusing on “Club Target” for small and mid-sized short-form creators and Target Ambassadors for larger ones (powered by LT. Amazon made its own move a few weeks ago, eliminating the halo commission for publishers in its Onsite Associates program. Old way: a reader clicks your blender recommendation, buys it, some bowls and few bendy straws.  You get commissioned on all of it.  New way: You just get the blender vig.

Major retailers are devaluing traditional affiliate programs and bringing their best creators in house.  If affiliate links are your primary revenue, your model is getting repriced. Watch what LTK, Motom, and similar platforms do next, as both let retailers host a creator shop directly inside their own site.  That’s one model that should survive the impending affiliate shakeout.  But it probably won’t stop there.  At what point does Target, or someone like them, eliminate the middleman and just hire their top ambassadors outright? @Wendy Wildfeur has more on the creator/attribution upheaval in her LinkedIn post. (Marketing Dive, Affiliate CMS, Wendy Wildfeur)

A new FAST channel launching on Roku brings 8 travel and adventure creators together into a single channel.  These creators span the gamut, from vanlife and boat adventures to family travel and off-grid living. Broad?  Sure, but then again, The Travel Channel had a good run in cable’s heyday, and Discovery/Group Nine/Vox’s Seeker found an audience for a bit too (although it may become an orphan now that Vox breaking up (see below). (Nomad Travel)

Last week I wrote about the micro-drama explosion, PineDrama and Screen Time. This week, a look at what’s next.

@Patrik Wilkens explores what’s behind Bytedance’s new PineDrama app.  Turns out, it gives them a huge financial and tactical advantage.  Platforms like ReelShort spend up to 90% of their operating budget on user acquisition… much of it on TikTok.  Once monetization is turned on for micro-shows (via advertising, not loose change), TikTok can drive traffic to PineDrama essentially for free. Meta’s doing the same thing with Instagram.

Back in January, @wenwen han warned me that AI-generated microdramas were going to be huge.  That didn’t take long.  An NYT story highlighted all the furloughed actors in China, replaced by AI.  Guess who makes the most popular AI model?  Bytedance with Seedance 2.0. Nearly 50,000 AI-generated titles hit Douyin in March alone.  Patrik and I chatting and he shared a shocker.  One of his clients is making micro-formats with real actors in green suits.  A single video can be reproduced infinitely, customized to whatever ethnicity or Vibe a platform (and ultimately and individual) wants. (The Attention Economy Weekly, The State Council Information Office)

A creator monetization platform recently pitched me with a bold claim: they had “new, unique technology that no other platform is using.” A few sentences later, they assured me they were “powered by proprietary technology that’s not used anywhere else.“

Bold. Decisive. You can tell because they said it twice.

I got excited anyway. They promised brand deals for creators with over just 1,000 followers on LinkedIn, TikTok, and beyond. Easy money. Until their onboarding hit me with some proprietary math: in their “unique’ world,  my 45,000 followers are actually less than 1,000. Their TikTok onboarding flow also delivered a fabulously unique experience, rejecting my authorization without actually sending or asking me for an auth code. Powered, I assume, by unique technology that no other platform would touch with a 10-foot pole.

My agent, @Aneesh Lal, remains safely employed. I’m not outing this groundbreaking platform… unless you ask nicely.

Pew Research analyzed where Americans get their health advice on social media. They found that 40% of U.S. adults, and half of those under 50, now get health information from social media influencers or podcasts. But they mostly discover the content passively and are selectively skeptical.

Their definition of a health creator is broad, and includes coaches, entrepreneurs and professionals.  Jay Shetty’s the Instagram leader, according to the study, and he’s more life coach than mental surgeon.   

Want to be successful here?  Use credentialling to solve the trust gap as you lean into your content and focus on uninsured and minority audiences.  Pew does legit research, the results are projectible across the over-18 US population. (Pew)

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All written by me – no human or AI ghostwriters were involved in the production (except for the cover art!) and AI was very lightly used for editing.

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