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- Influence Weekly #342 - TikTok Introduces Ads With A.I.-Generated Influencers and Avatars
Influence Weekly #342 - TikTok Introduces Ads With A.I.-Generated Influencers and Avatars
Meta Plans To Bring AI Chatbots Imitating Celebrities To Instagram?
Nii Ahene
June 21, 2024
Spotlight Stories
Did Meta Just Make Finding The Perfect Influencer Partner A Whole Lot Easier With ‘Creator Insights’?
Meta Plans To Bring AI Chatbots Imitating Celebrities To Instagram?
Priceline, Coca-Cola Cos. Shift Ad Dollars as Influencers Launch Their Own Brands
TikTok Introduces Ads With A.I.-Generated Influencers and Avatars
Great Reads
YouTuber Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson is expanding his creator empire, according to newly revealed court documents from his ongoing lawsuit with Virtual Dining Concepts. The filings show plans for a new beverage company, "Beast Beverages," and a mobile game set to launch in 2025. The beverage venture will compete in the influencer-driven market currently dominated by YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI's Prime Hydration, which outsold Gatorade at Walmart in March 2024.
Donaldson's mobile game aims to monetize through ads and in-app purchases, leveraging his extensive fanbase. This follows a successful rebrand and formula improvement of his Feastables snack company earlier this year. These details emerged amidst his legal battle over alleged poor food quality with Virtual Dining Concepts, which managed his MrBeast Burger brand. This expansion highlights Donaldson's ongoing efforts to diversify his brand and capitalize on his massive following.
Meta introduced a new 'Creator Insights' tool on Instagram to facilitate brand and creator partnerships. Creators can display key metrics like follower count, accounts reached, and engagement over 30 days to brand accounts. This aligns with Instagram's Creator Marketplace, allowing brands to directly message interested creators or find similar ones based on shared insights.
Travel creator Becca Alves calls it "a game changer" for managing influencer campaigns. The tool is part of Meta's push towards using AI to better match brands and creators, including a 'Recommended Creators' feature and testing an AI tool to predict organic branded content performance for paid ads. At its recent NewFronts presentation, Meta discussed these AI-driven efforts to facilitate seamless brand-creator collaborations across its platforms as it continues prioritizing creator economy initiatives.
"The BBC is broadening efforts to discover emerging digital creators by expanding its Creator in Residence initiative. The broadcaster's commercial arm BBC Studios is moving its TalentWorks division under its Global Digital Brands team. As part of the restructuring, the paid residency program will now offer three 6-month positions annually for up to 6 creators to develop projects affiliated with BBC's major digital brands like Top Gear and Doctor Who.
Residents gain training while embedded with BBC production teams or invested independent companies. The investment signals BBC Studios' aim to better connect with younger audiences consuming content online and through social platforms. The expanded program provides an avenue for digital-native voices to help shape narratives around BBC's globally recognized branded content as it prioritizes engaging the next generation of media consumers.
Campaign Insights
Drugstore skincare brand Cetaphil is pursuing a new influencer marketing strategy to reach male consumers interested in skincare routines. The "Made for Phil" campaign features humorous videos and unconventional product packaging aimed at appealing to traditionally masculine interests. A key part involves partnering with over 100 male influencers, including "dadfluencers" who create family-focused content. Cetaphil mailed these creators custom
"Ceta Six Pack" packages designed to look like six-packs of beer. The brand noticed a spike in interest from men after an NFL player enthusiastically endorsed Cetaphil products. The marketing push comes as dermatologists report an "unprecedented number" of men seeking skincare advice. In addition to the influencer collaborations, Cetaphil released videos depicting men using Cetaphil bottles on a grill. The campaign aims to make skincare appealing to stereotypically masculine scenarios while positioning the brand for the growing male skincare market.
TikTok expands its in-app Taylor Swift experience to celebrate her record-breaking The Eras Tour. Fans can complete weekly tasks themed around Swift's albums to earn digital rewards like profile frames and friendship bracelet beads.
After 11 weeks, fans who finish all tasks get a celebratory Swiftie frame. The experience also highlights tour stop videos and themed playlists, deepening the artist-fan connection on TikTok.
CeraVe's influencer campaign around Michael Cera's rumored involvement with the skincare brand won the Social and Influencer Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2024. Ogilvy PR got over 450 creators to fuel online speculation that Cera founded CeraVe before the brand's Super Bowl debut.
Influencers shared gossip about Cera's role, generating 15.4 billion impressions pre-game and boosting brand searches by 2,200%.
NBCUniversal is taking an unconventional approach to cover the 2024 Paris Olympics by partnering with major social platforms to assemble the "Paris Creator Collective." This star-studded lineup includes 27 influential creators like rapper Lecrae, gymnastics star Olivia Dunne, and popular TikTokers. The creators will have unprecedented access, attending the Games and trials to create custom behind-the-scenes content showcasing athletes, events, cuisine, and celebrations.
This multi-platform program aims to engage younger audiences by offering a unique insider's perspective. Advertising partners can work with NBCUniversal on sponsored creator posts from Paris. With iconic city landmarks as venues, Paris 2024 organizers are reimagining the Games to increase public accessibility. NBCUniversal's unconventional creator team allows brands to connect with the next generation through authentic influencer voices experiencing the global gathering first-hand.
Forbes and Walmart are partnering to host the inaugural Creator Upfronts in Los Angeles on October 28-29, 2024. The two-day event will bring together hundreds of creators and brands to facilitate earning, learning, and growth opportunities through social commerce. It comes as brands spent an estimated $21 billion on creator marketing in 2023. Programming includes panel discussions with insights from creators and marketers on enhancing collaboration.
Notable creators will pitch brand partnership ideas, presenting their creative processes, content and audiences. The event aims to celebrate the influential role creators play in shaping media, advertising, entertainment and consumer tastes. It will feature interactive roundtables led by Walmart executives and creators, along with curated networking and content experiences.
Beauty brands cautiously engage "tradwife" influencers promoting traditional housewife roles with an idyllic, polished portrayal. While reaching large audiences, these creators risk controversy by aligning with unsavory political views. Brands must tread carefully - parsing genuine homemaking content from radical rhetoric.
Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm gain mass appeal by glamorizing domesticity, but far-right creators like Gwen The Milkmaid inject anti-feminist conspiracies. Partnerships provide escapism for some viewers, but monitoring potential dogwhistles is crucial. As the divisive 2024 election nears, creators' stances will prove pivotal. Brands should prioritize resonating with the lifestyle's aesthetic over its fringe politics. Thoughtfully tapping tradwife's massive yet precarious engaged audiences could prove lucrative.
Interesting People
Influencer marketing agency founder James Harrison took an unconventional path, launching iamsocial after his daughter's success as an influencer. The "anti-agency" prioritizes creator relationships and personalized service over transactions. It utilizes technology to provide creators transparency into brand deals and performance data. When evaluating partnerships, iamsocial seeks unique personalities offering distinct creative voices. Maintaining authenticity is critical for monetization.
Harrison highlights clients like Kayla Sullivan and Gabriela Soares whose careers flourished under his mentorship. He cites challenges like the TikTok Shop commission frenzy disrupting user experiences and brands delaying creator payouts. Future plans include launching a culinary division, hosting an "Outdoor Con" creator retreat, and a soon-to-be-announced major initiative. Overall, Harrison's creator-first approach exemplifies how agencies can uplift talent in the booming influencer economy.
Owen Han, dubbed the "Sandwich King" on TikTok and Instagram with millions of followers, is a 25-year-old food influencer known for his quick-cut ASMR videos assembling extraordinary sandwiches. Drawing from his Chinese and Italian heritage, his recipes reimagine classics like a steak "sando" and bao with hoisin pork.
Han recently landed a cookbook deal, capturing his viral success transitioning from a healthcare job to full-time content creation after his grandmother's shrimp toast video went viral in 2021. Though appearing unassuming, Han meticulously self-films and edits, spending hours perfecting each post. As a one-man operation, his rise exemplifies the creator economy's potential for niche internet stardom through relentless passion.
Two Syracuse University students, Brandon Gilbert and Jacob Tilem, founded an upstart agency called Slice Sports Management to tap into the booming athlete influencer market driven by new NIL rules. Slice represents college athletes, pairing them with brands for endorsement deals promoted on social media. Rather than just elite recruits, they prioritize athletes with engaged followings able to deliver authentic long-term brand partnerships over one-off posts.
While facing challenges like brand conflicts and competition from larger agencies, the founders have quickly adapted outreach strategies like email blitzes to connect athletes and brands. Slice offers non-exclusive representation, focusing on microfluencers overlooked by bigger firms. The young entrepreneurs are betting on content creation being essential for athlete branding, seeing opportunities in underutilized platforms like YouTube. As they graduate, Gilbert and Tilem aim to keep scaling Slice's innovative model within the exploding creator economy.
Music veteran Ryan Ruden shares insights on guiding artists and brands in the creator economy through his firm Aerial Entertainment. A core philosophy is enabling artists to own fan data and facilitate direct fan relationships. Ruden notes you can build a multi-million dollar business from just 1,000-5,000 true fans, making niche success often more viable than mainstream stardom. For brand clients,
Aerial helps leverage music strategy for customer acquisition. At VidCon, Ruden and artists like Black Gryph0n will discuss charting independent paths beyond labels. Critical trends include owning the fan relationship, prolific creative output to break through noise, and financial literacy education. Ambitious goals include breaking a gaming culture act into the mainstream via innovative metaverse experiences, while imparting business basics.
Industry News
Montreal-based startup Heylist announced a $1.6 million seed funding round to power its marketplace connecting brands with nano-influencers. Heylist's platform leverages AI to match companies with social media creators having 10,000 or fewer but highly engaged followers for sponsored content collaborations.
The oversubscribed round was led by Accelia Capital and included investors like The51 focused on women-led tech firms. Heylist aims to "democratize" influencer marketing by facilitating earning opportunities for passionate niche creators.
At TikTok’s annual World event, the platform unveiled "Symphony," a new suite of AI-powered ad solutions aimed at streamlining content creation for brands and influencers. This initiative includes forming the Symphony Collective, an advisory board integrating leaders from notable brands like Mondelez, American Eagle, Wendy’s, NBA, and agencies such as OMD, VaynerMedia, and TBWA Chiat. The Symphony suite offers tools like Digital Avatars and AI Dubbing to enhance global reach and personalization.
Research from TikTok indicates a 37% rise in purchase intent and a 38% increase in brand favorability for ads tailored to its format, showcasing Symphony’s potential to revolutionize AI-driven marketing. Influencers, including O’Neil Thomas, express enthusiasm about leveraging these tools for expanded global reach and revenue growth, emphasizing the suite’s capability to foster authentic brand-creator collaborations.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, is reportedly developing technology that would allow users to create and interact with AI chatbots mimicking the personalities of celebrities and influencers. The feature, called "Create an AI version of yourself," aims to assist popular creators by having AI chatbots respond to fan comments and messages in a way that simulates the creator's voice and personality.
While still in early testing stages, this initiative aligns with Meta's broader plans for Creator AI to help influencers manage administrative tasks. However, concerns remain about how these AI personalities will be trained, implemented and monitored.
The Federal Trade Commission has escalated its battle with TikTok over potential child privacy violations. The FTC referred a complaint against the popular app and its parent ByteDance to the Justice Department, an unusual move signaling serious concerns. Evidence suggests TikTok may have broken laws governing underage users' data collection and privacy safeguards.
Rather than seek a settlement, the FTC voted handing its findings to the Justice Department was in the public interest, implying TikTok either violated rules or is about to. TikTok denied allegations it calls inaccurate, saying it cooperated for over a year addressing prior issues. This referral is separate from national security fears over potential Chinese government access to American user data. TikTok also challenges a new U.S. law requiring its Chinese owners sell or face a ban.
Snap has unveiled new augmented reality experiences powered by generative AI models optimized to run in real-time on mobile devices. A prototype instantly generates vivid AR experiences from text prompts using optimized, faster and lighter GenAI techniques. The optimized GenAI models already power Snapchat features like Bitmoji Backgrounds, customizable wallpapers, AI filters and lenses. For creators, Snap introduced a GenAI Suite in Lens Studio with tools to generate custom machine learning models and assets, accelerating lens development timelines.
Snap partnered with London's National Portrait Gallery showcasing AI-generated lenses inspired by iconic portrait styles using the GenAI Suite. The suite launched with Lens Studio 5.0, focused on productivity, modularity and performance boosts. Snap states the GenAI Suite empowers creators to unlock new creative dimensions by combining custom AI models with additional AR capabilities.
Kairos Group, a UK social agency known for high-impact marketing campaigns targeting Gen Z and video gaming audiences, rebrands as NewGen and secures a multimillion-pound investment from BGF, one of the UK and Ireland’s largest growth capital investors.
According to the announcement, the rebrand to NewGen reflects the company’s evolution beyond its 2015 origins as a gaming influencer agency to meet the demand for agencies that can bridge brands and creators across sectors. NewGen leverages its gaming roots and expertise in niche communities to provide top social and influencer support to blue-chip clients like PepsiCo, Porsche, Hasbro, and Samsung.
The consolidation of Kairos Media, Kyma Media, and Horizon Union under the NewGen brand aims to standardize processes and enhance collaboration across the group’s individual agency functions. The investment from BGF allows NewGen to further invest in infrastructure, data, technology platforms, services, intellectual property, and expertise within the booming creator economy space.
The U.S. Surgeon General calls for requiring warning labels on social media platforms due to mental health risks for youth. Dr. Vivek Murthy cites evidence linking adolescent social media use to the ongoing youth mental health crisis. He proposes mandating labels stating "social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents," drawing precedent from tobacco warning labels. While labels alone won't solve the issue, Murthy views them as a critical first step toward increasing awareness.
Data shows up to 95% of teens use social media, with over a third reporting "almost constant" usage. However, implementing such requirements would necessitate Congressional action amid a lack of updated federal laws addressing modern platforms and child online safety concerns. While supporters applaud prioritizing youth protection, tech industry voices object, citing free speech implications.
TikTok launched TikTok One, a centralized hub giving marketers access to the platform's creative tools and creator marketplace with nearly 2 million creators. Brands can discover agency partners, leverage TikTok's tools to create and scale campaigns through a single log-in. TikTok also unveiled Symphony, a new AI content creation suite blending human creativity with AI efficiency to aid scriptwriting, video production and asset optimization for TikTok ads.
Research shows native TikTok ads boost purchase intent 37% and brand favorability 38%, with 79% of users preferring brands demonstrating TikTok content mastery. The announcements aim to inspire creativity while enabling brands to reach TikTok's over 1 billion users at scale creatively and drive meaningful impact.
Registration Required
Creators had an unprecedented presence at the 2024 Cannes Lions festival. Several factors are driving this, including rising brand demand for influencer marketing, the new Lions Creators program lowering entry barriers, and no overlap with VidCon. Agencies like UTA are tripling their creator contingents. Many creators aim to network and learn from brands/marketers rather than just create content. Some hope to alter the conversation from one-way seminars to mutual learning.
Brands view Cannes as an opportunity to deepen creator relationships and integrate them throughout creative processes. For newer creators, Cannes allows connecting with seasoned peers. Overall, creators seek acknowledgment as strategic marketers versus just content producers.
Major advertisers like Coca-Cola, Allstate, and Priceline are moving bigger portions of their marketing budgets to influencers on social media. Fanta revived its "Wanta Fanta" campaign primarily through influencers rather than TV ads. Bodyarmor has increased influencer spend to a third of its budget, partnering with creators like Dude Perfect.
The rise of creator-led challenger brands like Prime energy drink and Chamberlain Coffee is also driving incumbents toward influencers. However, risks remain, like Bud Light's partnership backlash. The Cannes Lions ad festival is embracing this shift, offering creator-focused programming and expected attendees like MrBeast's company president. As consumers shift to digital media, tens of billions in traditional TV ad spending could be at stake as brands double down on the influencer marketing revolution.
Leading brands are prioritizing fair compensation and creative control when partnering with diverse creators. Pandora has earned praise from creators of color by allowing them freedom over content ideas and customizing contracts to their preferences. The jewelry brand even has "freestyle campaigns" with no creative direction. At Google Pixel, creators from underrepresented groups are highlighted through targeted programs, not just one-off campaigns. Long-term partnerships over a year are emphasized.
Adobe developed a pay rubric stating minimum rates for creators based on their audience size and engagement. If creators undervalue themselves, Adobe offers higher pay reflecting their true value. The brand especially aims to cultivate fair partnerships with aspiring, smaller creators. By giving underrepresented talent equitable pay, creative latitude and targeted opportunities, brands like Pandora, Google and Adobe have become favorites among diverse creators.
A disturbing Wall Street Journal expose reveals how parents pursuing influencer deals for their young daughters often have to accept building audiences that include large numbers of men sexually interested in children. In one case, a mother managed an Instagram account for her pre-teen dancer that had over 100,000 followers, with 92% being adult males according to Instagram's data.
Despite creepy comments and evidence her daughter's photos circulated in explicit groups, the mother continued posting, seeing influencer income potential. Instagram eventually shut down the accounts, citing child exploitation policies. But the economic incentives remain strong - the mother and daughter now debate letting the teen open her own Instagram, underscoring the challenges of the influencer economy. For brands working with young creators, the realities of monetizing digital audiences can conflict with ethical concerns over child exploitation.
TikTok has announced new tools that allow brands to create ads using AI-generated avatars that look like real people. Brands can choose from stock avatars or customize avatars to resemble specific creators. These AI avatars can be placed in different settings and voiced in multiple languages. While labeled as AI, some experts worry these realistic avatars could blur the line between organic content and advertising on the platform.
Influencer marketing professional Jessy Grossman believes AI can help creators work faster at scale. However, marketing professor Mara Einstein cautions that lacking human elements, the AI ads may struggle to genuinely connect with consumers. As the technology improves, these AI avatars could become increasingly convincing, raising ethical concerns around transparency and the future of human creators in the influencer marketing industry.