Away’s celebrity look-alike partnerships, Alex Cooper’s new beverage brand and MAC Cosmetics’ meme-centric collaboration are some of this week’s creator economy headlines.
Welcome to Ad Age’s influencer marketing news roundup. Each week, we’ll be highlighting the latest developments at the intersection between brands and the creator economy, including new partnerships between brands and creators, notable new features across social media platforms and the growth of creator-led businesses. Sign up for our influencer marketing newsletter here.
Have tips or news to share about influencer marketing and the creator economy? Email Gillian Follett at [email protected].
Away and celebrity look-alike contest winners: The celebrity look-alike contest craze hasn’t slowed since the viral Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York in late October, where the actor himself made a surprise appearance.
Luggage brand Away capitalized on the enduring virality of look-alike contests by teaming up with three winners—Ben Shabad, who was dubbed the best Jeremy Allen White look-alike in a Chicago contest; Miles Mitchell, who won New York’s Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest; and Jaipreet Hundal, the winner of a Dev Patel look-alike competition in San Francisco. “Even lookalikes travel with the real thing,” the caption of Away’s Instagram post reads.
Rhode and Matilda Djerf: 2024 has been a year of creator-led brand crossovers, from Emma Chamberlain and Kendall Jenner uniting their brands (Chamberlain Coffee and 818 Tequila, respectively) for a limited-edition product collection, to MrBeast, Logan Paul and KSI teaming up to launch Lunchly. Hailey Beiber’s beauty brand Rhode continued this trend last week, revealing a peppermint lip balm created in partnership with lifestyle influencer Matilda Djerf. The two influencers have been collaborating on the peppermint product for roughly two years, according to the caption of one of Djerf’s Instagram posts.
The MTA, Instagram and @subwaytakes, @newyorknico and @overheardnewyork: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) will soon phase out its iconic MetroCards—and with them, the limited-edition designs created with celebrities and brands. For its final MetroCard collaboration, the MTA teamed up with Instagram and three New York-based creators: Kareem Rahma, creator and host of “Subway Takes”; Nicolas Heller, better known as “New York Nico”; and the account “Overheard New York,” which posts snippets of conversations shared by users who overheard them.
The limited-edition designs, revealed in a series of Instagram posts on the three creators’ accounts, launched yesterday.
MAC Cosmetics and Tracy E. Gilchrist: Though she isn’t an “influencer,” per se, Gilchrist, the VP of editorial and special projects at LGBTQ media company Equal Pride, certainly influenced internet culture when a clip from her interview with “Wicked” stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande went viral. Gilchrist’s statement that people were “holding space” for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity” quickly became a meme, as neither Erivo nor Grande (nor most of the internet, for that matter) understood what the phrase meant. MAC Cosmetics tapped into the trend by partnering with Gilchrist on a video where she “holds space” at a MAC store.
Booking.com and Wes-P: Booking.com pulled off a fun loyalty program announcement by partnering with Japanese comedian Wes-P (real name Kazuhisa Uekusa) on a sponsored video highlighting several elements of its “Genius” loyalty program, including free breakfasts and room discounts, through comedic stunts.
TikTok’s U.S. ban battle heats up: A federal appeals court on Friday unanimously upheld a new law that will ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform. The ban is currently set to take effect on Jan. 19, 2025, the day before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. But TikTok yesterday announced it filed an emergency motion requesting the law be put on pause until the company has a chance to take the case to the Supreme Court.
In its filing, TikTok said if the platform were banned, within just one month “U.S. small businesses would lose more than $1 billion in revenue, almost two million creators in the United States would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings, and TikTok itself would lose 29% of our total targeted global advertising revenue for 2025.”
Meta updates its broadcast channels: Meta unveiled several updates for its “broadcast channel” feature on Instagram to make the previously one-way messaging tool more interactive. On Wednesday, the company revealed that brands and creators can now opt in to allow broadcast channel members to reply to messages and share prompts to start conversations within the channel. Broadcast channel hosts will now also be able to track metrics such as the number of interactions on their messages or the number of votes on their polls.
Platforms look back on 2024 and ahead to 2025: Over the past two weeks, social platforms including TikTok, Snap and YouTube have shared “year in review” reports highlighting the biggest trends, creators and user behaviors on their respective platforms in 2024. Pinterest, on the other hand, shared its annual “Pinterest Predicts” report outlining several beauty, fashion and design trends the platform projects will shape pop culture in 2025.
Alex Cooper reveals her new brand: Cooper, host of the podcast “Call Her Daddy” and founder of The Unwell Network, last week announced the upcoming launch of Unwell Hydration, an electrolyte beverage made in collaboration with Nestlé. The brand will launch exclusively in Target stores on Jan. 1, 2025. Nestlé did not respond to requests for comment, and Cooper declined to comment.
Convincing higher-ups to sign off on social posts leveraging bizarre TikTok trends can be one of the biggest hurdles for social media teams looking to maintain their relevance with Gen Z, as illustrated in the above video from German female wellness brand Her One. In the video, a young employee presents the “queen never cry” meme, which originated from a Korean webcomic, to their boss and shows her a mockup of a post the brand could make tied to the trend. The boss, perhaps understandably, is visibly confused by the meme—but the employee’s pitch did end up becoming a TikTok video on the brand’s account on the same day.
This post, from writer, educator and mental health advocate Blair Imani, is a response to influencer Dominique Brown’s death from a severe allergic reaction at an event hosted by pop culture retailer BoxLunch. In a statement to Us Weekly, BoxLunch said the company is “devastated by the passing of Dominique Brown, a beloved member of the BoxLunch Collective” (a group of influencers who regularly work with the brand) and is providing grief counseling to other influencers in the collective and to event staff.
