Snaps new ad tools aimed at beauty brands and the “Tube Girl” 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.
Have tips or news to share about influencer marketing and the creator economy? Email Gillian Follett at [email protected].
MAC Cosmetics and Sabrina Bahsoon: Sabrina Bahsoon, also known as “Tube Girl,” has become the latest example of how quickly creators can go viral on TikTok. Last month, Bahsoon began posting videos of herself riding London’s rapid transit system—nicknamed “the Tube”—while dancing, lip-syncing popular songs and pivoting her phone camera in a series of different angles.
TikTok users, as well as a handful of brands, quickly began replicating Bahsoon’s filming style, giving rise to the so-called “Tube Girl effect” that has soared to over 91 million views as of writing.
Over the weekend, MAC Cosmetics became the first brand to partner with Bahsoon, inviting the creator to walk the runway at the brand’s “Face Show” event during London Fashion Week.
Google and Taylor Swift: Last month, Taylor Swift announced she would be releasing her next re-recorded album, “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” at the end of October. On Tuesday, the pop star teamed up with Google to tease the names of several new songs that she’d be including on the album with a series of word puzzle games that her diehard fans, or “Swifities,” could access by typing “Taylor Swift” into the Google search bar.
Also read: Taylor Swift is everything a brand wishes it was
The influx of fans scrambling to solve the puzzles and unlock the “vault” containing the new tracks quickly crashed Google’s Easter egg feature—but fans ultimately solved a collective 35 million puzzles, leading Swift to unveil the song names on Wednesday.
Target introduces influencer storefronts: Ahead of the holiday shopping season, Target is following in the footsteps of Amazon’s popular influencer storefronts to launch its own “Target Storefront,” allowing consumers to view—and directly purchase from—creators’ recommended products. Since Target’s Tuesday announcement, more than 350 influencers have created a storefront, including fashion and lifestyle creators Ava Jules and Isimeme Edeko, as well as mental health creator and therapist Kier Gaines.
TikTok implements new AI labels: The rise of generative AI technology has made it difficult for social media users to distinguish between real images and AI-generated ones—remember the fake photo of Pope Francis wearing a white puffer coat? Now, TikTok is helping creators disclose when their videos are made using AI with a new content label that appears beneath the creator’s username. The platform is also testing a new tool to automatically assign the “AI-generated” label to any videos created using AI and has renamed video effects that use generative AI to include “AI” in their names.
Twitch teams up with TikTok on vertical video clips: In May, Twitch introduced its “Clip Editor” tool to enable streamers to crop vertical video clips from their Twitch livestreams. Twitch is now updating that tool to further streamline editing and sharing vertical video clips to other social platforms through a collaboration with TikTok. Starting this week, streamers will be able to directly upload the video clips to TikTok through Twitch’s Clip Editor feature—effectively simplifying a process many Twitch streamers were already practicing in hopes of attracting viewers to their livestreams with highlights shared to TikTok.
Snap unveils new beauty-oriented ad tools: Snap previewed several upcoming ad tools oriented around beauty brands at its beauty summit last Thursday. These included AR filters that users can apply to existing photos of themselves rather than in real time, and a new “Beauty Drops” feature enabling users to include brands’ makeup products on their Bitmoji avatars. The platform also announced its new “Beauty Bestie” partnership with L’Oreal-owned cosmetics brand Nyx, which will generate a makeup look for users based on their responses to different prompts.
Convincing brand higher-ups to jump on social media trends is an enduring struggle among many social media managers, especially when it comes to trends such as the “Tube Girl effect” that abruptly surge to virality. This week, non-alcoholic beer brand Days Brewing showed that struggle as its social media team tried to win their bosses’ approval to participate in the “Tube Girl” trend. This started with the above video and was followed by a series of TikToks documenting the Slack conversations and comment section bullying that led to the brand’s “Tube Beer” video uploaded on Monday. TikTok users seemed to enjoy getting a glimpse behind the brand social media curtain, as the initial video received nearly 13 million views—almost 10 times more views than the eventual “Tube Beer” video of the social team taking part in the TikTok trend.
Threads hasn’t been immune to the “Roman Empire” trend sweeping across the internet, which originated from a TikTok of a woman asking her husband how often he thinks about the Roman Empire, to which he replied, “every day.” Other women soon began asking men in their lives about how frequently their thoughts drifted to the Roman Empire, and a new offshoot of the trend involves people describing “their Roman Empire”—effectively shorthand for a topic, event, person or piece of media they think about on a daily basis.
Brands, too, have been getting in on the trend—particularly on Threads, where the trend of brands latching onto other brands’ post formats continues to dominate the platform. Wheat Thins kickstarted one of these “brand memes” with a Tuesday post (above) that read, “The roman empire would’ve loved wheat thins,” and a plethora of other brands, from Ritz Crackers to Uniqlo, inserted themselves into that post structure.
