Tums’ partnership with designer Nik Bentel, BeReal’s four new platform features and Prime’s Patrick Mahomes sponsorship 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].
ABO Breads and Grandma Droniak, Brunch With Babs and Retirement House: As the holidays inch closer—along with the stress over party planning and hosting duties that the season brings—Arnold, Brownberry and Oroweat (ABO) Breads is recruiting a small army of “granfluencers” to share their sage holiday wisdom. Lillian Droniak (aka “Grandma Droniak”), Barbara “Babs” Costello and creator group Retirement House each shared an Instagram Reel last week announcing the campaign and encouraging their followers to ask their most pressing holiday questions in the comment section. This week, the three creators will respond to several of those questions through a series of Instagram stories.
Tums and Nik Bentel: The antacid brand tapped into the enduring popularity of food-inspired fashion collabs this weekend, teaming up with designer Nik Bentel to create a wearable Tums bottle. Bentel, whose past work on a bag modeled after a box of Barilla pasta went viral on X (formerly Twitter) in 2021, designed the sleek, metallic Tums-inspired bag, which retails for $200 on both Amazon and Bentel’s website. Tums also tapped singer-songwriter GAYLE to don the silvery bag on the red carpet for the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball.
Shopify and MrBeast: Shopify is once again partnering with Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson—this time, turning him into the e-commerce platform’s younger and more boisterous version of Santa. Instead of mailing their holiday wish list to the North Pole, MrBeast fans can log into Shopify’s Shop app and request Donaldson buy them any item sold on the app for the chance to have him purchase that product for them in the new year.
Stanley and @danimarielettering: Roughly a month after Stanley president Terence Reilly pledged the brand would buy TikTok user @daniemarielettering—whose first name is Danielle—a new vehicle in response to her viral video of her Stanley tumbler unscathed after a car fire, the brand followed through on its promise. Danielle, who has proclaimed herself “Stanley cup car fire girl” in her TikTok bio, shared a 2-minute-long video over the weekend showing off the new car and recapping her journey with the brand.
BeReal gets more real with four new features: The French social media app (still used by about 13% of U.S. teens, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey) announced it will implement four highl requested features into the platform over the next two weeks. BeReal’s “Behind The Scenes” feature, which launched last week, emulates the Live Photo tool on iPhones and records a video of the few seconds before a static image is captured. The other three upcoming new features include “RealGroups,” which allows users to share photos and chat within invite-only groups; a tool to tag other users in BeReal photos or repost photos a user is tagged in to their own account; and BeReal’s version of Spotify Wrapped.
TikTok streamlines its Branded Effects program and jumps to streaming services: Brands can now partner with any creator involved in TikTok’s “Effect House” AR development platform to create AR-branded filters for their TikTok campaigns. At TikTok’s Effect-House-focused “Open House” conference last week, the platform announced all creators, not just those in a closed pilot, can now work with advertisers to produce Branded Effects. TikTok also announced that it will launch an “Effect Creator Marketplace” in 2024 to help facilitate partnerships between those advertisers and creators.
Additionally, TikTok released a recording of its hour-long “In The Mix” concert on Hulu and Disney+ on Friday, five days after TikTok streamed the event live on its platform. That live broadcast, along with three subsequent broadcasts of the concert recording, drew more than 33.5 million collective views across the globe, with nearly 10 million of those viewers tuning in to the “In The Mix” livestream, according to a TikTok blog post.
Prime sponsors Patrick Mahomes: YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI yesterday announced Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes as the newest spokesperson for their beverage brand Prime. The announcement is the latest example of a creator-led brand breaking into the world of pro sports, following MrBeast partnering with the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets in October to slap his snack brand Feastables on the team’s jerseys.
Speaking of pioneering creator-led brands, haircare brand Gisou, founded by beauty blogger and YouTuber Negin Mirsalehi, got in on the “faux out-of-home” trend for its holiday campaign last week. Emulating the mix of CGI set against real video backgrounds spearheaded by brands such as Maybelline, Gisou shared a TikTok video featuring a bedazzled CGI version of its hair oil bottle being lowered into Times Square by an equally fake crane. Dozens of TikTokers flocked to the comment section of the video to ask one resounding question: “Is this real?”
Instagram last week brought Threads’ VP of product management, Emily Dalton Smith, onto the Threads account for Instagram’s official creator-focused account, @Creators, to answer user questions about “being a creator on Threads” in an ask-me-anything-style post. Some notable takeaways from Smith's replies include that Threads is “working on” an in-app analytics tool and testing a feature to show view counts on posts.
