Atria Books’ cruise passenger partnership, Meta’s new policies around sensitive content and Maybelline’s creator-commissioned product ad 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].
Atria Books and Marc Sebastian: TikTok users closely following the deluge of video content being shared by passengers aboard Royal Caribbean’s “Ultimate World Cruise” have for weeks been anticipating the first brand deal that would inevitably arise from the viral voyage. Few expected that the inaugural brand sponsor would be book publisher Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
Within days of TikToker Marc Sebastian posting a video begging someone to “put [him] on the cruise” so he could monitor the nautical drama, Atria Books reached out and offered to sponsor an 18-night stay on the cruise. In exchange, Sebastian is reading Will Dean’s novel “The Last One” throughout his voyage and leading a “World Cruise Book Club” on TikTok Live. The hashtag for the partnership, #MarcReadsABook, has amassed more than 8 million views in just over a week.
Linktree and Challan Trishann, Paige Gallagher and more: Link-in-bio platform Linktree snagged a digital billboard in Times Square for the entire month of January. But rather than just leveraging the massive screen to display brand messaging, Linktree is using it to offer free publicity to seven creators: Challan Trishann, Paige Gallagher, Brooke Averick, Connor Wood, Kurtis Conner, Abbie Herbert and Brian Jordan Alvarez.
The out-of-home campaign reflects influencers’ ongoing expansion from social media feeds to new marketing mediums, an influencer marketing trend anticipated to take off this year.
Grace Wells and Maybelline: In her TikTok bio, Wells, a videographer, describes her content as “epic commercials for random objects.” That’s an apt description for her latest brand-sponsored video, a “spicy” ad for Maybelline’s chili-pepper-powered plumping lip gloss. In the video, Wells documents the behind-the-scenes process of filming the commercial, including scenes of her dipping the lip gloss into a fondue pot and setting fire to the applicator tip.
Wells has previously produced sponsored TikTok videos for Maybelline, along with other brands from Old Spice to The Weather Channel app.
MrBeast’s X experiment: Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson yesterday uploaded one of his YouTube videos to X, formerly Twitter, as part of an experiment to determine the amount of ad revenue videos can generate on the platform. In his X post featuring the video (which has been available on Donaldson’s YouTube channel since September), Donaldson said he’ll be sharing the results of that experiment next week.
Meta introduces new teen protections: Meta last week unveiled a slew of new policies and platform updates across Facebook and Instagram designed to protect teens from potentially harmful content. These changes include removing posts containing “age-inappropriate content” such as self-harm from teens’ feeds and stories; automatically applying settings to teens’ accounts that filter out sensitive content; and directing users to crisis helplines and other mental health resources when they search for terms related to suicide, self-harm or eating disorders.
Teens’ accounts will automatically be put into the most restrictive content recommendation settings to limit their exposure to sensitive content, such as posts discussing self-harm or eating disorders, Meta announced.
Snap bolsters its parental controls: Snap also honed in on its teen safety policies last week, announcing an expansion of its “Family Center” parental control tools. Some of the new features outlined in a Snap blog post include parents’ ability to view teens’ privacy settings, such as whether they’re sharing their location on the Snap Map and the power to prevent their teens from using Snapchat’s “My AI” chatbot.
Tumblr shuts down its livestreaming feature: Tumblr last week announced it will be shuttering its “Tumblr Live” in-app livestreaming feature on Jan. 24, a move the social platform says will help it “refocus on the core Tumblr experience.” The announcement comes just over a year after Tumblr Live’s December 2022 launch.
Gaming YouTuber MatPat retires, the latest in a series of notable retirements: Matthew “MatPat” Patrick, creator of the popular YouTube channel “The Game Theorists,” last week announced he will be stepping down from his YouTube career in March and passing the channel—along with the three other channels in his content network, Food Theory, Film Theory and Style Theory—to several members of his staff. Patrick revealed his retirement plans in a video simply titled “Goodbye Internet,” which has accumulated nearly 17 million views over the past six days.
Notably, his upcoming YouTube exit follows similar announcements from several other prominent YouTubers, including animator MeatCanyon (real name Hunter Hancock), who told viewers he’d be retiring in a video earlier this month, and musician Seth Everman, who ended his YouTube career with a six-hour livestream in November.
Despite TikTok Shop’s recent rollback of subsidies that had incentivized sellers to launch on the e-commerce platform (along with its ratcheting up of commission rates from 2% to 8% over the next several months), TikTok Shop’s affiliate program still presents a lucrative opportunity to creators, says Ali Grant, partner and chief marketing officer of influencer marketing and talent management agency The Digital Dept. In the above video, Grant shares several highlights from a recent call with the team at TikTok overseeing TikTok Shop, including that an affiliate with 5,000 followers (the minimum requirement to join the program) has the same potential to go viral as one with 1 million followers—unlike on a platform such as Instagram, where the number of clicks a creator receives on an affiliate link largely depends on the size of their following.
Travel search engine Kayak last week kicked off a satirical trend joking about the brand receiving less engagement on its Threads content, jokingly writing, “Our first Thread got 14 likes. Now we get [three]. Here’s how we did it.” Ironically, the post has since amassed over 4,000 likes and inspired several other brands to emulate Kayak’s post, including REI and Microsoft.
Also read: Inside Kayak’s absurdist new ads from Supernatural
