The Oscars red carpet influencer correspondents, period care brand August’s new “period fairy” and buzz around Rhode’s lip-gloss-holding phone case 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].
The Academy, Amelia Dimoldenberg and Reece Feldman: Influencers have been rubbing elbows with celebrities on the red carpets of every major award show this year, from Julian Shapiro-Barnum of the web series “Recess Therapy” at January’s Golden Globes to comedy creator Harry Daniels, who drew criticism for a question he asked at the People’s Choice Awards in February.
The Oscars was no different, as The Academy brought on Amelia Dimoldenberg of the YouTube series “Chicken Shop Date” and creator Reece Feldman, whose content revolves around his experiences working on the sets of TV shows and films, as red carpet correspondents. Dimoldenberg also served as an “Oscars ambassador” and helped promote the awards show with a series of celebrity speed dates at a luncheon for Oscars nominees.
Also read: Content creators flip the traditional agency model on its head
TikTok also had two red carpet correspondents—Joe Aragon and Yasmine Sahid —whose livestream from the awards show drew more than 1.4 million collective TikTok views.
Samsung, MrBeast and Dude Perfect: For the third straight year, Samsung Mobile U.S. is bringing back its Samsung Galaxy Creator Collective, a multi-day creator economy conference. This year’s conference will be held from March 27-28 at the Texas headquarters of YouTube creator group Dude Perfect and feature talks from MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson; the five “dudes” of Dude Perfect; and several of Samsung’s influencer partners, including Demi Bagby and Marilyn Hue.
Also read: Dude Perfect teams up with Smoothie King
Samsung has also entered into “a unique multi-year partnership” with Donaldson, who will include Samsung’s phones and other devices across his content, according to a statement from Marc Hustvedt, the president of the MrBeast company.
August and Morgan Presley: Period care brand August last week teamed up with comedy creator and reproductive health advocate Morgan Presley, who took on the role of August’s “period fairy.” Presley joined the brand’s existing “period fairy,” August’s Co-Founder Nadya Okamoto, in a series of candid social media videos destigmatizing some of the unpleasant realities of menstruating.
Lyft and Carrington: Last month, TikTok comedian @carringtonxx, who goes by the name “Carrington,” began sharing videos with unsettling audio (almost always starting with him gutturally yelling, “Darling!”) that users could play and pretend to respond to if they felt uncomfortable riding in an Uber alone. But it was Uber’s rival Lyft that sponsored one of Carrington’s videos last week, tasking him with promoting Lyft’s “Women+ Connect” feature, which connects women and nonbinary riders and drivers, in one of his one-sided dialogues.
TikTok revamps its creator monetization program: Last week, TikTok announced the exit of its “Creativity Program” revenue-sharing initiative from beta testing, a year after its February 2023 rollout. The program, renamed “Creator Rewards Program,” will continue to reward creators who produce videos over a minute in length, according to a TikTok blog post. Viewership of longer-form TikTok content has jumped 40% over the last six months, according to the platform. “Originality, play duration, search value and audience engagement,” will also factor into the new monetization model, according to the blog post.
In other TikTok news, Congress is once again threatening to ban the app in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t divest TikTok. Congress’s previous attempts to pass legislation banning the app have failed, but President Joe Biden says he’d sign a bill banning TikTok if it makes it through Congress. Ahead of the House of Representatives vote on the legislation on Wednesday, TikTok is urging users to call their local representatives with the hashtag #KeepTikTok and an in-app banner that connects users to their representatives.
Instagram slides into its DMs: Instagram is Gen Z’s preferred platform for direct messaging, with 72% of Gen Zers reporting using the app’s DM feature in the past month and nearly 36% citing Instagram as their “go-to” platform for direct messaging in an eMarketer survey. Last week, Instagram introduced a slew of new DM features, including the ability to edit messages for up to 15 minutes after sending and the options to toggle read receipts on or off and to pin up to three conversations to the top of the DM inbox.
Dude Perfect launches a streaming service: Dude Perfect, a group of five creators who have amassed nearly 60 million YouTube subscribers for their sports content and elaborate trick shots, have expanded from social media into streaming. The creator group launched a free, ad-supported streaming service, also called Dude Perfect, that brings all of their video content to platforms such as Roku and Apple TV—and to mobile devices through an app available for iOS and Android. The app climbed to the second-most-downloaded sports app after ESPN by the day after its launch, Chad Coleman, Dude Perfect’s chief brand officer, wrote on LinkedIn.
When Hailey Bieber’s skincare company Rhode introduced a new phone case with a slot designed to perfectly fit the brand’s lip gloss, it immediately went viral. Several brands shared videos of their own comedic takes on the phone case, with Benefit Cosmetics and Claire’s adhering their products to a phone case with packing tape and Oscar Mayer mocking up a bright yellow case with a slot for one of the brand’s hot dogs. But the buzz hasn’t died down since Rhode’s reveal in mid-February, as the above TikTok highlights. Dozens of creators on TikTok have featured the phone case in unboxing videos or “phone refreshes” over the past week, and one review of the case received more than 1.3 million likes.
Threads users can now take photos within the app and save post drafts, according to a post from Instagram head Adam Mosseri. Those features are the latest in a series of recent updates to the platform—a number of which are still in testing, such as a “trending topics” feature Threads has been piloting in the U.S. for the past month.
