Creator and influencer trends brand marketers need to know about right now

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 gillian.follett@adage.com. New deals Maybelline and Jojo Siwa: Maybelline took a page from Fox’s “The Masked Singer” last week to promote its “Super Stay Teddy Tint” lip product, disguising a mystery influencer with a red teddy bear mascot head and tasking the person (who Maybelline referred to only as “Teddy”) with handing out its lip tints at five surprise pop-ups throughout New York. The weeklong lip tint scavenger hunt, which also involved Maybelline sharing clues about Teddy’s whereabouts on its social channels, ended with Teddy being unmasked on “Good Morning America” as Jojo Siwa. Creative agency adam&eveDDB U.S. worked with Maybelline on the “Teddy Takeover” campaign. View this post on Instagram A post shared by JoJo Siwa (@itsjojosiwa) Victoria’s Secret Pink and Katie Fang, Nia Sioux, Dez Smith and more: Victoria’s Secret’s Pink brand hosted over a dozen influencers in Sonoma Valley last weekend. Attendees on the early Spring Break getaway, which included pastoral activities such as horseback riding and hikes in the forest, ranged from mega-influencers such as Katie Fang and Nia Sioux to creators such as Dez Smith and Nica Phan, who each have fewer than 60,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Katie Anne Fang (@katiefangg) NextGen Marketing Summit Join us for a crash course on Gen Z, DTC marketing and the creator economy Register today Alaska Air Group and Jordan Howlett, Rachel Nance and more: Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, both owned by holding company Alaska Air Group, are the latest airlines to tap into influencers’ sway over how Gen Zers and millennials travel. The corporate sibling airlines are partnering with a group of influencers and creators, including Jordan Howlett (aka “Jordan The Stallion”) and Rachel Nance, a former contestant on “The Bachelor,” on a campaign focused on the airlines’ premium cabin seating. Creative agency Mekanism is behind the effort, which includes video ads, sponsored social posts and digital out-of-home displays, among other mediums. @jordan_the_stallion8 I’m traveling today and that first class experience definitely made me choose @@Alaska Airlinesagain ##AlaskaAirlinespartner##iflyalaska ♬ original sound - Jordan_The_Stallion8 Allegra and Jools Lebron, Megan Boni and more: After Allegra discovered that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek returned drowsy responses to prompts about taking rival allergy medications (such as Benadryl or Zyrtec) before performing a task, but weren’t affected by drowsiness when the prompts mentioned Allegra, the brand tapped a handful of influencers to highlight that distinction through their own interactions with these chatbots. Allegra recruited Jools Lebron, of “very demure” fame; Megan Boni, the creator behind last year’s viral “man in finance” trend; and several other influencers to show off how bringing up other allergy medications impacted their chatbot conversations. Marketing agency MRM and communications agency Current Global collaborated with Allegra on the campaign. @joolieannie Very drowsy? Not very demure. @AllegraAllergy #drowsyprompts #allegrapartner ♬ Drowsy Prompts - AllegraAllergy Dick’s Sporting Goods and Tara Davis-Woodhall, Hunter Woodhall and more: Plenty of brands have launched influencer programs, but few of those programs include the opportunity to be mentored by athletes such as track and field couple Tara Davis-Woodhall and Hunter Woodhall or college basketball star twins Haley and Hanna Cavinder. Dick’s Sporting Goods’ “Varsity Team” influencer program will offer the content creators selected for the program that and more, including a 10-month paid contract with the brand, a monthly $400 Dick’s gift card and training sessions led by both Dick’s influencer team and the brand’s influencer marketing agency Fohr. Dick’s Varsity Team program, which was previously limited to the brand’s employees, received over 1,700 applicants less than a week after opening it up to content creators, according to Fohr. View this post on Instagram A post shared by DICK'S Sporting Goods (@dickssportinggoods) Social media screenshot X rolls out AI-generated ads: Advertisers will soon be able to leverage X’s AI assistant Grok to generate ads for the platform, the company announced last week. Grok can “generate ad copy, imagery, and a call-to-action (CTA) headline” for advertisers by scanning their websites, and can also use AI to analyze the performance of those AI-generated ads, according to X’s announcement. Also read: How AI-generated ads on X will work Starting to roll out Grok powered X Ads interface.Grok can now create beautiful ads, analyze your campaign performance, and recommend improvements, all within your X ads interface.Rolling out to all SMBs using X ads today! pic.twitter.com/b58x8FgjW3— Sid Rao (@sidgrao) February 21, 2025 YouTube’s CEO outlines his “big bets” for 2025: Neal Mohan laid out four of YouTube’s biggest focus areas for 2025 in a blog post uploaded earlier this month, exactly 20 years after YouTube launched. Mohan doubled down on his assertion that YouTubers will increasingly cross over into Hollywood and emphasized the fact that TV has outpaced mobile devices as the primary medium for YouTube viewing in the U.S., saying, “YouTube is the new television.” He also shared a few updates on YouTube’s generative AI features, including its test of a new tool that will allow influencers and celebrities to “detect and control how AI is used to depict them on YouTube.” Livestreams take off on TikTok: The popularity of livestreams among creators and users on TikTok is skyrocketing, according to a new TikTok blog post. In 2024 alone, more than 100 million creators hosted livestreams on the platform, nearly half (46 million) of whom used TikTok Live for the first time last year, per TikTok. These livestreams are also increasingly lucrative for creators—roughly 250,000 TikTok creators who leaned into TikTok Live doubled their income between 2023 and 2024, according to the blog post. Creating businesses Celsius plans to acquire influencer-founded Alani Nu: Celsius last week announced plans to acquire Alani Nu, a female-focused energy drink brand founded by influencer Katy Schneider, née Hearn, for $1.8 billion. The deal highlights the growing power of influencer-founded brands—indeed, just a few days before the announcement, Nike and Kim Kardashian’s underwear and loungewear brand Skims unveiled their upcoming collaboration on a new fitness brand, NikeSkims. More: What the Alani Nu deal means for beverage marketing TikTok of the week @vitacoco Everyone deserves a free treat from our vending machine 🥥🤍 #vitacoco #coconutwater #valentinesday #vendingmachine #nyc #treatyourself #newyork #strawberry #coconuts #fyp ♬ original sound - Vita Coco Vita Coco joined in on the viral controversy around Poppi’s splashy vending machine influencer campaign by wheeling a “vending machine” of its own—a metal shelf wrapped in pale pink signage—around New York City and handing out cartons of strawberry-flavored coconut milk to passersby. The text overlaid onto the video nodded to the debate around the cost of the vending machines Poppi loaned to influencers, with Vita Coco writing “our vending machine cost $25. did we do this right?” The video has racked up just under 5 million views, as of this writing, along with a comment from Olipop, a rival prebiotic soda brand that stoked the flames of the Poppi vending machine backlash with shady comments on TikTok videos about the machines. Threadspotting View on Threads The popularity of the hit Apple TV+ show “Severance” is spilling over into marketing, including in the form of a new social media trend where people list the embarrassing traits or habits of their “outie,” the show’s term for its characters’ identities outside the office. While this trend has largely shown up in video content up to this point, the above post from Wendy’s proves the trend is now making the jump to text posts, too. Follow us on social media X Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn YouTube

Creator and influencer trends brand marketers need to know about right now

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