How influencer companies are bringing creators to connected TV

Influencer marketers have their sights set on a new medium for sponsored creator content: connected TV. Both influencer marketing agency Linqia and creator-led shopping platform LTK are helping advertisers extend their influencer partnerships to CTV with new offerings—CreatorTV, which Linqia announced yesterday, and LTK CTV, which rolled out last week. The back-to-back announcements highlight a surge of investment in both influencer and CTV marketing from advertisers, fueled by the mediums’ respective power to target specific audiences with individualized messaging. “Because so many brands now have loyalty, they have data [and] they've got so much rich content on the specific audiences they want to reach with specific messaging, they're using connected TV to do that,” said Rodney Mason, head of marketing and brand platform at LTK. “And because creator [marketing] is so highly associated with targeting … brands have come to us and said ‘Hey, can we put creators on CTV?’” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Linqia’s CreatorTV offering allows brands to either take influencers’ existing vertical videos and combine them into a fullscreen spot with added on-screen text, QR codes or other visual elements, or to tap creators to produce “elevated, premium” content that fits the orientation of a TV screen rather than a TikTok feed, said Keith Bendes, VP of go-to-market strategy, marketing & growth Linqia. The agency piloted this program with Alka-Seltzer about two months ago, partnering with several photographers and videographers to create a CTV ad for the brand. Bigger influencer and CTV budgets Roughly three in five marketers boosted their influencer marketing budgets in 2023, according to a survey of 164 marketing leaders conducted by LTK and Northwestern University’s Retail Analytics Council. And the same percentage (59%) of those surveyed marketers said they’d upped their CTV spend last year, too. This year, 92% of those marketers plan to invest more in influencers—and those investments are increasingly transcending phone screens. A slew of advertisers have honed in on digital out-of-home as a site for creator content, including GSTV and Influential, which last month teamed up to bring creators’ videos to gas station TVs. And last October, TikTok introduced its “Out of Phone” offering, enabling advertisers to extend influencer campaigns to billboards or run their ads between creator videos in cinemas or on Redbox kiosks, among other mediums. Read more: GSTV and Influential’s new partnership Brands looking to bring creators to CTV isn’t a brand new concept. Since 2022, Linqia has worked with a few clients, including Schick, to create TV spots with influencers’ vertical videos centered in the middle of the screen. But CreatorTV builds on and streamlines that influencer marketing strategy, which Linqia introduced after speaking with several brands “whose media teams are having their CTV budgets increased significantly, but their content for those placements is not increasing,” Bendes said. “If you think about CTV, where you have better targeting mechanisms—kind of like you did with social [media], where you have a lot of data to target—brands are still primarily working with their one hero TV asset,” he said. “A lot of the media teams are like, ‘Hey, my budget is going up. My targeting is getting better. But I have this one hero asset that isn't really helping me. It feels like a waste that I'm just spending more on this one asset and not targeting.’” With creators, brands can source a slew of video content for far less than the production costs of a traditional commercial, Bendes said. And those brands can then combine the resulting collection of videos “100 different ways” based on the consumer demographic they’re targeting with the ad, he said. The consumers brands are reaching via CTV also mirror the younger audiences they’re engaging with through influencer marketing. Each day, 63% of 18-to-34-year-old consumers stream video content via an “internet-connected TV device” (including smart TVs or streaming devices from platforms such as Amazon or Roku), according to a June 2023 survey from Leichtman Research Group. In comparison, roughly 58% of consumers ages 35-54 watch video on a connected TV device on a daily basis, and just 27% of consumers 55 and older do the same, per the group’s survey. Also: DoubleVerify will rate NBCU CTV programs for brand safety Creators themselves are also expanding their content into the realm of CTV. Both Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson and creator duo Rhett and Link brought their YouTube content to The Roku Channel and Amazon’s Freevee last year. And in October, YouTube group Dude Perfect launched its own streaming service across Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV, among other platforms. View this post on Instagram A post shared by DPeditors (@dpeditors) Unlike CreatorTV, LTK’s CTV offering doesn’t repurpose existing social content, said Mason. Instead, LTK connects advertisers to creators, who produce video content (still in the style of their social content, but with a higher production value, Mason said) for the brand. LTK then cuts their video together with a “front and back bumper” created by the brand, he said. Those CTV spots can range from 30 seconds to over a minute, depending on the ad slots of the streaming platform the videos are airing on, Mason said. And they’re easily shoppable, as each spot typically includes a QR code or link to the LTK storefront of the creator in the ad, he added. Read more: What to know about shoppable TV “We’re really seeing this demand now as brands are trying to make [creator content] work harder,” he said. “And when they’re putting a creator in a TV spot, it’s not just about sales. They’re thinking, ‘How do I build this trust with their following and kind of scale that?’” Mason said. LTK is currently in talks with “some major retailers,” as well as a few fashion and beauty brands, to collaborate on creator CTV ads. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Agency A-List winners here Advertisers’ growing interest in CTV as a medium for influencer marketing is a boon for creators, too, Bendes said. The influencer industry has pivoted from purely sponsored posts on creators’ social channels, and “most of the value [of creator content] these days is being extracted from the amplification of the content, not necessarily the organic reach of high[ly] influential people,” he said. More: Creators were involved in more Super Bowl campaigns Creators can leverage that value of their content on mediums beyond social media through licensing deals that require brands to pay them a certain amount per month of usage or per channel, Bendes said—all without needing to clog their TikTok or Instagram feeds with sponsored content. “A lot of brands now are sourcing content for their own ecosystems, and I think for a lot of creators, it’s really cool to be able to say, ‘Oh, I don't even need to post this. And potentially it's not even for social, which is a cool new application of my content skills,’” he said. Plus, CTV “is just really exciting for a creator, especially for the ones who aren’t normally getting that type of exposure [on social media].”

How influencer companies are bringing creators to connected TV

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