Home Depot goes creator-first and Instagram heads to TV

Hi friends!

Home Depot “finally” launched its creator portal for home improvement influencers. If you live on YouTube DIY the way I do, this feels inevitable, but it’s also a clear marker of how far the creator economy has moved beyond blogs and beauty tutorials.

And yes, Instagram is now experimenting with a TV channel.

Let’s dig in.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

(December 16th)

📺 Instagram Is Bringing Reels to the Living Room

Instagram is testing a TV app built around Reels and longer-form video, according to a new report from Variety. The move pushes Instagram beyond mobile-first consumption and into lean-back viewing, signaling a quiet ambition to compete for attention traditionally owned by YouTube and streaming platforms. For creators and brands, this changes the ceiling. Content designed for phones may soon need to work at TV distance, and performance formats could collide with entertainment formats in a shared living-room context. Distribution is expanding, but expectations will rise with it.

📎 Source: Variety

📈 Over Half of DTC Brands Now Spend Up to 25 Percent of Budgets on Influencers

New data shows that 54 percent of DTC brands allocate as much as a quarter of their marketing budgets to influencer marketing. This is no longer an experimental line item. Influencers have become a core distribution channel, often outperforming paid social on trust and conversion. The shift also explains why platforms keep building creator-native commerce tools. The money is already there.

📎 Source: Storyboard18

🔨 Home Depot Launches a Creator Portal for Home Improvement Influencers

Home Depot unveiled a new creator portal designed to connect influencers directly with the brand. The move formalizes what’s already happening organically on TikTok and YouTube: creators driving product discovery for high-consideration purchases. By centralizing access, tools, and collaboration, Home Depot is treating creators less like media and more like partners. It’s a signal that creator commerce is moving upstream into legacy retail.

📎 Source: Home Depot Newsroom

🔭 Trend Watch

Trust Is Becoming the Real Scarcity in Influencer Marketing

A recent Harvard Business Review piece makes the argument plainly: the influencer campaigns that perform best today are the ones that look less like endorsements and more like lived experience. Audiences trust creators when they believe the recommendation would exist even without a brand deal. The moment content feels optimized for a brief instead of grounded in real usage, credibility erodes. Scale does not fix that. In many cases, it makes the problem worse.

That tension is showing up clearly in new data. A Net Influencer survey found that user-generated content ranks as the most trusted form of creator media, while AI-generated posts face growing skepticism. Consumers are increasingly fluent in spotting what feels synthetic. Polish, speed, and volume no longer signal quality. They signal distance. As platforms flood feeds with more content than ever, audiences are gravitating toward signals of authenticity: rough edges, personal context, and specificity.

The implication is structural. Brands can no longer treat influencers as interchangeable distribution units. Trust is built through continuity, not one-off activations. Through creators who use products over time, not just on campaign days. Through formats that privilege experience over performance. This also explains why creators with smaller audiences often outperform larger ones on conversion. Trust compounds locally before it scales globally.

Going forward, the winners in influencer marketing will not be the brands that move fastest or spend the most. They’ll be the ones that protect trust as a finite asset.

Because in a world of infinite content, credibility is the only thing that still converts reliably.

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡