Social Stars Take Center Stage At The Big Game
Sunday’s ad spend revealed that top creators significantly drive sales. What about everyone else?
Hi friends!
The Seahawks defense made sure that Sunday’s game was a bit of a snoozefest, but you didn’t need to squint during the commercial breaks to see that social darlings like IShowSpeed, MrBeast, and Alix Earle were leaving their fingerprints on the event.
Despite broad exposure and a mainstream, monocultural debut in the creator economy, the bulk of the industry consists of much smaller creators, leaving more value on the cutting room floor.
According to the social marketing platform Archive, only 4% of creators earn more than $100,000 a year. While the bulk of the creator economy appears to be made up of the top 4%, the remaining 96% is underserved, and that trend is accelerating. Case in point: this week, TikTok made headlines as sellers began to pull back from the platform amid its move to end independent shipping in the U.S.
As these influencers become entities in their own right, it’s the 96% who will have the edge in trust but a disparity in resources. This trickles down to the marketing ecosystem surrounding them, making it even more important to deploy influencer marketing budgets as precisely as possible. As we like to say over here, “the industry isn’t data-poor. It’s poor of making sense of the data.”
That is what we work on here at Ouftit – making sure that relationships between buyers and sellers are as seamless as possible to offer you the most flexibility as the industry continues to mature.
(February 10th)
🛒 TikTok sellers are pulling back as the platform moves to end independent shipping in the U.S.
The change will require sellers to fulfill orders through TikTok Shop’s proprietary logistics services. This includes Fulfilled by TikTok, where merchants send inventory to TikTok’s warehouses, and they handle picking, packing, and shipping in exchange for a fee.
🏈 Creators were everywhere in the build-up to the Big Game. YouTube’s flag football game featured Druski and J. Balvin, TikTokers were on Radio Row, and Twitch streamers gamed against some of the NFL's best.
The Olympics also saw creators carrying the torch, literally – cooking creator Nick DiGiovanni was a torchbearer following a partnership with YouTube and the International Olympic Committee.
📺 Creators continued to reach couches across the country with ad appearances by MrBeast for Salesforce and IShowSpeed for Oakley.
Not for nothing, Alex Earle was on the front steps of Bad Bunny’s casita for the halftime show and took us behind the scenes on TikTok.
📎 Watch here
🤖 Nearly one-quarter (23%) of Super Bowl ads featured AI, per iSpot data cited by Adweek.
Anthropic (Claude AI's owner ) took a shot at OpenAI’s decision to introduce ads in ChatGPT, launching its own campaign across several ad slots, promising to stay ad-free in the future.
📊🤔 A slim majority (55%) of younger adults—Gen Z and millennials—say that seeing a celebrity they like in a Super Bowl ad makes them feel at least somewhat more favorable toward the brand. Feels lower than you might expect.
The more telling stat is on the downside: over one-third of younger adults (36%) say that seeing a celebrity they dislike in a Super Bowl ad makes them feel more negatively about the brand. Among older adults, 28% say the same.
The takeaway: celebrity association cuts both ways. Polarization comes for almost everyone in the public eye, and advertisers are starting to feel the impact.
🇪🇺⚖️ EU regulators have declared that TikTok’s “addictive design” may put it in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA), in the preliminary results of an ongoing investigation into the social media app.
With TikTok bans being considered by governments worldwide, the platform could not have chosen a better time to move stateside.
📎 Read more
💄 6 of the 10 top-selling TikTok shops were in the Beauty, Skincare, and Grooming space.
Also, QVC continues to solidify its presence at the top. You love to see a linear television channel actually thrive digitally for once.
📎 Read more
💰 MrBeast gave away $1 million over the Super Bowl Sunday weekend, as part of Whatnot’s “Big Game. Big Deals.” promotion.
🔍 Case Study
Business of Fashion: Influencer marketing’s shift from hype to dollars 💵
Per BoF: “Influencer marketing is bigger than ever, but it’s also become more complex as the number of creators multiplies, consumers grow more resistant to blatant ads, platforms like Substack gain traction and new tools for tracking performance appear.” If only there were a place where you could make sense of the abundance of data. Oh wait…there is! It’s CreatorCart.
📎 Read more
See you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡