Hi friends!
Advertising Week is over. The pledges were loud, the contracts are quiet.
This week, the creators you most want are cutting their roster to five, only 9% of health creator posts cite a source, and TikTok is about to carry your creative into 400,000 apps that are not TikTok.
Let’s dig in.
October 13th
🛍️ The best creators are cutting from a hundred deals to five
Alix Earle, about 14 million followers, says she wants five or six long term brand partners instead of roughly 100 a year, and is weighing equity. Jordan Howlett became chief content officer at Blenders Eyewear this year. Druski took an equity stake in Gopuff this week. No terms disclosed anywhere.
This is supply, not sentiment. When your best performers cut to five slots, you stop bidding on a rate and start bidding on a seat. Equity, a title or a product input role wins one. A CPM quote does not. The middle of the curve is not cutting volume and not getting equity offers, so rates there stay soft. Your access problem and your price problem have moved apart.
🍪 Only 9% of health creator posts cite a source
Pew analysed 535,512 posts from 6,334 health and wellness creators on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, all with at least 100,000 followers, published February to April 2026. Just 9% cite an outside source while making a health claim. Health policy is the most cited topic at 50%. The heavily promoted topics, supplements among them, sit at the bottom.
Supplements and wellness are among the largest categories on TikTok Shop, so this maps your category’s evidence base. It is also the shape of data an FTC action gets built from. If you sell here, a creator who cites sources is a differentiator you can brief for. If you buy here, 9% is the base rate your brand safety review works against.
📺️ TikTok will carry your creative into 400,000 apps that are not TikTok
TikTok opened its Ad Network to US advertisers at Advertising Week, a placement network it describes as nearly 400,000 apps worldwide, bought inside TikTok Ads Manager with brand safety controls. Alongside it, Smart+ Creative Selection pools advertiser assets, Symphony AI generated creative and creator content into one approval workflow.
The second part matters more than the first. Creator content stops being a TikTok native asset and becomes inventory, scored in the same queue as synthetic creative and carried into apps the creator has never heard of. Nothing TikTok published addresses creator terms or payouts when that happens. Check what your talent agreements say about placement, because most were written when the answer was obviously TikTok.
🎤 Seller Spotlight
A creator’s audience designed the product, and it sold out in 19 hours
Kaer, founded in late 2024 by Fatima Farouk, let creator Alexis Wilkerson and her audience co-design a fragrance oil. Our Skin launched at 3pm on August 29 and sold out by 10am the next day: $96,159 in about 19 hours, roughly 1,600 orders, over 80% from first time customers. The full window did $111,597, around 70% of the brand’s entire 2025 revenue, against a previous best month of about $63,000.
The waitlist existed before the inventory did: over 2,700 people across three SKUs against 1,627 units produced. The sellout was a supply decision as much as a demand result.
The pre launch was deliberately small: one Coach hosted event of about 50 people, and a New York event of 25 to 30.
Farouk: “No one knows their community better than the creator themselves.” Note the dates though. This happened at the end of August and only reached trade press last week.
🧠 Brand Move of the Week
Long John Silver’s did not pay for the videos selling its fish
Kishia Moore posted an Instagram video in early June eating Long John Silver’s: over 3 million views, and the line “Who keeping Long John Silver’s in business? Me!” Dozens of unpaid mukbang videos followed. Between June 21 and September 25 the brand’s Instagram did 4.8 million views, 3.8 million organic, with organic up 500% on the prior period.
The chain went from 900 US stores in 2019 to 479 at the end of 2025 while systemwide sales rose from about $400 million to $430 million. Fewer stores, busier ones.
The order of operations is what the brand got right. The unpaid wave was the demand test, and the deal with Moore came after the signal rather than before it. You cannot manufacture that wave, only notice it fast enough and partner with whoever started it rather than briefing ten lookalikes. No sales lift figure exists, so the claim is attention, not revenue.
🔭 Trend Watch
How do you pick five?
Jordan Howlett took a title at Blenders Eyewear
Three things happened this week that only make sense together.
Alix Earle says she wants five or six long term brand partners instead of roughly 100 a year. Jordan Howlett took a title at Blenders Eyewear. Druski took equity in Gopuff. The top of the creator market is cutting volume and changing what it accepts as payment.
That is a sourcing problem before it is a budget problem. If your best performers go from a hundred slots to five, you are not bidding on a rate any more. You are bidding on a seat, and the brands holding equity, a title or a product input role get it. The question stops being what does this creator cost, and becomes which five are worth it.
Most brands cannot answer that. The standard influencer buy is priced on reach and measured on awareness, which tells you who was watching and nothing about who bought.
Our CEO Ryan Mulcock argued the fix on a Meta hosted panel at Advertising Week last week. We sell software that does this, so weigh it accordingly. The point stands anyway: run affiliate underneath the awareness buy, not instead of it. The link is not there to save you fees. It is there to tell you which creators convert, so the long term deals go to the names the data already picked.
One complication. TikTok said on October 5 that GMV Max will factor in affiliate commissions, coupons and referral fees. The measure you would use for this is about to mean something different. Start now, before the denominator moves.
📰 Other news you should look at for this week
Pinterest will let brands pay to boost Pins from creators they have never worked with. No sponsorship tag required. Creators get an email and can decline that Pin or opt out at account level, so consent is opt out, not opt in. Check your creators’ settings. 📎 Read more
YouTube tested handing brands creator analytics inside Studio. A Channel Search tab showed a small set of brand accounts unique viewers, watch time, audience age and gender, and top countries. One non brand account got in by mistake and YouTube rolled it back. 📎 Read more
Virtual try on is live in ChatGPT. Upload a selfie and see yourself in clothing without leaving the chat, with Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts, David’s Bridal and Etsy named. A consideration surface with no creator layer at all, on your budget line. 📎 Read more
Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡