Hi friends!
Writing this one from Advertising Week in New York, where nine stages are busy attaching numbers to things.
This week, TikTok opened a checkout and will not say what it counts as a sale, 73 of Temu’s 100 most used influencer accounts turned out not to be people, and the conference I am standing in has put $100 million against deals nobody has signed. Three numbers, and nothing you can point at behind any of them yet.
Let’s dig in.
October 6th
🛒 TikTok opened a checkout that may not be TikTok Shop
TikTok launched Buy Direct and a conversational Shopping Assistant at Advertising Week on yesterday. Buy Direct puts one click checkout inside the For You feed. The named launch partners are Salesforce, Shopify, Shoplazza and Stripe, and TikTok’s own framing is that the purchase happens directly from a brand.
That partner list is a brand’s own commerce stack, not TikTok Shop’s. TikTok has not said whether a Buy Direct sale creates a TikTok Shop order, which is the record creator commission settles against. If it does not, a creator video can drive a purchase that generates no affiliate attribution. Nothing announced carries a launch date or a market list. Ask which checkout a campaign runs on before you price the creator side of it.
🛍️ 73 of Temu’s 100 most used influencer accounts were fake
A Fortune investigation published August 31, with research by Online Risk Labs, found that 73 of the 100 accounts Temu used most for Meta partnership ads were likely fake. Those accounts ran over 1.4 million campaigns with nearly 17 billion cumulative reach. Temu spent roughly $962 million on partnership ads in the 16 months to April 2026.
Partnership ads are the mechanic, and you probably buy them. The format lets a creator tag a brand and the brand pay to boost the post. Nothing in that flow verifies the account behind the tag is a person. By September 4, 90 of the 100 had stopped running Temu ads, and weekly partnership ad volume fell from 115,114 to 64,008 in three weeks. Exposure worked. The control did not.
📺️ A trade show put $100 million on deals nobody has signed
Advertising Week New York named Dhar Mann its first chief creator officer and set a target of $100 million in creator and brand deals over the next 12 months. Creator attendance is 2,500 this year against 1,000 last year. The mechanic is matchmaking: 30 minute sessions pairing creators with CMOs on stage, a Masked CMO competition, invite only deal rooms and curated dinners.
Mann says pledges already exceed the target, then says he does not expect ink to dry this week and that brands set Q4 budgets in Q1 and Q2. No CMO is named and no contract is public. Treat the number as a conference pricing its own relevance. The structural part is real though. A trade show now measures itself on deal volume, which puts it in the same business as your roster and your agency.
🎤 Seller Spotlight
Shapermint recruited against its buyer, not the platform stereotype
Shapermint is on track for $10 million in annual TikTok Shop sales, and it got there by casting for its customer rather than for the platform. Brand director Gabrielle Richards: “Since our inception, our demographic has been women ages 35-65.” The affiliate network now runs over 5,000 active creators, and 60% of the best performers are over 35. The volume behind it: more than 20,000 videos since January, over 5,000 in the last 30 days, built from $1.5 million in the first four months toward a $4 million monthly run rate by year end.
The creator pool is younger than the buyer pool: that gap is where affordable supply still sits, and almost nobody is bidding for it.
What converts is proof of fit: content showing the garment does not slip or tug during ordinary movement, so a buyer can judge it without handling it.
One affiliate has earned over $31,900 from the programme. Treat the headline growth rate carefully. Month over month figures as high as 515% sit on a small base, and the $1.5 million over four months is the number worth holding.
🧠 Brand Move of the Week
Litter Robot sells a $699 litter box and will not discount it
Whisker sells the $699 Litter Robot on TikTok Shop at full price. CMO Hew Loyd calls the self cleaning cycle a thumb stopper, the thing that makes a viewer pause and watch the mechanism work. The brand picks niche creators over a high volume posting approach, and onboards TikTok Shop buyers into the Litter Robot app so the second purchase belongs to the brand rather than to the channel.
Set it against the Sephora launch we ran on in last week’s issue, where a prestige retailer put a discounted exclusive bundle into TikTok Shop and kept its own site clean. Two brands, same channel, opposite pricing decisions. That answers the question the Sephora item left open. The channel does not force the discount. A product that demonstrates itself on camera does not need one, and a product that cannot has to buy attention with margin instead.
@litterrobot Replying to @☁️ #Litter-Robot is definitely worth the investment ✨🐈⬛ Click the link in bio to learn more about Litter-Robot! #catparent ... See more
No sales figure has been published for Litter Robot on TikTok Shop, so the claim here is pricing discipline, not revenue.
📰 Other news you should look at for this week
L’Oreal put its first ever brand on TikTok Shop. Korean skincare label Dr.G launches with prices from $6.95 to $50, under North America consumer products president Christina Fair. K beauty brands did over $245 million on TikTok Shop between January and June. 📎 Read more
Meta turned Instagram creator livestreams into ad inventory. Brands can now put paid spend behind a creator’s Live while it is still running, extending a format that was Facebook only. A live slot is no longer capped by the host’s own follower count, which changes what one is worth. 📎 Read more
Only 15% of brands run creator programmes that outperform. Across 940 marketers, BCG found the leaders post 19% lower cost per acquisition and 133% higher ROAS, and roughly 70% of companies have no dedicated creator team. BCG sells the reorganisation it recommends. 📎 Read more
Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡