🔎 Where does creator influence lie?

TikTok has revealed details of how its custom creator network will operate in its ‘barista influencer’ deal with Starbucks. This is one of those ‘ah-ha’ moments we’ll look back on. Starbuck’s baristas get enrolled in the program and in TikTok’s ads platform. Starbucks watches their posts in real-time behind the scenes putting money behind the good ones and the baristas get a cut of the ad revenue through the ad platform. We’ve been writing about this a bit, your best brand advocates are already working for you or buying from you. Now the platforms are creating the mechanisms to operationalise and monetise those relationships. The message for marketers is to audit your team’s social prowess pronto, find the hidden creators who are already there and then enable them. Switched on brands are already doing it (see below). Happy Thursday, Simon.

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The regular thinking is that creator marketing ideas started in Silicon Valley or London and drifted outward. Fabulate co-founder Nathan Powell told a marketing audience at Sydney’s Expand conference that’s now backwards. Southeast Asia is where the forward thinking on creator scale, social commerce and campaign orchestration is happening first. The shift shows up in how brands pick creators. Rather than handing the whole budget to one big name, SEA marketers spread it across networks of micro and mid-tier talent, chasing relevance over reach. Powell’s example was TikTok Beauty Fest, which ran 68 creators and 132 pieces of content across livestreams, activations and a large-scale consumer event, instead of building one campaign around one face. Powell doesn’t describe creators as just posting content anymore. They’re the event host, the product educator and in some cases the point of purchase itself. A complete ecosystem, not a media buy, but … Powell sells creator campaign software, so read the enthusiasm accordingly.

Six years ago Guillaume Huin was an intern at McDonald’s French arm. Now he runs the chain’s global brand strategy, largely because his X account with 40,000 followers, is where McDonald’s fans get the real news. Last week he teased a Hello Kitty and Godzilla Happy Meal crossover before HQ made it official. Call it fan-first marketing with content aimed at the diehards, not some vague reach metric. Poppi, the soda brand PepsiCo bought for $1.95 billion, got there first. Its social team treats TikTok comments as a product roadmap: one fan thread became a Love Island-flavoured limited release. Duolingo did similar things until DoorDash poached Zaria Parvez, the exec behind its owl account, into an identical role. Fewer people are posting at all now (49% of UK social users still post on Instagram or Facebook, down from 61% last year), so brands want marketers who behave like creators as much as brand managers.

Marketing professor Mark Ritson, who’s spent two decades picking fights with industry, has a new target. The creator economy’s favourite number, the “$5.78 earned for every dollar spent” figure that gets quoted at every marketing conference. Turns out it’s quoted almost entirely from influencer platforms and agencies with a direct financial stake in brands believing it. The bigger problem, he says, is that estimates of the whole channel’s size vary by USD14 billion depending on who’s counting, and Goldman Sachs still puts the global creator economy at USD480 billion by 2027. Citing Byron Sharp’s penetration-first model, he argues creators are good at deepening engagement with people who already buy from you, and there’s no evidence they reach light or non-buyers better than a normal ad does. He’s not calling for brands to pull the budget, just to show leading stats can be deceiving.

Everyone’s been asking how anyone will prove what AI wrote, and Anthropic has part of the answer. Future Claude models will watermark their text, not with hidden characters, but through a statistical pattern in their word choices. Paste the output into an email or webpage and the pattern comes with it, although heavy rewriting can remove it. Anthropic is rolling this out globally in response to EU transparency rules. It won’t prove Claude wrote every word, but it could show the model was involved.

Buying the camera is the easy part. Figuring out what else you actually need usually takes longer. This video runs through accessories for the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P, including filters, quick-release tripods, a battery handle, a protective case and a carrying bag small enough to be worth carrying. It’s an ad, to be clear, but a useful one that covers the basics properly.

Everyone reckons they can spot AI writing, but most of us are probably guessing. Pangram co-founder Max Spero explains how its detector works and why the verdict goes beyond a few suspicious phrases. Useful if you’re checking someone else’s work or wondering why your own keeps getting flagged.

In an era when AI can produce polished content in seconds, the surprise hit in China is a film with terrible animation and a plot nobody can follow. Niu Lai made about 7,700 yuan in its first ten days, then went viral for being genuinely bad and has since pulled in more than 11.4 million yuan, holding its own against The Odyssey and Spider-Man. People are sharing clips and praising its “hand-crafted” quality as proof no AI was involved. It’s rough, quirky, and that’s exactly why people have taken to it.

Why do corporate videos so often feel, well, corporate? Our producer Nadia breaks down the tells that make a video feel stiff and how to keep some personality without losing the brief. Have a look.