The fast pace of trends and the maturing creator economy have created bottlenecks for brand deals. Creator commerce platform LTK wants to solve that problem by allowing brands to launch flat-fee campaigns that creators can opt in to as they see fit.
The company has just released Quick Collabs, a feature in its platform for creator marketing, called Brand Platform, that launched last November pairing brands with creators, Digiday has exclusively learned. LTK claims to reach 44 million customers shopping monthly and spending over $6 billion annually — in addition to access to 400,000 creators and 8,000 retailers.
“If we make all of that data available and build toolkits into a single platform, and we give brands free unlimited seats, they’re equipped to leverage and harness creator marketing in a productive way,” LTK president and co-founder Amber Venz Box said.
Quick Collabs is meant to make creator campaigns feel more like one-click launches rather than lengthy back-and-forths as part of an industry-wide shift to creator marketplaces, she added. LTK tested the feature with a small group of brands, and are now now rolling the feature out to all of the companies on their brand platform and all U.S. creators on their creator platform.
Scaling creator collabs, quickly
“The algorithm has made it so that you can’t just use a single creator, you need to be in every single feed, which means you need to scale content really quickly,” she explained. “The internet has been moving faster than creator campaigns, if you’re negotiating and identifying and you’re using humans to do it, it’s just too slow.”
LTK’s Brand Platform lets brands see which creators are earning the most money on the site, what kind of traffic those creators pull in, and how valuable they are to their specific brand. And when they launch their Quick Collabs, they can use the platform’s discovery tools to automatically send campaigns to creators who are engaged with their brand’s products.
“This isn’t scraping the internet and finding creators and figuring out how to get a hold of them, this is just messaging them on the platform where they’re already running their business. It’s a huge difference reaching someone in the technology they’re already using,” Venz Box explained.
LTK creators have to apply to the platform, which will only accept those with public social media profiles, a “high number of engaged followers,” and who post original content regularly. Not only are brands discovering the best creators to work within the platform, but Quick Collabs let creators know exactly what’s expected from a campaign, when it needs to be delivered, and what they’ll get paid for it and when.
“LTK is predominantly an affiliate program where creators can earn on conversion, so if there’s more of a fixed fee, it builds an on-ramp for creators to make more predictable fixed revenue versus everything being on an affiliate conversion basis,” explained Keith Bendes, chief strategy officer at influencer marketing platform Linqia. “I think it’s smart for them to have an offering for creators to earn guaranteed revenue.”
Though, he said he believed Quick Collabs would only work for creators in the mid- to lower- funnel who otherwise would not have access to sizable brand deals.
Becca Bahrke, CEO of creator management company Illuminate Social said most of her company’s creators don’t participate in programs like Quick Collabs. “It might be nice during a slow period, but largely they’re declining,” she said. “It’s just too much of a lift compared to these meatier partnerships we’re getting regularly for them…it’s much more for the creator who needs the volume and is not doing as much.”
But as more middle-tier creators fuel the burgeoning creator economy, programs like Quick Collabs could grow in popularity.
Venz Box believes the program will help professional creators grow their businesses as much as it helps brands popular feeds.
“There’s a democratization that this will unleash, because it will allow brands to target in the thousands and for payments to happen up front and quickly,” she said. “That’s really the focus here: the content and filling feeds.”