Creators Get A Chance to Pitch

TODAY’S EDITION

• Thanks to a new partnership between Forbes and Walmart Creator, creators will have a chance to pitch themselves to marketers this fall.

• Instagram lets users go live privately with a new Close Friends feature.

• Instagram encourages users to share their own posts with friends — creators react as expected.

• TikTok gives brands and creators the ability to create digital avatars to reach global audiences — a look at the pros and cons.

• YouTube gets inspired by X and experiments with community fact-checking.

DEEP DIVE

Forbes & Walmart Team Up For First-of-Its-Kind Creator Upfronts

This fall, top creators will have a unique opportunity to pitch directly to brands at the inaugural Creator Upfronts in Los Angeles, hosted by Forbes in partnership with Walmart Creator on October 28th and 29th.

What’s Happening

The two-day event will assemble hundreds of creators and marketers. Selected creators will showcase their creative process, content, audience reach, and brand collaboration strategies. The event will also feature roundtables, panels, and networking sessions.

A Twist on TV Upfronts

Forbes and Walmart are reinventing the traditional TV Upfront—an event where TV networks, Connected TV platforms, and streaming services present their upcoming season's programming to advertisers and media buyers to secure advertising commitments in advance.

Similarly, creators can highlight their offerings and meet directly with brands, stakeholders, and marketers, potentially kicking off conversations that could lead to collaboration and sponsorship opportunities.

Why This Matters

This event demonstrates how creators continue to operate within the same realm as traditional media and command advertising dollars. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), 44% of advertisers have planned to increase their investment in content creators this year by 25%. It’s also why marquee events like The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity are having a much greater presence for creators.

In-Person Connection

While technology has made deal-making between creators and brands much easier, some of the human aspects that play an important role in the marketing and advertising industry have been lost. In-person interactions like these can build stronger relationships and help marketers look beyond a creator's follower or subscriber count. Likewise, creators can see marketers and brand managers as more than a means to a dollar and understand their priorities.

A Flashy Event Isn’t Always Needed

Not every brand or agency can put together an event of this caliber, but there are plenty of ways to get similar benefits from bringing creators and marketers together. Here are a few ideas and examples:

• Host smaller events in key regions where partners are located, including mini-panels where creators share their processes and desired collaborations.

• Consider virtual events like summits, where top creators and your team can host sessions highlighting upcoming collaboration opportunities and soliciting input from creators.

• Create a dedicated form on your website or social media where creators can share their information, pitch content ideas, and outline potential projects or events for your brand's involvement.

Whether I’ve been on the marketer side, helping brands work with creators, or in my creator shoes, working with brands on Instagram or LinkedIn, I’ve always found opportunities to connect outside of campaigns valuable. I believe more of this should happen to push the industry forward.

NEWS, TRENDS & INSIGHTS

Instagram

Instagram Introduces Close Friends on Instagram Live for Private Live Streaming

Instagram has introduced Close Friends on Instagram Live, allowing users to privately broadcast live only to those on their Close Friends list. In addition, up to three people can co-broadcast.

Why It Matters: Adding Close Friends to live streams marks Instagram's newest endeavor to nurture private and intimate connections. This can be used for various purposes, from catching up with friends and planning trips to simply hanging out. It also provides opportunities for creators and brands, such as offering their most devoted followers exclusive Q&A sessions and sneak peeks at forthcoming content or product lines.

Instagram Encourages Users to Share Their Posts via Direct Messages

Instagram has begun encouraging users to share their posts with friends. After publishing a post, some users have received a notification saying, "Want to send it directly to friends?" along with a Send button.

Why It Matters: From his Ask Me Anything session to a recent sit-down interview, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has explained that "sends per reach"—how often a post is shared compared to how many people see it—is a key metric for creators to pay attention to when it comes to reach. This supports Instagram's mission to help people connect over content.

Encouraging users to share their own posts aligns with this mission but represents a different approach by shifting the responsibility of sharing from others to the original creators. This approach could be perceived as spammy and isn't scalable for most creators (read feedback from creators in responses to my Threads post here). However, it indicates how Instagram continues to view messaging, along with Feed, Stories, and its Recommendation surfaces, as channels for distribution.

Instagram Lets Users Add Music to Video Carousels

Instagram now allows users to add music to their Carousel posts that include videos. Previously, users could only add music to Carousels composed of photos. When music is added, the sound from the video(s) is muted.

Why It Matters: Whether it's a video Carousel or a Carousel with a mix of photos and videos, creators now have more creative freedom by being able to add music to these types of posts, which can help make their content more engaging. For example, creators might add their favorite song of the summer to a vlog-style Carousel or a song by an artist whose concert they recently attended.

TikTok

TikTok Announces Symphony Digital Avatars and AI Dubbing

After several months of testing, TikTok has announced Symphony Digital Avatars, which are generative AI avatars of real people. There are two types:

• Stock Avatars: These are prebuilt avatars created using paid actors, available across different backgrounds and nationalities, and in 30 languages.

• Custom Avatars: These are developed to represent a creator or brand spokesperson. Creators can use their likeness, while brands can use their IP, spokesperson, or partnered creator to build their avatars.

TikTok has also announced TikTok Symphony AI Dubbing, a tool that allows creators and brands to translate their content into over 10 languages and dialects. It detects the original language, transcribes, translates, and produces a dubbed video in the selected language.

Why It Matters: With advancements in AI technology, virtual influencers and digital avatars on social media have become more common, prompting social media platforms to take a more direct role. With Symphony Digital Avatars, brands can leverage realistic digital avatars to star in their content and benefit from cost and time savings, as well as more personalized content via multilingual tools.

As one might expect, this development raises concerns for creators, who now not only have to compete against other creators for brand partnerships but also with digital avatars that brands can deploy at any time. Fortunately, creators also have the opportunity to replicate themselves digitally, which offers similar benefits, and even the opportunity to license out their own likeness.

While some brands may fully embrace digital avatars to address challenges in working with human creators, a more balanced approach involves continuing collaborations with human creators to leverage the strengths of both virtual and human influencers. Amid all the talk about AI, there may come a point where audiences become overwhelmed and actively seek out content featuring real humans and created by humans.

TikTok Launches Out of Phone: Mission to Amplify Creator Content to Digital Out-of-Home Channels

TikTok has launched Out of Phone: Mission, a program that combines its Branded Mission and Out of Phone initiatives. This program enables brands to crowdsource content from creators and amplify the top-performing videos as ads both on TikTok and across digital out-of-home channels, including billboards, cinemas, and in-store screens.

Why It Matters: This allows brands to distribute user-generated content at scale in everyday settings, reaching audiences even when they are not on the app and getting more value for the content created on their behalf. For creators, it provides additional opportunities for their content to be discovered, especially when featured on high-traffic screens like billboards in Times Square.

YouTube

YouTube Tests Viewer-Added Notes to Provide More Context and Information

YouTube is experimenting with a feature that allows users to add notes that appear under videos, providing relevant, timely, and easy-to-understand context. Selected contributors will be invited to participate, and third-party evaluators will rate the usefulness of these notes. They will appear publicly if deemed broadly helpful.

Why It Matters: YouTube draws inspiration from X (formerly known as Twitter), which has a similar feature called Community Notes designed to combat misinformation. While the effectiveness of X's feature remains unknown, YouTube sees value in leveraging its viewers to help fact-check, debunk misinformation, or simply provide additional context for videos. This is important not only because of a major election around the corner but also because of an increasingly AI-filled world.

WHAT I’M READING

Surgeon General: Why I’m Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms (New York Times)

Could your favorite social media platform get a tobacco-like warning label? That’s what U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy wants to happen in order to warn people about the potential harms of platforms. In an op-ed, he makes his case.

NBCU unveils Paris Creator Collective for Olympics coverage (Marketing Dive)

There’s another reason to be excited about the Paris Olympics. NBCUniversal, in tandem with Meta, Overtime, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, will be supplementing its coverage of the Olympic Games with creators who will highlight different perspectives, from the athletes to the food to the celebrations.

LinkedIn eyes B2C marketers as it looks to increase ad dollars (Digiday)

The value of LinkedIn for B2B marketing is a no-brainer. But what about B2C? From more user-generated and creator content to the addition of new content formats and the expansion of its advertising tools, LinkedIn is gaining traction for B2C marketers. Krystal Scanlon talks to Tom Pepper, Senior Director of EMEA and LATAM at LinkedIn, about this trend, plus a few quotes from me.

THANK YOU

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