With the latest upgrade to its Creator Marketplace, TikTok is making it simpler for brands to collaborate with its “megastar” creators. Talent managers will now be able to monitor, implement, and assess marketing possibilities and campaigns given to their clients. This Monday, the video-sharing site launched a new Talent Manager Portal as part of its TikTok Creator Marketplace, a platform that puts 800,000 qualified artists all over the world in touch with brands and agencies.
With the new service, talent managers may log into the Creator Marketplace on behalf of their talent to handle deal flow, negotiate contracts, manage creative feedback, and examine different statistics and data on the success of a campaign. This new feature makes it possible for TikTok to cater to the demands of “celebrity-level” artists as well as those with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers.
In 2020, TikTok stars like the D’Amelio twins signed with the agency UTA as their popularity expanded outside the platform into other mediums including as podcasts, books, TV, licencing, tours, and sponsorships. It seems reasonable that they would delegate the review of brand queries and deal making to their UTA salespeople through this platform.
The Talent Manager Portal is now in alpha testing, as verified by TikTok. Several organisations have joined up for the free service, but the identity of the beta testers cannot be disclosed at this time.
TikTok further specifies that talent managers will only be able to view their creative clients’ Marketplace accounts and not the creators’ own TikTok profiles.
This approach is meant to supplement the Creator Marketplace’s current services for businesses that want to take advantage of the success of creator-led advertising, which, according to a poll conducted by TikTok, results in a 71% increase in ad recall.
TikTok Creator Marketplace, which debuted this year, is an integral part of the expanding creator monetization ecosystem. It joins Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and YouTube as platforms that let artists build relationships in the influencer marketing arena. In 2021, the Creator Marketplace added an API that let’s marketing firms like Captiv8 and Influential use its first-party data within their own systems, making it more than just a destination in and of itself.
Before the advent of these marketplaces, marketers seeking to collaborate with top artists had to put in more effort, sifting through the app’s pages or using search keywords to find creators, without the ability to narrow their search based on specific criteria. More resources are available to them in the form of the TikTok Creator Marketplace, where marketers may select content producers based on keywords, the type of material being shared, and other data such as audience size and demographics.
Brands may collaborate with creators in two ways: either by personally inviting them to work with them (“direct invitation”), or by posting a brief online and having interested creators submit applications (“application campaigns”). To further automate the process, the marketplace has a matching tool that analyses the material that producers are publishing to determine which ones best fit the brief. This matching tool makes use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Lahens has been in her present capacity for almost a year and a half, and her primary responsibility is to facilitate corporate partnerships and sponsored content for TikTok producers so that they may monetize their work.
Creator collaboration on TikTok results in a 26% increase in brand favorability and a 22% increase in recommended brands, according to the app. Seventy-one percent of TikTok users also think that a creator’s genuineness is what now encourages them to buy from a company.
With intense competition from the likes of Meta, Snap, and YouTube — the latter of which just announced it will begin sharing ad income with its Shorts (short-form video) artists as of February 1 — TikTok must find a way to monetize its creators in order to keep its best and brightest on the platform. (Though TikTok unveiled its own revenue-sharing programme last year, it has not yet reached critical mass.)
Some of the most popular producers on TikTok are making tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars through the platform’s Creator Marketplace thanks to marketing campaigns. There may also be more modest campaigns that give incentives like gifts rather than cash.
