Influencer Marketing

Welcome to Ad Age’s influencer marketing newsletter, featuring news gathered by Ad Age reporter Gillian Follett. Every week, we explore how brands are working with influencers and how the creator economy is transforming the advertising landscape. You can sign up here to get updates delivered to your inbox.

Social media spurs gut health soda brand Poppi’s meteoric growth 

In June, Poppi transformed social media comment sections and real direct messages with consumers into the prebiotic soda brand’s largest campaign to date. The brand’s decision to make social media the focal point of its ongoing “Soda’s Back” campaign played a crucial role in helping the brand rise from a “Shark Tank” hopeful to an Amazon best-selling product, Poppi's co-founder and chief brand officer Allison Ellsworth told Ad Age’s Jon Springer. 

Now Poppi is challenging traditional soda brands Coke and Pepsi.

Read more about the rise of Poppi here

What we’re reading

How TikTok and creators are leaning into TikTok Shop, the platform’s in-app e-commerce function. 

Some actors are turning to Cameo, the digital platform where fans can pay a celebrity for a personalized video message, as the SAG-AFTRA strike continues. 

An interview with Kristina Avakyan, also known as @SubwaySessions, a fashion influencer whose controversial style and subway platform modeling is going viral on TikTok. 

Inside the Seattle Kraken's falling out with BookTok creator Kierra Lewis, whom the NHL team previously invited to a game and gifted a custom jersey. 

Why Mattel’s Bratz is partnering with Kylie Jenner for its first celebrity collaboration.

Social Media Manager Spotlight 

Ashley Woodall, VP of franchise development, animation at Warner Bros. Discovery, discusses how the company revitalized Looney Tunes’ social media presence to help the decades-old cartoon appeal to younger audiences.

Below, a preview of the interview, which was lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

How do you and your team create content? Is it planned out far ahead of time or typically more reactionary?

I would say that about 75% of our content is planned and about 25% is reactive. So, when we're building out our social calendar, we really want to take into account what's happening with our franchises. Is there a new launch or a new series coming out? Is there a key product collaboration that we want to promote? And we're also taking into account everything that we know that's happening in pop culture, and then planning accordingly. We call this our “planned reactive,” and it’s essentially us planning for an event and anticipating that there’s going to be a lot of social media conversation around it. 

It's really impossible to predict what's going to resonate, so we work really closely with our agency, Movement [Strategy], to monitor trends. They are extremely tapped into the social, cultural zeitgeist, so with their help, we're really picking out those moments that we feel confident are going to pop across social media.

Read the rest of our interview with Woodall here

Number of the week: $851 million

That’s the total earned media value of the social media content created by beauty influencers in the first six months of 2023, according to a new report from influencer marketing platform Tagger Media. That $851 million value comprises 184,000 posts from roughly 40,000 beauty creators, nearly all of which stemmed from Instagram, per Tagger’s data. But while the vast majority of this influencer content was posted to Instagram, the report revealed that beauty influencers actually receive higher engagement on their TikTok videos, with an average engagement rate of 2.75% on TikTok compared to 1.42% on Instagram.