Happy Monday,
We hope everyone had a great weekend! We also hope that your friends, families, and colleagues based in southern US are safe and recovering from the devastating hurricane.
Tons of developments in the influencer marketing & social commerce space; especially with Meta’s recent Connect event. Here’s what you need to know:
Expedia launches Travel Shops: These are personalized, storefronts that give creators a dedicated page in the Expedia app to curate recommendations and earn commission. Sound familiar?
TikTok launches search ads in the US: TikTok doubles down on Google’s lunch by launching its own version of search ads. The new feature allows brands to serve ads in TikTok’s search results.
Music from big names are missing from YouTube: A recent licensing dispute between YouTube and SESAC means music from Adele, Green Day, and R.E.M has been pulled from the platform.
Survey from Commercetools finds 77% of brands plan to invest in social commerce: Ahead of Black Friday, over three-quarters of surveyed brands plan on ramping up investments into social commerce and Black Friday.
Enjoy the rest of the newsletter!
Cheers,
Al & Alexa
Industry News By Al
Expedia Group launches ‘Travel Shops’ for creators to aggregate recommendations and earn commission
Expedia’s Travel Shops gives creators an all in one personalized storefront on its app. The storefront page features the creator’s profile picture, biography, travel recommendations, and collections. Collections are a group of hotels centered around a common theme; creators can also add a personal touch to collections by adding captions.
Expedia references several benefits of signing up for a Travel Shop:
- Offers a single, shareable link for all affiliate related needs – making it easy to share and monetize travel recommendations across creators’ bio, posts, and stories
- Streamline Travel Shop optimization with access to analytics and tooling
- Opportunity to be featured on the homepage of the Expedia app
Expedia also revealed its roadmap for ‘Travel Shops’. In the future, creators will be able to upload their own content. Currently, creators can only curate from Expedia’s inventory of 3M+ properties, but in the future will include +220K activities and +500 airlines.
Creators with an affiliate account can currently join the waitlist for the program. Expedia hopes to open the program to anyone who wants to join, in 2025.
Expedia represents another major enterprise equipping social creators with a dedicated, personalized storefront for curating recommendations for their followers. It also is seemingly the first travel & entertainment player to lean in on the concept. It certainly will not be the last.
As others join in on the fun, they will look to LoudCrowd who is pioneering the “Creator Storefront” space!
Brand of the Week By Alexa
New Look, a UK-based fashion-forward retailer, partnered with LoudCrowd to build and manage its new ambassador program aimed to gather more high-quality content from its creator community at scale, without adding management costs and time.
In just 4 months, New Look accomplished:
✨ 2K+ interested ambassadors/creators
✨ 85% and 331% increase in UGC on Instagram and TikTok respectively
✨ Six figures in monthly EMV (earned media value) from ambassadors monthly
Our case study dives deeper into their recruitment strategy, program reward structure, engaging campaigns they’ve run within the program, and more.
Check it out here: https://loudcrowd.com/case-studies/new-look-influencer-program/
Content of the Week By Alexa
For this week’s content, check out LoudCrowd CEO, Gary Garofalo‘s interview with Net Influencer, where they chat about the future of creator-driven, owned social commerce.
A few highlights:
Inside the Boohoo x LoudCrowd partnership for Creator Storefronts
Why performance tracking and an incentive system drive engagement and motivation for both the creators and brands
Where the industry will go from here, and why the two key components of success include revenue generation and content creation.
Read the full interview here:
Tool of the Week By Al
Meta AR Glasses and AI Studio
At its Connect event last week, Meta unveiled its ‘revolutionary’ Orion augmented reality glasses. The glasses use holograms to overlay digital content on the real world.
At the same time, Meta announced new updates to its Meta AI system for influencers like:
Voice interactions with Meta AI, with voices from celebrities like John Cena
New AI versions of creators – previously only in text form – but now in video too
Live translation + AI video dubs – users can dub their videos in another language so it looks native, even changing lip movements to match appropriately
Meta says its new announcements and products are aimed at “bringing the future to everyone.” Not sure about that… but the AR glasses are pretty darn cool.
LoudCrowd Updates By Alexa
Custom profile upload on Creator Storefronts
Creators asked – we listened!
The profile pictures on each creator’s Storefront are automatically pulled in via their Instagram profile picture. Now, creators can change their profile picture by either uploading a new picture or choosing from one of their posts that tagged your brand.
All they have to do is log in to your page and click the camera icon next to their picture to get started.
Tip: If you’re utilizing LoudCrowd’s Influencer List Page, you can now ask your creators to change their profile picture, so it better aligns with your brand’s image as you feature them in the Influencer List Page.
