Beauty and fashion influencer Eni Popoola first learned she'd been deepfaked the way many creators do: from her audience. A YouTube ad sent by a follower featured her face and her voice, promoting an online course she had never heard of. "People were sending screenshots saying, 'Hey, there's this video of you, and we obviously know it's not you, because this is not something that you would talk about,'" Popoola said. She's far from alone, as the experience of finding one's AI doppelganger - promoting unknown supplements, self-help content or beauty products - is becoming increasingly commonplace in the creator economy.
If you do not get laser focussed on this right now, you run the risk of having marketing activity that drifts loose with no real purpose. You need to base everything you do to promote and acquire new affiliate partners around three clear principles: Why You - Why do you want to work with that affiliate in particular? Why Me - Why are you the right program or affiliate manager for that affiliate?
Negotiating real estate on affiliate portals means you need to have a good sense of commercial selling and how to value different traffic sources. At the end of the day, this is a business, and you need to be able to make the right media advertising decisions that will help the business succeed and meet your overall customer acquisition targets.
Authorities in Europe and Israel have targeted companies and suspects behind fraudulent social media advertising campaigns as part of a crackdown on a massive cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering operation, which allegedly scammed thousands of victims with fake online investment schemes. Coordinated actions by law enforcement in Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, and Israel in November led to two arrests and other suspects questioned, Europol said Thursday.
People aren't finding products the way they used to. Tools like Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT's new conversational shopping feature are compressing the traditional funnel. Instead of starting with a search and clicking through multiple sites, consumers are increasingly discovering and comparing products directly within AI platforms. Recent data shows nearly 60% of Google searches now end without a click - a trend that will only accelerate as AI takes a more active role in summarizing content and generating recommendations.
As OpenAI seeks more ways to make money, ChatGPT's potential as a shopping assistant is one promising idea: You tell the bot what you're thinking about buying, and it will help you make comparisons, sort prices and answer intricate product questions. With any luck, those answers might even be right. Crucially, the assumption is that many people will prefer to shop online this way rather than use their current methods,
Relying on one gig is like putting all your eggs in one very fragile basket. The most successful gig workers I know have multiple income streams flowing at once. Think about it this way: If you're driving for Uber, you're already in your car. Why not deliver food between rides? If you're freelance writing, why not offer social media management to the same clients? The key is finding gigs that complement each other instead of competing for your time.
Now, a new crop of storefronts want to make it easier to shop what we see on our favourite creators' feeds by positioning them as the curators of their own online stores. As the traditional wholesale model falters, it's shaping up to be the next creator economy battleground. In the last three months, ShopMy launched direct-to-consumer (DTC) creator storefronts on its platform, which currently provide affiliate links to creators to tag their recommendations.
Affiliate programs are often sold as "partnerships," but for most publishers, they function more like a long-shot gamble. You generate traffic, clicks, and conversions, and then wait to see if the brand's tracking system recognizes your contribution. Spoiler alert: it often doesn't. Ad blockers, private browsing, cookie restrictions, and platform bias all eat away at affiliate tracking. Even when a publisher does everything right - driving legitimate traffic to a partner brand - many clicks go unrecorded or uncredited.
For years, brands tried to split the difference by hiring a PR agency for visibility, an affiliate manager for commerce coverage and affiliate partnerships, and a media buyer for paid social scale. Seven years ago, I, in fact, was one of them as the former VP of Marketing and Founding Team at Ritual. On paper, it made sense. In practice, I found it created silos, competing agendas, and a lack of shared accountability and synergy across agencies and partners.
"Unlike transactional affiliate programs, Gap Inc.'s new social media advocacy platform is a centralized hub for creators to engage deeply across Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Athleta," Gap Inc. indicated. "Modeled to create community, it will offer [creators] early access to new releases, product seeding, and exclusive promos, as well as content collaboration opportunities and the ability for creators and their content to be amplified across paid, social, and brand-owned channels."
B2B brands that invest in growth hacking strategies don't focus on wide-reaching influencers with millions of followers. They typically focus on micro-influencer campaigns since smaller influencers likely have a much more targeted audience base that is aligned with your industry.
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