Hi friends,

Two stories this week point the same way. The Wall Street Journal found TikTok Shop filling up with AI-generated creators, cheap synthetic clips standing in for real people. And out at the World Cup, the creators pulling the biggest numbers were doing the least scalable thing there is: sitting in a stadium, reacting in real time.

Put them together and the week has a shape. Making content is racing toward free and infinite. Earning trust is not.

Let's get into it.

🚨 This week's headlines

(July 21, 2026)

🤖 The Wall Street Journal says AI-generated creators are flooding TikTok Shop

TikTok Shop is filling with AI-generated product videos, some synthetic avatars, some digital duplicates of real creators, the Journal reported July 15. TikTok supplies the tools and takes a cut. The economics drive it: a human demo needs a script, lighting, and edits; an AI clip costs a few dollars and spins into dozens of A/B-tested variants in an afternoon. eMarketer projects US TikTok Shop near $23.4 billion in 2026, up about 48% (its projection).

When anyone can generate a hundred competent demos before lunch, volume stops being an advantage; the scarce thing is a reason to believe the person on screen. Two moves follow: set your disclosure and authenticity posture now, before a backlash or platform rule sets it for you; and price real creators for what you are buying, verified human credibility, not footage. The footage is now a commodity.

📎 Read on the Wall Street Journal

📺 Creators built a second World Cup broadcast on Twitch and YouTube

As the World Cup wrapped, creator-led livestreams ran alongside the official feed, with streamers reacting from inside stadiums (Digiday, July 13). IShowSpeed's sideline streams pulled tens of millions of views each. Twitch's "Football Fest" hub reported 29% of viewers with higher fandom than 2022 and 44% wanting coverage traditional media missed (its own figures); an NBA "Creator Cast" added 5% incremental Prime viewership. Fox paid a reported $485 million for the US rights.

The tell is who paid to be there: brands without official rights, Unilever among them with a 50,000-creator activation, sponsored creator streams over the broadcast. The creator layer sells what an official feed cannot, a specific person and a live reaction, the opposite of the synthetic clips flooding the Shop above. If your category has live or event energy, a creator stream is now a real media line, cheaper than rights you cannot win.

📎 Read on Digiday

🧠 Brand(s) Move of the Week

How ten brands won the World Cup without a single big-budget football ad

The World Cup produced the usual flood of expensive films: famous players, swelling soundtracks, dreams. The Drum's ten brands that actually won on social had almost none of that. The sharpest work reacted fast, spent little, and let the tournament or FIFA supply the idea. Three patterns stand out, all stealable.

The restriction became the brief. FIFA's clean-stadium rules force non-sponsors to cover their logos. Levi's, Heinz, Gillette and Beats made the cover-up the campaign instead of complaining: Levi's recreated the blackout in stores from London to Berlin, Heinz Canada shipped a censored bottle, Gillette turned its covered sign into shaving foam. Levi's says the stunt drove roughly 1 billion impressions, its most-viewed campaign ever (its own figure).

Distinctive assets did the logo's work. None of this lands without a brand already recognizable by shape alone. Audiences knew the Levi's red tab, the Heinz bottle, the Beats silhouette, even with the wordmark taped over. If a strip of tape makes your brand more visible, your assets are strong; if the cover-up leaves people guessing, that's the more useful finding.

They played the result, not just the match. Most brands chase the celebration; the best mined the whole range, losing included. British Airways and Norwegian wagered on the England-Norway quarter-final, the loser swapping its profile picture for the rival's, reaching tens of millions. Uber handed tissues to knocked-out fans; Chispa paired up supporters after elimination. Defeat proved as good a trigger as victory.

Instagram post

The meta-pattern: the biggest advertisers paid for certainty, official rights, guaranteed placement. The winners on social bought the opposite, betting the result or the fans would supply the idea, then moving fast enough to own it. Meltwater's tracking bears it out: non-sponsors out-mentioned sponsors roughly 57,000 to 43,000 (via CNBC). The catch: reactive wins can't be scheduled, and every figure is self-reported. You can't brief "go viral off a taping error," but you can build distinctive assets, watch the feed, and pre-clear approvals so the moment is yours when it comes.

📎 Read on The Drum

🔭 Trend Watch

Content went free. Trust didn't.

Stack the week. On one side, AI creators flooding TikTok Shop and big advertisers wiring up generative content engines (L'Oreal just deepened an OpenAI deal, per Glossy). On the other, the World Cup's winners owning global moments with a roll of tape and a fast reaction. Cheap content, synthetic or reactive, is now effectively infinite. What is not is the buyer's willingness to trust it at the register. ESW's June survey of 23,000 shoppers found 62% are influenced by social but only 6% prefer to buy there, and only about a quarter trust social checkout (ESW sells cross-border commerce). NielsenIQ puts North Americans who have never bought through social at 68%, even as China's live-commerce market nears all of US e-commerce ($900 billion, a third-party estimate in NIQ's report).

The two lines move in opposite directions: content supply is exploding while willingness to trust it at purchase is flat to falling. When anyone can manufacture infinite persuasive video, the binding constraint is no longer output, it is belief, and most orgs fund the wrong side. IAB data has US brands spending about $16 billion amplifying creator content versus $9.6 billion on the direct relationships that build the trust. We pay to scale reach and starve what makes reach convert. The winners next quarter will be whoever can still make someone believe the person on screen.

📎 CX Dive · NielsenIQ · Glossy

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends,

Notice where everyone spent their energy this past week week. Google built a way to track how your social posts perform in search. Food Network put a trained chef on TikTok live and AliExpress leaned on creators instead of discounts.

Three companies, three different surfaces, all chasing the same thing: a bigger share of where people discover products now that discovery has scattered across every app. The catch is that discovery turned out to be the easy part.

Let's get into it.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

July 14th

🔍 Google built a tool to track how your TikTok and Instagram posts perform in search

Last week, Google added platform properties to Search Console, a new account type that lets creators and brands see how their Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube posts perform in Google Search and Discover, with no website required. It reports clicks, impressions, and the queries driving traffic to individual posts, and rolls out gradually over the coming weeks.

Google's own worry is that younger users have stopped starting at Google: a Forbes Advisor and Talker Research study found 45% of Gen Z are more likely to search on social platforms than a search engine. So Google is meeting the behavior where it lives and measuring it. For operators, your social posts are now a search asset with real analytics behind them, not just an in-feed play. The content you already make is doing double duty. Start measuring it that way.

Net Influencer · Google Search Central

🍅 Food Network and TikTok LIVE launched a co-hosted cooking series

On July 8, Food Network and TikTok LIVE aired the first episode of a co-hosted cooking series, pairing Tournament of Champions winner Antonia Lofaso with creator Jose El Cook for an hour of tomato recipes across four TikTok accounts. Viewers voted in polls and bought food-themed gifts in the chat.

No shopping in it yet, and that is the point. Food Network is lending creators what the platform cannot manufacture: the credibility of a trained chef and a broadcast brand. Live commerce is borrowing television's trust signals, not the reverse. If your live setup is still a phone propped against a shelf, the bar just moved.

Tubefilter · WBD Pressroom

🛒 AliExpress leaned on creator livestreams instead of discounts for its Summer Sale

AliExpress started reporting back on its June Summer Sale, and the choice was strategic, not promotional. Instead of leading with price, it built the event around creator-led livestreams and Brand+, its channel for authenticated brands, using more than 100 creators across 14 countries. US country manager Chris Gu framed livestreaming as adding discovery and trust at once. Those are the company's own words about its own campaign, and results are still being tallied, so treat them as directional.

The tell is what AliExpress measures: traffic, engagement, retention, and brand mentions alongside sales, not GMV alone. A platform whose US identity was built on being cheapest is now trying to buy trust, and it has decided creators are the currency. The cheapest catalog in America thinks its problem is credibility, not price. If that is AliExpress's problem, it is probably yours too.

EMARKETER · Digital Commerce 360

🎤 Seller Spotlight

What $14 million in live sales taught one TikTok Shop insider

Jason Termechi spent nearly 18 months as a Live Seller Account Manager at TikTok Shop, where he says he helped generate more than $14 million in live GMV across 30-plus fashion and small-business sellers. That figure is his own, from his time inside the platform, so read it as a claim rather than an audited number. He left last October to start a consultancy, on the bet that demand for live commerce expertise now outruns what TikTok's own account managers can supply.

His advice is refreshingly unglamorous. Live selling, he argues, is won on preparation, not production: product selection, pricing, scripting, and the data you read afterward. Three points are worth stealing.

First, build a functioning TikTok Shop before you go live, because the algorithm learns who your buyer is from purchase history and shop score, and a brand with no sales record is asking to be surfaced before it has proven it can serve anyone.

Second, know that TikTok currently favors auction-based sellers in live traffic because they convert faster, so a new brand running flash sales starts at a disadvantage.

Third, watch GPM, gross merchandise value per thousand impressions: above six means the stream is converting and just needs more eyeballs, not a new strategy.

The through-line is the same one running through this whole issue. Live rewards operators who treat it as a discipline, not a stunt.

📎 Read more

🧠 Brand Move of the Week

Crocs turned a TikTok shopping trip into a seven-episode sitcom

Crocs became the first US footwear brand to build shoppable product tags directly into a scripted series. Déjà Shoe, a seven-episode microdrama made with creator commerce agency SuperOrdinary, follows an aspiring stylist stuck reliving a chaotic first day at a fashion company, with Crocs styles tagged for purchase inside the episodes. It premiered June 16 and was produced in under four weeks. The first-footwear-brand claim comes from SuperOrdinary, which sells this exact service, though independent coverage backs up the format's momentum.

@crocsshop_us

Today's the day everything changes... right? | Déjà Shoe Ep 1: The Perfect Fit Catch the rest of Déjà Shoe, starring @Paige Gallagher as E... See more

Why it works is the mechanic, not the novelty. The shopping is native to the story instead of bolted onto it, which is the same insight behind every good piece of branded content: people do not skip what they chose to watch. And the format is having a real moment. Time spent in short-drama apps rose 5.78 billion hours year over year in 2025, per Sensor Tower, and brands from JCPenney to Marc Jacobs to Dr Pepper are now producing them. JCPenney's micronovela with TelevisaUnivision drove over 16 million impressions.

Crocs also has the numbers to make the bet rational. Third-party estimates from Kalodata put it eighth among TikTok Shop's top-revenue shops in April, at $6.35 million in monthly revenue and a $39.05 average order. Ensemble's Ian Schafer had the sharpest framing of the format: it sits somewhere between live shopping and the old promise to shop the look. Which is the quiet theme again. Recorded commerce is trying to buy back the intimacy that live has for free.

Marketing Dive · Net Influencer

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Welcome back to Sell! Sell! Sell! 🛍️

Hi friends!

Finally back after a little summer / Cannes hiatus.

The creator economy has definitely not stood still. Unilever is running 50,000 creators at the World Cup, Dentsu and Meta built machinery to manage activation at that scale, and AliExpress tried to win over US shoppers with creator livestreams instead of just low prices.

The quiet thread tying it together is worth watching all summer: activation is racing way ahead of anyone's ability to prove it pays off.

Let's get into it.

🚨 This Week's Social Commerce Headlines

July 7th

⚽ Unilever activates 50,000 creators for the World Cup

Unilever says it activated 50,000 creators across more than 120 markets for the 2026 World Cup, its biggest creator push ever. Dove and 35 other personal care brands ran House of Fresh pop-ups in New York, Miami, and Mexico City and put top influencers pitch-side. Dove's head of purpose and engagement called it "a Super Bowl every two days."

Note the omission: Unilever shared no budget or ROI (perhaps too early), only talk of attention and long-term equity. Activation at this scale is now table stakes for a tentpole moment, not an experiment. The real question is whether you build that roster and tempo now or rent it later at a premium.

Read more

🔧 Dentsu struck a deal with Meta to speed up mass creator activation

Dentsu announced a deal with Meta today (July 7th) that wires Meta's Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads into its internal operating system through an API. Teams can now efficiently manage creators from one dashboard, reducing work from days to hours. This addresses the scale issue highlighted by Unilever, with micro and nano creators making up nearly half of US influencer spend this year. The competition is over who controls the activation layer.

Brands with resources can develop this in-house, prompting holding companies to offer it as a service. The challenge in creator marketing has shifted from finding creators to matching, contracting, and paying them at scale, making it a strategic decision between building or buying solutions.

Read more

🛒 AliExpress is leaning on creator livestreams, not just low prices

AliExpress shifted its Summer Sale strategy from discounts to creator-led livestreams through its Brand+ program, involving over 100 creators from 14 countries. These creators, chosen for their niche expertise and community trust, partnered with brands for authentic engagement.

Successful streams included interactive sessions like a 3D-printing creator with Anycubic and product testing, drawing significant views. The key takeaway is to engage US shoppers on platforms they already use, like YouTube and Twitch, rather than standalone apps. AliExpress evaluates success based on traffic, engagement, and retention, not just GMV.

Read more

🧠 Brand Move of the Week

A cartoon frog wizard is selling Pine-Sol on TikTok Shop

Pine-Sol, a cleaner that has existed for nearly a century, now runs a TikTok presence that looks like a Gen Z meme page: a frog in a wizard hat, an anime girl, a dancing banana, and bottles branded OMG da Pine. In May, Clorox turned that universe into product, selling four limited edition scents (Magic Matcha, Strawberry Shine, Banana Boogie, Midnight Espresso) exclusively through TikTok Shop. They sold out within hours, according to Clorox. Pine-Sol is one of several Clorox brands now on the platform, alongside Burt's Bees, Brita, Hidden Valley Ranch, and Clorox itself, part of a broader wave of legacy brands moving in as sales from brands over $30 million nearly doubled on TikTok Shop in 2025.

@pinesol

That’s tea, Pine Frog Wizard🐸🍵

Now read the order counts, because they are the whole lesson. Clorox says Burt's Bees has done more than 60,000 orders since launch. Pine-Sol has done more than 300. Brita around 1,000, Hidden Valley around 450, Clorox more than 250. Those are not sales numbers, they are rounding errors. What Pine-Sol actually generated is attention: more than 8.4 million organic impressions, one frog video past 13 million views, at roughly 72,400 views per post. Clorox is refreshingly honest about what this is. Its brand experience lead calls TikTok Shop an "always-on learning lab," a place to test scents, read demand, and build community before committing to a wider rollout.

That is the move worth stealing. Do not judge a TikTok Shop storefront by its GMV in year one. Judge it by what it teaches you about demand and which products earn attention, then carry that signal to the channels where the volume actually lives. The mistake is expecting the shop to be the register when it is really the focus group.

Read more on Modern Retail

🔭 Trend Watch

Everyone is scaling activation faster than they can prove it works

Stack this week's stories and a bigger pattern shows up. Unilever put 50,000 creators on the World Cup and would not share an ROI number. AliExpress ran its Summer Sale on livestreams and is grading it on engagement and retention, not sales. Clorox counts a TikTok Shop launch in impressions because the orders are in the hundreds. Everyone is pouring money and people into creator-led activation. Almost no one is willing to say, on the record, what it returns.

That gap between activation and proof is the real story of the summer. Measurement is one piece of it, which is why a vendor can build a whole campaign on the claim that your ROAS is inflated, and why 30% of marketers told Digiday their biggest problem with creator marketing is not having the data to know what worked.

The brands that win the next year will not be the ones running the most creators or buying the newest ad format. They will be the ones who can tell the difference between attention that sells and attention that just looks good in a deck.

📌 Other stories worth your attention

Walmart is buying ad tech firm Vibe for $1.4 billion. The deal brings Vibe's roughly 10,000 small and midsize advertisers onto Walmart's platform and sharpens its retail media business against Meta and Pinterest. Retail media keeps eating the budget that used to sit in standalone social. Wall Street Journal

Legacy retailers are copying the collectibles playbook. Target and Aldi are borrowing blind boxes and limited drops from the collectibles world and applying them to food and apparel. Scarcity mechanics are migrating out of sneakers and Pokemon into the grocery aisle, the same fandom-commerce logic that built Whatnot. Modern Retail

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends,

Quieter week on the consumer side, busier one on the back end. Three platforms shipped infrastructure aimed at the same thing: getting brands and creators paid through a system the platform controls. LinkedIn leaned hardest into B2B, which is the part worth your attention.

Let's get into it.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

June 16th

🤝 LinkedIn launched a Creator Marketplace for B2B brands

On June 10, LinkedIn launched Creator Marketplace inside Campaign Manager: brands search vetted creators by topic, check performance, and amplify their content with Thought Leader Ads. It shipped with BrandWorks, a managed creative team already working with SAP and Webflow. In LinkedIn's 2026 B2B Marketing Outlook, 82% of marketers said creators build trust with decision makers, and 56% of buyers said they lean on creator input at the final stage. Alpha, US and Canada, English only.

LinkedIn just made itself the system of record for B2B creator partnerships, the way TikTok did for consumer ones. If buyers vet you on LinkedIn before sales picks up, the creators shaping that research are now a line item you can find and pay inside the platform you already run. Cheap to claim now, expensive once it's table stakes. Read more on Social Media Today

💸 Substack opened a native sponsorship program

Yesterday (June 15), Substack launched a sponsorship program pairing its top publishers with brands like Whatnot, T-Mobile, and Uber, which it says are putting millions into participating creators. Publishers build a Creator Kit to signal they want deals; Substack runs the matchmaking and keeps creators in editorial control. Lenny Rachitsky's Product Pass, more than $30,000 of bundled software access offered as a subscriber perk, is the model to study.

Read it as a monetization map, not a Substack story. Newsletters are converging on subscriptions plus brokered sponsorship, and platforms are racing to own the brokering, which is where the margin quietly sits. You no longer pick between a paid list and sponsorship revenue. The operators pulling ahead run both. Read more on Substack

📈 Social commerce is growing about four times faster than e-commerce

New research from agency Influencer puts social commerce growth near 32% against 8% for traditional e-commerce. Discount the headline, the firm timed it to its own event. The stat that matters: bedding brand Resident scored a studio brand spot at 0.89 on its return-on-ad-spend index and a creator-made ad at 1.08, with no cost beyond a gifted mattress. The report also found 72% of creators want long-term partnerships while 54% have them.

The cost-adjusted math flipped. Creator content now beats polished brand work on the number finance watches, turning the creator line from an awareness expense into a performance channel. Most brands still buy creators one campaign at a time; the ones signing repeat deals compound trust and data the rest pay to rebuild every quarter. Read more on NetInfluencer

🔭 Trend Watch

Can live commerce scale like affiliate?

Ad Age made the bull case last fall: live shopping becomes the dominant force in e-commerce by 2030, the next trust-based medium after social video. Worth asking what scaling actually looks like. The last channel that grew on trust plus measurable performance was affiliate, and affiliate is a warning as much as a model. It scaled by making everything trackable, then spent years fighting the coupon leeches, cookie stuffers, and incentive spam that the tracking invited.

Live commerce is at the same fork, and Vogue Business spent the week documenting the early signs. Its piece catalogs the conversion tactics now drawing scrutiny, the countdown windows, the limited-time bidding, the scarcity cues built to turn a browser into a buyer before they second-guess the cart. That is what a trust medium looks like once it gets optimized for conversion at scale. The pressure arrives with the growth.

The defenders have a case. Live selling moves dead stock and secondhand inventory static pages struggle to shift, and lowers returns because people see fit before they commit. The format is not the problem. The pressure layer bolted on top is. And it draws attention now for one reason: the channel got big enough to police. Whatnot is tracking toward roughly $15 billion in GMV this year. A tactic nobody questions at small scale becomes a liability at billions in volume.

The warning already showed up in the data last month, when 63% of Gen Z told eMarketer they had pulled back from TikTok Shop even as discovery stayed strong. That is urgency fatigue. The affiliate lesson is that the winners were not the operators who gamed the tracking hardest, they were the ones who built durable programs the pressure tactics could not poison. Live commerce scales that way or it does not scale at all. Treat trust as the product, not the wrapper on a faster checkout. Read more on Vogue Business

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends!

I feel like last week was the busiest event week of the year. The Outfit / CreatorCart teams was OOO most of the week at various events (NY Tech Week, Retail Brew, and an assortment of branded events). I guess it was kind of the last week before both summer and the World Cup are taking over? 🌞 ⚽

This week, Vogue Business put real numbers to how luxury shoppers use social and AI to buy. Airbnb said it wants creators hosting its Experiences. A startup called The Mall launched a single feed for tracking your favorite brands. And Etsy ran a campaign betting on the opposite of automation.

Let’s dig in.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

June 9th

🔁 Social became the fitting room. The sale moved off it.

Vogue Business surveyed 3,103 luxury consumers, and the headline finding travels past luxury: social is now where people decide, not where they buy. (I know TTS is an anomaly here). TikTok's head of luxury, Kristina Karassoulis, calls it an "evaluation engine," where shoppers pull up reviews and comparisons and ask creators "is it worth it" before purchasing somewhere else. That breaks on-platform conversion as a metric, because the platform doing the persuading rarely logs the sale.

The same concentration is happening with AI. Across 25 brands and 40 shopping prompts, Vogue Business found six brands already own more than 60% of AI shopping visibility, the same winner take most pattern social produced. AI tools also pull from Reddit and reviews over your own product pages. If your data isn't readable by a model, you're not in the consideration set.

Read on Vogue Business

🏠 Airbnb wants creators to sell experiences, not posts

Airbnb is adding creators to its Experiences product after internal tests it says showed strong conversion, with listings coming in the next few months. CEO Brian Chesky's pitch is local demand: a creator's fans will book in their own city, so a following turns into bookings where the creator lives.

The angle for sellers: as paid posts lose trust, the creator asset that holds value is the one that can't be faked, a real audience that shows up in person. Note that Airbnb released no data and named no creators, so "strong conversion" is a claim, not a result.

Read on Tubefilter · PhocusWire

🛍️ A new app wants to be Spotify for shopping

The Mall, founded last October, lets users build a feed of their favorite brands and track drops, restocks, and price changes across 10,000-plus retailers. It scrapes brand sites rather than partnering, labels everything with LLMs for search, and is rolling out invite-only to about 4,500 testers.

The catch: it owns discovery and hands off the sale. Checkout happens on the brand's own site, with no affiliate cut. It calls itself Spotify for shopping, but it's closer to Shazam, a tool that points you to where the money is made. Watch it as a sign that aggregation layers are forming above you, not as a threat.

Read on TechCrunch

🧠 Brand Move of the Week

Etsy is betting on being human… while it still sells AI

Etsy’s Celebrate Being Human Campaign

Etsy's new campaign, "Celebrate Being Human," is a 60-second anthem spot from creative shop Orchard that measures a life in numbers: about 26,826 days, 76 summers, 12 jobs, 15 great loves, three broken hearts. The products it features are the un-automatable kind, a one-year sobriety chip, an "officially divorced" sweatshirt, objects tied to a moment rather than a need. CMO Brad Minor's thesis is clean: most e-commerce optimizes for convenience and speed, and Etsy is choosing the opposite, purchases tied to memory and identity. The craft backs the message. The spot was shot on film, cast mostly with non-actors, and voiced by the creative director who co-wrote it. It is a direct play on the same eroding trust in slick, paid, AI-polished content that runs through this week's lead story, and it lines up with a wider move toward realism and phone-free, experiential marketing across the industry.

Here is the part the campaign leaves out. Etsy still allows AI-generated products on the marketplace, per its own seller handbook, and AI listings have proliferated there for two years. So the brand is running an anti-automation message over a catalog that is itself filling with automation. That is the operator lesson worth both stealing and watching: positioning is cheap, product reality is expensive, and the gap between the two is exactly where customers lose trust. Etsy is making a real bet that humanness is a durable differentiator. It only holds if the marketplace underneath the ad actually feels human, and that is a promise the platform has chosen not to enforce.

Read on Marketing Brew

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends,

For three weeks the story has been infrastructure. Platforms collapsing the funnel, agents learning to buy, checkout moving one tap closer. This week the layer everyone forgot to talk about pushed back to the front: affiliate.

Amazon put the AI shopper up for sale, Meta finished internalizing the link in bio business, and Minecraft, a game with 300 million copies sold, launched its first affiliate program from scratch.

As AI takes over discovery, the one thing it cannot manufacture is a trusted recommendation, and every player this week made a move to own that layer.

Let's get into it.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

June 2nd

🤖 Amazon is now selling the AI shopper, and the receipts are thin

On May 27, AWS launched its Agentic Shopping Assistant, letting any retailer build its own AI shopping agent on the tech behind Rufus, now Alexa for Shopping, which Amazon says drove close to $12 billion in incremental sales last year. The pitch is sharp: build your own agent, do not hand your customers to a middleman. Accenture projects more than 30 percent of online commerce could run through agents by 2030.

Then there is the part the keynote skipped. Only 22 percent of US shoppers have ever bought inside an AI tool, and Walmart found conversion ran three times lower in ChatGPT than when shoppers were routed back to its own site. AI is winning discovery and losing the sale. Treat agentic surfaces as research for now, and keep your own store as the place the transaction actually closes.

Read more on GeekWire · CNBC

🔗 Meta's native affiliate links are live, and link in bio is the casualty

Timing first. Meta announced this at Shoptalk back in March, and the rollout has landed in waves since. It has now reached broad availability, which makes the consequences concrete. Creators can tag up to 30 products inside a single Instagram Reel and paste affiliate links directly, as long as the product sits in Meta's commerce catalog. Facebook gets clickable product bubbles tied to affiliate accounts, starting with Amazon in the US.

The move underneath the feature is that Meta is absorbing the affiliate rail LTK and ShopMy built their businesses on, and keeping the click and the conversion data inside its own walls. For brands the prerequisite is immediate and unglamorous. If your catalog is not clean and live inside Meta's commerce manager, none of this fires, and no creator outreach fixes a broken catalog.

Read more on The Verge

🎭 US live commerce is breaking from the Chinese playbook

A new roundup of sixteen creator economy operators makes a claim worth sitting with. Live shopping in America will not look like it does in China, and brands waiting for the Chinese conversion math are waiting for the wrong thing. There, streams convert fast because people arrive already intending to shop.

In the US, viewers come for entertainment, so the stream earns the sale through community and show, not countdown timers. The format that works looks more like a variety show than a sales counter. For sellers that is a hiring problem dressed as a content problem. The winning talent is not whoever reads a product list fastest. It is whoever can hold a room for an hour.

Read more on Net Influencer

🎤 Seller Spotlight

Creators are the latest New York export

The New York Post ran a piece this week with a frame worth stealing: influencers are now one of New York's leading exports. The mechanic is that the city still works as an accelerator, the place creators come to break out, but once they reach scale the math of staying stops working. High rent, no production space, and a job that no longer requires proximity to any industry building. So they leave, and they take their brand partnerships and their spending with them.

@meals_by_cug

A/C szn 🧊🧊🧊

The number that matters for this audience is not in the article. It is the one in your own talent budget. If the creator who moves your category now lives in Austin or Miami or Lisbon and performs identically, the premium you have been paying for New York-based talent and New York shoots is a premium for a backdrop. The creator is a portable business. Source your roster nationally and stop overpaying for a zip code.

Read more on the New York Post

🧠 Brand Move of the Week

Minecraft turned its players into an affiliate channel

On June 1, Minecraft launched its first ever affiliate program, and the scale is the story.

The game is the best-selling title of all time, with more than 350 million copies sold and over 200 million monthly active users, and its Marketplace creators have already earned more than $500 million across roughly 300 active partner organizations. The new program adds a tracked, performance-based layer on top of that. Creators, publishers, and educators get a unique link they can drop into any content they choose, from a QR code in a video to a banner on a website, with commissions starting at 5 percent.

The terms tell you how cautious this first step is. Commissions apply only to select Marketplace items sold on the web, things like skin packs, texture packs, mini-games, and adventure maps. Subscriptions and full games are excluded. So this is not earn on anything Minecraft. It is a controlled test on the highest-margin, lowest-risk corner of the catalog.

Read the move, not just the news. Minecraft is not chasing a new audience. It is formalizing the recommendation behavior its community was already doing for free, and putting attribution and payouts behind it. That is the playbook for 2026, and Minecraft is arguably late rather than early. Macy's, Adidas, and Home Depot already run creator affiliate programs, and inside gaming both EA and Roblox have moved to pull creator partnerships in house. When the best-selling game of all time treats its creators as a measurable growth channel rather than a marketing line item, the affiliate model has stopped being a niche tactic and become default infrastructure.

Read more on Net Influencer & Marketing Dive

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends!

It’s small business month - so lets look at what truly moves the needle for business owners wanting to dip a toe in social content that converts. I've been sitting on numbers from a 180 day playbook we just wrapped with a SMB fintech operator and I keep coming back to one stat: 56% of organic reach went to founders who had never heard of the brand before. Cold audiences, in the buying window, finding the brand through other operators. The full breakdown is in the Brand Move section below.

I'm bringing it up here because everything else that happened in B2B this month points to the same shift. LinkedIn passed YouTube as the primary share of voice channel for B2B brands. Amazon DSP opened its CTV inventory to LinkedIn audience targeting. And a new Meltwater reptort showed LinkedIn is now the second most cited domain inside AI chatbots, with individual creator posts beating company pages by a wide margin.

Let's get into it.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

May 26th

📈 LinkedIn just passed YouTube as B2B's primary share of voice channel

New Shake Content data, surfaced by Dani Markovits last week, shows LinkedIn has overtaken YouTube as the top B2B share of voice channel in the US. The pattern underneath is the part that matters. Founder and operator content is outperforming brand handles on the same platforms, with the same budgets.

The B2B brands winning right now have stopped optimizing for company page reach and started building the personal accounts of three to five operators inside the business. If your 2026 plan still treats LinkedIn as a recruiting channel with a marketing bolt on, you are reading the platform wrong. Read more on LinkedIn

📺 LinkedIn and Amazon DSP open CTV to professional targeting

Announced May 7, advertisers who buy streaming TV ads through Amazon can now target viewers using LinkedIn's professional data. A campaign on Netflix, Roku, or Paramount can be aimed at specific job titles, industries, and company sizes, the same way a LinkedIn feed ad targets today. LinkedIn says its streaming TV ads reach B2B audiences 2.2x more effectively than other streaming platforms.

Streaming TV was the last major format where B2B targeting wasn't available at scale. That gap just closed. Expect upfront budgets that defaulted to retargeting banner ads to start moving into streaming over the next two quarters. Read more on Marketing Dive

🤖 LinkedIn is now the second most cited domain in AI chatbots

A Meltwater report released May 21 analyzed 9.5 million citations across six major AI chatbots and found LinkedIn ranks second as a source for chatbot answers. The detail that matters: individual creator posts get cited far more often than company page updates, and 83% of citations come from LinkedIn articles and plain text posts. LinkedIn dominates B2B queries specifically, ranking top five across every industry vertical tested.

The next generation of buyers researching your category will get their first answer from a chatbot that learned what to say from a LinkedIn post written by a person, not from your company's About page. Brands without a meaningful individual presence on LinkedIn are losing share of the AI summary that increasingly stands between buyers and brand websites. Read more on Social Media Today

🧠 Brand Move of the Week

What we learned running a 180 day creator playbook for an SMB fintech operator

Back to the stat from the top. We just wrapped a 180 day creator engagement with an SMB-focused fintech operator. Three numbers from the report worth sharing here:

• 56% of organic reach went to cold founders. Not warm audiences, not retargeted lookalikes. Founders who had never heard of the brand before, reached during their active buying window.

• 17.6% weighted engagement rate. Built almost entirely on Saves and Shares, not Likes. Founders were forwarding the content to peers mid decision.

• 3 creator archetypes carried the entire program. Zero to One Founders, Scaling Operators, and Professional Advisors. One roster, three voices, three stages of the SMB buying cycle.

The reach number is the one that surprises most operators. Cold founders aren't supposed to find a brand through organic content in a category as crowded as SMB fintech. They did here because the content was built to be forwarded, not broadcast. The Zero to One Founder's post lands with someone two years ahead of them. The Scaling Operator's post gets sent to a CFO. The Professional Advisor's content closes the loop with credentialed authority. Buyers weren't just watching the feed. They were using it to recruit their own peers into the decision.

The engagement number matters because Saves and Shares are the signals that actually predict pipeline. Likes are vanity. A Save means the content is being archived for a real moment of consideration. A Share means it's already inside someone else's decision process. 17.6% weighted to those two actions is what a healthy B2B funnel looks like before anyone clicks an ad.

This tracks with everything else in this issue. LinkedIn is rewarding individual voices over company handles. AI chatbots are quoting creators over brand pages. The brands winning the B2B share of voice race are the ones that figured out the operator voice is the unit of distribution, not the brand handle.

The thing to keep in mind: this is harder than it looks. Most brands try to do creator content in B2B by pointing a camera at the CEO once a quarter and posting the clip on the company page. That is not what works. What works is a structured roster of voices, each playing a clear role in the buying cycle, producing content that other operators want to forward.

If you want to see the full report from our insights team, with the framework, the engagement breakdown, and the playbook we used, book a time here or reply to this email commenting SMBplaybook.

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends!

TikTok World 2026 dropped last week (May 13). The press fixated on Branded Buzz and Search Hubs. The actual story is bigger: TikTok shipped enough infrastructure this week to stop being a discovery layer and start being the operating system of social commerce. Full funnel. All owned in-house.

Six new tools aimed at sellers. And buried inside the announcements is a metric change that will quietly reshape every TikTok Shop P&L this quarter.

Let's get into it.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

May 19th

🛠️ TikTok World 2026: Branded Buzz & Search Hubs

Out of the six announcements, two matter for anyone selling on the platform.

Branded Buzz packages a campaign of "300 creators, thousands of videos" into a single buy. The advertiser doesn't pick talent — they pick a brief and a budget, and TikTok handles the cohort. Read this as TikTok industrializing the top of the funnel.

Search Hubs are brand-owned takeovers at the top of TikTok's search results. Until now, brand presence on TikTok has been a feed bet. Now it's also a query bet — the first credible direct-response surface inside TikTok discovery. If you've been spending on TikTok to drive search volume elsewhere (Google, Amazon), Search Hubs lets you intercept that volume on-platform.

📎 Read more

📊 GMV Max will now include seller-side costs in ROAS

This one didn't get the headlines but every TikTok Shop seller will feel it.

GMV Max: TikTok Shop's auto-optimized campaign product, will now factor in affiliate commissions, coupons, and platform fees when reporting return on ad spend. Until this update, ROAS reflected gross GMV, which overstated profitability for any seller running affiliate-heavy or discount-driven campaigns. The reported number and the actual take-home didn't match. Now they will.

1. Campaigns that looked profitable last quarter may not anymore - not because performance changed, but because the metric got honest. Reset your internal benchmarks now, not at the end of the quarter when finance starts asking questions.

2. This rewards sellers who already model true unit economics and penalizes sellers who were running on TikTok's old number. The gap between sophisticated and unsophisticated TikTok Shop operators is about to widen.

📎 Read more

🔭 Trend Watch

TikTok is collapsing the funnel into one app

Stack what TikTok announced or expanded this month:

Top of funnel: Branded Buzz (cohort creative at scale) and the existing feed.

Mid-funnel: Search Hubs (brand-owned search takeovers) - finally a query surface where intent is high.

Bottom of funnel: TikTok Shop, now with enterprise assortments from the likes of Ulta and Sally Beauty in the last 2 months.

Beyond the funnel: TikTok GO, which just expanded to the US and Japan, lets users book travel, experiences, and reservations directly inside the feed through Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, and Trip.com. That's not strictly social commerce, but it tells you where the app is going — every transaction category, every part of the funnel, no need to leave.

@tiktokforbusiness

How do top global brands capture deep consumer intent without the standard manual ad grind? 👀 At TikTok World, Isobel Sita Lumsden, Head o... See more

The strategic question for sellers: if TikTok can run the entire funnel, what's the case for sending traffic anywhere else? For many DTC categories, the answer is increasingly "not much." For categories with complex consideration: high-ticket, regulated, or long sales cycles, TikTok is still upstream of conversion, not the conversion surface itself. Know which one you are. The marketing budget you allocate based on the wrong answer is the most expensive line item in your P&L.

The thing to watch: as TikTok closes the funnel inside the app, attribution will get harder, not easier. Sellers should be aggressive about pixel hygiene and conversion API setup now, before TikTok starts gating attribution behind ad spend tiers, which is what Meta did.

📎 Read more

📌 Other stories worth your attention

Sazerac took an equity stake in Alix Earle's Sipmargs. Brief callback to last week's piece on creators wanting equity — Sazerac is now treating creator-backed brands as an acquisition pipeline, second deal in two weeks after Kendall Jenner's 818 Tequila. The takeaway from last week stands: the top of the creator stack is playing a different game than the middle. Food Dive

Meta is readying AI shopping agents for Instagram. Direct response to TikTok Shop. EMARKETER reports the assistant will help users identify products in Reels and complete purchases inside the platform, potentially by Q4. Watch the rollout pattern — if Meta ships a comparable MCP-accessible agent layer, the cross-platform agent workflow we wrote about above becomes real this year, not next. EMARKETER

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends!

Welcome back to Sell! Sell! Sell!

This week we’re looking at Meta building AI shopping agents into Instagram, Pinterest trying to prove it can move beyond inspiration, and Apothékary showing what actually makes TikTok Shop work at the brand level after generating $1M in sales in 30 days.

We’re also looking at a bigger shift in the creator economy: creators taking ownership instead of just cash.

Let’s get into it.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

May 12th

🤖 Meta Readies AI Shopping Agents for Instagram

Meta is developing AI shopping tools for Instagram, including an assistant that could help users identify products in Reels and feeds, navigate to external sites, and complete purchases inside the platform. The feature could launch by Q4, according to EMARKETER.

The timing matters. Meta expects 47.2% of U.S. social buyers to shop on Instagram this year, compared with 51% on TikTok. The gap is close enough for Meta to compete, but TikTok has already trained users to treat content as a place to buy. Meta’s AI push is an attempt to reduce friction and make Instagram feel more transactional without rebuilding the app around a marketplace.

Read more

📌 Pinterest Wants to Prove It Can Drive More Than Inspiration

Pinterest reported $1 billion in Q1 revenue, up 18% year over year, with 631 million monthly active users, an all-time high. The company is now trying to prove it can move beyond discovery and become a stronger multichannel marketing platform.

The strategy is built around intent. Pinterest is leaning into AI-powered ad tools, shoppable partnerships with companies like Walmart and Instacart, and its acquisition of tvScientific to connect Pinterest data with CTV performance. The platform has always been good at knowing what people want next. Now it needs to show advertisers it can help close the loop.

Read more

🎙️ Podcasts Are Pulling in More Advertising Dollars

Podcast advertising continues to grow as brands look for environments with longer attention spans and more intentional audiences. According to The New York Times, podcasts and broader creator-led content mixes are attracting a larger share of ad budgets as marketers move beyond short-form reach alone.

The appeal is partly structural. Podcasts offer sustained engagement, host trust, and formats that are harder to replicate in feeds built around speed and interruption. As creators expand across video, audio, newsletters, and live content, advertisers are increasingly buying into ecosystems rather than individual posts.

Read More

🧠 Brand Move of the Week

Apothékary Builds a TikTok Shop Playbook Around Operations

The Japanese wellness company Apothékary made $1 million on TikTok Shop in one month, but the interesting part is how unflashy the playbook was. The wellness brand didn’t start with viral creative. It started by improving its TikTok Shop performance score, which affects access to key features like sample distribution for affiliate creators.

@hangingwithalo

On day 4 and so far still working great!! I am still making sure I eat throughout the day even if it’s smaller meals!! But I can def say t... See more

Once that foundation was in place, the brand built an affiliate creator sales force. Apothékary offered 20% commissions instead of the more typical 15%, supported creators through TikTok and Discord group chats, and ran education sessions to make sure affiliates understood the product.

The brand also found a hero product. Blue Burn, a $39 liquid herbal supplement, worked because creators could explain it clearly and customers could understand the use case quickly. That is the part many brands miss. TikTok Shop rewards content, but the backend still has to work. Fulfillment, creator incentives, product clarity, and customer service are not side details. They are the system.

Read more

🔭 Trend Watch

More creators are taking equity in brands

A growing number of creators are thinking beyond the sponsorship fee.

SuperOrdinary is now offering creators access to a shareholder program, including a 7% dividend and the option to convert shares into equity. Digiday also reported on micro-influencers exploring ownership-driven deals as a way to build more security beyond one-off sponsorships.

The logic is simple. If creators are helping brands acquire customers, move product, and build cultural relevance, some want exposure to the upside they are creating.

This is not going to replace cash deals. Most creators still need predictable income, and equity is risky. It can be illiquid, hard to value, and tied to outcomes that may take years. For smaller creators, a standard sponsorship is often the better deal.

But the direction is worth watching, with both Digiday and Netinfluencer reporting on similar stories this week. The creator economy is moving from posts to assets. Revenue share, equity, licensing, co-created products, and IP all sit inside the same broader shift. Creators who build long-term businesses are trying to own more of the value chain instead of renting their audience to brands campaign by campaign.

That does not mean every creator should become an investor. It means the best creators are starting to think less like media inventory and more like business partners.

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends!

Our team spent two days at Meta’s offices here in New York last week looking at what they’re building next around AI-driven ads and revamping shopping.

The direction is clear. Meta is going back into commerce, this time with AI at the center.

TikTok just put up a $4.9B quarter with TikTok Shop. That kind of signal forces a response from Meta.

The question is whether they can make it work this time around.

Let’s get into it.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

(Cinco de Mayo)

🛍️ TikTok Shop Finds Growth With Older Shoppers

TikTok Shop is expanding beyond its early Gen Z base, with shoppers over 45 becoming a growing segment of spenders on the platform. What started as a youth-driven discovery engine is now pulling in a broader demographic with higher purchasing power.

The shift changes how brands view the platform. TikTok is no longer just a place for trend-driven products. It’s becoming a more stable retail channel with a wider customer base and more consistent purchasing behavior.

More in WSJ

🔗 Whatnot and Shopify Connect Live Selling With Owned Commerce

Whatnot is partnering with Shopify to allow sellers to sync inventory and operations between live selling and their own storefronts. Merchants can now move between auctions and traditional ecommerce without managing separate systems.

Live commerce is starting to integrate into the broader ecommerce stack rather than sitting alongside it. Sellers don’t have to choose between audience and ownership. They can operate across both.

Read full announcement

🧠 Etsy Tests AI-Powered Shopping With ChatGPT Integration

Etsy is testing a ChatGPT-powered shopping assistant designed to help users find products through conversation, starting with gifting. Instead of browsing categories or refining search terms, shoppers describe who they’re buying for, the occasion, or the type of item they want, and the system generates tailored suggestions.

The shift moves Etsy away from traditional search and toward guided discovery, where product recommendations are shaped by context and intent rather than keywords alone.

Read more in Retail Brew

🥽 Deep Dive

Take Two for Meta - will it work this time?

Meta relaunching Shop

Meta has been here before.

In 2020, the company launched Shops across Facebook and Instagram, aiming to turn its platforms into full ecommerce destinations. The pitch was simple. Discover products in the feed, browse storefronts, and complete purchases without leaving the app.

It didn’t stick.

Shops struggled to change user behavior. Checkout often pushed users off-platform, merchant tools were fragmented, and most importantly, the content wasn’t built for selling. Commerce sat on top of the experience instead of being embedded into it.

By 2023, Meta quietly pulled back. Commerce was deprioritized, and the focus returned to ads and engagement.

Then TikTok changed the model.

Instead of building storefronts, TikTok built commerce into content itself. Creators didn’t send users to shops. They sold directly inside videos and live streams. Discovery, trust, and purchase happened in the same moment.

That model worked. TikTok’s commerce business scaled quickly, culminating in a $4.9B quarter that showed what happens when content and transactions collapse into one layer.

Now they are back.

This time, the approach is different. Instead of building standalone shopping surfaces, Meta is embedding commerce into its existing strengths. AI-driven recommendations, creator-led distribution, and ad formats that move directly into purchase.

The new system looks less like a store and more like a pipeline. Content creates intent. AI matches products. Checkout happens without friction.

The question isn’t whether Meta understands the model. It does.

The question is whether it can shift behavior.

TikTok built commerce into a culture that was already creator-first and action-oriented. Meta is trying to retrofit that behavior into platforms where users are used to scrolling, not buying.

At the same time, Meta has advantages TikTok doesn’t. Scale, advertiser relationships, and one of the most advanced ad systems in the world.

If they can connect those pieces, they don’t need to copy TikTok. They just need to make transactions feel natural inside their existing ecosystem.

I think they will “succeed” this time around for one main reason = Reels.

Instagram has gone from following your friends to what Gary Vee calls the ‘interest media’. If a user is being fed content they are interested in at the time, the reach to checkout seems shorter and more natural.

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends!

This week’s issue is about one shift: creator commerce is getting measured like media. Not vibes, not reach, not “brand love.” Actual performance. The clearest signal came from the IAB data showing creators are now a core media channel, not a nice-to-have experiment which is changing how brands spend, how platforms pitch themselves, and how creators position their value.

BeReal is now chasing brands after building its identity against them. BoF is making the case that conversion, not clout, is the real filter. And Gigi Robinson’s latest test is a good reminder that sometimes the best creator strategy is not scaling louder, but scaling narrower. 

Let’s dive in!

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

(April 28th)

📈 Creators are now a core media channel

The strongest story this week is not about a single platform. It is about budget logic. The IAB says creator marketing has moved from add-on to core media channel, with creator spend reaching $37 billion in 2025 and projected to hit $44 billion in 2026. Brands are shifting from one-off partnerships to always-on systems that mix micro creators, affiliate mechanics, and performance goals.

That matters because creators are now being judged against the same standard as paid media: can they drive measurable outcomes, not just attention. The implication is simple. If creator budgets keep moving into the main media mix, creators stop being treated like a side bet and start being managed like a channel.

Marketing Dive

🧾 Commerce is beating clout

Business of Fashion landed the sharper version of the same argument: not all creators convert, and brands are getting better at spotting the difference. New tools are making sales impact easier to measure, which means follower count is losing value as a shortcut metric.

The useful distinction here is between creators who make content people watch and creators who make audiences act. Those are not the same thing. For brands, that means creator selection is becoming more KPI-specific. Some creators are for awareness. Some are for conversion. Some are just content supply. The lazy era of assuming big audience equals business value is ending.

Business of Fashion

📸 BeReal starts recruiting creators and brands

BeReal is actively pitching U.S. creators to post more, get verified, and connect with advertisers as it tries to restart growth. The company told Business Insider it has worked with more than 500 advertisers including Amazon, Apple, and L’Oréal, and that 60% of its U.S. clients are repeat advertisers. It still does not offer ad rev share or a creator fund, which makes the pitch more about access than economics. That is the tension.

BeReal built its identity by rejecting the polished, monetized logic of mainstream social platforms. Now it has to prove it can bring money into the system without flattening the thing that made it interesting in the first place.

Business Insider

🎤 Seller Spotlight

Gigi Robinson is using dog accounts to test creator strategy

Gigi Robinson

The most interesting seller story this week is small on purpose. Gigi Robinson is using pet accounts as a live experiment to test a broader idea about creator commerce: niche trust often beats broad attention.

According to Net Influencer, the test currently includes a dog Instagram account with around 11,000 followers and a TikTok account with about 7,400. The point is not novelty. It is signal quality. Smaller, more specific accounts can reveal whether a creator actually drives action when the audience relationship is tighter and the commercial context is clearer. 

Instagram post

That matters because too much creator strategy is still built backward. Brands start with scale, then hope intent follows. Robinson is testing the opposite. Start with affinity, relevance, and audience behavior, then see what commercial value shows up. It is a cleaner way to think about conversion. Not every creator needs to be a celebrity. Some just need an audience that listens and buys.

If you are testing creator partnerships, do not just ask who has the most reach. Ask where the trust is concentrated, where the category fit is obvious, and where the audience behavior is easiest to observe. That is where the real signal lives.

Another story about size not being the most important thing…

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends!

Obligatory New York weather report – we have had two IMMACULATE days. The kind of weather that puts a spring in your step (pun intended). I feel like a burly bear emerging from hibernation – sights, sounds, and sun that I haven’t seen in months. The melting tundra has revealed some unfortunate trash that has been stuck in the permafrost, but we are ignoring that.

Getting down to business!

This week’s social headlines were less monumental than weeks past, but subtle shifts in the social landscape have been inching like a tectonic plate. I’m personally bracing for “the big one."

So what’s changed? Since TikTok changed ownership in the US, its user base has temporarily dipped. After some ups and downs, it finally landed at 90 million, 2 million less than before the sale. Another red flag is that ad spending on the platform is down 48%, while generic social spending is up 133%.

Pair this with an incoming social media ban in Indonesia, the 4th most populous nation in the world, an upcoming suit against the current administration for the TikTok sale, and the biggest viral moment of the week actually being a clunker of a post from McDonald’s being meme’d to death, you have a weird-vibe sentiment happening in the social marketing space.

We’ve been covering this week over week, but all signals point to one of Outfit and CreatorCart’s operating theories, that “macro” isn’t as strong as it used to be, and a more targeted approach yields better results for conversion.

Especially as new agencies emerge to serve the creator economy. Take Cami Téllez, founder of the Gen-Z underwear brand Parade, who recently launched a new agency, Devotion, to help creators capitalize on the rise of niche-casting as a viable monetization model.

Let’s get into it. 🚀

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

(March 10th)

📱📉 Signals of a shifting social landscape: declines in TikTok and Instagram engagement. Storm clouds brewing?

Daily active TikTok users in the US temporarily dropped from 92 million to around 86 million to 88 million following the transition, according to SimilarWeb data, before recovering slightly to 90 million.

The up-and-down could signal a pullback from the platform: TikTok-heavy campaigns fell 48% YoY, while platform-agnostic content campaigns surged 133% on Collabstr, according to Collabstr’s 2026 annual influencer marketing report.

Instagram maintained a higher overall median engagement rate than platforms like TikTok (4.6%) and Threads (3.6%), but saw the sharpest declines in 2025. Engagement on Instagram was down 26% YoY, falling from 7.3% to 5.4%; engagement on Meta platform Threads, meanwhile, fell 18% YoY to 3.6%, indicating fragmentation within Meta’s ecosystem.

📎 Read more here and here.

🇮🇩 Indonesia to implement sweeping social media ban

Indonesia has announced a nationwide restriction that will prevent children under the age of 16 from opening accounts on major social media platforms, a measure the government says is aimed at protecting minors from growing risks in the digital space.

With the announcement, Indonesia becomes the second country to introduce restrictions specifically aimed at limiting children’s access to social media platforms.

Australia passed a similar law in December, widely described as the first of its kind globally.

📎 Read more

🍔 🍟 McDonald’s CEO’s Big Arch video gets meme’d into oblivion

What was meant to be a laid-back introduction of the Big Arch, a new “premium” burger, turned into a cringefest—the lighting, the windowless room, the hostage-video vibe. It didn’t land.

That said, McDonald’s did go viral—just not in the way they intended. No doubt the marketing team is spinning it that way to the C-suite.

📎 Read more

🏛️ Trump, Bondi Sued Over TikTok Deal, Investors Allege ByteDance Retained Prohibited Control

Two California investors filed a petition in the D.C. Circuit on March 5 challenging the Trump administration’s handling of TikTok’s court-mandated divestiture. The petitioners—software engineers Zhaocheng Anthony Tan (an Alphabet shareholder) and Garrett Reid (a Meta shareholder)—name President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi as respondents.

They argue Trump violated the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by issuing five deadline extensions between January and September 2025—over 450 days total—despite the law allowing only one 90-day extension with certification to Congress that binding agreements were in place, which they say never occurred.

📎 Read more

🎓 Academia continues to embrace content creation

Valkyrae visited NYU with Squeex to announce a scholarship named after him. Students learned “why you should drop out” at an NYU Game Center guest lecture organized by Valkyrae and delivered by her fellow variety streamer. Squeex’s scholarship will include professional development funds, travel stipends, and more.

Academia has been introducing the creator economy into the classroom for the last couple of years. Syracuse University has created a specific path for content creation, and Alix Earle created her own scholarship at the University of Miami in 2025.

📎 Read more 

📺 Niche-casting is growing, while traditional broadcasting wilts away

This week, Warner Bailey, creator of the popular Assistants vs. Agents account, will launch a livestream talk show about Hollywood.

As traditional broadcast audiences shrink, a new format is emerging online: ultra-targeted livestream talk shows built for specific industries and communities. Instead of chasing mass audiences, creators are launching shows about highly niche topics—from trucking logistics to advertising and startup culture.

The shift reflects broader changes in media economics and viewing habits. Broadcast morning shows now draw roughly half the audience they did 15 years ago, leaving space for smaller, specialized formats to thrive.

📎 Read more 

📊 FIT check of the week

Kaeden Rowland, known as the Staples Baddie, has been dominating social feeds. We decided to analyze her FIT score to understand what kind of partner she might be.

Unsurprisingly, she’s highly promising! While not quite reaching unicorn status, she's a strong converter with growing visibility. Her posts don't reach huge audiences yet, but her followers show strong buying signals, indicating they are ready to make purchases.

We love Kaeden’s content as much as anyone and will definitely be getting a custom mug at Staples this week.

Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends,

We’re back in your inbox with the social commerce news of the week.

This week’s headlines cover a wide range of developments — from new retail data showing that social commerce is becoming firmly embedded in the shopping landscape, to more established brands adopting creator-first strategies.

As I’ve said before, the creator economy is no longer a separate category — it’s simply part of modern retail. At this point, there’s no avoiding it. The line between scrolling and shopping keeps getting thinner. The Venn diagram has basically merged.

Retailers are now fully embracing creator marketing as a core selling infrastructure, not just an experiment. In Q3 2025 alone, TikTok generated $19 billion in GMV, and the platform is projected to account for 14.6% of global marketplace share by 2030.

Whether it’s TikTok or Whatnot, these platforms aren’t just marketing channels anymore — they are the marketplace.

Let’s get into it. 🚀

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

(March 3rd)

🛍️ Creators are becoming retail infrastructure

Creator marketing is no longer a sidecar to retail strategy. Increasingly, it’s becoming part of the infrastructure retailers use to drive commerce media growth, unlock new budgets, and influence sales both online and in-store.

📎 Read more

🛒 Why social media is the new revenue engine for retail brands

The line between scrolling and shopping continues to blur. Social media success is not just about gaining followers; it’s about converting them and partnering with the right talent to do so. Vertical video is the gold standard and is only becoming more relevant as “live” remains a priority for platforms.

📎 Read more

👠 Doja Cat, and other online personalities are hosting the 2026 Vogue Vintage Market

What is Vogue Vintage Market? “A one-day sale filled with vintage and archival fashion pieces and homewares sourced from eBay and curated by friends of Vogue, along with a corresponding online Vogue Shopping edit.”

📎 Read more

📈 How TikTok shop is Amazon’s most powerful commerce demand engine

Why it matters: In Q3 2025, the platform drove $19 billion in GMV, nearly matching eBay. It is no longer just a social platform with a shopping feature. TikTok Shop is a retailer.

📎 Read more

📰 The Washington Post launches creator-led newsletter on Beehiiv

In the wake of mass layoffs, the latest legacy media outlet is the latest to turn to Beehiiv to expand reach and regain relevance by meeting readers in their inboxes.

These creator-led offerings are meant to help legacy media outlets compete in the new personality-led media landscape.

📎 Read more

🎮 Roblox, TikTok Shop, Whatnot all see a rise in Gen Z spending.

The Retail Technology Show, a London exhibition founded in 2021, collected data from 1,000 Gen Z shoppers and found that on average, they made 20 purchases on Roblox within the last 12 months. That’s a 54% year over year growth from Gen Z Roblox purchases made in 2025, RTS said. 

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⚾️ The MLB experiments with TikTok, continuing big sports’ foray into the creator economy

The MLB has announced an expanded partnership with TikTok that will bring highlights, behind-the-scenes features, and creator-led baseball content to the For You Page.

An MLB Hub will be stocked with highlight reels from each team’s busy, 162-game season, and brands will be able to advertise on that hub through a product suite called TikTok GamePlan.

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🕶️ Instagram hijacks influencer posts with AI shopping links

Instagram is testing AI-generated 'Shop the look' buttons that automatically appear on influencer posts without creator consent.

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🪝 Creator Spotlight: How to Craft a Perfect Hook with Milo Lee

I’ve been seeing a lot of discourse online about “the hook” and how to craft the perfect phrase to catch your audience’s attention. Milo Lee broke down “is it possible,” the phrase that garnered him 24 million views.

It’s not so much about the phrase, but about the need to create suspense. I’m down with the algo rewarding videos with great hooks, but if it just leads to brands’ vague-posting, I’m out.

Instagram post

✍️ Creator Spotlight: Tess Sullivan’s How to Shop eBay Like a Pro

Creative consultant and stylist Tess Sullivan, formerly of Buck Mason and Ralph Lauren, broke down how to search the annals of eBay with pinpoint accuracy. Now this is news you can use. Her simple technique – mastering eBay mad libs (see above)  

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Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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Hi friends!

Here in New York, the Outfit team is digging out from the second wave of heavy snowfall and gearing up for more in the next few days. It’s nice to have a real winter, the first in the last few years, but I think everyone can agree that the charm is quickly wearing off.

Across the social commerce space, it was bombshell after bombshell this week! Industry consolidations, Supreme Court rulings, and TikTok shop policy reversals all point to an extremely hospitable climate for sellers to thrive.

So what happened last week that made these ripe conditions even riper?

Firstly, eBay’s recent purchase of Depop is a MAJOR event for anyone who sells online. Depop currently hosts 7 million users, most of whom are under 34, while eBay has become a bit of a legacy brand in social commerce. The marriage of these two brands, and what is sure to be an expansion of cross-listing on the platforms and perhaps even live-selling integration, gives both eBay and sellers a much larger toolkit to leverage for sales.

In addition to eBay’s acquisition, last week the Supreme Court ruled the White House’s retaliatory tariffs unconstitutional. What this means for sellers is that inventory costs will be lower, and they can either purchase more inventory or put the savings into business expansion.

And finally — the cherry on top for sellers: TikTok is halting its plans to end independent shipping for U.S. sellers after major backlash from creators. The fulfillment support had been a huge selling point for power sellers. Without it, creators would’ve had to manage shipping themselves — something many weren’t willing (or prepared) to take on. That pushback appears to have worked, leading TikTok to reverse course — at least for now.

One other thing – at Sell! Sell! Sell! we’ve been tracking the rise of creators to monocultural relevance with a sharp eye. A few weeks ago, it was Super Bowl ads featuring MrBeast and Speed, and this past week, Vanity Fair profiled the current and future stars of the talk show, the names you’ll need to know as late-night television continues its slow slog to irrelevance.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

(February 24th)

🛍️ eBay to Buy Depop From Etsy for $1.2 Billion

eBay aims to target a younger user base and expand its potential live-selling audience. Depop has a base of 7 million active buyers and 3 million active sellers, with most of its audience under 34. 

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🏛️ Supreme Court ruling could have upside for social selling

By 2030, reversing the tariffs would add more than $24 billion to US retail sales relative to the baseline; those revenues would likely be funneled into retail media investment, which was already set to grow 17.8% this year.

Without the previously imposed tariffs, firms and sellers won’t have to swallow the cost and can reinvest in other parts of the business.

📎 Read more

📦 TikTok Shop halts plan to end independent shipping for U.S. sellers after backlash

TikTok’s e-commerce arm, Shop, has reversed course on its plan to end seller-fulfilled shipping in the U.S., telling merchants that previously announced deadlines will no longer go into effect.

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🎰 Polymarket x Substack partnership suggests “journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets. 🥴 Not sure about that one.

Substack will now allow users to embed prediction market data in their articles, with “native tools that make it easier to share, discuss, and debate prediction market data directly on Substack.”

Wish my grandpa were around to tell him that there is now a slot machine in your newspaper.

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 📑 DCK publishes its February Affiliate Intel Report. Key takeaways:

• Mid-tier creators (50K-250K followers) crushing conversions on ShopMy and TikTok

• TikTok leads in engagement, but YouTube crushes on conversion value and long-term revenue, with the highest average cart value at $84 - beating Instagram ($61) and TikTok ($57).

• ChatGPT checkouts to take 4% cut of Shopify merchant sales

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🎮 Twitch targets the wider creator economy with new Business Manager role

Twitch’s new Business Manager role allows creators to give select individuals access to their dashboard — as creators become whole businesses, Twitch has been a bit behind the curve when it comes to business tools. This update hopes to remedy that.

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🍫 Hershey Just Revealed a Limited-Edition Product That’s Launching First on TikTok Shop

As the Milano Cortina Winter Games come to a close, Hershey is launching its own gold medals made of milk chocolate. The limited-edition “bespoke” treat, which will cost $5.99, will be available to purchase on TikTok Shop.

Wondering if brands will follow suit with TikTok exclusives to drive engagement, traffic, and conversion down the road.

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🎙️ Vanity Fair features Bowen Yang, Brittany Broski, and the 8 other hosts who are shattering the talk show format

With the late-night format in peril, these digital natives are reinventing the form and are ready to take the helm.

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🔎 Cats out of the bag! Reddit is testing a New Shopping Product Experience in Search.

This is for all those people who punch “best toaster ovens for a small apartment reddit” into their search bar. Their new AI-powered search feature turns community recommendations into action.

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🧠 Brand Move of the Week

Staples Baddie, @blivxx, brings life into a big box retailer on the verge of flatlining, and leadership listens

Staples Baddie — aka @blivxx — took both the internet and the marketing world by storm last week with her charismatic content about working at Staples.

The contrast is what makes it pop: her IDGAF Gen Z aesthetic (neck tattoos, piercings, acrylic nails) paired with the classic Staples uniform, name badge, and lanyard. It’s instantly eye-catching — the kind of visual that stops your scroll.

And beyond the look, she’s genuinely good on camera. She breaks down everything Staples offers beyond pens and paperclips — from printing services to custom coffee mugs with your favorite weird alien on them.

Staples’ Chief Marketing Officer, Bob Sherwin, told Fast Company, “We’re incredibly proud of our associate, Kaeden, and the passion she brings to her work.”

He added, “We’ve connected with her to share our appreciation, and we are exploring opportunities to collaborate and continue supporting her creativity and engagement with the community.”

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Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡

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