LTK's new AI tools push creator marketing toward a programmatic ad stack
Creator commerce platform LTK rolled out an AI-powered offering this week that structures campaigns, identifies creators and recommends next steps for marketers. Holding companies have spent the past two years acquiring influencer marketing companies for their technology, and platforms across the sector are automating creator discovery, pricing, contracting, content production and measurement. Co-founder Amber Venz Box said the tool draws on 15 years of data and more than 100 billion commerce signals. Gregory Curtis Jr., director of brand and growth at Empower Ocean Media Group, said such systems let brands "target and buy contextually the audience the data, and you can even measure the performance of that."
Brands running large creator rosters gain a way to manage discovery and measurement without adding headcount for every relationship; Unilever's network of roughly 300,000 creators shows the scale some marketers already operate at. Standardization has limits, though. Reach Agency CEO Gabe Gordon said creator partnerships take many forms, from sponsored posts to entertainment series, product collaborations, affiliate deals, live experiences and spokesperson roles, and warned that over-reliance on automation risks losing the human trust and creative judgment that make campaigns work. Collectively's chief innovation officer Natalie Silverstein put it more simply: creator marketing "has always been some combination of art and science."