Latest news with #creator economy
Forbes
25-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Inside Howl's $1.1 Billion Creator Economy Expansion Play
Social commerce platform, Howl, is expanding creator economy access beyond beauty and fashion. Since 2022, founder and CEO Li Haslett Chen has been on a mission to expand access to social commerce through her creator platform Howl. Over the past three years, over 20,000 creators have generated $1.1 Billion in sales across brands like Samsung, Nintendo, LG, Sony, and Nike. When it comes to modern lifestyle essentials like gaming, consumer tech, and wellness, Howl is the clear leader. 'Social commerce has exploded into a $100 Billion dollar market, but it's been artificially constrained to beauty and fashion,' Haslett Chen shared. 'We built Howl to capture the enormous opportunity in gaming, consumer technology, and wellness.' Howl's top revenue drivers challenge conventional wisdom about what sells in the creator economy. It's things like Nintendo Switch 2, Sony Noise-Cancelling Headphones, Oura 4 Smart Ring, Nike Vaporfly running shoes, Pokémon cards, TP Link wifi routers, and thousands of other modern essentials from OLED TVs to Ninja CREAMi devices. Howl founder and CEO, Li Haslett Chen. Haslett Chen learned brand building from the inside out at Vogue and Chanel, then watched media's digital transformation unfold as a Warner Bros Discovery board member. That vantage point revealed what others missed. Howl allows brands to work directly with creators and product reviewers and is becoming the go-to platform for athletes, cultural commentators and industry insiders who lead the conversation and drive purchase. This unlocks countless new possibilities for people to discover, share, and earn through media. For brands and retailers, Howl offers an end-to-end solution featuring creator matching, campaign management tools, performance optimization, content rights, attribution, reporting and payments. Howl is unique because it provides real-time, product-specific sales, SKU insights that retailers need to power their media networks, as well as clear commission rates, bonuses, and flat fees with no hidden fees. Creators of all sizes can partner will brands from home, beauty, fashion and electronics. On a Howl dashboard, creators can see exactly what was sold, at what times, and through which videos. It's the kind of visibility that feels obvious, until you realize that other affiliate platforms creators are left in the dark about their audience purchases. It's this type of transparency that has empowered creators to earn more than $100 Million dollars on the platform since 2022. This supports the company's belief that the more creators know the more everyone wins. Creators regularly discover that their audience purchases items they hadn't originally featured, generating fresh earning opportunities they wouldn't have considered otherwise. 'With so many new creators in the space, this type of order data really differentiates Howl - this feedback loop means new ideas, better content, of course, more revenue,' shared Haslett Chen. Howl's technology works for all the stakeholders involved, which are creators, brands, and increasingly, retail media networks. Retail media networks (RMN's for short) are expected to be the fastest-growing advertising channel across media in the next few years, but until Howl, creator commerce has been difficult to scale and measure. On a Howl dashboard, creators can see exactly what was sold, at what times, and through which ... More videos. 'RMN's best-selling onsite inventory is sponsored product listings. We're connecting these turnkey retail media ad products to creator commerce. This innovation allows RMN's to access exponentially more inventory without changing the way they buy or sell to brands,' added Haslett Chen. With social commerce projected to reach massive scale over the next decade, Haslett Chen's bet on expanding the creator economy to new categories positions Howl at the center of a fundamental shift. Not just in how products reach consumers, but in who gets to participate in the economic upside of content creation. For Haslett Chen, that expansion represents the creator economy's true potential finally being realized.
Forbes
18-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
INGENIUS Studio helps brands and creators scale influencer marketing.
LaTecia Johnson, founder and CEO at Ingenious Studio Brands are investing heavily in influencer partnerships. The global creator economy is projected to grow from $203 billion in 2025 to $848 billion by 2032. But too often, marketers are flying blind. Data is siloed. Campaigns are run on spreadsheets. And marketers are forced to guess which creators truly align with their brand. It's no surprise, then, that tools to help brands and marketers understand and optimize their influencer campaigns are a booming market, with an expected growth from $25.4 billion in 2024 to $97.6 billion by 2030. LaTecia Johnson, a veteran of Nielsen and early-stage startups, saw this dysfunction firsthand and set out to change it. In 2024, she launched INGENIUS Studio, an AI-powered creator economy platform that brings structure, insight, and strategy to influencer marketing. For Johnson, the problem was clear: As media campaigns have become more fragmented and platform-specific, the tools to manage them haven't kept up. 'Most of the people building marketing technology have never done the job,' she said. "They don't understand what creative teams need." INGENIUS Studio fills that gap. Its platform aggregates performance data across Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube, allowing brands to evaluate creators not just by follower counts but by audience alignment. 'If you're at Reebok and your influencer's followers prefer Nike, that's a bad investment,' said Johnson. 'We help brands avoid those mistakes.' By focusing on operational infrastructure rather than campaign gimmicks, Johnson positions INGENIUS as the marketing OS for a creator-led media future. A Shopify integration adds e-commerce performance into the mix, helping users understand what drives conversion, not just engagement. "Creators aren't just shaping culture, they're redefining the marketing funnel and ultimately how brands go to market," shares Jodine Gordon, a venture scout with Zeal Capital Partners. "INGENIUS is building the infrastructure that helps creators become performance-driven growth channels, not just brand collaborators. I invested because LaTecia and her team understand how to turn cultural influence into attributable business value—and that's what the creator economy needs to scale beyond hype and into real longevity." "INGENIUS is solving the long-standing gap between fragmented creator campaigns and the strategic infrastructure the industry has been missing. LaTecia's ability to channel cultural fluency into a scalable, revenue-driving system is rare—and exactly what the market needs right now," added Prerna Sharma, General Partner at Antler. While INGENIUS relies on AI to process massive amounts of data and identify high-potential creator-brand matches, it doesn't replace human judgment. 'We get people 80% of the way there,' said Johnson. 'The rest is the human element—context, nuance, strategy.' That clarity and flexibility make INGENIUS especially valuable in fast-changing markets like women's health, where Johnson has helped researchers identify impactful creators across platforms. 'Every platform wants you to stay on it,' she said. 'We let you look across everything—to see where the audience is.' "At Greenwood Ave, we partner with platforms that understand culture isn't a buzzword—it's a business driver," said RJ Harris, Managing Partner of Greenwood Ave. "INGENIUS gives us the tools to scale creator campaigns with real strategy and measurable impact, without compromising the authenticity that makes them resonate. It's built for how we work, and more importantly, how the culture moves." Johnson launched INGENIUS with the backing of Antler, an early-stage accelerator that 'backs founders at day zero.' She raised $2 million in a challenging fundraising climate, focusing on strategic angels from the media, tech, and entertainment worlds. Some customers became investors after seeing the platform in action. "Mark Cuban recently said founders who look like me should focus on bootstrapping," Johnson explained. "I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I knew I had to optimize for revenue to prove this was a real business." INGENIUS achieved revenue growth quickly, combining a SaaS model for self-serve users with white-glove services for major brands. "We want to meet people where they are, whether they need to run a full campaign or just find the right partners," said Johnson. Women made up 53.5% of income-earning creators but took home just 40.2% of online earnings. People of color accounted for 30.2% of creators but received only 28.8% of the earnings, underscoring the persistent economic gaps in the creator economy. As a Black LGBTQ+ founder, Leticia Johnson has been intentional about building a company that challenges those disparities. INGENIUS Studio's cap table is 60% female and includes a diverse cultural advisory board with leaders from global brands such as Amazon and Reebok. 'We're building the future of media,' Johnson said. 'It has to reflect the world we're in.' Johnson envisions a future where anyone—a founder, a brand manager, a healthcare advocate—can log into INGENIUS, enter a few prompts, and generate a fully optimized, cross-platform marketing strategy. 'Eventually, we want to execute the whole thing end-to-end,' she said. With deep industry experience, a sharp eye for inefficiency, and a product grounded in reality, Johnson isn't just riding the creator economy wave. She's building the infrastructure to make it scalable, sustainable, and broad-based.
National Post
10-06-2025
- Business
- National Post
NIQ Announces Global Collaboration with WeArisma to Measure the Impact of Creator Marketing on Sales and Brand Perception.
Article content The collaboration is the first of its kind to measure sales impact from WeArisma's industry-leading influencer marketing data. Article content LOS ANGELES — NIQ, the leading consumer intelligence company, today announced a strategic global relationship with WeArisma, the leading creator marketing measurement and optimization platform for brands and agencies. The groundbreaking alliance will enable advertisers around the world to understand the impact of paid and organic creator marketing across the full marketing funnel, including sales impact. The measurement framework enables marketers to take a more results-oriented approach to influencer marketing, allowing local and global brands to maximize the impact of investments in the creator economy. Article content The global collaboration combines NIQ's unique data assets and expertise in outcome measurement with WeArisma's leading technology platform and intelligence on creators around the world. 'By leveraging our collective strengths, we are helping businesses make more informed decisions about their influencer marketing investments,' said Jason Tate, General Manager, Marketing Effectiveness at NIQ. 'This strengthens our position as industry leaders in quantifying the impact of an increasingly important marketing channel around the world.' Article content The collaboration between WeArisma and NIQ helps accelerate the way creator marketing is planned, measured, and optimized, helping marketers keep pace with rapid changes in pop culture. 'For too long, marketers have been unable to attribute the impact of creator marketing on brand equity and sales performance, leaving a major gap in full-funnel measurement. We are thrilled to combine forces with NIQ to solve this challenge and enable marketers to get the greatest impact from every dollar spent on creator marketing,' said Jenny Tsai, founder and CEO of WeArisma. Article content Key Highlights: Article content Modular solutions from WeArisma and NIQ help advertisers more effectively measure, optimize, and plan their investments across the creator marketing economy, including hard-to-measure organic creator content. Metrics from creator campaigns tracked through WeArisma's global analytics platform are incorporated into NIQ's Marketing Mix Models, enabling marketers to make data-driven optimizations of their influencer strategies. To serve the unique needs of each brand, NIQ and WeArisma support customized engagement models, including managed service support and self-serve platform access. Article content About NIQ Article content NIQ is a leading consumer intelligence company, delivering the most complete understanding of consumer buying behavior and revealing new pathways to growth. NIQ combined with GfK in 2023, bringing together two industry leaders with unparalleled global reach. Our global reach spans over 90 countries covering approximately 85% of the world's population and more than $ 7.2 trillion in global consumer spend. With a holistic retail read and the most comprehensive consumer insights—delivered with advanced analytics through state-of-the-art platforms—NIQ delivers the Full View™. Article content For more information, please visit About WeArisma WeArisma is the industry's most comprehensive influencer marketing and social intelligence platform. Combining advanced AI-powered image, video, text, and audio recognition technology with influencer marketing and social listening capabilities, WeArisma reveals the complete spectrum of brand impact across social media, including the vast majority of untagged, organic mentions that occur outside paid partnerships. Trusted by top agencies and brands worldwide and operating from offices in London, New York, Paris, and Singapore, WeArisma provides a product suite supporting brands in every stage of creator marketing from strategy development through to execution. Article content
