The State of the Ever-Changing Creator Economy

The creator economy is growing fast—and while creators themselves are adapting to new forms of technology, they’re simultaneously changing the ways consumers engage with them and connect with brands. Through their highly-valued creativity, creators have built thriving ecosystems and pioneered innovative ways to interact with commerce, cultures and content distribution. As a result, they’ve cemented themselves as quintessential resources for brands to reach new audiences and build long-term positioning. This trend caught the eyes of the Social Innovation Lab and inspired the development of “The Year of Digital Creators” report, a closer look into the quickly-evolving creator economy which is imprinting its importance in the broader scope of social media. 

In this report, we will explore the state of the creator industry, how they inspire people and how brands can work in unison with creators to reach new audiences around the globe. This report is also available in both Spanish and Portuguese. 

Video content is compelling to users that have flocked to visual social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and (more recently) TikTok. And after Instagram began to offer features that link content directly to the point of sale, video has captured renewed interest for brands and marketers as well.

Shoppable video has caught on with brands and consumers as social networks like Instagram have aimed to support consumers in not only discovering products within the platform but in making purchases as well. In “The Forrester Tech Tide™: Video Technologies For Customer And Employee Experience, Q1 2019,” Senior Analyst Nick Barber notes, “One aim of the technology is to bridge the gap between virtual and in-store shopping experiences. When US online adults choose to shop in stores rather than buy online, 38% do so to touch, see, feel, or smell products before purchasing them.” With these consumer needs in mind, shoppable video becomes an important way for consumers to engage with a brand and get to know their products better.

So, video is useful within an ecommerce setting. But how can it elevate the social experience? As it turns out, consumers enjoy turning to “Story” content—the quick, one-to-many snippets of video content distributed on platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook—to learn more about brands and products. An eMarketer analysis notes that 69% of Facebook Story users feel that “brands using stories is a great way for people to get to know new products or services,” and 62% say they “become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in stories.”

Realizing this, brands have been using shoppable video to drive consumers throughout the purchasing funnel, letting users discover, save and purchase content directly through the platform. Instagram Checkout, a feature that went live last year, is one such feature that makes shopping on the platform easier than before: previously, brands had to link out to an external website to complete a purchase—a barrier that risked losing a sale by prompting users to save the purchase for later (and possible forget to go through with it).

Approach Shoppable Video as a Storytelling Opportunity

Shoppable video offers a potential revenue stream for brands, but it can also be a compelling storytelling medium in its own right, helping to build the story behind a brand or explain product benefits in a captivating way. This means that before you invest in shoppable content, you’ll want to consider what your goals are and what types of creative experiences you want to offer with the medium.

“Whenever investing in a new channel, brands must ask themselves if their target audience is there and if it makes sense for them to be in that space,” says Heather Hosey, VP Client Engagement at MediaMonks. “For example, some luxury brands may be concerned with whether channels that increase accessibility, like shoppable video, video cheapens the brand. They might turn to social to approach an audience that skews a little younger but will wonder how they can elevate that experience.”

Approaching the creative experience with a sense of purpose is critical to ensuring the channel is both effective but also compelling for the brand. Too often, we’ve seen marketers treat mobile video as a smaller TV screen, often featuring cutdowns of TVC’s and linear film. This approach flies in the face of what makes mobile—let alone social content found there—so special in the first place: its potential to spark interaction and collaboration, two characteristics that have contributed to the meteoric rise in platforms like TikTok.

In exploring the creative potential of stories to build authentic connection between brands and their audiences, MediaMonks partnered with Facebook and 72andSunny to build an installation of 12 mechanically moving monitors at Facebook Beach at Cannes last year. Each monitor features best-in-class use of the medium; visitors to the installation could control the display by bringing the monitors together into a cohesive whole, showcasing Stories’ power to change perspective and disrupt—two uses of mobile video that we’d love to see brands lean into more.

Consider Shoppable Video’s Role Within the Overall Customer Experience

Like anything else, it’s important to note that social doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it’s just one ingredient that sits within the wider context of the brand’s overall marketing strategy. For example, Misty Gant, SVP USA at our influencer activation team IMA, notes that brands that don’t have a strategy in place might find themselves looking at abandoned carts—but that doesn’t mean the content, which consumers might come across at the top of the funnel, wasn’t valuable.

“It’s very important from an analytical standpoint, because you have the data,” Gant says. “Back in the day, through flipping through a magazine or watching a commercial, you couldn’t quantify who purchased from that ad.” But through shoppable content, you get a better sense of who’s tapping through, what they tapped next, what was the bounce rate and more—data that can be essential to understanding the path to purchase. “A good marketeer is always looking at that kind of data,” says Gant. “You want to see what’s working but also what the problems are, to figure out where in your ecosystem you can better support and work with that.”

Hosey agrees that taking a holistic view of the overall customer experience is critical to success with shoppable content. “For CPG brands in particular, it can be a challenge to determine where that link will actually send the user,” says Hosey. “If you don’t typically support buying direct, how do you choose which retailer to connect users with?” Hosey notes that establishing an exclusive deal with a retail partner opens up all sorts of new questions about a campaign that brands must consider—for example, how long the promotion will run for.

Brands should also consider how a shoppable campaign remains cohesive with their existing creative. For the launch of L’Oreal’s Unbelieva-brow, we began with the brand’s existing global campaign and assets as inspiration for a social-first video campaign—this time, targeting millennial consumers in Italy. The strategy was built around a handful of influencers that knew their audiences best, catering to a diverse group of interests and segments—beauty-oriented, sporty, travel-focused and an on-the-go actress—allowing the brand to tell relatable stories about the product’s durability throughout the many situations someone might run into throughout the day.

Shoppable content is an excellent way for brands to play to video’s strengths in helping consumers discover brands and learn about their products. Connecting directly with consumers and prompting them to pause and consider content, shoppable video offers a more authentic way to engage with consumers at any point of the funnel—prompting a sale or simply driving initial awareness—provided that brands are strategic in their approach.

In the middle of April, an eagle-eyed user discovered a news feed format explored via swiping, much like how users interact with Instagram and Facebook Stories. Initially suspected to be a bug, Facebook confirmed that the new newsfeed was indeed an early, internal prototype.

While it’s possible the prototype won’t see the light of day in its current form or even at all—it’s very much a work in progress, according to the Digital Trends story linked above—the interface got the creative wheels turning in our Monks’ heads. We spoke to Jon Biggs, an Executive Creative Director at MediaMonks who’s worked closely on a majority of our Facebook projects, about what a potential new news feed could mean for brands and users alike.

A News Feed Responding to New Behavior

A year ago, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post that content consumption on the platform is typically light on interaction and engagement: “Too often today, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience,” he wrote. While users can like or react to content, until recently there were few content formats that really allowed users to interact. In fact, we found that users spent only 1.7 seconds viewing a given piece of content on the news feed, prompting us to develop new formats that react to user behavior. As a platform, Facebook is likewise offering new, interactive formats like Camera Effects and 3D photos to inspire users to act.

Its Stories-inspired news feed prototype may signal Facebook’s desire to support more visually engaging, interactive formats. One year ago, after all, TechCrunch reported that sharing via Stories was growing 15-times faster than on the news feed; the reasoning behind the news feed prototype, then, could be to better support user behaviors when it comes to sharing or engaging with friends and loved ones.

“Facebook has introduced a lot of lovely formats that let brands achieve a lot more value within the space they have,” says Biggs. “This setup shows how they’re not restricting themselves to scrolling through the same old timeline, but looking at how the space can be used more effectively.”

That point on effectiveness is important, according to Biggs. Greater screen real estate can open the door to gorgeous new content, but brands must think critically about the value the content has on their experience. “If you have the whole screen to work with, you must make sure what you put there is really interesting,” Biggs says. “If not, then you’re interrupting the user experience—and you need to justify that interruption with something worthwhile.” Effective channel strategy built in response to user behavior is key for designing content that users will find valuable rather than annoying—especially when they’re presented with a rapid-fire stream of content as seen in Stories.

More Room to Love

The possibility of utilizing the full screen is particularly exciting for Biggs. “Posts on the news feed are quite limited and small,” he says—think of the truncated text post or small thumbnails appended to a link share. But the Stories-inspired format could provide brands with full-size content akin to Facebook’s Instant Articles, which are presented within a swipe-able carousel of content as well.

As a creative, Biggs is especially interested in how taking interactions from one part of the Facebook platform—the camera feed—to another can take engagement on the channel to a new level. “Facebook presents a nice space where you can take advantage of all the natural things people do with a phone: hold it, turn it around, shake it,” says Biggs. Selfie lenses let users play while checking themselves out with the camera, for example, while 3D or 360-degree photos transform devices into viewfinders that gaze into an alternate space. “If we begin to think about new ways to explore content, which might have been inspired by other channels themselves, how can we learn from that and make better things for Facebook?”

The Sign of More Changes to Come?

The unearthing of the Stories-inspired news feed prototype isn’t the first time Facebook has shown an interest in pulling together various platforms or channels within its suite of services. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg expressed plans to merge the backends of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. The move to unify the backends would allow for easier end-to-end encryption, which is currently WhatsApp’s key differentiating factor. In addition to encryption across the platforms, the move could potentially harmonize the data between them, making it easier to surface up the types of content most relevant to users from their interactions across one platform to another.

“Is this prototype the first stage of Facebook pulling various parts of its ecosystem together?” Biggs asks rhetorically. He suggests that brands and users not hold their breath on a single platform that combines all three. “Putting all three platforms together would be risky from a user’s perspective,” he says, “as each excels at a different purpose: WhatsApp supports a more traditional conversation between people; Instagram is glossy and visual; while Facebook is most ideal for publishers.”

The real interesting development, says Biggs, is how interactions on one channel might continue to influence others: “They’re cross-pollinating the knowledge across the social ecosystem they’ve built.” How might future amalgams of the platforms drive new creative opportunities for brands to forge deeper relationships with their audiences? Only time will tell—though brands may want to study up on the myriad of user behaviors native to these platforms now so they’re ready to adapt to the next big change.

Innovate to give your Facebook audience something to smile about.