Aspire

Our team is back from Shoptalk and we're happy to report that they hit 140% of their step goal 🚀 🏃♂️ Big shoutout to Arie Pollak, Lucia Sanchez, William Padilla, Emily Trapasso (Hollifield), Madison Doyle, and Zak Zander for all of the hard work!

When you have the chance to meet up IRL with clients and enjoy the sunshine, you have to take it ⚾ Thanks for the love Lexi Winberg

We're making it official: Aspire is now a preferred partner with YouTube. 🎉 This milestone reflects something we've believed for a long time: YouTube isn't just a social platform... it's one of the most powerful performance channels available to brands today. Here's why: ▶️ The algorithm rewards quality over recency. YouTube's recommendation engine is built to surface videos weeks or months after publishing. A single great piece of creator content keeps working long after it goes live. ▶️ It measures intent, not just clicks. YouTube tracks whether viewers were actually glad they clicked, rewarding creators who've built genuine trust with their audiences, and the brands that partner with them. ▶️ Personalization at global scale. Recommendations are tailored by watch history, device, time of day, and language so that branded creator content finds the right viewer, at the right moment. YouTube isn't just a place to publish content. It's where audiences go to discover, evaluate, and decide. We're currently building a more seamless way to find and manage YouTube Creators at scale. More to come. 👀 YouTube for Business #YouTubeCreatorPartnershipsAPI #CreatorEconomy #InfluencerMarketing #YouTubeMarketing #Aspire

$42K in gifting. $12.8M in awareness value. 280M impressions. That's what Kulani Kinis achieved in just one year with Aspire. 🤯 The swimwear brand runs 8 collection launches a year with a team of just 3. Before Aspire, they were managing up to 200 creators per launch cycle in spreadsheets with no clear way to connect product seeding back to real results. Here's how they changed that: ✅ Seamless product fulfillment - Aspire's Product Catalogs made it easy to seed products to hundreds of creators at once, removing the manual overhead slowing them down before every launch. 📊 Real-time tracking - The team gained visibility into creator content across every active campaign, running multiple programs in parallel without anything slipping through the cracks. 📈 Streamlined measurement - Aspire's Impact Dashboard connected creator activity directly to impressions, awareness value, and ROI, giving leadership the clear performance story they needed to keep investing. Influencer marketing doesn't have to be a black box. Read the full Kulani Kinis story 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gHaC5Knf #InfluencerMarketing #ProductSeeding #CreatorMarketing

Come say hello to our team at Shoptalk!

If YouTube isn’t part of your 2026 creator marketing strategy, it should be. Here’s why: ✅ Creators on YouTube see an average engagement rate of 23.2%, far surpassing TikTok (4.8%) and Instagram (2.2%). ✅ 70% of viewers say that they bought from a brand as a result of seeing it on YouTube. ✅ Organic branded content on YouTube drives significant impact across the funnel, with a 100% lift in top-of-mind awareness and a 35% lift in purchase intent. Our latest guide will help you tap into this momentum with strategies and insights to elevate your YouTube influencer campaigns. Download it now 👉 https://lnkd.in/g8rYAQMN

Our team always has their eyes peeled for interesting news in the world of influencer marketing and here's what's caught our attention this week - three reads worth your time 👇 📖 Middle-tier creators are fueling the next phase of the creator economy: https://lnkd.in/eg2D8a-f The creator economy is increasingly being powered by a growing “middle class” of creators (nano, micro, and mid-tier influencers), who are building sustainable income streams through newsletters, courses, affiliate marketing, and smaller brand deals rather than massive sponsorships. While brands are investing more in this segment due to their higher engagement and conversion rates (with mid-tier creators even outperforming macro influencers in sales), earnings remain highly uneven. 📖 Some creators don't see immediate value in Instagram's 'Shop the Look' AI test: https://lnkd.in/gXjgjpn5 Instagram’s AI-powered “Shop the Look” test sparked backlash from creators after it automatically added product tags and shopping links to their posts, often without consent and sometimes linking to products they didn’t endorse. While the feature aims to push Instagram closer to TikTok-style social commerce, creators say it risks undermining trust with their audiences and cuts them out of monetization, since many weren’t earning commissions on those links. 📖 What to know about the third model in the creator economy: https://lnkd.in/g55AfZi4 College students don’t have unlimited brand affinity, capping out at around five brands they genuinely care about. That constraint is forcing a rethink of how brands earn relevance with Gen Z, especially as traditional channels lose effectiveness and attention becomes harder to buy. What’s emerging is a shift beyond the two dominant creator economy models: paying for attention (influencers) and paying for conversion (affiliates). A third model is gaining traction: paying for participation. We'd love to hear your thoughts on what's happening in our industry right now - what news has caught your eye? 👀

The one-off influencer post isn't dead. But it's leaving a lot of ROI on the table. 👀 Here's what we keep seeing: brands get the content, get the reach, and then start over from scratch next quarter. New creator, new brief, new relationship to build. It's tiring for your teams and it can get expensive. Ambassador programs work differently. When a creator has worked with your brand for months, their audience has watched them use your product again and again. That's not a sponsorship. That's a recommendation from someone they trust. And honestly? Creators prefer it too. 63% say long-term campaigns are their favorite type of collaboration (which means they show up differently for those partnerships). 🚀 Yes, there's more upfront investment to build a real ambassador program and Aspire can help in a big way. But the brands we work with who've made that shift? They don't go back. Read more about what's actually driving ROI in influencer marketing this year → https://lnkd.in/gVrtDxqw