While many influencer marketing platforms focus on the size of their creator networks, identifying creators who are the right fit and truly interested in collaboration can be time-consuming for marketing teams. 

This disconnect between platform size and influencer selection has opened a wide gap in the creator economy.

Popular Pays, acquired by Lightricks in 2022, tackles this challenge head-on through their creator management platform, connecting brands with a verified network of 160,000 creators. 

The platform combines advanced AI technology with human creativity to streamline the collaboration process from concept to campaign execution.

A Platform-First Approach to Creator Marketing

Popular Pays distinguishes itself through what Theresa Gaarde, Head of Sales & Partnerships, calls a “platform-first” model that reshapes how brands and creators collaborate. 

This approach emerged from recognizing that brands and creators needed more than just a connection point – they needed a comprehensive system for managing their relationships and measuring success.

“Our platform is at the root of everything that we do,” Theresa explains, detailing the distinctive dual-service approach that distinguishes them in a competitive market.

The company’s managed service option provides brands with dedicated customer success managers who become deeply embedded in the campaign process. “You’re going to work with a dedicated customer success manager, you’re going to get guaranteed deliverables, and then we are going to act as an extension of your team,” Theresa elaborates. 

These teams handle everything from creator vetting and content review to creative ideation, allowing internal brand teams to focus on strategic initiatives. “Think of us as truly a part of your team and helping free up your time by taking care of the execution here so you can do some of the bigger things.”

For brands with established creator programs, Popular Pays offers a self-service platform that transforms how teams manage creator relationships. “Let’s just say that you are a small but mighty team. You just need a platform to streamline the work that you’re doing so that you don’t have to be constantly in emails and spreadsheets trying to track everything. Our platform makes it simple for you to do that,” Theresa explains.

The company’s status as a marketing partner with major social platforms amplifies its capabilities. “Because we are marketing partners, we have access to all of the APIs across all those different marketing partners,” Theresa notes. “We’re getting first-party data direct from the platform.”

Quality Over Quantity: The Opt-In Creator Network

Building on their platform-first foundation, Popular Pays has developed a carefully curated creator network that prioritizes engagement over size. 

“We are an opt-in community of creators,” Theresa emphasizes, explaining how this selective approach delivers better results than the massive databases offered by competitors. “When we tell you we have 160,000 opted-in creators in our community, these are all people that have raised their hand to say they want to be a part of the Popular Pays platform, they’ve applied to be a part of it, they have authenticated their social platform.”

The platform’s verification process includes specific requirements for joining their community. “We ask that you have 10,000 followers or more before you consider applying,” Theresa explains. “We also want to make sure that you are willing to authenticate at least one of your social platforms, which means we can confirm you are indeed who you say you are, and you’re enabling us to ingest that data.”

Brand testimonials consistently validate this approach. “We’ve heard from many brands that have worked with our competitors that they were offered to choose from a pool of 2 million creators, but it was a real struggle to get people that actually wanted to work on their campaign. They won’t find that here because it’s already such an engaged community,” Theresa shares.

The platform maintains detailed performance tracking for creators, offering brands invaluable insight into potential partnerships. “We can see how creators have worked on other campaigns in the past, and you can see if they have created content that was on brief and met brand guidelines as well as on time,” Theresa reveals.

Technology and Innovation

Popular Pays aims to enhance their platform with sophisticated AI integrations that transform how brands identify, engage, and measure creator partnerships. Their most significant recent innovation, the SafeCollab tool, exemplifies their technology-driven approach to solving industry challenges. 

“It is an AI-powered brand safety tool that lets our brands identify potential influencer partners they want to work with and evaluate them before they engage,” Theresa explains. “It’s allowing brands to protect their reputations before, during, and even after working with creators.”

The efficiency gains from this technology can be substantial. “We can reduce vetting time from the standard like hours and days, when you’re having to do it manually, down to just minutes to get a full report on an influencer or content creator’s brand safety metrics,” Theresa notes. 

This brand safety tool represents just one component of Popular Pays’ broader AI strategy. The company is developing AI-powered solutions for brief creation, helping brands articulate their requirements more effectively. 

“The way that you engage with creators on Popular Pays is to create a brief and launch it to our opt-in community. And within that brief, you’ll have the mandatories, the requested deliverables, the type of creator they’re looking for, and the type of content they’re looking for,” she explains.

Creator matching represents another area of AI innovation at Popular Pays. ‘It allows you to take a lot of that information that’s in the brief, a lot of the requirements of what kind of creator do you want to work with, what kind of content are you looking for, and then match that up with creators that are already in our community but may not have seen the brief,” Theresa says.

Content scaling through AI represents perhaps the most transformative capability Popular Pays is developing. “Eventually, we will be able to integrate AI content creation tools directly into the platform so that all of our partners can take content created by an influencer or a content creator and then scale it,” Theresa explains.

One of the biggest benefits from the 2022 Lightricks acquisition is that Popular Pays can now tap into Lightricks’ AI and photo editing technology to allow creators to continue doing what they love, which is creating content and getting paid for it, Theresa explains. 

“We’re seeing such amazing outputs from our creators who are still creating their net new content, but then using AI to take it further, whether it’s versioning, editing, and producing amazing and engaging content,” she adds.

The ROI Front

Popular Pays’ measurement approach begins with fundamentals like direct sales tracking through platform integrations. “Tracking direct sales, being able to either work with third-party partners like Shopify, or we can give creators the custom link so that they can track how many sales they’re driving,” Theresa explains.

For content amplification, Popular Pays evaluates how creator content performs when boosted through paid media. 

“There’s something to be said for taking that high-performing content and putting paid spending behind it across social platforms,” Theresa shares. “Making sure that you’re targeting your specific audience with little to no waste and truly getting this engaging content in front of them in the hopes that it will drive sales.”

For metrics beyond direct response, the company partners with research firms to measure brand lift. “We also have a third-party partner that we’ll work with to run research studies to measure things that are a little bit more soft, like a brand awareness lift, a purchase intent increase, etc.,” Theresa explains.

Popular Pays is now expanding their measurement capabilities to include sentiment analysis. “We can actually see over the course of a campaign also how that engagement rate will shift,” Theresa notes. “One of the additions we’ll be making this year is the ability to measure audience sentiment. So, to be able to see, did this audience comment negatively, positively? Do they feel like this is a product they believe the influencer uses?”

Future Outlook

Popular Pays’ development roadmap focuses on expanding AI capabilities while enhancing measurement tools. 

“I think it is all of the ongoing improvements that we are making to our SafeCollab tool,” Theresa explains, detailing upcoming enhancements. “It’s expanding into different platforms, enabling customized preferences and risk tolerances. It’s also, like I mentioned, the creator matching we will be rolling out. It’s the AI content creation tools that we’re going to build into the platform.”

The company’s vision for brand-creator relationships is based on market feedback. They’ve observed a significant shift toward more authentic, creator-led content strategies. This shift reflects a broader industry trend toward valuing creator expertise and audience relationships. 

“I think brands are starting to realize the amount of work that goes into creating this type of content and really valuing that time and creativity,” Theresa observes. Popular Pays aims to facilitate these more collaborative relationships by providing the data and tools brands need to feel confident giving creators greater creative freedom.

Lastly, Popular Pays is focused on leveraging the value from Lightricks acquisition to accelerate platform development. “It is really the year of Popular Pays trying to establish a stronger presence, working to leverage the technology that we have in our parent company, Lightricks, and to be able to roll it out for our brands and creators to be able to take advantage of,” Theresa concludes.