Welcome back to the Deep Dive! Our monthly series where we take one thing happening in marketing and go all the way in on it, so you get why it matters rather than just what happened.

 

Last week I flew to Texas to attend LTK Con for the first time, and I came home with nine pages of notes on where creator commerce is heading that I've been dying to share with you. So here you have it, and enjoy!

If you've never come across it, LTK is the creator commerce platform that a huge share of the fashion, beauty, home and family creators you follow run their income through. 

 

Creators share shoppable content, the audience buys, the creator earns commission, and brands run campaigns through the same infrastructure. It's fifteen years old and it runs at retail pace, with three pairs of jeans and two home products sold every minute, a beauty product every sixteen seconds, $6 billion in sales a year, and 464 creators who have now earned more than a million dollars on it.

 

LTK Con is the annual conference they run for those creators, and you can't buy a ticket to it, because creators are invited based on how they're performing and the agencies who attend have to be top tier to get in. I expected a few days of product announcements with a party at the end, and got something much closer to an influencer business school. The social platforms were there running sessions on how to get the most out of their apps, brands like SharkNinja and Target were meeting creators face to face and talking through their ambassador programmes, and the main stage was breaking down real earnings benchmarks and growth data for the room, so you came away knowing what good looks like rather than just what's new.

That's the sentence I wrote in my notes app before the first session had even finished, because the room wasn't full of people with accounts, it was full of people running businesses, and every one of them was there to work out how to grow.

 

You could hear it in the language. Nobody on that stage talked about reach or engagement, they talked about revenue lines, benchmarks and growth rates. Katie Melton, LTK's VP of Creator Success, broke creator income into three engines, which are commission on what you share, fees from your brand relationships, and passive earnings from content that keeps selling long after you posted it, and then told the room to go and work out which of the three they'd been neglecting. 

 

Katie's growth case study made the attitude even clearer: a creator lifted her posting volume by 8% and her commission earnings increased by 363%. She held her posting steady inside the benchmarks, tested carousels when she saw them working on Instagram, dropped what didn't land, and made nearly everything she posted shoppable. That's the kind of decision-making you'd expect from someone running a shop, not an “influencer”.

 

When I asked LTK's co-founder and president Amber Venz Box whether they set out to teach creators to run businesses or whether they're catching up with the ones already doing it, the answer was neither: "the point was always to help them make money doing what they love, and the role we see ourselves playing is being the technology infrastructure layer that makes that possible, but the outcome we're after is that people are growing their businesses." Nobody sat down to teach entrepreneurship, they built the tools a business needs, and the businesses came.

LTK ran research with Northwestern that found the number of creators brands invest in has gone up by more than 275% in a year. On LTK itself, 34% more individual creators received campaign opportunities than last year, 70% of the top 100 retailers now work with creators on the platform, and brands put $450 million through it in the past twelve months. The growth is in how many people are getting paid rather than in how big the individual deals are, and the job is moving from booking a campaign to managing a roster.

 

Target's rebuild of its ambassador programme shows what that looks like up close, and it meant cutting people as well as adding them. Anyone used to be able to sign up and earn commission on a sale, which left them with a long list of people who had been accepted and never posted, while a small group at the top drove almost all of the results. They've now separated the two, so shoppers who want to share what they've bought sit in one programme and professional creators sit in another, and the creators are chosen on how distinctive their point of view is and whether their audience buys when Target gets mentioned: "we are not looking for creators to create a perfect piece of Target content in our style. We can do that. What we can't manufacture is the connection you have with your audience."

 

That's also the reason for the biggest product announcement of the week. When your programme is a handful of campaigns a quarter you can run it on a spreadsheet, and when it's hundreds of creators on an always-on basis you can't, so LTK launched an Agentic Experience in their brand platform where you describe the outcome you're after and it recommends the creators, the campaigns and the next actions, with agents running in the background looking for opportunities. 

Here's a number that should bother anyone spending on creators: on LTK, 15% of the average creator's earnings come from sales the app generated on their behalf, from shoppers finding old posts through search and browsing rather than anything that creator did that day, and one creator is at 26%. Content from months ago, still selling.

 

Now think about the last creator campaign you paid for. It went out on a feed, it did its work in about seventy two hours, and then it stopped, and the next quarter you paid for another one. The content was no worse. It just had nowhere to keep working, because a feed is built to move on and the link in the caption expires with the post.

 

That gap is the thing LTK built for. Amber told me their own consumer app was an unpopular idea internally when they made it, because nobody wanted another platform to manage, and they did it anyway. Her reasoning was that the feeds were going to end up sitting between creators and the people who followed them, so creators needed somewhere their audience could go looking for them on purpose.

 

So the question to ask before you sign off the next creator budget is where this content lives once the campaign ends and whether it stays shoppable when it gets there.

Thank you to Amber and the whole team at LTK for having me, and for being so generous with your time and your data! That's this month's Deep Dive. If there's a shift you want pulling apart next month, hit reply and let us know.