Lightricks rolls out AI-powered brand safety tool for influencer onboarding

Lightricks, the company behind the Popular Pays influencer marketing collaboration platform, has announced a new feature called SafeCollab that represents its latest effort to minimize the friction that goes into creating brand partnerships. The new tool, which is available to marketers on Popular Pays as of early November, enables the use of AI to automate the process of selecting and vetting creators. 

Social media influencers can drive major results for brands, with Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey reporting that 81% of marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential component of their social media strategies. However, many in the industry are aware of the work that goes into creating these partnerships and ensuring that the creators in question are good fits to deliver the goods. Nearly 70% of respondents to Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2024 State of Influencer Marketing study indicated that brand safety is either always or occasionally a concern when running influencer campaigns.

For marketers overseeing these operations, the process begins with finding the right talent for their brand to associate with, and that alone is a daunting task. Across the leading social media channels, there are hundreds of thousands of influential creators, all posting about hundreds of different topics. Many command significant, engaged audiences around niche interests, and it can be tricky for brands to identify those that are best suited to deliver their messaging. 

Once an influencer has been found, marketers must then get down into the nitty gritty of vetting the talent before initiating a collaboration engagement. Again, that’s an exhaustive process, involving reviewing past posts, closing on the business terms, creating briefs and brand messaging outlines, coordinating on campaign assets and drops, measuring impact and handling compensation.  

The challenge of brand safety evaluations can add considerable friction to the process. In recent months alone, several well-known influencers have come under fire for controversial and offensive social media posts that were published either recently or even long before they ever became famous, prompting brands to disavow their partnerships. Marketers charged with managing creator campaigns need to avoid incidents like these, which can cause major brand damage by association. 

Auto-vetting reduces friction

The need to vet creators exacerbates the friction involved in signing up creators. The last thing marketers want to do is to sit down for days on end, viewing hundreds of hours of content an influencer has uploaded over the years, to ensure there’s nothing that might spark controversy. 

With the new update to Popular Pays, the SafeCollab tool helps to eliminate that hassle. As the name suggests, SafeCollab is all about ensuring safe collaborations with content creators, automating the risk assessment process to ensure there won’t be any nasty surprises later on down the line. 

"We've seen firsthand the challenges brands and creators face with brand partnerships in today's digital world,” said Corbett Drummy, Lightricks’ vice president of brand collaborations. “Our SafeCollab tool not only helps to protect brand reputation but also opens up new opportunities for collaboration, making it easier for brands and creators to work together.”

SafeCollab is powered by advanced large language models and integrates with Popular Pays’ database of more than 160,000 influencers, giving marketers a quick and easy way to perform background checks. They can use it to analyze hundreds of hours of video uploads and years of social media posts on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. The tool can deliver the results of this analysis in just a few minutes, so brands can quickly check that the influencer they’re vetting with has a clean past. 

The Popular Pays platform is fast-becoming an essential tool for marketers to eliminate the friction of creator onboarding and scale their influencer marketing campaigns. 

Besides vetting, Popular Pays provides tools for spotting creator talent, ensuring they fit with the brand’s goals and vision, as well as a collaborative platform for planning, managing and measuring campaigns. 

The platform is equally beneficial for creators. After all, most influencers are individuals who work alone and spend a large part of their day just creating content. They have very little time to spare as it is, so anything that can streamline the collaboration process is likely to win their favor. And by signing up and making it simple for brands to vet them, influencers make themselves more visible to marketers. 

A game-changer for marketing

SafeCollab is just the latest example of how AI is making the lives of marketers much easier. These days, thousands of marketers are using AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT for brainstorming, asking it to come up with ideas for fresh content based on the latest trends in social media. 

AI is increasingly assisting with the content creation process, too, with specialized tools that can generate visuals and videos or draft article outlines. For instance, you can feed AI information about a new product or service and it will then spin up blog posts, social media posts and presentations that can be used to help promote it.  

For campaign optimization, AI-powered ad tech can help teams by automatically managing their budget allocations across multiple campaigns to try and maximize the efficiency of each one. It helps teams to squeeze maximum value out of every marketing dollar they spend, while providing tools for real-time performance tracking and reporting, intelligent data analysis, KPI predictions and more. 

AI can also be invaluable for personalization, helping to boost the effectiveness of email marketing. The vast majority of cold emails sent to prospects are ignored, but AI tools can help to create personalized messages that can help to boost the ratio of hits to misses. These apps can search the web for the recipient’s social media activity, bios and anything else it can find online to tailor the messaging to each prospect. 

Popular Pays itself has created another useful marketing tool called BriefAI, which helps to automate the process of drawing up a creative brief. With it, marketers can quickly get their influencer collaborators up to speed on the company’s messaging and guidelines, campaign objectives and more. Simply input the basic details, and it auto-generates a comprehensive brief for the influencer to follow, so they can create more compelling content with the right kind of messaging. 

The rest of the Lightricks product line – which includes Facetune, Videoleap and LTX Studio – likewise features powerful generative AI tools, mostly aimed at streamlining the creation of visual content assets.

This vast and varied arsenal of tools underscores how AI has dramatically transformed the way marketing is done, helping brands to expand their outreach, protect their reputations and get more bang for their marketing bucks. The tech is fast-becoming a must have for every marketing team, for the benefits it provides are just too compelling to ignore.