When Nick Chen, co-founder and CEO of Hype, a marketing and payments platform for creators, raised $5.5 million Series A financing in 2020, it took about a month. That probably wouldn’t happen today—for creator economy companies looking to raise funds, “the vibe is really bad,” he told Marketing Brew.

Even if many kids want to become influencers instead of athletes or astronauts, the cottage industry catering to the creator economy isn’t doing so hot. Those are the businesses that largely view creators as their customers, like link-in-bio companies or platforms that can help with their finances.

Despite everyone and their cousin ordering a ring light, as of June, at least seven creator economy startups had shut down and 11 had been acquired since the start of last year, according to The Information, which described it as a “reckoning” for these businesses. It also reported that projected fundraising for creator startups was down more than 90% in Q2 compared to the same time in 2021.

While the creator economy itself is still growing—one recent report expects it to grow 17% this year to $34 billion—venture capital in the sector has cooled since the early pandemic days, when people were spending more time online and companies like Meta and TikTok were thriving. But that’s not to say investors are writing off the space—some are just going directly to creators instead.

Read the full story here.—RB

End-of-year planning may be underway, but winning holiday messaging strategies are still in the tinkering phase for tons of marketers.

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Not sure what to watch next? Talk to Tubi about it.

The free streaming service on Tuesday rolled out a ChatGPT-powered recommendation tool designed to help people surface recommendations using conversational language, not keywords. The tool, called RabbitAI and available for now as a beta test on Tubi’s iOS mobile app, is aimed at making it easier for users to find things to watch within its library of more than 200,000 shows and movies.

“You can ask it like you would a friend for a movie recommendation based on your mood, based on a topic or theme,” Blake Bassett, Tubi’s senior director of product, told Marketing Brew. “Our goal with this is obviously just to connect our viewers to content that they love.”

The tool is also designed to help Tubi better understand how its users watch, search for, and categorize programming. The streamer will log search prompts that come through RabbitAI and use that information to enrich content metadata to better inform how Tubi labels and surfaces programming to users, Bassett said.

The hope, he told us, is that over time those search prompts will help create meaningful “microgenres” on Tubi in the backend, categories like “slice-of-life anime,” “magical realism romance,” and “nonlinear war dramas,” for example. “Once we’re able to name something, we can then surface it to other people who we assess might be interested in it,” he said.

Continue reading here.—KS

Music festivals are so back.

After being deeply impacted by the pandemic, the live music industry is getting back on its feet, in large part thanks to festivals, according to sports and entertainment intelligence platform SponsorUnited.

As music fans have returned in droves, so, it seems, have brands.

Beverage brands are embracing music festival sponsorships more than any other category, according to a report from SponsorUnited that analyzed almost nearly 30,000 posts and 13,000 deals spanning more than 1,400 festivals and artists and over 8,300 brands between January and December of 2022.

The top 12 brands by deal volume all come from the beverage industry. Of the top 10, more than half are alcoholic-beverage companies, including Tito’s, White Claw, Bacardi, Bud Light, and Jack Daniel’s. Coca-Cola came in at No. 1, followed by Red Bull at No. 2. Coke competitor Pepsi had the fifth-highest number of deals.

“They can be engaged with fans and serve whatever they’re serving over those multiday experiences,” SponsorUnited CMO Michelle Harmon-Madsen told Marketing Brew. “It’s the perfect match of reaching new audiences, reaching influential audiences, and being able to give them an experience that just can’t be beat in a digital or other environment.”

Keep reading here.—AM

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Matter of opinion: Why quality of impressions > quantity of impressions, according to one ad-tech executive.

Get down to business: Some tips for crafting effective B2B-focused social media strategies.

All about the image: Could Delta’s loyalty overhaul tarnish its brand? Fast Company dug in.

AI can mimic human art, but can it produce art itself? See what musicians, cognitive scientists, and history have to say.

Make marketing magic: Learn to create messages that stand out this holiday season at Mailchimp’s free Marketing Success Season from Oct. 3–5. Hear about all things personalization, automation, and brand building with the pros. Don’t miss out.*

VC isn’t EZ: What’s the state of VC funding in the creator economy? Glad you asked, because Marketing Brew is covering funding’s current direction and what it indicates for 2024. Sponsored by Tagger.*

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