Creator marketing intelligence for brand builders

July 7, 2026

By Jeremiah Rosen, Founder & CEO, Sundae Collective

TikTok's new pitch to brands, laid out this spring in a sponsored piece it placed in Fortune, is that TikTok Shop has become durable commerce: a place people go back to shop again and again. That's a fine ambition, and probably the right one to chase eventually. But TikTok Shop isn't there yet, and it doesn't need to be. Chasing that story is actually underselling the more interesting thing that's true about TikTok Shop right now.

Buried in that same Fortune piece is an admission that's worth more than the headline: purchasing activity on TikTok Shop "does not remain confined to the app," momentum that "often carries over to retail, online and in-person," positioning TikTok Shop as "a starting point for broader growth rather than a standalone channel." That's not a weak spot to spin around. That's the hardest and most expensive job in commerce, and TikTok is doing it better than almost anyone.

Every brand's most expensive dollar is the one that gets a stranger to buy for the first time. Once someone has bought from you, keeping them is comparatively cheap: email, retargeting, loyalty programs, your own site experience. Winning that first purchase from someone who wasn't looking for you is the hard part, and it's the part TikTok Shop is proving out at scale. Jamie Gutfreund's reporting in Forbes this year found that TikTok Shop activity produces a measurable halo on Amazon: branded search, product page traffic, and sales velocity all rise in the one to two weeks after a push. One wellness brand she cites attributes 30% of its net-new customers to TikTok Shop, and coordinating TikTok Shop with an Amazon strategy lifted new customer acquisition 40% year over year. Independent agency research on the same halo effect, working apart from Gutfreund and from each other, converges on a similar shape: 8-22% branded search lift and 50-80% order lift on Amazon in the days following TikTok Shop or TikTok Live activity.

Compare that to the evidence for TikTok Shop as a repeat-purchase engine, which barely exists. I went looking for TikTok Shop's actual in-app repeat-purchase rate this week and found a mess: one source says 12-18%, another says 81%, another says 89.7%, none citing a methodology anyone could check. That's fine. TikTok Shop doesn't need to win that game. Amazon, DTC sites, and retail loyalty programs are all built and measured for retention. None of them are built to manufacture a first purchase out of someone who wasn't shopping in the first place. That's the seat TikTok Shop actually holds, and plenty of platforms would trade for it.

If you're a brand marketer, stop scoring TikTok Shop against your DTC site's repeat-purchase rate or your Amazon LTV. That's not the job it's doing, and it's not the job worth asking it to do. Score it against your other discovery and prospecting spend, paid social, influencer seeding, top-of-funnel media, on cost of first purchase and the downstream lift it produces in branded search and site or Amazon conversion. Build the attribution so you can actually see where that first TikTok Shop customer shows up buying again.

— Jeremiah Rosen, Sundae Collective

Here are this week’s latest creator marketing stories.

The biggest brand moves do similar things: give creators and platforms credit for the job they're actually doing well, not the one you assumed they were doing.

Marketing Brew, June 18, 2026

Unilever's activation as Official Personal Care Sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 2026 launched in late May and has been running throughout the tournament across more than 35 brands, from Dove to Axe to Rexona. A 24/7 content hub called The Locker Room feeds real-time content across TikTok and YouTube, and in-person "House of Fresh" hubs in Mexico City, New York, and Miami pull in 200 to 250 creators a day, not all of them with paid deliverables. "The VIP talent is really important to us, our mega-creators, but also our nanos...are really driving that credibility online," Unilever influencer and media director Sarah Potter told Marketing Brew. It's the largest sports activation Unilever has ever run, part of a pivot the company has been public about: CEO Fernando Fernandez has pushed for an influencer presence in every ZIP code of its major markets, and Unilever has been shifting a growing share of its ad budget toward social and creator-first tactics.

Sundae take: The tell isn't a headline creator count, it's that Unilever's own team describes the mega and nano mix as deliberate portfolio construction, not vibes: mega-creators bought for reach, nano-creators bought for credibility, some of them working without paid deliverables at all. That's a media-buying mindset applied to creators, not a separate "influencer" budget bolted onto the sponsorship. If your creator budget still lives in a different spreadsheet than your media plan, this is the model to study. Match your mix to what you're actually trying to buy, awareness or credibility, the same way you'd weight display against search.

Read on Marketing Brew →

Glossy / YPulse, June 26-29, 2026

Ahead of its fall Fashion Show, Victoria's Secret ran "Angels Among Us," an open casting search that drew more than 100,000 applicants and generated 1.7 billion impressions, almost entirely through social content rather than a traditional casting announcement. That builds on real precedent: last year's show cycle saw the brand engage thousands of creators directly, producing more than 1,700 pieces of content, with more than 150 creators attending VIP store events and one gifting video alone reaching 2.58 million views. The brand's 16,000-member creator program, run with advocacy platform Duel, is built to reward existing fans and creators on an ongoing basis rather than recruit only for one-off campaigns. CEO Hillary Super told investors on the company's June earnings call that Victoria's Secret is "building the Fashion Show into an ongoing franchise."

Sundae take: The show used to be the moment and everything else was promotion for it. Victoria's Secret has inverted that: this year's creator-driven casting search alone already generated more total impressions than the show itself will likely draw live, building on a program that already proved out engagement and sales last year. If your brand has one big annual moment, a launch, a show, an event, ask whether you're still treating creators as amplification for it or whether the build-up deserves its own creator-led campaign with its own goals. Give the run-up a separate content strategy instead of saving your creator budget for the day of.

Read on Glossy →

WBD Pressroom, June 30, 2026

Starting July 8, TikTok LIVE and Food Network are launching a recurring cooking series that pairs food creators with Food Network's own on-air chefs for hour-long livestreams shot from the Food Network Kitchen. The first episode features Chef Antonia Lofaso alongside creator @jose.elcook cooking with tomatoes, and viewers can vote in polls, ask the chefs questions live, and buy gifts in the chat, TikTok's usual livestream commerce toolkit layered onto Food Network's own production. This isn't Food Network sponsoring a creator's channel or a creator guest-starring on TV. It's a joint, ongoing format where a creator shares equal billing with Food Network's own talent inside Food Network's own kitchen.

Sundae take: Pay attention to what Food Network didn't do here. It didn't run a one-off influencer collab and call it a campaign, it built a recurring series with its own name on it and gave a creator a permanent seat next to its established chefs. If you have owned formats, a show, a franchise, a signature event, look for the one where a creator can co-host on equal footing rather than appear as a guest. The credibility transfer works both directions when the format is built to repeat, not just to air once.

Read on Food Network / WBD Pressroom →

Skift, July 1, 2026

When Expedia first partnered with IShowSpeed in April, the play was pure awareness: a livestreamed, four-country Caribbean trip that reached more than 400 million people and spiked destination searches for places like Sint Maarten and Guadeloupe. The newest phase of the partnership pushes past that. Expedia is now making IShowSpeed's travel content directly bookable, connecting the trips he documents to a dedicated hub, Exspeedia.com, a portmanteau of the two names, where fans can book the same itineraries and enter to meet him in person. That's a shift from watching a creator travel to buying the trip he just took, with Expedia now tracking the partnership's value in bookings rather than just views.

Sundae take: Most creator travel and lifestyle partnerships stop at the awareness stage, a big reach number and a nice case study, with no clear path from the content to a transaction. Expedia's second phase closes that gap by building the booking path directly into the creator's content instead of hoping viewers navigate to the brand's site on their own. The naming is doing its own work too: most co-branded creator pages keep both names distinct, brand.com/creatorhandle, but fusing "Expedia" and "Speed" into one word borrows the convention of fan-culture shipping names, not standard co-branding. That's a stronger, more deliberate signal of commitment than a typical storefront page, not evidence that brand-name rules are loosening broadly. If you're running a creator partnership built for reach, ask what the second phase looks like before you sign the next one, and design the purchase path into the content itself rather than bolting it on afterward.

Read on Skift →

Curated by Isla Novak, Sundae Collective.

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