Increasingly, today’s marketers understand that working with influencers is one of the fastest ways to increase trust in their brand. But that begs the question, how does the brand know which influencers they can trust?

A software company known for its AI-powered tools for the creator economy, the team at Lightricks thinks it can simplify access to the answers, with Popular Pays SafeCollab.

Announced this week, SafeCollab is a tool for investigating influencers’ digital footprints for brand safety purposes, and it uses AI to accelerate that process. Its customized large language models effectively automate the process of vetting content creators on multiple social media platforms, performing a quick and accurate risk assessment that gives brands greater confidence in their influencer relationships.

SafeCollabs is a new brand safety tool on Popular Pays, an influencer marketing and creator management platform that Lightricks acquired in 2022.

Influencer marketing is hardly a new thing, but brands are quickly realizing the value that can be derived from expanding these kinds of relationships. As a marketing strategy, working with content creators and influencers provides brands with a way to gain public exposure through word of mouth, and it can have a significant impact on consumer’s decisions. According to recent research from Matter, 81% of consumers have bought or researched products that they first saw an influencer or otherwise trusted social media profile mentioning.

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One of the reasons for this is that influencers operate independently. They produce their own content, on their own terms, and it’s mostly up to them to decide how to integrate a brand’s message into their social media posts. This model gives the influencer a lot of control over how a brand is portrayed, and this is what makes such collaborations so valuable – it promotes greater authenticity, increasing trust in that brand.

As a result, marketers are becoming more reliant than ever on influencer marketing as a key component to their strategies. One industry report recently found that 74% of responding marketers are investing more in creator collaborations this year than last year, a 19% surge from the same report a year prior.

Accelerated Vetting

While today’s marketers are increasingly focused on influencer collaborations, they’re also emphasizing working with creators who have smaller, more engaged followings. Indeed, posts by niche-focused micro-influencers have been demonstrated to yield higher newsfeed reach rates and more sales conversions than those from influencers with massive audiences.

To make the most of influencer marketing, then, brands need to work with several creators across various social media platforms.

With Popular Pays SafeCollab, marketers have a way to quickly analyze the social media history of more than 160,000 creators who are already on the platform. They can also invite other influencers they want to work with to join the platform to speed up the vetting process.

When a creator signs up for Popular Pays, they’ll automatically opt into SafeCollab, giving brands an easy way to research their social media history and ensure that they’re a suitable partner. At launch, SafeCollab’s exhaustive analysis spans Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, allowing brands to review the content they’ve posted on those platforms right back to the very first post they published.

It’s a great example of how AI can enhance research processes, and it goes further too, providing continuous real-time monitoring, so that brands will be made aware of any newer videos or posts an influencer has made that might cause them to rethink a long-term relationship with that person.

“Our AI-powered SafeCollab tool isn’t just about mitigating risks – it’s about reimagining the entire ecosystem of brand-creator relationships,” Zeev Farbman, CEO of Lightricks, said in a statement. “This tool sets a new standard for trust, efficiency, and creativity in the digital age, empowering brands and creators to proactively cultivate long-term, authentic, and mutually beneficial partnerships.”

Controversy Is Common

Brands have good reasons to want to automate the brand safety vetting process, for influencers have made attracting controversy something of a habit.

Take the example of the U.K. vlogger Elle Darby, who had more than 785,000 followers on Instagram and 716,000 on YouTube and would regularly promote cosmetics and fashion accessories on those channels. Or at least, she did until January 2022, when a series of offensive tweets she had posted on X, formerly Twitter, resurfaced almost a decade later, exposing her as a xenophobic bigot.

In a more recent case, the TikTok star Alix Earle, who boasts more than 7 million followers, was also outed as a racist when Reddit users discovered a ten-year-old post on the website ask.fm, where she used the N-word.

Both of these cases highlight the urgent need for automated vetting. For someone with a decades-long history on social media, it can take days to run through all of their older posts and videos spanning platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. And of course, who is going to think to check for previous posts on relatively obscure platforms, including comment threads, video backgrounds and spoken audio content?

Beyond racist content, there are dangers associated with content that discusses drugs or alcohol, sexual activity, or uses foul language. Brand safety, of course, extends beyond hate to encompass brand values.

Even the most vigorous of human researchers could easily overlook something that later comes back to bite them. Plus, marketers must continue to monitor the influencers they work with on an ongoing basis to ensure they don’t get into hot water with any newer content they post.

Scaling It Up

The addition of SafeCollab enhances Popular Pays’ status as a powerful platform for brands to scale their influencer marketing campaigns.

With a community of more than 160,000 popular influencers within its database, Popular Pays makes it easy for marketers to find the most suitable creators to work with for each campaign, applying filters like their target audience, location, engagement rate, follower size and more.

It also provides tools to outline a marketing brief that creators can use to channel their creativity while ensuring they stay within the brand’s guidelines. By outlining their objectives, key messaging, aesthetic guidelines and deliverables, marketers can make it easier for influencers to create content that’s likely to resonate with their audience, maximizing impact.

It also provides tools that marketers can use to manage collaboration discussions from a centralized messaging hub, and to measure the success of individual influencer campaigns, with detailed metrics such as engagement rates, impressions and other insights.

Lightricks has indicated that the company will expand the capabilities of SafeCollab in a forthcoming update, giving marketers the option to create custom brand safety risk tolerance parameters.

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