This week, in data
As we come off July 4th and Prime Day holidays, most advertisers are slashing spend for ecomm summer. CPM improves but CAC, CVR, and ROAS dip as a result.
Smart advertisers are taking advantage of cheaper impressions and are using these upcoming weeks as the ultimate creative testing gauntlet in preparation for Black Friday.
Now, continuing our UGC Flywheel strategy:
Creative Ops Job 3: Tracking
This is the layer that breaks first as the program scales.
You need to know, at any moment, for any creator:
Are they active, meaning they've posted in the last 30 days?
What have they posted, with links, view counts, and attributed sales?
What do we owe them, and for what?
Where are they in the lifecycle: new, ramping, core, dormant, or churned?
There are two tooling paths depending on scale. Under 200 creators, Airtable and manual workflows will work fine. Build a creator CRM with fields for name, handle, follower count, date joined, lifecycle stage, posts this month, total posts, gross attributed sales, commission owed, and last contact. Connect Airtable to Shopify and Discord with Zapier. This works surprisingly well up to a couple hundred creators, if somebody owns it. Once again, automate everything. You do not want this to be manual.
Above 200 creators, you want a purpose-built platform. This is where Saral, Aspire, GRIN, or Social Snowball start to show real value. Social Snowball is specifically designed for affiliate-style creator programs at scale and integrates natively with Shopify and Klaviyo. Archive sits alongside any of these as your "what did they actually post" capture layer.
The metric that actually matters is posts per active creator per month. If it drops below four, the program is dying. If it's above ten, you've got the flywheel. This is the ultimate measure of creative volume, and volume is what we're after. Focus on volume and the winners will appear.
Creative Ops Job 4: Payouts
This is existential: Late or incorrect payments will kill creator goodwill faster than anything else. These people want to do this for a living, or at least as a real side hustle. Be a reliable source of money for them and they will be committed to you. A creator who didn't get paid on time will say so in Discord, the rest of the community will see it, and word will travel.
The non-negotiables:
a predictable payment schedule, weekly or bi-weekly, never "we'll get to it."
Automated commission calculation, not manual spreadsheet math.
Multi-rail payment options, PayPal at a minimum, ideally Venmo, ACH, and Wise for international.
Statements that show creators what they earned and why.
Tooling in order of complexity:
Under 50 creators: manual PayPal Mass Pay weekly with a spreadsheet is painful but workable.
From 50 to 500 creators: Trolley, formerly Payment Rails, is the cleanest option. It handles tax forms like W-9s automatically, supports 200-plus countries, and integrates with Airtable.
Above 500 creators: Tipalti gives you full automation including invoicing, tax compliance, and accounting integration. It's pricier, but it's built for that scale. For TikTok Shop affiliates specifically, TikTok Shop handles commission payments natively, which is one reason Comfrt's program scaled so cleanly.
One tax compliance flag: anyone paid more than $600 per year in the US needs a 1099. If you're paying 500 creators, that's five hundred 1099s in January, and your finance team will hate you if you don't get this figured out. Trolley and Tipalti both handle it.
If you're doing it yourself, build W-9 information collection into your application form from day one. Going back later to collect tax info from creators is a nightmare.
Creative Ops Job 5: Retention
The first four jobs are systems. This one is about people. Creator programs that scale have a real person whose job is to make creators feel seen. These creators have a relationship with your brand. They're spending their time advertising your product for money. The deeper those relationships are, the more successful this whole process becomes.
Discord is our favorite way of building community with these creators. A Discord channel structure that works:
#announcements – brand-only, weekly drumbeat of news, briefs, contests
#start-here – onboarding resources, FAQs, guidelines
#brief-of-the-week – current creative direction
#wins – creators post their viral videos, sales screenshots, payouts
#help – questions, payment issues, product questions
#general – open chat, memes, off-topic
#feedback – explicit channel for creators to say what's not working
The #wins channel is the engine. Other creators see what's working, get hungry to match it, and the cultural pressure to post compounds.
The person you hire to run this program will live in this Discord. Hudson Leogrande (a pioneer of this UGC system) described his director of influencers as one of the earliest hires he made, and credited that role with the brand's growth more than any other single tactic.
The community manager is not an admin role. It's a relationship role, and it scales surprisingly well: one good person can manage warm relationships with 500 to 1,000 creators if the systems underneath them are clean.
What does that person do every day?
They spend one to two hours in Discord answering questions, dropping reactions, and hyping up wins.
They send personal DMs to anyone who hits a milestone: a first sale, a first viral video, 30 days active. They run a weekly leaderboard or shout-out post celebrating top performers.
They plan monthly contests, bonuses, or themed challenges to inject energy and give creators new ideas. They surface creator content to the brand's main social channels, which is a huge incentive in itself, since you're amplifying the creators back.
They listen for friction points, whether that's payment delays, unclear briefs, or product issues, and escalate them fast.
What does that person do every week?
Monday, drop the week's brief in #announcements and #brief-of-the-week, and email everyone inactive for 14-plus days.
Tuesday through Thursday, stay active in Discord, respond to questions, repost creator wins, approve flagged content.
Friday, process payments, post the leaderboard, and send the weekly recap email: here's what crushed, here's what's coming next.
Monthly, run a cohort review. Who's in each lifecycle stage? Where is posts-per-creator trending? Who's about to churn, and who's ready to be promoted to core creator status with bigger briefs and exclusives? That review keeps you aware of the program's health at any given time.
Here's the big mistake that takes these programs down. Almost every collapse I've seen has the same root cause: the brand started treating it as a side project once it scaled.
They got to 300 creators, the content was flying, the ads were working, and they stopped feeding the community side. Within 60 to 90 days, posting volume dropped, the best creators churned to competitors' programs, and the whole thing limped.
The unsexy truth is that creator programs are never on autopilot. They're a living thing, a community. The brands that win commit to treating community management as a permanent function, not a phase.
Step 3: Managing and Repurposing Content
So you've got all these creators sending you massive amounts of ad creative. How are you supposed to organize it into something functional and get it posted across multiple channels and platforms?
Content management has five layers. Master these and you’ll be fine.
Capture: pull creator content off TikTok and Instagram before it disappears.
Tag: apply a consistent taxonomy so it's findable.
Organize: store it in a structure that scales past 10,000 assets, because you'll get there fast.
Distribute: get the right asset to the right team member quickly.
Govern: track licensing, exclusivity, and where content has been used.
Most brands do capture and organize reasonably well and ignore the rest. The pipeline only delivers compounding value if all five are running.
Capture: you cannot trust the platforms
Creator content is fragile. Creators delete posts, accounts get suspended, algorithms hide old content, platforms change their APIs. If you don't capture content the day it goes up, you may not have it later.
Capture happens at three points:
At time of posting: automated capture from registered creator handles grabs content the moment it goes live. Archive is the gold standard here, capturing tagged and untagged mentions across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, including Stories.
At submission time: creators upload raw files to a portal as part of the deliverable. This is critical because the TikTok-compressed version is lower quality than the original, and you want the raw file for ad cutdowns.
Ad-prep time, when content is selected for paid use: you need both the original raw file and a clean version without the creator's TikTok username and captions baked in.
Build a deliverable workflow where every paid post requires the creator to also drop the raw video file into a brand-controlled folder, whether that's Frame.io, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Make it part of the payment trigger. No raw file, no payment. It sounds harsh, but it's the only way to ensure you have what you need at scale, and creators get used to it fast.
For organic captures, meaning creators posting without a brief, Archive is the only real game in town. It runs in the background, captures everything, and lets you search it later.
Tagging: the gold-standard taxonomy
This is the core of the system. The goal is that anyone in the organization, whether they sit on paid media, brand, email, retention, or partnerships, can find exactly what they need with three filters or fewer. Here's a production-grade schema:
Creator Name / Handle (text, e.g. @northbeam.io) – attribution, payments, follow-up
Creator Tier (single-select: Core / Active / New / Dormant) – quickly filter for vetted creators
Date Posted (date) – recency for ad freshness
Platform of Origin (single-select: TikTok / Instagram / YouTube Shorts / Snapchat) – format optimization
Product(s) Featured (multi-select, e.g. Weighted Hoodie / Sweatpants / Blanket) – cross-reference with SKU launches
Product Color / Variant (multi-select, e.g. Black / Sage / Sand) – critical for inventory-tied ads
Content Format (single-select: Talking Head / GRWM / Demo / Unboxing / Lifestyle / Testimonial / Skit / POV / Trend / Voiceover) – the single most important tag for ad strategists
Hook Type (single-select: Pain Point / Curiosity / Stat / Question / Bold Claim / Trend Sound / Problem-Solution / Aspirational / Negative "I hate...") – lets you A/B test hook patterns
Angle (multi-select, e.g. Anxiety Relief / Gift / Travel / WFH / Mental Health / Cozy / Aesthetic / Quality / Price) – your angle library, the strategic dimension
Promotional Status (single-select: Organic / Paid Brief / Whitelisted / TikTok Spark / Meta Partnership Ad / Repurposed) – tells you where it's been used
Licensing Status (single-select: Full Rights Perpetual / 6-Month / 12-Month / Organic Only (no paid use) / Pending) – legal protection
Performance Tier (single-select: Hero / Strong / Tested-Neutral / Tested-Loser / Untested) – drives reuse decisions
Optional but valuable secondary fields:
audio used (branded sound, trending sound, original audio, voiceover only), whether captions are on screen (matters for sound-off placements)
aspect ratio (9:16 / 1:1 / 4:5, for cross-platform repurposing)
length in seconds (useful for filtering by placement requirements)
discount code mention and which code, featured talent demographic in broad buckets like "20s female / 30s male / family / pet”
brand safety flag (clean / requires review / do not use).
The principle behind a good schema: every field should answer a real question someone in the organization will ask. "Show me anxiety-angle, talking-head, hero-tier content from core creators that's licensed for paid use" should be a four-click filter, not a Slack message to whoever manages Dropbox.
Organize: the database is the source of truth, folders are the fallback
Ideally, every time a piece of content is submitted manually or automatically, it falls into a database where it is automatically tagged, when possible.
A common mistake is building an elaborate folder structure in Dropbox or Google Drive and treating it as the content management system. Folders don't scale. By creator 50, you can't decide whether a video goes under by-creator/samantha, by-product/hoodie, or by-format/demo. The answer is all three, and folders only let you pick one.
The right architecture: the database is the source of truth, whether that's Airtable, Notion, or a purpose-built tool like Air, Brandfolder, or Wedia. Every asset has one row with all 12 tags applied. The files live in cloud storage (Frame.io, Dropbox, or Google Drive) with a stable URL referenced from the database. Folder structure on the storage side stays minimal, because the database does the searching, not the folders. The recommended structure, kept dumb on purpose:
/01_Raw_Submissions/[YYYY-MM]/[creator-handle]/
/02_Approved_Final/[YYYY-MM]/[creator-handle]/
/03_Ad_Cutdowns/[YYYY-MM]/[concept-name]/
/04_Archived/[YYYY]/
For brands not ready to build a custom Airtable base, these purpose-built platforms are worth looking at:
Air.inc: built specifically for this use case, beautiful for creative teams at around $20–50 per seat per month, with best-in-class visual search.
Brandfolder: more enterprise, with deeper governance features.
Archive: has a built-in asset library with tagging if you're already using it for capture, a reasonable starter.
Notion is workable under 1,000 assets if you're already in Notion, and falls apart above that.
For most brands in the $5M–$50M range, an Airtable base with the schema above plus Air.inc for visual file management is the sweet spot.
Distribute: who needs what?
The whole point of the tagging is that other teams can self-serve what they need from this database of content. Make sure the following teams are satisfied.
The paid media team needs hero-tier and untested content filtered by hook, format, and angle, raw files in the correct aspect ratios, confirmed licensing for paid use, and a view of what's already been ad-tested so they don't re-test losers.
The brand and organic social team needs high-quality creator content for repurposing on owned channels, with permission status verified and variety across creators, not the same five faces every week.
The email and lifecycle team needs static stills pulled from video, testimonial-format content with strong quotes, product-specific content by SKU for triggered flows, short punchy sub-15-second content for SMS previews, and promo-code-friendly assets.
Partnerships and PR need content that demonstrates social proof, view counts and engagement, filtered by creator tier so they're not pitching with random content.
And customer support needs demo and how-to content to send to confused customers, plus anything FAQ-relevant.
Part 3 comes next Thursday!
🤖 OpenAI just opened ChatGPT ads to everyone with a credit card. Let the games begin.
🏷️ Meta redesigned the Audiences section around labels. Jon Loomer broke down the July 16 refresh, which makes organizing custom audiences and value rules way cleaner.
Love this newsletter? Please forward it to your friends, coworkers, or Garrett Langley. Subscribe here to get this data in your inbox every week.