X Launches New Creator Push with Advertising Called Creator Connect

X wants to carve out a bigger slice of the creator economy, and it is launching a new product that it thinks can entice creators to do more on the platform (and earn more revenue doing it), while also persuading big brands to spend more on ads, all powered by AI, of course.

“We’ve really been looking at this as the year where we’re entering our creator era as a platform, and really trying to build a platform that fosters a healthy creator economy,” says Mitchell Smith, the global head of content partnerships for X, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

Smith notes that X (formerly Twitter), has in the past few months launched a creator’s choice award, with cash prizes for winners, as well as starter packs, which provide new users lists with creators in relevant areas like sports or business.

“Our head of product, Nikita [Bier], is so committed to really bettering the platform for creators,” Smith adds. “As a result, we’re seeing a lot of great engagement around creators, and all of that organic work finally gives us the credibility to now go to market with a commercial offering.”

That commercial offering is called Creator Connect, and it is meant to connect brands and campaigns with specific creators that will resonate. The company is a bit vague on the mechanics of it, but it will use tech from sister company xAI, and incorporate campaign objectives, real-time trends and audience interest.

When a brand partners with X, it will use the tech to identify hyper-specific creators, spanning video, text or whatever medium they engage with (or some combination), with the tech platform reaching out to the creators that are surfaced to gauge interest in participating in the campaign.

“What we can do is we can provide clients with a brand new AI-powered system to essentially select the most impactful creators on the platform,” Smith says. “So we look at it as a hyper-intelligent creator-led branded content solution, where we’re essentially leveraging proprietary tooling through our sister company xAI, to pair the most suitable creators on the platform with client specific campaign needs.”

Notably, Creator Connect is meant, at least in part, to connect brands with smaller and more niche creators, beyond the largest players on the platform, many of whom would already have an easier time securing brand deals.

“We’re canvassing the entire platform, because there’s obviously lot of different creators of size and type and different voice, and then based on a brand RFP or specific campaign objectives, we’re actually pairing based on suitability and using AI tooling for that intelligent recommendation part of it,” Smith says. “Creator Connect is actually much more designed for those rising creators, those commercial niche creators. There’s absolutely a plethora of options there, and the tooling is really good at surfacing those options. And if there’s a specific niche creator that a brand really likes, we can actually then find a bunch of lookalike options, other people with similar voices or types of creation style.”

The product will “connect [blue chip brands] to a lot of rising creators and niche creators, not just that upper 1 percent but actually creators that have an audience and an authority in a specific space that might be a mile deep, even if it’s an inch wide, and they actually might be more effective for that brand’s objectives,” he adds.

X says that it has already executed some campaigns using the product, including “one for a premium laptop company that wanted tech creators who were F1 enthusiasts, and a major movie studio for a recent horror film.”

With the World Cup on the way, a number of soccer activations are currently in the pipeline.

The new product also underscores X’s efforts to push further into video, which is not only a major engagement driver across social platforms, but increasingly at the hear of where advertiser dollars are flowing.

“Look the video capabilities of the platform have obviously gotten better,” Smith says. “There’s a lot more premium content now on the platform, but I’d say we’re still the conversation-driven platform, and that’s a good thing. It’s just that a lot of that conversation now happens in and around video, which is great. And I kind of think the video can then spark discourse in a way that the comment section on another platform may not have not nearly as much power as the dialogue does on X.”

And in fact, Smith says that X is leaning into that real-time conversation, with another product meant to take advantage of the fact that when something happens in the world, be it a sporting event, political event or news and cultural moment, people start talking about it there.

“I think one of the superpowers of the platform is the real time nature. Something happens in the world, and people are talking about it,” Smith says. “We’re working on pairing Creator Connect with another product we have called Trend Genius, that actually surfaces bespoke creative assets for a brand at moments of conversation velocity, when that topic is spiking. We’re talking to a large financial services client about this right now, pairing these together, where we can have you make a bunch of assets, and then, based on the conversation velocity, deploy different ones at different moments for peak relevancy.”

X’s big creator push also comes as the space is more crowded than ever, with TikTok, Meta’s Reels, Snapchat and, of course, the king of the creator economy YouTube all continuing to invest in the space. Top creators post on all the platforms though X’s real-time conversation focus and a relatively smaller focus on video (Instagram, Snap and YouTube are now video-first) mean that it is still playing catch-up in some regards.

Still, the company is also extremely public with its updates and changes, with Bier often announcing changes to its product and algorithm himself, sometimes sparking instant feedback from users.

“We’re, I think, very well known for building in public and and kind of getting that immediate feedback loop, in a good way,” Smith quips. “So the communication, I think, drives a lot of the innovation that you’ve been seeing, and I like to think we move at such an incredible pace, when you look at just the past few months and a lot of the product innovation that’s been going on for both creators and for users.”

Now the company is hoping that it can bring more brands along for the ride, and give its most active creators a bit more opportunities to earn in the process.