Digital Front Door

Ep. 7 - How Creator Commerce Works

• Scott Benedict

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What if the real “digital shelf” lives inside your social feed? We sat down with Jessica Thorpe, CEO of PartnrUp, to unpack how creators, user-generated video, and smart automation now drive verifiable lift at retailers like Amazon and Walmart, and why that changes how brands plan, fund, and measure growth.

We walk through the big shift from top-of-funnel hype to bottom-line impact: creator videos show up where shoppers research, answer the questions brand assets miss, and carry affiliate links that shorten the path to purchase. Jessica breaks down a practical operating system for partnership marketing, streamlining creator discovery, contracting, and syndication, so teams can reuse content across social, retail media, and product pages. The result is a ROM model that stacks value: reach from social distribution, outcome from tracked clicks and sales, and merchandising gains from higher PDP conversion.

We also draw a firm line on AI. Automation should handle scale job; shortlisting creators, outreach, briefs, and campaign support, while humans deliver the authentic storytelling that builds trust. You’ll hear data-backed insights on mobile vs desktop buying, how to correlate social traffic with glance views and sales, and why mixing UGC with brand content on product pages delivers the strongest results. Looking ahead, we explore creative variability, personalization across hooks and formats, and how one-to-one creator-audience tools will route shoppers to their preferred retailers without losing attribution.

If your team manages influencers in PR, performance in media, and the digital shelf in ecommerce, this conversation lays out how to connect the dots and prove impact where it counts. Subscribe, share with a teammate who owns the PDP, and leave a review with the metric you care about most, we’ll tackle it in a future show.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the digital front door. I'm Scott Benedict. Today we're going to dive into one of the most powerful shifts happening across retail, in my view, the fusion of creator marketing, user-generated content, and artificial intelligence. The result is a new kind of digital shelf experience for a customer, one that starts long before a shopper reaches a retailer's website or the store shelf. Joining me today is Jessica Thorpe. Jessica is the CEO, a partner up, a company that is pioneering how brands, creators, and retailers work together to drive measurable results through what she calls partnership marketing. Jessica has spent her career helping global brands transplate influencer reach into real impact at retail. And she's here to help us understand what's next in the creator commerce ecosystem. And Jessica, thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thanks, Scott. I'm excited to be here in Chat All Things Creator Commerce.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. So I I know uh that you were one of the early uh innovators in video-based shopping and social commerce and things of that nature, long before a lot of your brand clients were probably ready for it. What led you to launch Partner Up and what problems are you really trying to solve for in the relationship between brands, creators, and retailers?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, I guess I'll take a step back. The business that's been around since 2006, with a core mission to help people make smarter shopping decisions through shared product stories in video. Um many of the founders of the original pieces around the company came from a digital media background and understood the power of direct response TV, right? Seeing a product, being able to look at it, get perspective, testimonials, all sort of like wrapped into one. Um, and so this was long before TikTok was born. Um and you know, if you think back from a retail standpoint, word-of-mouth marketing, ratings in our view platforms, um, they've been around for a while to collect experiences from customers around products and put them in front of shoppers to guide that shopping journey. Uh as you really what we've been focused on, and more recently with the rebrand or the product to help leverage the influence of marketing, marketing activities that brands are interesting in, and that's the core of their budgets into and thinking about with that uh customer journey can that content deliver value to consumers, whether that's in product research, when they're doing price comparison and then deciding to buy, and even after the purchase, helping with returns or answering questions about products, right? A customer can help at all of those touch points, and through creative marketing strategy, you can really do that in an efficient way. Um, and so for us, partner up has been kind of at the forefront of thinking about where is that connection point between social content and commerce? Uh, and it's allowed us to kind of live through the evolution of the space, and you know, we're going to the second decade here, and so have a lot of experience around what works, what doesn't work, and you know, everything in between.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, you know, most of my my friends in the space viewed uh influencer marketing initially as kind of a top of funnel tactic. Today, it's really a legitimate uh commerce channel that drives measurable sales in very verifiable ways. In your view, what kind of caused that evolution and how should brands think differently about the role of creators in their overall omni-channel strategies?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Um, you know, in early days, one of the biggest feathers in a cap, if you will, was around being able to convince Amazon to put a video from a consumer on the product page. They have such amazing community, um community around their brand and very high standards on what's allowed and who can create content. Um, and so I'd say that was uh you know something that was like this like mission impossible at the beginning, especially when retailers will mute every pickle matter. Um if you think about where consumers want to get their information, you buy things that you need or things that you heard about from someone you trust, right? Years ago, maybe that was your mom, your friends, but today it's social media content creators, people that you follow for specific reasons on certain channels. Uh, they're more trusted than brands, than retailers, and your family. And so thinking about aligning your brain with it in channels where this is possible is kind of table safe at this point. Uh well start there. And there's a number of reasons why I think this is happening. One, YouTube and other channels like TikTok, who are more product research destinations, not just entertainment channels, right? People go there when they're looking for information about a product, they want to make sure that they're getting all of the information before they buy online or go in store. And so making sure you're showing up requires more mid-funding. Think about long tail search, right? Whether it's need or organic, you're not necessarily doing brand building activities, you're not trying to create a next viral video, you're trying to meet people when they have very specific needs at a moment in time. And as you think about the role of AI and APT and and the like, making sure you're showing up in those answers is critical. If you're not, you're not even in consideration center, right? And so having purpose-built content strategies that happen to creators is cost-effective and allows you to show up in those places that are feeding feeding those um channels. The second is better measurement measurement. You know, Nielsen and other measurement solutions exist that allow brands to tie creator and implement marketing efforts into their broader um mixed media modeling activities. And so this brings more discipline and analytics to the work, which is critical if you put more media dollars or bigger budget investments into it. Um, we saw this firsthand when we did some work. Um, I think the case breaks down now, but it was even live metal at one point where we were working with one of our clients, uh Armin Hammer, on a campaign to drive awareness for a new product, but also to drive demand at Walmart. And so the SKU in the influencer content and other product skews within the portfolio saw in-store lift when influencer activity and paid amplification was live. And so being able to tap into data sources and partnerships with your retail channel teams gives brands and marketers the data and the information that they need to really tie these two things together. And the third is affiliate and performance models. And so you talk about the evolution of influencer to create a marketing. There's some people that think about it more as like a partnership and performance channel. It's because of affiliate marketing. Uh the central channels make it really easy. YouTube was first to doing this. One of the many reasons why we spent a lot of time on YouTube, putting product lists in the descriptions allows you to bring people closer to the point of purchase. It also allows you to track how many people are buying after watching that content. And so as these systems improved and as the retailers got more comfortable with this type of UGC content, it's really made it easier for marketers to make a case to their CMOs or their leadership to move around the investment because they can prove out the value. Um, and it's just as effective, if not more, than some of their channels and tactics that they were using.

SPEAKER_00:

That makes sense. And I've heard you describe what you and the team at PartnerUp do as kind of an operating system for partnership marketing, integrating the various pieces, the creators with the affiliates, with influencers, all into a single workflow. And I'm curious at a high level, how does that system work and what other organizations learn from your model as they try to break down the silos between marketing, e-commerce, retail sales teams? Uh, how does that all work?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, you said something really important. The silos that exist between brand marketing, sometimes PR comms, and e-commerce, um either make or break a brand's ability to really deliver on the value of the influencer to its fullest potential. And so those organizations that understand that through line are seeing far greater success because they understand the creator service center and feeding a lot of these things. Um and so from a platform standpoint, you know, one of the most time-consuming aspects of working with creators and influencers is the very beginning. It's finding the right creators. And if you're thinking about a shopper-specific campaign, you're thinking about a mix of both demographic to graphic information. Are they the right consumer? Do they have the right household income? Do they have the right type of hair or the shampoo that you're trying to market to? But then you also think about and where do they shop and where is their audience located? And so there's different layers of data that you look at beyond just do I like the way they make content, right? So there's all these data points um that go into it, but then there's also the tedious task of emailing all of them, following up with them. And so what we've done is tapped into one of the powers, one of the powers of AI, is to really automate that and to leverage the data that we have to do that sorting and discovery and evaluating, and then sending the emails and then managing the contracting process. So, what that means is the user of the platform, whether it's our agency services team or custom webs, you know, DIY on the platform, when you log in, you get a lesson ready-to-go creators. They're contracted, they are um meeting whatever your budget rate needs are. There's even functionality to negotiate around what usage rates, whether that's for paid or organic. Um, and so it will let the brands or the e-commerce, you know, whoever's running point with the influencer focus on the creative and the strategy, and where do they want to use the content beyond just the influencer posting to the channel? And that's the big differentiator for us is we saw from the very beginning creators as a means for creating impactful, high-quality product experience content, but we wanted to put it on our retail product page to help other shoppers. We we almost didn't care to a fault about their following until we realized we could crack the traffic in sales using affiliate links. And then we said, okay, well, let's care a little bit about the top of the funnel, but also make sure those videos are on the digital shell. And so the platform's designed to take the burden off the front so that you can focus on the things like what happens next, um, including making it super easy to download the assets, make it really easy to push a button and syndicate it to Amazon related video, uh, really looking at that full um, you know, 360 perspective of the content. Um, because again, you know, if you think about the upper funnel impressions that you'd get on the social channel, the traffic that you can drain through to the digital shelf, maybe some carting lengths, and so you're getting them closer to making that buying basically good. And then when you put the videos on the product page, you can look at conversion rate impact. And so there's this ROM framework that is three pillars of value. Uh, and that's what I think is the key unlock for brands that are thinking about retail and the role creators can play in driving business growth.

SPEAKER_00:

That makes sense. And you know, it's not accidental that the the name of our show is a digital front door because digital is is the entry point in the shopping journey for consumers to a greater degree every day, no matter how they end up ultimately consuming an item or buying an item. And the the role of digital used to mean you know driving towards a website and ultimately to a product detail page. Today, it feels like because of the role of uh of influencer uh content, that entry point could be short-form video. It could be a product review to your point that has video elements in it. It could be a live shopping event. And I'm kind of curious, given what you do and what you and the team do, how should brands approach kind of this new reality of how products are first uh uh unfolded or or viewed by a consumer where a creator is themselves kind of becoming the the digital shelf or the the the entry point into the consideration uh journey that you hope ultimately leads uh to a purchase.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Um, you know, again, I think one of the benefits I have of being in this space for the last nearly 20 years is you know, if you think back, Google came out with like C Mont, the zero moment, and the whole point was you don't know where they come in and you don't know when they're gonna be ready to buy, so you've got to be everywhere, right?

SPEAKER_00:

You gotta be ready and you gotta be everywhere, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Um, and so today there there's truth to that, but it's from a shoppability standpoint, right? Like, how do you reduce the clicks? How do you make it easier? You can buy directly in every social platform right now. Uh you can buy directly on a video in the shop app or from a Shopify store, right? Like that half the purchase is getting so much shorter. And and again, if consumers are going to social media to be inspired and buying new things and are motivated to try something after watching a piece of content, whether it's a link in the buy-in, uh you know, a swipe up through an Instagram reel or an actual ad on meta that has the products associated to it, right? Like making sure you're you're not losing out on that opportunity is important. I think that's number one. Number two is you know, the digital shelf was something to know your look by traditional agencies. And if influencers sit with PR or phones, it's not their remix, it's not their APIs, and everyone's over, right? Let's let's be obvious way. So to help the guy next door with their job seems like a a nice to have, but always gets depriorities. Um, and so the easiest way to unlock that is to really think about um, you know, are there two systems working simultaneously that support each other? You know, so I think there are a lot of organizations that are just debate on like who should own influencer versus thinking about the why and how around it and maybe like allowing each business group to tap into the power of creator commerce or influencers and a creator and guard rambles and playbooks, if you will, so that you're not you know making concessions for one or the other. And so to me, I think the the technology and the openness from the retailers has really validated it. I mean, think about how many beats have their own influencer programs now, uh, even if that speaks in volumes, it also creates a lot of confusion for brands. I think in the well, do I need to use their influencers or can I use mail longer, you know, and that's probably its own podcast episode. But it's validating, and it is validating that the retailers are seeing better success in selling their products or the products that they sell, and brands should think about how to shorten that that path, and whether it's just mucking the dots, it's planning with your e-commerce canoe part, or you know, just thinking about how do I use that path to purchase from a piece of content, even if the objective was upper final. It doesn't have to be a one or one or the other. It can be both.

SPEAKER_00:

So as a former retailer myself, I I feel confident in saying that retailers very much care about conversion, they care about sell-through, they care about the velocity of sales for an item or for a brand. And I'm kind of curious in that context, how creator-driven programs like those that you work on can be evaluated by the retailer in in business terms and business metrics. What kind of metrics does a retailer look at that connect influence to commerce if you're looking at it through the lens uh of a retailer?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Um, well, so we've had the opportunity with a major conglomerate that has, you know, a dozen household brands to participate in a web lab with Amazon in in earlier days where they were able to create two groups of shoppers and have enough glam feed and sales activity for a duration of time to have these findings be statistically significant enough to report back out. And I think for Low Stats and Seller Central, Tender Central is driven by some of these early insights and they've just built upon them over time. But the presence of a video alone on a product page increases commercially. The overlap in terms of shopper questions being answered between a brand asset and the UGC and like social group video is less than 10%. They're talking to different people and they're solving different needs, they're answering different questions or they're giving answers from a different point of view. So it's not again sort of both and they work better together. So that's one is the the the consumer demand for rich media content is you know, you can't debate that at this point. Uh there's also enough stance that should know that the watcher is buying more and spending more money on the brand in the video. And so for a brand, why wouldn't you think about taking a piece of content that you funded for? An activation on Instagram or YouTube and bring some of them, maybe not all of them, but get right bring them in and then do post analysis. And so the challenge in e-commerce is you're running around, you're doing 10 different things, and see if you can't isolate this one tactic. But if you're running point on all of those activities over a quarter, and you can say I I think that this effort is worth 20% of the conversion rate left, the sale incremental sales, you can start to quantify to what extent was this social proof content driving that. The other thing that's a little bit easier now is you can pull down your data from meta YouTube or TikTok and you look at look at correlations. You can look at the amount of traffic that you just drove for your click-through rate relative to your glance news, and then look at sales and frequent from that perspective. You know, your conversion rate might go down, you have a lot of media going, sales volumes going up. Um you're you're able to kind of overlay these different data sources. And that's the hard part for influencers. And most influencer platforms have a children of time, making sure they've got all the creator information, being able to pull in Walmart data, Amazon data, D2C data, it's harder. Um, and we're not even there yet candidly, but when we are partnering with bringing it from a services standpoint, we have access to both, and we know how to pull them together, and we understand how to draw those conclusions because of the you know our expertise and and analyzing that data together. Um, and so I think a lot of times brands are probably having more success than they know with the influencer because they just don't know how to find the metrics and do the math.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. You know, it occurs to me while you were talking that one question I I I probably should ask, and I should I should know this uh as a former retailer. Do you have any data points on the difference of between whether a consumer engages creator content on a mobile device versus on a desktop website? Is is it dramatically better or worse in one platform or the other? And obviously that that's not always actionable. It's more like a just an interesting factoid based on how mobile devices have be gone from just being a good research device to actually a purchase platform to much greater degree than than it was in the early days. Any any data points or any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh I'll speak to it from the perspective of the affiliate links. And so, you know, whether it's a program driving to a Shopify, Disney, S-Bod, Walmart, Amazon, the vertical data varies a little bit, but 30 to 50 percent of the sales, actual transactions may occur from an influencer putting a link somewhere around their pink one and driving to a product page or driving to a brand store is high on the phone. And so, you know, some might argue it should be way higher, others might argue, yeah, that's actually pretty high because you might get exposed to a product. Many of you are guilty of like screenshotting something you found on the phone, but you really want to be on your computer and put your credit card in because you don't feel comfortable connecting your credit card to your phone, right? So I think the comfort line for shoppers is still varied and more. But 30% is high, in my opinion. I think it's gonna continue to get better over time. Um, but it's it's significant in the early, you know, what we're still in the early days of the space from a maturity perspective in truly delivering on like social commerce and you know social selling.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. Uh and and that's both fascinating and interesting uh trend that's that's continued to evolve to your point. It'd be interesting to see where we are two years from now, five years from now. Next thing I was gonna ask you is I know that the partner up uses AI agents to handle some of the discovery, uh outreach, and campaign management in your work with influencers. How does automation help to kind of change the scale and the efficiency of creator marketing overall? And where, in your view, should brands kind of draw the line between uh algorithmic efficiency and authentic human storytelling in the space?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the my perspective um is that AI is great and potentially detrimental to the at the same time, at the same time, concurrently, and you know, it will continue to be that way for a long time. Uh the reason why influencer marketing exists is because of that trust and that authenticity. I'm talking to you through video, you're in my home, and you know, it's not always the most clean kitchen. You might see the dishes in the thing, but then it's more relatable. Uh it is too easy today to replicate that with AI content with someone who looks just like me, sounds just like me, has never really had an experience with a product. And then I think there's a fine line between using AI to create and to help creators make things. Um maybe it's fine for a product 360 video or something that's just showing product features, but the moment you try to impute a human experience upon a product, I don't care how cheap it is, run from that. Range shouldn't be doing that. We're gonna the longer recommendation impact with their customers, then it's worth um it's cool as hell, right? Like, I think we should all be playing with it, but we should be thinking about where it makes sense and having front of that like narrow compass as like part of the equation um in our platform and taking that same approach. AI shouldn't help, it shouldn't replace humans. I don't think it's good enough to make full decisions and automate. I think the human needs to be driving the strategy, the AI should help them connect the work that they're doing or be running while they're sleeping. Like you should be approving it, right? And I think you know, in probably years, maybe they're doing 90%, 60% of the work with the AI meetings that we have have built so far. It's one to help with that discovery and I found you 100 people, so you're not wasting two hours in a discovery to turn the filters on and then getting ghosted. So let us do that for you with AI. That's easy work to bring in the model. Two, sending a bunch of emails to the people that kept all the boxes. We help you draft the email, you can modify it. And then when you say, okay, we'll start doing the email outreach on your behalf. Uh the third is we'll we'll help you draft a creative rate based on talking points you put in, but it's never gonna be gone percent right. And so, you know, again, we give you the tools and the control to improve upon it, but it gives you a head start. And the fourth and the one that I'm most excited about is customer support. Uh today there are lots of questions influencers ask that's across campaigns and across grants that he can answer on your behalf quickly, so we're not slowing the creator down from getting back to work. But we're introducing opportunities for brands in their own workspace to feed and train the customer support agent to answer brand specific and campaign-specific questions. Hey, can I buy Christmas five? Or are you sending it to me? Well, that's a campaign answer, that's not a where do I update you know my performance metrics? So we're being very thoughtful on how. Um, and again, I think there's a lot of opportunity ahead of us, and I'm really excited about it. But I'm also you know, very cautious on some of the things that unfortunately you see a lot of people talking about as like amazing use cases for AI. I think they have real implications that can harm brand health. Um, and if the retailers don't want that content, and I think there's probably some risk involved for the retailers. And so I think it's upon Ollie Bummer um responsibility that's leaders in the space and is the space and companies to really be advocating for what's good and not good as we test the loggers with AI.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Now and it occurs to me as you were talking, uh, I I managed the user-generated content program for SamSClub.com for a number of years, and there the our our context was writings and reviews and authenticity, and just authenticity was always in our head. And you draw a through line to that to now in the creator space, and that continuing element is if you damage uh uh in the consumer's mind the credibility or the authenticity of whatever content it is, you're done. Whether that's you as a retailer, you as a brand, you as a creator, whatever it is, and there's no there's no going back.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's it's not you know, and it's for a good reason, right? Like if a consumer can't feel comfortable that that information is of quality, data, sound, experience, right? Like why why would you go there for that information? So then it's just taking up space, right? Um, and so it's it's really important, and quite honestly, um the creators have the responsibility also, right? And so as they think about where in their work, they can use AI and the disclosure. And so it's why the FBC was so important in all of this, is just thinking about trying to create standards and expectations and make it easier for us as practitioners to do the work and not try to skirt around it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it feels like until regulation uh and appropriate uh uh guardrails are put in place, we're kind of all on the honor system. No matter what role we play in the ecosystem, we're on the honor system because it's in our own best interest to operate that way, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, because otherwise, you know, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves for what becomes uh you know just a pile of artificial content and consumers that don't want to watch it because they can't tell what's fact and fiction and what's a real experience or a a deep stake, right? And so um I think that again, I I think there's a lot of opportunity for brands to lean in to create a market and to make and AI is making it accessible to a lot of brands, small startup companies, not just the enterprise brands. And so there's a lot of greatness in that, um, if done well.

SPEAKER_00:

Indeed. So I think the last question I want to pose to you is let's look ahead uh for a second, and and I'm curious how you see creator commerce evolving as a component of the broader retail ecosystem in the foreseeable future. And I always want to insert foreseeable uh into that question. Will it start to merge with perhaps with retail media networks or digital product passports or some elements of next generation personalization? Can we foresee any of that? I'm just kind of curious as you talk to some of your brand clients, how are you advising them to not only execute today, but to look forward and and kind of think about their strategies over the course of the next few years?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the foreseeable future, let's see. I think there's a lot of uh opportunity for creative variability within retail or I mean even paid social. Uh, you know, creating different five, 10 second hooks in front of one piece of content is not being seen as unique as anymore, right? So really think about are there different formats for creating content where you can still have efficiency in the scale and have those uh those broader creative asset libraries to optimize your media. Uh and that I think connects the to personalization, right? So it's um different voices, different customer segments, and different creative formats. What you might respond to might be different than someone in your single demographic in your segment. And so the matrix of content that needs to be made and their variability as um, I think is an area where creators are a really active role. Um and personalization take part of that. The other thing I'm pretty interested in is where one-to-one communication and relationships with the creator's audience can go in terms of personalization. And so, you know, there are lots of tools that exist uh that give creators the opportunity to build their own community, collect emails, DM someone if they comment a certain word. Um, that's a little pippy of mine, nothing worse than like fluffing your engagement because someone says like potato to get the casserole recipe over and over again. Um but I think there's a lot of opportunity in that to think about like how do you have unique conversations with your fans and people who engage with your content and bring them to the retailer or let them decide which retailer they want to shop in. Uh and so I think again, the first time you're testing anything that are on all these like learnings that come out of it, but I think the personalization problems, either within the DMs or within the commenting section of social media, will be an interesting, you know, near-term evolution of how we think about that social shopping experience and the roles that brand can play within those micro conversations between the fan or the follower of the creator and the creator themselves.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. Jessica, I'm I'm so grateful for the conversation. It's really been an incredibly insightful look into how creator ecosystems are are really starting to transform retail in in more profound ways. And uh some of the things that you shared, I think certainly have enlightened my my perspective, and and I sure appreciate you you sharing with them and you joining us today.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. I always love when there's an opportunity to talk about that bridging between social and commerce. There are many conferences and platforms that really come deep in influencer and the role influencer can play in media and brand building. Uh, I don't think enough people talking about the digital shelf and the role that creators can play in driving commerce uh and some of the challenges that are you know inherently baked into that. And so you love the opportunity and thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

You bet. My pleasure. And I share your perspective. There's not enough discussion about the role on the digital shelf, and that's part of why I wanted to have you on, and you provide a lot of great uh value and insight for the audience today. So thank you for that. Uh for our audience, uh if you'd like to learn more about what Jessica and the team at PartnerUp do, we'll put uh a link to their website up on uh the screen for you. And I want to thank Jessica again for joining me and helping us to see how partnership marketing and and uh in this content is really evolving and enhancing the shopping experience for consumers and creating a wonderful business opportunity for creators as well. That's it for now. Thanks for listening for the digital front door. I'm Scott Benedict.