The algorithm has broken influencer marketing. That’s the premise upon which Parade founder Cami Téllez and ex-TikTok executive Jonathan Kroopf founded Devotion, an AI-enabled company that will help brands scale their influencer marketing initiatives with a more-is-more approach to creator partnerships, at a time when follower count is mattering less.
Using AI, Devotion scales creator identification, outreach and relationship management for a new era of influencer marketing. “Brands are going to have to work with creators at scale, and they’re going to have to move from working with 20 to 30 creators in a month to working with 500 to a thousand. That looks very different. It looks less like one-on-one deals,” Téllez says. “Agencies have not been able to crack this scale model because they don’t have the technology to really drive the type of engagement that’s needed. And software doesn’t sit close enough to the business decisions to be able to drive [successful] outcomes.” Kroopf likens the way that brands work with Devotion to a traditional brand-agency relationship, but the tech they’ve built means they can work at a much higher volume.
Scale is more critical than ever. The creator economy has fast evolved over the last two years, and one big difference from earlier influencer strategies is not only that big followings don’t guarantee reach anymore, but that smaller accounts are much easier to discover. TikTok’s For You algorithm pulls content from all over the internet, whether you follow that person or not, and Instagram’s algorithm has changed to pull suggested content in the same vein.
“Version one of the creator economy for brands, which was that working with a select group of macro-creators [would] build brand equity and awareness, was a broken promise,” Téllez says. (“Macro” generally refers to creators with followings from 100,000 to one million, but some influencer marketers benchmark 500,000 to one million.) This, coupled with the fact that so much of the content we now see is not from people we follow, means brands must rethink their influencer marketing investments, she says.
Over the past couple of years, brands have begun to redo their influencer marketing budgets to include more micro and nano-influencers, which generally have 10,000 to 100,000 and sub-10,000 followers, respectively, given these creators generate up to 60% more engagement than big influencers, per creator ads platform Ramdam. But for many brands, enlisting enough of these micro-creators to make serious returns has proven challenging because of the time and resources it takes to find them, as well as building or maintaining those relationships.
Now, to help solve this problem, Devotion is coming out of nine months of stealth on March 2, which it commenced last year after a $4 million seed raise with investment from AI investors including Basecase and Will Ventures, as well as entrepreneurs such as Away and Charmspring co-founder Steph Korey Goodwin, Ramp founder Eric Glyman, and Twitch co-founder Justin Kan.
It starts with a full assessment of what a brand’s goals are, and how they can get the most people to buy in. “We have them really bring us into the secrets of the brand; of what drives your brand devotion,” Téllez says. “Because that is a big part of what we’re trying to scale when we build a community of thousands of ambassadors.” From there, the Devotion team develops a strategy for the brand, uses its tech to recruit ambassadors, and then implements an end-to-end experience for them, which includes incentivization or gifting, education, event invites, and more.
Téllez grew Parade, a Gen Z favorite intimates brand, in large part via a brand ambassador program built on scale rather than a creator’s reach. Téllez constructed big networks of ambassadors who helped propel the brand to $10 million in annual revenue. Parade’s pursuit of fast growth, however, resulted in financial struggles, and Téllez sold the company, which shuttered last October, in 2023. Building the ambassador program showed Téllez the white space for a tool to help brands work with high volumes of creators at once.
Kroopf most recently built TikTok Shop’s creator affiliate ecosystem and celebrity partnership strategy after 12 years working in the creator economy space. It was his time in China, back in 2022, during his TikTok tenure that most informed his approach to Devotion. “[TikTok] was like, the algorithm is [in its] very early days and what you guys need to understand and help brands prepare for is that there’s going to be an explosion of creators,” he recalls. “The view was that brands really needed to spend resources across a lot of creator partners that would give them better, fresh content, keep them relevant, and make them more successful on the platform.”
Devotion has worked with dozens of brands in stealth, about half of which are fashion and beauty associated, though the founders decline to share names at this stage. They say that brands have seen triple the amount of tagged content on average. Devotion has hit seven-figure revenues. (The company declined to share their fees, but says it varies based on the size of the brand and the scope of its creator program.)
“When we were scaling Away, Instagram was just starting to reshape modern word of mouth — and even then, real scale was limited by manual processes,” Goodwin says. “Today’s algorithmic feeds reward velocity and volume, so I invested in Devotion because Cami and Jon have the vision to build the infrastructure modern brands need to grow sustainable share of voice.”
Scaling intimacy
The scale Devotion works at is only possible because of AI technology, the founders say. AI influencer gifting software is nothing new; a host of companies have launched in the past two years that offer these capabilities, from Spate to AMT, but marketers often aren’t satisfied with existing tech. (One influencer marketer described an AI gifting software she trialed as “absolutely shocking” and lamented that these companies are often run by male developers who have AI expertise but lack understanding of the influencer marketing landscape.) Devotion takes things one step further by establishing a creator ecosystem that includes, but goes well beyond, product seeding.
Devotion identifies creators worth working with by deploying thousands of AI agents to comb through data points from photos and videos creators have posted across platforms to the brands that they’ve tagged. They identify creators’ interests so that they will later be notified of brand launches and initiatives that align with their niche. “It allows us to do that personalization and psychographic tagging that allows us to really scale intimacy — which is sort of an oxymoron, but it’s a big and important part of what we do,” Téllez says.
This aligns with a larger shift brands have noted in recent months: consumers want to co-create. Brands have seen success in enlisting consumers for product feedback sessions, hosting community events, and handing over creative license to creators themselves. Savvy founders are now looking for ways to do more of this, by reaching more creator-consumers, as they grow their brands.
Creators are keen to get in on this, Kroopf says. Some of the most successful promos in the stealth period were those that gave creators access to a celebrity campaign. “For them, it’s the opportunity to elevate,” he says. “Sometimes, the opportunities to be a part of the community are greater incentives than just pure cash payouts.”
Notably — and ironically, in Devotion’s case — this consumer desire is, in part, a reaction and resistance to the rise of AI. Experts aren’t convinced cultural intelligence can be automated. “AI cannot read the room or scrape the messiness of human desire,” Eve Lee, founder of marketing agency The Digital Fairy, told Vogue Business last month. “It relies on data sets from the past to create more of the same, [and] it can’t get inspiration from new things it has no reference for.” Téllez and Kroopf are confident that AI can, however, connect the dots on the backend to drive much more human-generated content and interaction.
It begs the question: Devotion is founded on the notion that the algorithm has changed since the early days of influencer marketing, and is built for today’s creator economy that is shaped by today’s algorithm. What happens when it shifts again?
Like they did at TikTok, the company will continue to track what and whose content performs well, and pivot accordingly. “Those will evolve as tastes evolve. It’s very hard to predict,” Kroopf says. “Even at TikTok, we’d get that question [of what dictates algorithmic performance] all the time. No one really knows. It’s truly dictated by culture and where our culture goes, it follows.”
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