We Went to SoCom 2026 (and Saw the Future of Social Shopping)

0:01Welcome to Creator Upload, your Greater Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Shipper, live from Socom. And I'm Joshua Cohen, also live from Socom here in sunny Venice. So we have hair. It's like a thing. We're in the same room. Everybody knows that this is very, very uncomfortable. We don't know what to do with our hands right now. We're very tired. We had a fantastic day. I moderated a panel about affiliate links and how that's changing the industry. and then I did the fireside with Jordan Madder. And then we interviewed a few people for the podcast. What have you been doing today, Josh? So Lauren, I had a fantastic event on stage.

0:36I was moderating this panel all about the idea from culture and how it leads to commerce. And up on stage with me was Krithika from Elf Beauty, Josh from Beast, Mr. Beast, and Damon Berger from Gapping. It was an amazing conversation. People said, best one here. No, I don't think that's true, but I forgot to say it was on my first panel. So I had RJ from 16th, which is Whaler's management arm. Um, Amy Nevin from select. It was, um, Madison from creator society and Noah from underscore. His story was really interesting about this creator who partnered with William Sonoma, like sold out. He does a food influencers.

1:14And so he partnered with somebody that one of the creators partnered with a William Sonoma and then it blew up and now they're doing like skews in Walmart. It's like crazy. And then yes, the Jordan matter. I mean, the Jordan matter fireside was just, I mean, it was like it was just the giraffe on stage and nobody watching. And it was just like, it was intimate. And like, it was just like a conversation. You know what I mean? And it really got into the weeds of it. He couldn't believe how fast it went. Because it's just like when you're having a great time. Just like when you're having a great time.

1:39When you're having a great time. I interviewed for the podcast. Everybody's about to hear Lauren Selinsky, who's the head of content and community at YouTube Shopping, which is crazy. They have 500 ,000 creators using YouTube Shop. And one of the things that I think has been the through line for me today is around, and we know this it's not about subscriber count in terms of conversion it's about your core audience it's about how engaged they are how much repeat viewers they have how long they're watching their content and i would say if there's another big takeaway here that the platform that is on top and never going to probably not be on top is youtube totally like it's like they're like people are like i don't you i know tiktok shop is a big thing but here nobody's talking about tiktok shop really honestly i think they're talking about youtube people are excited about it.

2:22I mean, I'm just saying. They're just getting started. They're just getting started. Speaking of something's not mattering, I talked with LTK co-founder Amber Vensbox, who founded the company with her husband way back in 2011. It's an amazing husband-wife duo. In any case, she had this famous, now maybe infamous interview with TechCrunch in December and said that follower accounts don't really matter anymore. It's just all about your relevance on the platforms. And Some people got said she she said some people got really upset with her about that. She doesn't quite know why because she was just speaking the truth.

2:54She was speaking the truth. Well, I think it's also on that kind of note, not but like Amy and Madison on my panel had a little bit of a disagreement, which I love it when a panel there's some like friction because people are like, OK, I'm woken up now. Yeah. But Amy was like, I think the future of affiliate is like the Sephora's and the Dick's Sporting Goods are doing these like sort of in-house. And Madison was like to hard disagree. she thinks it's still like the LTKs and the shopmines of the world because people want to be able to put different you know brands out there it's like I don't all only wear she's like Sephora is like kind of the one of the exceptions because they have a ton of products and things like that but she was like she's like I just think that's more kind of the future and then it was sort of back where like William was like I think they're just going to go deeper longer with like fewer creators on those in-house like sort of thing so that's really it's just really interesting I just think it's fascinating around affiliates specifically and this goes to your interview with Amber is about how for years we were all trying to figure out conversion and it turns out we had a product to be able to do that the entire time which is called Affiliate but until recently big creators wouldn't use Affiliate because they thought that they just had to get paid and now it's like brands are basically brands are like that's not good enough for me anymore they're over just because you have a big follower count to your point that I'm going to spend a ton of money on you because there's just I got to see that this is going to work.

4:06Totally. Amber gets into that a lot what's interesting too is they launched their own AI chatbot, but it's just populated with data from their creators. And they have only a few hundred thousand creators on the LTK platform that they vetted that are there for certain reasons. So you can go in there to their chatbot and ask it specific questions. And this goes to the idea of trust. Do people trust AI? Do they not trust AI? I think people will start to trust AI more if it's in a kind of walled garden environment where they know what data is influencing it. And so that's where she thinks this world is going.

4:41So you can go in and ask it like, hey, I'm going to this place this time of year. What kind of clothes should I wear? I also talked with Damon Berger, who is the head of consumer digital engagement at Gap Inc. We did a great combo just from right off on stage to right into the interview room and talked about all the things that Gap Inc. is doing and how it's thinking about its owned and operated properties, its retail stores and all these different social platforms and how they're all integrating together into their strategy. All right, Josh, let's get to the interviews now and give the kids what they want.

5:11Let's do it. Hey, we're here on Creator Upload with Amber Vinsbox, who is the co-founder and president of LTK. Amber, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks. Nice to be here. So excited to have you. So you started LTK in 2011. It's now done over$6 billion in annual retail sales. Break that down for us. Yeah. Well, I'm going to take you back just a quick second to why we even started the business. Like I was doing personal shopping offline, which meant that I would, you know, curate trends, styles for my customers, get them dressed and whatever they kept, I would earn a commission on. I started a website in 2010 to market that business.

5:45Early. Very early. This was, I call it a website, not a blog, because I didn't know what a blog was. I just thought it was, you know, it was a cool marketing website. My boyfriend was into tech. I was like, cool, let's do this. It was fun. But I cut myself out of my own business because I couldn't charge when people would see things on my website and then go make purchases on their own. Interesting. So I had to create something that would basically take that analog business digital. And that was 2011. I was on blogs, YouTube. That's what we monetized. So when you think about LTK, our mission is to make creators as economically successful as possible.

6:15And we started out so me and my friends could make money doing what we loved, sharing all our recommendations. Fast forward to today, which is what you're talking about. We not only monetized, but really the infrastructure layer when it comes to creator commerce across the entire web. So that's socials, blogs, newsletters, now even a chatbot, our own publishing and social media platform. It's highly scaled. 38 % of Gen Z and millennial women today use LTK for trusted recommendations across everything they're into. So last year, those people spent$6 billion on products recommended by creators who are making their content shoppable through LTK, Whether that's on social media, blogs, websites, LTK itself, we're powering that layer really across the web.

7:02And so that's on the LTK owned and operated app or website or through affiliate links or different types of referral deals that eventually route through LTK. Exactly. We're the infrastructure connecting the brands, the creators and whatever the platform is so that we can basically have high fidelity tracking. the creators making the recommendations, the brand's able to kind of understand what happened, where to lean in from a marketing perspective. It's all highly measured. It's all happening on our platform. So a difference with us is that our creators are actually running their business on LTK.

7:34So they're creating content, they're tagging that content, they're pushing it out. And then brands on the other side are then, well, let's take it back for a second. They're doing all of that. They're talking to their audience. So audience sees it, loves it. We're getting traffic, we're doing sales now to the brand sites. The brands are receiving that saying, hey, I need to pour some like gas on this and saying, okay, well, I can work with these creators by incentivizing them with a commission on sales. I can maybe send them a gift in code. I can do some product seeding. I can pay them a little bit.

8:04I can pay them a lot a bit. They can do all that for the LTK platform, all at scale, which only really grows this industry. So round and round we go. The creators are making great content that's resonating with the customer, ultimately growing the brand's business. and we give them the brands, the tools then to connect with the right creators to grow at scale and in a really cost efficient way. So you're hitting all sides of this ecosystem. We have three customers that are scaled. So we have the, you know, the 44 million consumers every month that are shopping on through LTK. We have 400 ,000 creators that are professional creators that have been accepted to our platform and then, and running their business on it.

8:40And then we have 8 ,000 retailers that are currently receiving sales from our platform. So we take basically a transaction revenue fee on every sale. Right now, 8 ,000 unique retailers are receiving sales from us. Wow, that's incredible. Thank you so much for that context. That's great. I want to get into kind of the current state of the ecosystem and what your purview is on it. So in late 2025, you told TechCrunch that social followers don't matter anymore. Subscribers don't matter anymore. I get it. I think lots of people in this ecosystem get it. But if that doesn't matter, Like what's a creator supposed to do to elevate their business in 2026 going forward?

9:21Yeah. It's funny because that statement, I didn't think it was radical at all. I was just truth telling. It made a lot of people very angry. Even I was at a Washington Post conference for women a couple months ago even. And I, you know, this topic came up and the person next to me got very angry about it. And I was like, this was not meant to be inflammatory. It's just true. And here's why it's true. So when you look at social media platforms, historically, when they were created, the original traditional social, it was all about finding people and topics that you loved and following those. And then you had a reliability as the creator making that content that, hey, people have followed me.

9:57They log in. They see my content. What we're looking at today from a social media standpoint is that that doesn't exist anymore. So TikTok basically came into the United States, proved to every other social platform that actually you can just feed people content based on their interests and you can keep them on site longer and make more ad revenue. So what we saw behind that was YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and Snap were already there. Those guys made kind of radical transformations to where the vast majority of content you saw was recommended. And it's not just the savants looking on and doing the studies.

10:32Adam Masseri himself has said on his own channels, follower count doesn't matter. Even recently, he was like, if you're like a millennial here, I'm paraphrasing, but he basically said like, if you're lamenting the good old days, they are gone. And it's, you know, even a year ago, two years ago, they said the vast majority of content you see would be recommended. So you have this algorithmic feed. So it's just simply true that your followers, like he, he in his own words said following someone is like sharing commenting saving screenshotting it's a but there are a lot of signals that we look at following is one of them subscribing or following is kind of like a like for the channel exactly yeah and so what that means as a creator is the job that for me for example um instagram has been one of my biggest platforms so for me the job it used to do for me was a daily reachable audience it no longer does that job um it is though still a huge source of opportunity for both creators and brands.

11:31So there's a lot of caveats here. One is I have never had access to such a scaled qualified audience that has no idea who I am. So I'm able to find new customers, but I have to be really good at getting those customers back to me because the app is oriented for you to not follow, for you to not leave the app. That's why you see a lot of content now that says we'll probably never see each other again unless you take whatever activity. So it's just on the followers don't matter. It's just simply true. what we so what do what do you do now if you're a marketer and you're like well i used to go and see who had a million followers but that doesn't mean anything anymore um what you are looking at now is a couple different things one you can look at just kind of the the impressions like how and even linkedin actually yesterday i was looking to see my linkedin count and it showed me how many impressions i got it did not and like profile views it did not show me my like followers on the platform so even they're removing this it's basically how relevant you are yeah so my last coming on the follower thing is like, it's a signal that shows that you had relevance at what at some point.

12:31I would not be shocked if that goes away as a metric overall. It means a couple of things though. Like I said, you're starting to look at impressions like the platforms we're looking at. But really more important than that, a lot of the brands I'm sitting down with those, even in this room here today at this conference are saying, hey, I used to do these deals with people just because they have these huge reach. I need to drive outcomes for my business and I can get that at scale with a platform like LTK. And so what we just launched is a platform that allows brands to see all data about every creator in our entire network, how frequently they're publishing, where they're publishing, what their content looks about, who are they writing about, who are their customers, who are they?

13:06We gave all of our data away entirely for free, and we built workflows on top of that data. So discovery tools, messaging tools, collaborations, product seeding, all built in so that a single operator or every operator in your team can sit and have visibility into it, but you're not sitting there emailing codes back and forth to creators about product seeding, all this. I mentioned that because the biggest thing there is the data transparency, because if you can go in and see, hey, you can actually search and sort by sales volume across all platforms. You can drill that into like your various, I was just with a beauty brand.

13:42You can drill that into beauty brands, your competitor beauty brands. So that becomes a new source of truth of how valuable a creator is to your business. I wanted to have more into that in a sec because I think it's a fascinating platform that you all just launched. Before that, just getting back into the follower account and just linking it from a creator's POV. So is that more pressure on the creator? Do they have to go out and just earn it every single day now? It is. Well, there's like the mourning process. I mean, for me, I look at it and on one hand, I'm like, okay, there's 116 ,000 people on Instagram who at one point said, show me more of her.

14:16And the fact that I can post a story, I mean, I don't think I'm personally, I probably don't fall in the bucket of people that Instagram wants to promote because I tell a lot of truth to creators. So my reach is tiny. Even my story, it's like, I'm lucky if I get like 2 ,000 views on that. But I have 16 ,000 people who have said at some point they want to follow me. So that's pretty sad because I feel like I've done that work and then it was ripped out from underneath me. Separately now though, I mean, when I look at how many impressions, I mean, I think September, I was like 3 million impressions on my content.

14:47So I'm like, I'm reaching more people. I'm just reaching in different groups. So this platform just does a different job for me now. So I constantly have to play the game, but that's what marketing is. I also have to separate of like, what is the business and what is the marketing? Because now as a creator, social media is the marketing, but what is the actual business? And so starting in 2017, we started investing in our own social media platform for creators where a follower is a true follower. Our entire mandate with that platform is get that follower back every single day. We want a daily reachable audience.

15:20So we've built in an AI CRM for our creators. They don't have to touch anything. We're looking at their customers and saying, they haven't shown up today. Well, what are we going to send them? Did something go on sale? Did you have a new comment that went off the post that they'd be interested in? We're texting them. We're push notifications. We're sending emails. We're finding reasons for them to come back into the app, which is just a totally different mandate than the platforms we've operated on before. But what I will say is like, it's analogous to like Airbnb. Before you could use Craigslist to list your room, but it also did a lot of other things, right?

15:52And so now you have a platform that's purpose built, a tech team purpose built to just do the job that you're meant to do and to monetize the way you're meant to monetize. And now, you know, we can talk if you want to about kind of how that infrastructure layer is now built into the Apple handset. It's now feeding content into Pinterest. It's powering our new AI chatbot and being kind of the source of truth for content. So it does much more than being its own social app. But we had to create our own, not because I wanted to spend hundreds of millions on it, but because we really didn't see it an alternative because there's no longer a platform to retain, nurture, grow your audience.

16:27I want to dive back into the LTK brand platform. So one, like, how are you doing this from a business model perspective? It seems like you would want to hold on to lots of this conversion data, sell through rates, etc. And it would be really valuable for you to sell to a bunch of different types of advertisers. Are you hoping, like, if everybody did this, do you think that increased transparency in the ecosystem would lead to more deal flow and volume? Is that kind of the rationale? So much. I will say when I walked into your room and said, hey, this thing that we've been building, we're actually not going to charge for it.

16:59and people were like, okay, cute, but like in March when we do, and I was like, no, we're actually not going to charge for it. We've had even turnover within team of people who were like, I just don't believe in that. And I was, you know, it's been a good run. But I deeply believe in it. And here's why. I think that there are so many amazing brands that think about like the direct to consumer brands that people just love. It's great product. It has a good story. And we're seeing separately, we are seeing this kind of multi-brand model in many areas fade. And what I'm talking about is like the Saks bankruptcy that we're going through right now.

17:35You see like, was it, you know, Net-a-Porter, Ux, Farfetch, Coupé. I mean, named globally, all of these guys have gone through like restructures, through bankruptcies. And it's the model, the retail model is changing materially. I believe the brands of the future are these really cool independent brands. But to actually do creator marketing. So just for context, okay, so people are buying$6 billion a year on LTK. Brands are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to kind of make that happen. And it's all going around. But what's the stair step? Because this year, many banks say that there will be a 10x in creator marketing.

18:15And I'm looking around and saying without scale and without cost reduction, it's just not actually possible. Right. Like the infrastructure and the pipes aren't there to facilitate it. They're not. And there's no one else candidly to do it because everyone's a point solution. It's like I do gifting. I do discovery. I do content syndication. OK. And so what we did was we brought that all into a single place, made it free to democratize the industry, because I believe if you can give people the tools, so whether you're a founder sitting on Shopify or you're an intern somewhere or your entire hundred person team is now operating on this platform, which is true in many cases, actually, you're able to do so much more and be so much more productive with finding the right creators, getting the message in front of them, reaching them at a price and budget that makes sense for all of you.

18:56Your product seeding with two clicks of a button on the brand side, two clicks of a button on the creator side, there's no emailing back and forth and tracking and all of this, and you're doing it by the thousands. That's what unlocks this kind of next step change. So what we're betting on is ourselves and our data, because we're saying if we actually give it to you and I don't staff teams to have to give it to you that way, then you're going to be so productive that it's going to unlock a huge step change in this industry. So we monetized on success, not on access. So really, when you think about this industry up to date has been all SaaS.

19:31You're licensing for every single activity. But so let's say those are most of them around 100 ,000 a year. So our brands are anywhere three to five at a midsize, even small brand. That's what they're licensing. But then think if a staff it. And so and then you get the creators to use it because actually most of these are just scraping the web and it's just the yellow pages. So you've got your in five hundred to a million dollars before a creator ever earns a single dollar. You haven't even started marketing yet. And so my thought is let's make it all free. Give them the tools to get to the right people, the tools to be successful.

20:04We make money when people buy and keep things. And so we think that we will ultimately have a much larger opportunity when people buy and keep things based on scaling this out and just putting the tools in the hands of the marketers. It's fascinating. I love this idea that just democratizing this ecosystem to the fullest extent possible and then providing as much transparency as possible can really facilitate a ton more deal flow. So really excited to see how this goes. In addition to the LTK brand platform, you also launched this LTK AI chatbot. and in that same interview with TechCrunch at the end of last year you were talking about how the rise of AI is actually going to increase trust in creators and whether or not this is correlation or causation that actually happens so trust in creators according to this study increased by 22 percent year over year and so like one are you like pro just having a bunch of AI slop online because the more of that then that happens the more people are going to look for real creators and real talent and they'll trust them more?

21:01And then two, how does that square with this AI chatbot you built? Yeah. Well, okay. So we talk about, you know, I'm, I'm of course listening to what's happening across all these platforms. We are at the intersection of retail and media and advertising and marketing and consumer tech. And candidly, I'm on, I'm listening and reading transcripts of all the founders of all of these companies to understand how those things come together and what our next move needs to be based on where they're going. One of the transcripts that was last spring said that, or was, yeah, last spring, I said 25, you know, talked about kind of the movement of moving ads to be AI created, generated, and distributed.

21:41Now - Huge trend with a bunch of marketing companies coming up and saying they can make 70 versions of your ad in seconds. Yes. And this is like the platform itself. So this is a meta shareholder call, Mark's on there talking about that. So I'm looking at that overlaid with you know his CEO of Instagram saying that it's all going to be recommended content and I was like they don't know what they're doing they're an advertising platform which means you need people to trust what they see so if you put content in front of them that maybe is interesting but they don't know if it's true 87 % of people now say they cannot tell what's true on social media so they don't know if it's true and then you are overlaying that with most people now know that AI is there.

22:24So you have an algorithm. They're already suspecting that it's fake. You have a trust crisis. And if you're an advertiser, you don't go into a low trust environment. You go into a high trust environment. So now you as a brand, you could be the most legitimate brand in the world, but you're trying to find new customers and that's why you're using social media. You are now adjacent to fake Epstein content or fake bombing content or fake whatever it is that you're seeing. Can we think marketing content? Any of those things that people suspect that it's false, your cost of acquisition is now through the roof because not only is ours, you're not going to convince that person in that moment, but you're also never going to see them again.

22:59So you're going to start buying that customer every single time. And so when I saw that, I just thought to myself, they're killing their own business. The market got really excited about it and it has continued to grow. But what you also see is that engagement is down in the, like the mid double digits and it continues to go down like really tremendously. And actually in the shareholder call mark again said we don't have intention on changing that we actually don't care that people are engaging or not because our eyeballs are there so people are running ads this will shake out things always rationalize and the marketers i'm talking to are saying hey i have to rotate to creators because they've actually become the arbiters of trust so real human people i'll give you another example i use ai throughout my entire life i was going to visit a friend in houston i had never stayed at a hotel in houston i was like i want the nicest hotel in houston and you know here's my dates here's whatever is going on and it tells me this hotel it was for sure not and then my husband's talking in another meeting and he's like no like this is not true chat do what he told me I was like I have intimate knowledge of this business that is 100 % not how it's run but it it gives confidence like it's the source of truth but once you have been kind of like you know violated by you know so many times then then you start trusting it all have to say, it's not just me theorizing on this, the 22%, you know, growth and trust in creators, it's because people are, they need trust before they needed information.

24:21They needed access. They have all of that. Now, what they need now is a decision that they have confidence in, and it's going to make them successful at the end of the day. And so that's why we actually, look, AI is a great thing. I'm not against AI. I just think that people don't understand what they're doing to their businesses when they make claims like this or do stuff like this. But what we just launched today was a LTK AI chatbot in the LTK app. So our creators make 7 million pieces of content every year. And so what we've done is made a database of that and then create a personalized chatbot that's both like a companion, a recommendation engine.

24:53So when I say like, hey, I'm going to Nashville for a bachelorette, it's like, oh my God, how much fun? Like, when are you gonna be there? Let's look at the weather. Okay. These are the outfits. These are the creators. Do we make you like a schedule for what restaurants to go to? So it's bringing in so much more interesting information, but from real human people that are really in that, place and so we're taking like i love a chat bot um but we're taking that model and then applying our unique data to it yeah um and creating a personalized experience in the app we've seen search this is prior to launching this obviously just in september search and ltk is up 200 percent and again i point to like why why are people coming here to search it's because they can search within all this content from known real human creators yeah we make a stand that um and in our terms of service, like you have to be a real human person to be here and be a creator here.

25:40That's fascinating. Amber, we've talked about this forever. Thank you so much for joining us on Creator Upload. It was a pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me. Lauren Selinski, welcome to Creator Upload. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So you are the head of content and community at YouTube Shopping. That is right. Make sure I get that right. So lots going on. We're at SOCOM right now. We are talking about social commerce and shopping and platforms and all the things. So a couple stats here. So there, as I understand, there's over 500 ,000 creators currently using YouTube shopping. So I want to talk about like, I know that's a lot of creators, but like, what does that cohort kind of look like?