Back to School and ‘Back to Work’ | with RushTok, Staples Baddie and Employee Influencers

0:00Hi, everyone. This is Scalable, a weekly show about the business of the creator economy. I'm Kai Uriyev. And I'm Jasmine Enberg. Every Thursday, we take you beyond the headlines to tell you what's happening, what it means, and why it matters.

0:29matters. Automated recovery, clean data, a business that keeps moving no matter what hits. One platform, not a patchwork of stitched together tools and gaps. Don't wait for the next attack. Secure and accelerate your business at Rubric.com. Again, Rubric.com. Only a few years ago, people risked getting fired for posting content from work. Now, more brands are encouraging and in some cases paying employees to post. That includes some brands that were previously not very happy with their employees making content for social media about their work. We cannot overstate just how big of a shift this is.

1:07Back to school shoppers are starting earlier, spending more than ever, especially online, and they are leaning heavily on creators for inspiration. Creators surface the content that you never knew you wanted, right? One of the things that has been bubbling but feels extreme this year is the dorm room makeovers. There are examples of families spending as much as$10 ,000. Our dorm rooms in the SEC are now getting designed by interior designers. Freshman dorm rooms. Now think about your dorm room that you had as a freshman and compare it to this one at the University of Alabama. $10 ,000 is just insane.

1:43If you don't believe me that people are watching other people move into a dorm room, According to YouTube, in the past year, people watched 1.6 billion hours of college move-in videos. That's over 180 ,000 years worth of videos. Affiliate marketing had a big glow up over the past few years, but now it feels like some recent scandals might be setting things back. Why is everybody fighting for affiliate commissions?

2:14Hi, Jasmine. Hi, Kaya. Back to school season is here. If you've spent any time on social media lately, you'll probably have seen video after video of sorority girls returning to campus and recruiting new members. Dubbed Rush Talk, there have been over 1.4 million of these videos at schools like the University of Alabama or San Diego State posted on just TikTok alone. That's also attracted the attention of brands like Nike, Poppy, and even Sephora, which have partnered with different sororities during Rush Week. So I went to NYU where we didn't have barely any Greek life, So I have been living vicariously through Rush Talk, though I can guarantee you that college rushes back in 2006 did not look like what these sorority rushes look like now with choreographed dances.

2:57They've got get ready with me videos, makeup tutorials. I mean, these things really are a production. So we did have Greek life at GW, though it was not as crazy as the Southern schools. And in the early 2010s, there were some videos starting to be made for YouTube for recruitment, but they were nowhere near what we're seeing now. You unfortunately can find my sorority videos if you dig deep enough on YouTube. We also had a Tumblr account for our sorority as well. Well, I know what I will be looking up on YouTube later today. But anyway, on the other side of TikTok, you may also have seen Staples Batty, whose real name is Caden Rowland.

3:33Her videos about office supplies in the Staples in upstate New York where she works have helped her get close to 600 ,000 followers on the platform. a New York Times profile and helped brands rethink their attitudes toward employee content creation. So one of her videos about how to make paper chains, if you remember those from like the 90s, at Staples has nearly 20 million views on TikTok. And another one about stamps, yes, plain old stamps, has nearly 6 million views. It is very true. You can make paper chains here. So let me go through and show you what kind of paper you're going to want to grab for that.

4:08Tag the original creator down below because we give credit where it's due but you're gonna want to go over and grab one of these astro brights it's about oh 17 for a big pack about eight dollars for a smaller pack and now just bring it over to your print counter and your local staples baddie got you we're just gonna put it in our machine over here charge you a couple bucks per cut and boom you can go home and make your diy so yeah it's really that easy to get your paper chains done here i mean going to staples was such an essential part of back to school in the 90s and early 2000s it was so much fun to go pick out your binders and folders and pens.

4:43And my home phone number from growing up is still connected to our family's Staples rewards card, even though that landline has long been sadly disconnected. Okay, I was hoping you were going to say going to Staples was a staple of back to school shopping because you know how much I love a bad pun. But yes, Staples and also going to Abercrombie to pick out like the latest graphic tee and the lowest rise pair of jeans that your mom would let you buy. Like such a core memory for me. I can literally smell the inside of the Abercrombie store because they want spritz perfume on absolutely every service.

5:14Have you been recently? No, I haven't been. I have shopped online at Abercrombie, but I've not been to a store. So they still smell the same. Like it's so nostalgic when you walk in. There's one on the Third Street Promenade that I go to every now and then. I think they got rid of the shirtless models, which probably was a good Probably a good idea. But besides the fact that both of these brands, Staples and Abercrombie, have been having quite a resurgence lately. Abercrombie has the best graphic tees. So let's try on the four graphic tees that I just bought from Abercrombie. The back-to-school season now looks very different for both shoppers and brands than it used to.

5:50Today, we're going to talk about what back-to-school strategies are working and why, if you're only thinking about your back-to-school creator shopping strategy now, you might be too late. We're also going to dive into why, after firing employees for creating content about their work, more brands are now paying or rewarding their staff to do just that. That includes everyone from Gap to Starbucks, which recently became the first company to pilot a new program from TikTok, which lets it turn videos from select employees into paid ads on the platform. Plus, we're going to debate new research on how much a school cell phone ban nationwide in the U.S.

6:25might cost the social platforms and what the cookie stuffing scandal at Fiat might mean for affiliate marketing. Let's get into it. Okay, so big picture. Back to school shoppers are starting earlier, spending more than ever, especially online, and they are leaning heavily on creators for inspiration. So let's start with the timing. Yes. So back to school is no longer a two-week sales moment in August. And we see this with basically every shopping period, including Black Friday at this point. They are just getting longer and longer. They're starting earlier and earlier. So even Amazon this year moved its prime day from mid-July to late June and extended it from two to four days.

7:04So what that means is that back-to-school shopping is also now happening earlier. So according to the National Retail Federation, 62 % of back to school and college shoppers had already begun buying by early July. A third of shoppers had started their shopping already in June. So what this says, again, is that basically back to school is essentially now a summer long event. I mean, you have to have your first day of school outfit locked and loaded and ready to go. So on my first day of senior year in high school, there is a picture of me posing in front of my iconic red Ford Taurus station wagon.

7:41And I'm wearing a white top and a hot pink bandage skirt. And you know that I fully planned that out. Of course. As a side note, I had a yellow Ford Escape in high school, which was also such an icon. I mean, that was truly a recognizable car. Yellow is next level for sure. Red loves it a little more. But one big reason why this is all happening so much earlier is because we're all online all the time and being bombarded by shopping content. And that just wasn't the case when we were growing up. A lot of that shopping content is also coming from creators. So it makes sense that they are the ones who are also inspiring a lot of these back to school purchases.

8:18So according to research from later, 65 % of consumers say they have purchased a back to school product based on an influencer recommendation. So it's just one data point and it's coming from an influencer marketing platform. So you have to take it with a grain of salt. But it broadly coincides with larger social commerce trends that we've covered on this podcast before. Yeah, it does. And regardless, we know that more energy, more spending is being directed toward creators. And that probably includes in the back to school season. So what that then means is that creators and brands are also having to start their campaigns and their content earlier.

8:48And they are. So we got some data from creator shopping platform LTK, which showed that back to school content appeared three to four weeks earlier this year than it did last year on their platform, with dorm and school supply posts reaching June engagement levels that weren't seen until mid-July of 2025. They added that the earlier timing aligns with retailers moving major summer sales into June, like we mentioned with Amazon. on. So that means that these brands and creators probably already started planning in at least March or April, well before school was out for the summer. I mean, I don't even like seeing the fall clothes in stores in August.

9:26Like I'm not ready for that. So March for back to school is so early for me. So fall clothes is fine. I love fall outfits. It's my favorite sort of fashion time of the year. What I cannot stand is that Halloween supplies and costumes are now in stores in August. It's crazy. It's months away. I don't want to let go of summer yet, so I'm not ready for fall as much as I love fall. But on a related note, I also think it makes a lot of sense for people to shift their shopping habits to align with sales events. Affordability is a huge problem for a lot of Americans right now, and school supplies aren't cheap.

9:58According to that NRF data, families with students in elementary through high school plan to spend an average of$863 on items this year. And if you factor in the fact that over two-thirds of Americans can't afford an unexpected$500 expense, that is a really, really huge sum. It is. And then if you think about families with kids who are in college, they're going to spend even more. So the NRF data showed that college back-to-school spending would surpass$100 billion for the first time this year, with shoppers spending about$1 ,500 each. And that's, of course, on top of college tuition, which we also know is exorbitant.

10:33And admittedly, a lot of this growth that we're seeing in back-to-school spending is coming from rising prices. I mean, everything just feels much more expensive these days. But I would also add that it's also because there's a ton of new categories within back to school that just really didn't exist before. So you're not just shopping for school supplies and clothes anymore. It's also accessories like water bottles and there's beauty and skincare, all of the things that you need in order to look good in one of those sorority rush videos on TikTok. So one of the things that has been bubbling but feels extreme this year is the dorm room makeovers, which I'm sorry are ridiculous.

11:09So this has become kind of its own high ticket category. There are examples of families spending as much as$10 ,000 on these elaborate dorm makeovers. Here's one example of said dorm. College dorm rooms in the SEC are now getting designed by interior designers. Freshman dorm rooms. Now think about your dorm room that you had as a freshman and compare it to this one at the University of Alabama. Which, as I said, it's just ridiculous. I mean, the whole joy of a freshman dorm is that it's not nice, right? Like, I remember being excited to go to Bed Bath & Beyond and buy my polyester, bizarrely patterned duvet and matching pillow and pink towels, hanging some photos from high school on a cork board and calling it a day.

11:54I mean, that is how it should be. A hundred percent. I also went to Bed Bath & Beyond, the one on, I think it was on 14th Street, but hot pink for my duvet cover and hot pink towels, all of that. Like, it's part of the experience. $10 ,000 is just insane. Anyway, creators on social media also agree with us. This has been a whole thing on Instagram. I hate the interior designers doing the college dorm room. I hate the vanities, the matching everything, the carpeting, the wallpaper. That's not how freshman year dorm room is supposed to be. Literally, the ancient texts are slipping from our grip.

12:25Your freshman year of college dorm room is supposed to look like s**t. These dorm rooms, they've gotten out of control. I saw one that was fully wallpapered. And the thing about the dorm, and this girl went to OU okay it was a fully wallpapered dorm room at OU and my roommate messaged me because I posted on my close friend story and I was like are we wallpapering dorm rooms now she was like yeah and if you remember Alex we have popcorn walls at OU which means like in order to wallpaper them you have to have them like sloughed off and then wallpaper it like you have to have a wallpaper hanger come and like retexture the wall to hang the wallpaper and I was like girl the best part about moving into the dorms whenever I moved into the dorms was we got to pick out our bedding Yes.

13:05Like you got to go to the store, you picked out your dorm bedding, and you decorated your desk. This day and age, there's also people hiring interior designers. It's crazy. But anyway, crazy dorm makeovers aside, it's social media and creators that have really driven a lot of the category growth that we've seen in back to school more broadly. And it's also made school supplies and other basics into statements. I mean, kids are treating pencil cases like fashion purchases, and families are shopping for lunchboxes that match their kids' backpacks and planners, according to trends that LTK is seeing on its platform.

13:37Yahoo also did this very cute survey with 15 high schoolers, and they found that these students' back-to-school lists included AirPods, skincare, sneakers, and cute notebooks. And it wasn't simply because they needed these new supplies, but because the new school year felt like a chance to kind of reintroduce yourself. More than two-thirds said that what they carry affects how people see them, and so it helps them show up as the person they want to become. And so much of that is now being shaped by what they see online. That is so cute. But speaking of which, a few months ago, I talked to Amber Vensbox, the president and co-founder of LTK.

14:11And this is what she had to say about how creators are shaping people's perceptions of what to buy online. Creators surface the content that you never knew you wanted, right? Like the places that you never knew you wanted to go, or the recipes that you never knew that you wanted to try, the clothes that you didn't know were in style. For example, I wore a pillbox hat in New York Fashion Week. I did not come up with that on my own. I found that actually through a creator. And even if I then go to an AI and say, hey, give me the best price on a pillbox hat that can be here by Thursday, the discovery point is still the creator, right?

14:38And it's still a real human that I'm following because I admire or I trust in some way. And so the originating point is still kind of that human creation. So I think this applies to back to school shopping, too. Like if ChatGPT told me that I needed a matching lunchbox and planner for my kid, I would have said that it was hallucinating. But if I see a creator packing her kid's lunch into a lunchbox that then matches the planner or the backpack or whatever, that's a whole different story because I love a matching set. I just never would have come up with this on my own. So true. And I'm also just not there yet with trusting fashion recommendations from AI chatbots.

15:15I mean, just not there. Also, it's totally fine for a lunchbox to not match your planner. I feel like that's worth saying. Whatever makes you happy. This is a perfect segue into what type of back-to-school creator content is actually working. So in the later survey, 75 % of respondents said that short-form video is most likely to grab their attention, which no surprise there. And shopping hauls were the most influential content format rather than product reviews or brand ads. So I'm not surprised on the brand ads, but I have to say I was a little bit surprised about the shopping hauls being so influential because I feel like they've kind of fallen out of favor on TikTok.

15:49I mean, people have gotten bored of them. There's so many of them. But I guess in this instance, it makes sense. You're already hauling suitcases or boxes into a dorm room and people want to see what's inside, especially if you're spending$10 ,000 putting together that dorm room. Like I want to know what you're decorating it with. But if you don't believe me that people are watching other people move into a dorm room, let me blow your mind with some stats. According to YouTube data that was released in July, in the past year, people watched 1.6 billion hours of college move-in videos. For context, that's over 180 ,000 years worth of videos and racked up 800 million views on content titled with college or back to school haul.

16:30So totally insane. That's insane. I'm so happy this didn't exist when we were in college. Too much pressure. We could just have fun. So much pressure. Yeah. But at the same time, attention and watching those videos and being inspired by them doesn't necessarily drive sales or inspire sales. So while you might see a haul video and that might make you kind of stop scrolling and tune in, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to buy something from it. This is something we also talked about with Kim Tipton, who is a social media strategist at Kimberly Clark earlier this year. Here's what Kim said.

16:58We're increasingly in a world where we're so saturated with choice. You have a million choices from whatever you want, however you want, with whatever you want at whatever scale that you want. So what makes me buy one brand over the other? Because it makes me feel good. Because they support my favorite creator. Because it's got a$2 off coupon. And money's tight. There are all these different factors that you can't just look at someone as a consumer. Social is not your sales channel. You've got a million of those, right? If you're sitting in the broader integrated marketing ecosystem, it's okay if social or creator sits in a more upper funnel, which spoiler alert, I don't really believe in the funnel.

17:37Sorry, I'm controversial. I don't really believe in a funnel, especially with digital. I just think that the funnel doesn't exist. I think people are constantly in and out of all the phases. It's more like a windy road where people enter and exit the funnel. It's not linear. So Kimberly Clark sells household goods and CPG products like tissues and paper towels. These aren't necessarily essential back to school products. Although, of course, kids and college students need Kleenex too and some of these products. But the larger point stands. There are so many reasons why people ultimately choose to buy something or pick one brand or another or why they choose to buy in one place rather than another, including in physical stores.

18:14I mean, it's true for back to school as well. I mean, you might see a dorm hall on YouTube. You might search for products on Google. You might compare prices on ChatGBT. You might ask friends for recommendations. You might visit a retailer site and then go buy the thing three days later in a store. A hundred percent. I mean, there's just so many different options. But the one thing that gets me with Kim's take, though, is that she kind of contradicts herself. So she says that social and creator is an upper funnel tactic rather than a sales channel. But then she says she doesn't believe in the funnel at all, which if you watch the full episode, you'll know that I disagree with.

18:48There absolutely is a funnel. You just don't take a linear path down it, which is something that I agree with Kim on. I always actually go back to this survey that I conducted at eMarketer that shows that even when it comes to creator recommendations, people need to be reminded to buy something at least three or four times before they finally click buy. And it also showed that most people are still going to do their own research before blindly buying something from a creator recommendation, or they'll actually wait for a sales period, meaning again, that most of these purchases, even from creator content, aren't happening immediately.

19:22Yeah. And to take this back to back to school, the number one reason why people hadn't done their back to school shopping yet in that NRF survey was actually because they were waiting for the best price. So it'll be interesting to see what happens when the final sales figures for this year come in. Okay, as an aside, we have to talk about something else that we've been following that's back to school related, which is cell phone bans in schools. How do you feel about the new cell phone ban at schools? My kids have already been dealing with it for the last two years in their area. But I know we're statewide bell to bell restrictions, no phones.

19:54That means lunchtime. That means between classes. There's a lot of pros. There's actually more pros in the con. The only con I have is that after the school shootings and stuff like that, I want to be able to reach my kids or my kids be able to reach me at any moment for any kind of emergency. So the majority of U.S. states actually now have some sort of restriction on cell phone usage. So 22 states and Washington, D.C. have bell-to-bell cell phone bans, which means that once the school day starts, kids can't use their phones at all, according to the Harvard Kennedy School. Another 19 states have more flexible laws that allow school districts to do this, but they don't mandate it.

20:29So obviously, there is a lot of debate about how effective these types of bans will be and are. I mean, kids and teens are notorious for finding workarounds for rules. I always think about this story from years ago that Taylor Lorenz wrote for The Atlantic about how kids were using Google Docs as a way to communicate in class. In case you haven't heard, to get around the phone ban, a bunch of high school kids are creating a Google Doc with their friends that they all have real-time access to it, and they just type into it, like, during class time. So they basically reinvented the AOL chat room.

21:01Cell phones are now banned in schools in South Carolina. I'm going to teach y 'all the way that we used to do it back in my day when we didn't have phones, and that's writing a note. so what you're gonna do is at the top of your paper you're gonna write to my boo from your queen time third block and you're gonna put the song that remind you of your boo right here right and the way we used to do it was we would say what's up me just chilling never illing but always willing to drop you a few lines you got to drop it down you gotta drop it down But the main thing I need to teach y 'all is how to fold a note for secure transactions in the hallway.

21:44This is well before any cell phone bans existed. Or when TikTok was under threat of being banned in Montana, teens were saying that they were going to use Canadian VPN. So as we've seen this play out with social media bans in Australia and other places, remains to be seen how much they can really be enforced. Yeah, I mean, kids are super creative and they are not going to take no for an answer. I remember when Tamagotchis were banned at my posh private school in England in the 90s. Tamagotchi, Nano, Giga, Cyber, and Diki Dino. Eight-year-old Cassandra Hunter explains the attraction. You can play with him, you can feed him.

22:22It's like a real animal and you have to put him to sleep. The mini-computer indicates when it must be attended to. If the pet isn't looked after, it dies a virtual death. For teacher Elaine Le Quier, the toy became a major distraction and trying to teach a lesson and I noticed that they weren't listening to me. So Le Quier started to seize them and now they are not allowed during class time. What we did was that we hid them in our lockers and we went out to feed them when we'd asked to go to the bathroom. I must have gotten caught at some point though because eventually the responsibility of caring for my Tamagotchi while I was at school fell onto my very unwilling and very poor mother.

23:00I feel like she definitely had absolutely no interest in feeding your Tamagotchi. Absolutely not. But I also think she did it out of the goodness of her heart. So thank you, mom. Bless her. But it's not just in the U.S. The U.K. also proposed a social media curfew, which was highly criticized as users can easily turn the feature off. It's not something that's mandated. But on a positive note, it feels at least like these countries and these laws are trying to find ways to improve kids' well-being, even if some of these attempts have been misguided. But the reason we bring all this up is because ahead of the back-to-school season, there's new research that estimates how much TikTok and other social platforms could lose in revenue as a result of these bans.

23:40So according to eMarketer, where I used to work Jasmine, TikTok could lose about a billion dollars in ad revenue if there was a nationwide cell phone ban enacted in US schools. So that probably sounds like a lot, but for context, it's under 6 % of what eMarketer estimates TikTok will make an ad revenue in the US this year. Yeah, I mean, it's really not enough for TikTok executives to be losing a ton of sleepover. It's also super speculative. And the framing seems a little bit wonky to me. I will preface this by saying that there is so little data on the impact of any kind of ban, whether it's social media or a cell phone ban.

24:14So I love that eMarketer is actually trying to qualify the impact because it is a really important question. So the forecast basically suggests that teens might also limit their cell phone usage outside of school if they're not allowed to use their phones in school. I can see some kids at least trying to do that, and I imagine that there are some parents that restrict their kids' cell phone usage at home, but this is super unlikely to happen at scale. I actually think the first thing that most kids and teens are going to do when they get out of school is check their phones. Plus, we also have countries like Australia and France that have had cell phone restrictions or bans for much longer than places in the U.S.

24:51have. And unless I'm missing something super major, I really haven't seen anything to show that that has had a major impact on social media ad revenue in those countries. But please let me know if I'm wrong. Yeah, I think it's still very early days. But it's just like it reminds me of the TikTok ban in the U.S. as well. Like advertisers are just going to kind of ride this out and see the trends happen and they're not going to prematurely kind of pull funding yet or spending. But I think in general, I mean, teens say that they want to limit their screen time and their social media usage, but we really haven't seen that happen in practice at scale.

25:25I mean, back when TikTok could have been banned in the US, so many people, teens or otherwise, said that if it actually disappeared, they would use the opportunity to just cut back on short form videos altogether. But what actually happened when TikTok briefly went dark is that Instagram usage surged. Obviously, the shutdown was very temporary. So it's hard to say what would have happened longer term, but we don't really have a great example of a ban working to limit teen social media usage. Yeah. And like we say all the time on this podcast, I mean, what people say is rarely aligned with how they behave, especially on social media.

25:55But that leads us to our big question in all of this. So say eMarketer is right and brands do reduce their spending on TikTok as a result of a nationwide cell phone ban. Where does that$1 billion then go? I mean, Google Docs does not have ads, but I would assume that marketers would spend that money on whatever apps that teens are turning to instead of social media. So it'd be really interesting to see who the beneficiaries of a type, this type of band might be. Okay, moving on to our second big topic today. While we don't really go back to work the way that students go back to school, we are about to head into the busiest period of the year.

26:32So we thought it would be fitting to talk about a major influencer marketing trend we've been following, which is the rise of employee influencers. Only a few years ago, people risked getting fired for posting content from work. I mean, remember college student Tony Pellicino? In 2020, he was reportedly let go after videos of him mixing paint at a Sherwin-Williams store where he worked went viral. Now, more brands are encouraging and in some cases paying employees to post. That includes some brands that were previously not very happy with their employees making content for social media about their work.

27:07So there's Gap, there's Starbucks, and Expedia's chief communications officer also just told us that they're exploring an employee creator program that could come out in the fall. And we cannot overstate just how big of a shift this is in both attitude and brand strategy. Yeah, I mean, take Starbucks as an example. Back in 2021, a Starbucks barista in Indiana also claimed to be fired for posting a viral TikTok video. And in June of this year, Starbucks became the first brand to pilot TikTok's new program that lets brands create a custom network of creators, including employees, whose content they can then turn into paid ads.

27:41So who did Starbucks choose for this program? Their own baristas. That builds off of their Green Apron creator program, which launched in late 2024 and allows some employees to get paid for their content. Yeah. And we recently spoke with Moritz Barst, who is the head of creative product strategy and operations at TikTok and is also leading the partnership with Starbucks. He told us that The idea came from a TikTok video of a barista at a Starbucks who was pretending to DJ while making a coffee, and he took it to the Starbucks team and then they jumped on it. Bartz also helped explain some of the thinking behind these employee creator programs.

28:14So the idea is that these employees are already making a ton of content for social media. They're already posting it online. Why not formalize a program, add some guardrails, and turn it into a part of their marketing strategy? So here's a little of what he told us. People have realized how important it is in your marketing strategy to have an always-on stream of content. You want to do this at scale, not just like work with one or two creators. I think just really organically, people were thinking, hey, who are the people that are best able to speak about my product? And in so many cases, it is going to be your own employees, your loyal customers, for example, or your brand ambassadors, your affiliate programs.

28:52So obviously for TikTok, this program makes a ton of sense, too. all of the videos that are going through the program are being posted onto TikTok as paid ads rather than organic videos. So TikTok is making money from them as well. But I do think that Barsh is right in that so many brands are now simultaneously recognizing the value of working with regular people, as well as people who have expertise in their brand and in their products, and employees match both of those characteristics. Plus, then you have Staples Batty, who's going viral. So there's also an organic trend that these brands can point to and say, you know, this is working, people like this.

29:28And it really shows the value of having employees represent them on social media. And an organic trend like that just always is the best kind of trigger. Yeah. And Starbucks isn't the only brand that's doing this. You mentioned Gap as well. In July, the company expanded its creator program to allow staff at its brands, which include, of course, Gap, but also Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta to earn commissions from affiliate links on social media. So if someone clicks on that link, the employee shared on a social media post and makes a purchase, the creator, in this case, the employee earns a commission.

29:57So it's actually not that different from programs that a lot of brands and retailers have rolled out for customers. Target is a great example. They launched Club Target back in May, which basically lets customers who apply and are accepted into the program, create content and then be rewarded for it through everything from gift cards to affiliate commissions. If you aren't in Club Target, this is your sign. I just got my welcome kit in the mail, so let's see what's inside. We have this huge black tote bag. This is perfect for Target runs. And then we have the sticky seduction back of your phone type thing that you use for filming in the mirror.

30:28And then this is like a hands-free tripod that you can wrap around like your Target shopping cart. Content creating stay-at-home moms. Have you heard of this one yet? The Target Club. I've been in it for a couple months, so I've got all of the details and I'm going to share them with you. Target Club is basically like Target's new affiliate program. They're on this new system that a lot of companies are using now. I forget what it's called, but basically they have all of these challenges that you can do. In exchange for the challenges, you get points and then the points rank you up on different tiers.

30:51And then you get gift cards and opportunities and commission depending on what tier you're on. But as Barge also told us, customers and employees play a very different role in the marketing strategy. Take a listen. And please are in general people who are identifying very much with their jobs, with product that they're selling, that they're working on every single day. And so they're usually in a very good position to talk about the value proposition of what they're building and what they're selling, putting into customers' hands every day. If you take the customer point of view, it's different.

31:19You buy a product, you take it whole, and then you have experiences with it. So it's more like, okay, well, how did the customer redecorate their house? What it looked like before and after? So they can talk more from the consumer angle in that sense. And both of these are obviously very different from the types of campaigns and collaborations that some of these brands have with really big name creators. So if you take Target, again, as an example, they launched energy drinks with Alex Cooper that were sold in their retail stores. Though, if you've been following our coverage or pretty much anybody else's coverage of the creator economy lately, you will know that she's shutting that business down.

31:53And we go deeper on this and Cooper's media company Unwell in a recent episode. Anyway, let's put a little bit of data around all of this. Sprout Social just came out with a new survey, which shows that half or almost half of consumers say they want to hear from regular employees on social media. That was well ahead of the official marketing team at 23%. And only 10 % one 10th wanted to hear about products from C suite leadership. So sorry, or maybe not sorry to the McDonald's CEO who in case you missed it recently went viral for a very awkward video of him eating a burger and calling it a product.

32:31Here it is. Chris K here with, you've heard about it. Here it is, the Big Arch. This is something that we have tested already in Portugal, Germany, Canada. I love this product. It is so good. Okay, to the social team's credit, though, they turned this into a very funny tweet or post on X when they launched a new burger. So turning it into a win. Yes, and we're still talking about it. So double win. But back to the research, employee content also isn't just there to generate goodwill or entertainment or engagement online. It's driving business results as well. According to December 2025 data from the Harris Poll, seven in 10 adults in the U.S.

33:07said they are more likely to buy from or support a company after seeing a real employee experience. And in the Sprout Social Survey, 77 % of consumers said that they had discovered a new product or service because of employee content. So again, it's not just about the entertainment factor. To be fair, though, having employees post about their work can be very risky. And that is why so many brands have historically stayed away from it. And it is a big reason why these new formalized programs are so significant. So having a formal program versus, you know, just encouraging your employees to post gives brands so much more control over the content and the creative.

33:46On TikTok, for example, brands can choose which employees they want to work with. They outline and send briefs, and then they can review the content before they make it go live. Then you have Gap, which said it would provide its employee creators with clear guidelines around things like transparency, disclosure, and brand standards. I have to say, though, I am super curious to know what these content guidelines look like and also, like, what happens if creators don't follow them? You can get into the same territory as when brands are too strict with creators about what they can or cannot say. I think the reason that the Staples baddie, right, is doing so well is because it's really like raw and it's her and she doesn't have all these kind of guidelines.

34:25But formal programs like these also help to make sure that there is a clear payment or reward system, which is also very important. In that Sprout social survey, 61 % of consumers said that employees should be compensated for their work on social media. And what was interesting from our TikTok conversation is that the company is not handling the payments. Starbucks is. But that could change kind of in the future as they roll out this program with other companies. But I also just want to know how much Gap and Starbucks are paying their employee creators or how those payments kind of compare to typical influencer or affiliate marketing rates.

34:56OK, last thing about employee influencers before we move on to our final topic today. Almost all of the companies that are early movers in this space have been retail stores or restaurants, a.k.a. Gap and Starbucks. But that made us curious about where else there might be opportunities. So we asked Baruch his thoughts on this, and he had somewhat of an unexpected answer. He said automotive. Take a listen. Car dealerships are producing this kind of content, which is also huge. You have employees on the ground. They sell cars every day. Cars are historically very hard to ship to creators. You can't just work with hundreds of creators at scale and send them a car to shoot.

35:33So make the content where the product is already at. OK, to clarify, he is not suggesting that individual car dealerships launch these programs. Instead, what he's saying is that big brands or manufacturers, say Nissan, for example, could use content that car salespeople at different dealerships are already making because some of it is admittedly very funny. Let me paint you a picture. You're walking around. Your dog's acting a fool. You want to pick them up? Your dog gets heavy. What do you need? Dog backpack. Dog backpack. So to be honest, this surprised me when he said this because it's not a category I would have immediately thought of, especially as you said, so many of these employee advocacy programs or the content that we've seen have been from fast food brands or retailers, but it makes sense.

36:13Car brands are working more and more with creators. YouTubers Colin and Samira, for example, just did a splashy campaign with Lexus. So also just as a side note, TikTok loves to talk about automotive. They sure do. They also love to call it a niche, but you know what? Apparently it's having a moment. Speaking of having a moment, let's move on to our final topic because it feels like affiliate marketing's moment might be ending. Affiliate marketing had a big glow up over the past few years with LTK, with ShopMai, even TikTok Shop, which finally started to shed some of its reputation as only being for cheap stuff during the holiday season last year.

36:49But now it feels like some recent scandals might be setting things back. Yes, we're talking about Fia, the AI shopping company that helps customers find secondhand luxury goods online. It was founded by Bill Gates's daughter, Phoebe Gates, and her college roommate, Sophia Chiani. The business model is affiliate links, meaning that they make money when someone clicks on a link and then completes a purchase. And the founders are now being accused of, quote, cookie stuffing, which is essentially taking credit for sales that it didn't drive. Here is TVPan on the topic, which I thought was a very good explanation of what cookie stuffing means.

37:21Give this to me in horse terms. So you go from horsereviews.com over to Clydesdale's Direct. You merely have Fia install as an extension you don't know this any you don't you don't know that fia has been a part of the interaction at all you don't know you just click through but you have the software running in your browser that is inserting a a effectively attribution for fia without you knowing yep stealing potential revenue from horsereviews.com yes and horsereviews.com probably had to run ads yep on google yep to get people to horsereviews.com exactly to educate them on the the horse market to get them to Clydesdales Direct, to get them to close.

38:04And so they're sitting here being like, hey, we did all this work to get ClydesdalesDirect.com a new customer, and we're not being compensated for it. Obviously, Phoebe Gates, being the daughter of Bill Gates, has added additional scrutiny to the story. But also additional scrutiny is coming because it has an unusually ginormous group of celebrity backers, which it announced earlier this year with a Coachella-style lineup, which garnered a lot of attention, which honestly was a really smart marketing strategy. I mean, the list includes actors, athletes, creators. I mean, Khloe Kardashian, Alex Earle, Eileen Gu, Sydney Sweeney.

38:40It was just a who's who list of investors who have all been very quiet since the scandal, by the way. I want to know how they convinced all of these people to invest. But that is another question for another time. Because without going into the whole history of affiliate, this is not the first time that an affiliate company has been accused of doing something like this. Affiliate has always been kind of shady. I mean, it's often called the underbelly of marketing. Sorry to all the affiliate marketers out there. But this is also why the glow up that it recently had was just so significant. But do you remember Honey?

39:12I mean, Honey helps shoppers find coupon codes for purchases online. And in about 2024, I think it was, there was a YouTuber called Megalags who exposed the company for essentially replacing creator affiliate links with their own and taking the revenue. And that actually resulted in class action lawsuits from other creators. I mean, this was really bad, especially if you think about the fact that most creators really just are not making all that much money from affiliate marketing to begin with. But the FIA scandal, I think, has taken this to a whole new level. And I think part of that has to do with what you said, Kaya about all of these celebrity investors, as well as, you know, Bill Gates being Phoebe Gates's dad.

39:54And it's really blown up on social media. Also, if you don't know the founders, they're also really active on Instagram and TikTok with their podcast, The Burnouts, where they interview so many interesting founders, including a lot of women from Rebecca Minkoff to Chelsea Handler and Sarah Blakely of Spanx. So not surprisingly, Bethany Frankel, who is also very active on social media, had to give her take on the scandal recently, which actually puts quite a bit of the blame on Bill Gates. Take a listen. Thinking about this Phoebe Gates situation and the FIA, this affiliate link business, they reached out to me a while ago in 2024, by the way, and how they're allegedly taking people's commissions, like putting, taking the links.

40:41That is egregious. All that is terrible. How does her dad as a tech giant multi-billionaire, did he not like just like interface with the tech for one second? Like him not being able to detect that in a business, it's like a$35 million raise. He's has multi-billions of dollars under management and in charity. How did he at just a glance not notice anything? Like him not noticing would be like Lance Armstrong not noticing that your child doesn't know how to ride a bicycle without training wheels. Like what the actual f***? No one's talking about the Bill Gates of it all. So I would like to talk about the Bill Gates of it all.

41:25Like why didn't you be like, Dad, would you look at my homework before I hand it in? And the honey scandal is actually where cookie stuffing as a term came from. So a lot of people are kind of drawing parallels between the two. You know, I love Bethany Frankel in general. Gotta respect what she's built. And she's kept reinventing herself from the reality TV days to today. But anyway, what's been so interesting throughout all of this is that Gates and Keanu have been pretty quiet. I mean, besides their spokesperson responding to the articles about the issue, they've been posting through it. I mean, they're posting as usual, including kind of the typical clips of their podcast.

42:03And they haven't addressed the scandal publicly outside of these spokespeople statements. Yeah. And so when Bloomberg first reported the news, what Fia said was that it had only just learned about the cookie stuffing issue and that its team had worked overnight to resolve it and they attributed it to a coding error. But then Bloomberg followed up with a second report and this time it brought receipts. So they had Slack messages which showed that the co-founders were aware of what was happening and well before Bloomberg had reached out to them. The report also gave us a little bit of insight into why they might have chosen to ignore something like this.

42:40So apparently FIA's average daily revenue dropped from about$80 ,000 to between$10 ,000 and$28 ,000 when the company turned the cookie stuffing feature off in July after this report came out. I mean, that is a 65 % to an 88 % decrease in daily revenue, which is insane. I mean, it's staggering. After that second Bloomberg report, a FIA spokesperson said it was learn from the incident. And they also seem to kind of push back on the Bloomberg reporting, especially to other outlets. But I mean, Slack messages are pretty clear. FIA also said that it would hire a head of compliance as part of this statement.

43:19But again, I mean, the founders have just been kind of moving ahead as if it's business as usual. In fairness, it's probably a smart PR strategy. Them responding would kick off a whole other news cycle. And I'm sure their statements would definitely get picked apart. So it seems like they are just choosing to ride the scandal out. Yeah, I mean, people are picking apart their old interviews and statements as well now. Like there is one where Phoebe Gates is talking about how she and Sophia once debated making electric cruise ships for shipping before they settled on Fia as their company. I mean, I get where they were coming from.

43:52Like they were explaining how you have to find and make a product that is right for you. But it does now sound kind of ridiculous when you put all of this into context. Anyway, the original whistleblower on the FIA scandal was actually Ben Edelman. He is an affiliate marketing researcher. And now he's been looking into affiliate marketing platform Shopmai. And a new report from him suggests that Shopmai has also been claiming credit for sales it didn't drive and been telling merchants to cancel other affiliates revenue. So this is very bad behavior if it's true. And if you're not familiar with Shopmai, it's raised a lot of funding.

44:27And it also is part of the reason, like we said earlier, that affiliate has gotten a bit of a glow up. I mean, LTK was kind of the big name in the game, and Shopmai has become a really big competitor to them. In October 2025, Shopmai raised$70 million at a$1.5 billion valuation from some really marquee Silicon Valley investors, including Bain Capital Ventures and Menlo Ventures. And they also got individual investments from people like Sofia Richie, so some big celebrity investors as well. So the Shop My situation has not been as broadly picked up as the FIA scandal, at least not yet. But it shows that this issue could be much bigger than just FIA or even Honey.

45:04Yeah. And so then the question becomes, why is everybody fighting for affiliate commissions? I mean, this is something that the Business of Fashion asked in an article as well. Well, the reality is that even if creators aren't making a lot individually, there is a lot of money flowing in the affiliate market for these companies to capture. So spending on affiliate marketing is expected to reach nearly$14 billion in the US this year. And growth in affiliate marketing spending is actually outpacing that of retail e-commerce overall. We will be watching to see how all of this plays out. Thank you so much for tuning into Scalable.

45:40And we will see you back here next Thursday.

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