Influencer partnerships can be fantastic for brands looking to pump out content that promotes their products and services in an authentic way. These types of posts can lead to great brand awareness and brand morale, but they can also be fraught with risks. Social media stars’ behavior is not always predictable, as many seek controversy to increase their fame.
These actions do not always reflect well on brands collaborating with attention-seeking influencers, leaving marketers with no choice but to take due diligence on the individuals they work with. Fortunately, this task can be made much easier thanks to the evolution of artificial intelligence.
Lightricks, a software company known for its AI-powered photo and video editing tools, is once again expanding its AI capabilities with the announcement of SafeCollab this week. SafeCollab, an AI-powered influencer vetting tool within the company’s Popular Pays creator collaboration platform, is a new tool for marketers that automates the vetting process.
Traditionally, marketers had no choice but to spend hours researching the backgrounds of influencers and looking through years of social media uploads and posts. It is a long manual process that cannot be automated without smart tools.
SafeCollab provides this intelligence through its large core linguistic models, which investigate influencers to ensure that the content they produce is in line with the brand’s values. LLMs conduct a risk assessment of influencer content across multiple social media channels in minutes, sifting through hours of videos, audio uploads, images, and texts.
By doing so, SafeCollab significantly reduces the time marketers spend on due diligence on social media influencers they are considering partnering with. Similarly, when content creators opt-in to SafeCollab, they make it easier for marketers to understand the brand safety implications of working together, reducing friction caused by campaign lifecycles.
Brands Can’t Miss Out on Opportunities
The idea here is to empower brand marketers to avoid working with creators whose content does not align with the brand’s values – as well as those who have a tendency to stir up controversy.
Such due diligence is vital because even seemingly benign influencers may have skeletons in their closets. Examples include famous lifestyle influencer Brooke Schofield, who has over 2.2 million followers on TikTok and co-hosts the “Cancelled” podcast on YouTube. Due to her large following, attractive appearance, and strong fashion sense, Schofield seemed like a perfect fit for the clothing brand Boys Lie, with whom she collaborated on an exclusive capsule collection called “Bless His Heart.”
However, Boys Lie quickly regretted their collaboration with Schofield when a scandal erupted in April after fans discovered several old social media posts expressing racist views. These posts, uploaded to X between 2012 and 2015 when Schofield was a teenager, contained a series of racially derogatory remarks and demeaning jokes about black hairstyles. In one post, she strongly defended George Zimmerman, a controversially cleared white American who killed black teenager Trayvon Martin.
Schofield apologized profusely for her posts, acknowledging they were “extremely painful” with an emphasis on being a changed person with time to “learn, grow, and shape my own opinions.” However, Boys Lie decided they had no choice but to sever ties with Schofield. Following an Instagram statement where they said they were “working on a solution,” the company quietly pulled the clothing line they had previously collaborated on.
Speeding up Due Diligence
If Boys Lie’s marketing team had access to a tool like SafeCollab, they could have uncovered Schofield’s controversial posts long before entering into a collaboration. The tool, part of Lightricks’ Popular Pays influencer marketing platform, focuses on helping brands automate due diligence processes when working with social media creators.
By analyzing years of creators’ post histories across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, it can verify everything they’ve published online to ensure nothing could reflect negatively on the brand.
Brands can set their own risk standards, and the tool quickly creates a precise risk assessment to help them confidently choose influencers they wish to work with, knowing their partnerships are unlikely to provoke any strong reactions.
Without a platform like SafeCollab, the task of performing all this due diligence falls on marketers, meaning hours spent researching each influencer, checking everything they’ve ever said or done to ensure there’s nothing in their past that the brand would prefer not to be associated with.
Considering the scope may include voice comments, extensive comment threads, and frame-by-frame video content analysis, it’s an endless arduous process. After all, top influencers typically produce new content every day. Cautious marketers have no choice but to constantly monitor what they’re posting.
In addition to initial record screening, SafeCollab’s real-time monitoring algorithms take full responsibility and generate immediate alerts for any problematic content, such as posts containing graphic language, inappropriate images, promoting violence or substance abuse, mentioning violence, or anything else deemed unsuitable for the brand.
Expanding AI Applications
With the launch of SafeCollab, Lightricks showcases another use case for generative artificial intelligence. The company initially made a name for itself as a developer of AI-powered photo and video editing apps like Photoleap, Facetune, and Videoleap.
The latter app features AI-powered video filters and AI-generated functions that convert text into video. It also boasts AI Effects feature, allowing users to apply custom AI-generated artistic styles to achieve the desired look for each video they create.
Lightricks is also behind LTX Studio, a comprehensive platform helping advertising production companies and filmmakers create storyboard-rich asset presentations for their video projects using AI-generated text-to-video.
With all Lightricks’ AI-powered apps, the primary benefit is saving users time by automating manual labor and bringing creative insights to life, and SafeCollab is a great example of that. By automating the due diligence process from start to finish, marketers can quickly identify controversial influencers they prefer to stay away from, without spending hours conducting exhaustive research.
