On the 2X eCommerce Podcast, Nadia Bubennikova makes a crucial point about using influencer content for paid ads: don't just take the video and run it from your brand's account, promote the original post that the influencer made. When you do this with a tool like TikTok’s Spark Ads, you’re not just advertising the creative, you’re amplifying the creator’s authentic post, complete with their handle, their caption, and all the social proof they've already earned. It feels less like an ad and more like a trusted recommendation that happens to show up in the feed.
This approach keeps the authenticity that makes influencer content so powerful in the first place. A viewer sees the ad coming from a creator they know and trust, not a faceless brand account. Kunle Campbell, the host, really zeros in on this, clarifying that you’re effectively putting paid spend behind the influencer’s handle. This preserves the original context and engagement, which can dramatically improve performance. To do this, you absolutely must have usage rights that explicitly cover whitelisting or allowlisting, giving you permission to promote content directly from their account. This needs to be spelled out clearly in your influencer agreements.
This is one half of a great strategy. The other half is building a pipeline to source content at scale, which is where the strategy discussed on The Bottom Line: Ecommerce Tactics for Profitable Growth comes in. The hosts there talk about a system for product seeding, where you send products to lots of smaller creators without an explicit posting contract. The key is having a process to track when and what they post. When a great, authentic video pops up, you immediately reach out to that creator to secure the rights to use their content. You can offer a payment for rights in perpetuity or for a limited time, like 60 or 90 days.
Once you have those rights, you're not just whitelisting the original post, you're treating that video as raw material for your own ad creative. This is a core part of a strong Influencer Marketing Strategy. You can take a 60-second video and edit it down into five different 15-second ads, each with a different hook or call to action. This allows you to test different angles and see what resonates with your audience, which is essential for what makes for good Creative Ad Content Optimization. The best programs blend both approaches. You amplify the best-performing, most authentic posts directly from creator accounts, and you also acquire the rights to raw content that you can repurpose and test endlessly within your own ad campaigns.
