Pearpop goes ‘Boost Mode’ to turn creator content into ads

Pearpop has found a new way to play matchmaker between creators and brands. The social media marketing service has announced Boost Mode, which lets brands turn organic, creator-made content into paid ads.

Brands can use Boost Mode to locate high-performing pieces of creator content, which can then be repurposed as part of paid campaigns. The creators behind boosted videos receive bonuses when their clips are selected to run as ads.

The new feature is linked with Pearpop Challenge, which has emerged as one of the L.A.-based company’s top services. Challenge participants are prompted to create videos with certain specifications — such as the use of a particular song — and are rewarded based on the resulting viewership. Challenge was one of the products Pearpop discussed when it raised an $18 million addition to its Series A last November.

“Boost Mode allows brands to add paid amplification with just one click to the top-performing posts in their Pearpop Challenge,” Pearpop CEO Cole Mason said in an Instagram post announcing the new feature. “This allows brands to ‘scale what works,’ simply and instantly.”

Pearpop is not the only company that is looking to capitalize on the creator content-to-advertising pipeline. That model, pioneered by companies like Tongal

over the past decade, recently came to TikTok. The ByteDance-owned app introduced the TikTok Creative Challenge, which asks creators to respond to branded briefs. The best submissions are chosen to run as ads.

Compared to that product, Pearpop believes that Boost Mode offers better results for both brands and creators. Mason told TechCrunch that TikTok only pays creators when brands select their Creative Challenge submissions.

The creator-advertisers who work with Pearpop are paid in two different ways: They are rewarded for the viewership their receive from Challenge-inspired videos, and they collect a bonus when those videos get the Boost Mode treatment. Brands can use the Challenge interface to determine which creator videos are performing well, so that they are able to “double-down on the content that is already proven to perform,” according to Mason.

Pearpop was founded in 2020. According to its LinkedIn page, its community includes more than 200,000 creators.