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FEATURE

One of YouTube’s top creators, Marques Brownlee, has become Chief Creative Partner at e-commerce company, Ridge.

Last year the Ridge CEO explained that they “think, act and talk like a brand”. And to get to the next level they needed to humanize and broadcast their story by bringing a prominent Content Creator in-house.

Marques, with 18.5 million followers on YouTube, reached an agreement with Ridge to become Chief Creative Partner, Equity Investor, and Board Member.

The move is a signal of the growing belief that long-term partnerships with Content Creators as the public face of the brand, can significantly increase the bottom line.

Sources: Marques Brownlee on X, Business Wire, Fortune (subscription required)

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TODAY’S HEADLINES

Pinterest is launching a streaming TV show called "Deliciously Entertaining" that will combine Pinterest trends with shoppable products. During the show, viewers can access a Pinterest board with recipes, DIY tutorials, and related Pins. (Pinterest)

Google announced that there will be more displays of Reddit information on the platform. Google has seen a growing number of people searching for Reddit conversations for topics like product reviews. Google will seemingly keep ranking Reddit content prominently. Meanwhile, Google will get access to Reddit’s Data API to train its AI models. (Google)

Microsoft repeatedly tried to sell Bing to Apple which Apple rejected due to quality concerns. According to court documents provided by Google, Apple rejected the deal because Microsoft was not investing at a comparable level to Google in Search. (Forbes)

Meta will use Instagram data to help brands more easily discover Content Creators who are the best fit for their campaigns. Meta will also extend access to their Creator Marketplace to 8 more countries including The UK. (Meta)

TikTok is encouraging users to post photos as well as video to the platform. TikTok claims that photos get more engagement on average compared to videos. (Lia Haberman on X)

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