With an update to its Creator Marketplace that now encourages talent managers to monitor, execute and analyse the brand possibilities and campaigns being given to their clients, TikTok is making it simpler for companies to work with its “megastar” creators.

The TikTok Creator Marketplace, the platform that enables brands and agencies to interact with 800,000 certified artists worldwide, now includes a new Talent Manager Portal. This was announced this week by the video entertainment platform.

Reason behind it?To regulate deal flow, negotiate contracts on the behalf of their talent, handle creative criticism and study numerous statistics and metrics about a campaign’s performance, talent managers now have access to the Creator Marketplace with creator authorisation. With the growth, TikTok can now cater to the demands of both “celebrity-level” creators and those with fewer followers.

TikTok stated that the Talent Manager Portal is now undergoing alpha testing. The free service has already attracted various authorities’ interest, but it cannot divulge the identities of testers at this moment.

Additionally, TikTok states that the talent managers will only have access to the Marketplace accounts of their clients, not the artists’ actual TikTok accounts.

The system intends to supplement the Creator Marketplace’s current services for businesses who wish to benefit from creator-led advertising’s effectiveness, which TikTok claims results in higher ad recall for 71% of brands assessed.

What distinguishes it from the existing creator’s marketplace?TikTok Creator Marketplace, which was first introduced in 2019, is one of several platforms given by Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and YouTube that help creators build relationships in the influencer marketing industry. It plays a significant role in the expanding ecosystem for creator monetization.

The Creator Marketplace, in addition to being a destination in and of itself, debuted an API in 2021 that enables marketing firms like Captiv8 and Influential to use its first-party data within their systems.

Previously, finding top creators to collaborate with, required more manual labour on the part of brands: they had to browse through apps or use search terms to find artists, and they couldn’t narrow down their searchers’ criteria.

The new TikTok Creator Marketplace gives them access to more resources by letting businesses pick creators based on keywords, the material being shared, and filters based on audience size and demographics.

Brands have two options for collaborating with talent: they can contact out directly (also known as a “direct invitation”) or use “application campaigns,” in which they’ll develop a brief and creators will pitch the opportunity to them. The marketplace’s match tool further automates the process by using AI and natural language processing to match contributors to the brief based on the content they are submitting.

Some of the top TikTok artists are making tens of thousands of dollars, and in some cases even hundreds of thousands, through brand campaigns on the Creator Marketplace. Smaller-scale campaigns might only offer gifting as a payment option, for example.

TikTok did not specify how long the alpha testing phase of its new Talent Manager Portal would last until it became more widely available.