Amidst public scrutiny and the ever-increasing threat of a stateside ban, TikTok is continuing to innovate, this time with the addition of a feature that will purportedly help creators’ managers find and select brand representation from one centralized location.
The feature, referred to as “Talent Manager,” will fold into the existing Creator Marketplace aspect of TikTok’s administrative scene.
In theory, this feature will allow managers to view, negotiate, and approve or deny deals for their clients from within the TikTok app itself, streamlining the process and making those deals that much easier to clinch for TikTok’s top-performing talent.
The Talent Manager portal will not allow managers to access the TikTok accounts of their clients themselves, but will allow for things like image curation and more general control over how their clients appear to brands.
In essence, this addition should create a clearer bridge between talent managers, talent, and the brands that sponsor them.
In a screenshot from TechCrunch, one can see the prototype for Talent Manager; it includes a variety of pieces of information about the creator in question, most notable among which is the “Campaigns” section.
Here, managers can view ongoing campaign proposals, actual brand deals that are in progress, and concluded campaigns. All of the creator’s metrics–views, price for deals, engagement rates, and so on–are also available for perusal from this dashboard.
Social Media Today also points out one of the great challenges of monetizing TikTok: The short-form format of videos makes ad insertion much more impractical than it is with things like YouTube videos, making brand deals and sponsorships the most effective way to generate revenue. It’s a formula that has worked in many different arenas, YouTube Shorts and IG reels included.
As any creative will tell you, though, managing all of the possible options for deals from brands is exhausting; the Talent Manager addition should take some of the weight off of creators, freeing up more time for actual content creation.
TikTok has not indicated when it will be releasing the Talent Manager feature en masse, but it has confirmed that the feature is in testing with “selected agencies” across the platform.
