gen.video, an influencer marketing company founded in 2016, is making major moves in the creator economy with its launch, partnrUP. 

This platform, born from the company’s internal tools, aims to revamp how brands, agencies, and creators collaborate on content projects. partnrUP emerges as a solution to the growing complexities of making video content and unlocking usage across organizations. 

With its user-centric design and ambitious plans for AI integration, the platform aims to streamline content workflows, which often prove to be the creator economy’s pain point. 

gen.video CEO Jessica Thorpe explores the platform’s features, its potential impact on the industry, and the company’s vision for the future of content collaboration.

“I was shocked to learn from many F500 brands and their agency partners that much of the work between their two companies was still happening outside of the traditional Influencer Marketing Platforms,” said Jessica.  

“The key insight was that whenever they needed to talk to each other (not to the creator), they were using spreadsheets, Google Docs, and emails to collaborate. This includes selecting creators, approving creative concepts, reviewing content, giving feedback, seeing the second version, and then approving,” Jessica explains.

Meanwhile, Jessica says clients’ positive feedback on gen.video’s content approval process revealed a gap in the market for video-centric collaboration tools. 

She explained that her research found that many agencies and brands use influencer marketing platforms for discovery, outreach, and reporting, with much of the content review process happening off-platform.

“We have tools that we built for our own agency clients to help manage collaboration around video and social content,” she says in an exclusive interview with Net Influencer. 

So we decided to invest in building a platform that works for all parties involved in the brand partnership experience.”

The partnrUP platform streamlines this process. 

Jessica describes the platform’s functionality as “a central hub that helps manage content workflows, get feedback, manage the approval process, and share media so your teams can work faster and smarter than ever.”

Enhancing Collaboration in Creator Partnerships

partnrUP distinguishes itself from other influencer marketing platforms by focusing on collaboration and tailored user experiences. Jessica explains the platform’s multi-user approach:

“We’ve customized the user experience based on user types. So everyone’s in the same project workspace. But if you’re a brand or an agency account manager or creator, you have distinct permissions and access levels within an account.”

According to her, such a design allows all stakeholders to work in a unified space while maintaining appropriate access controls, similar to how CRM tools like Salesforce operate for different business units.

Streamlining Content Review

A key feature of partnrUP is its “creator mode,” which significantly improves the content review process. 

“When content comes in, there’s a workspace for all of the videos and images for [brands] to review and look at the content,” Jessica explains. “You can leave comments, drop pins, and it’s meant for a brand or an agency [to] share their feedback on the content.”

She adds that the platform allows users to easily share feedback directly with creators: “With the flip of a switch, you can push your pinned comments from the brand user interface into the creator’s interface. […] There’s no room for confusion; I can do that in seconds. Not minutes or hours.”

Enhancing Data Management

By combining user-friendly content collaboration tools with hooks into commerce and social datasets, partnrUP provides a holistic solution for managing influencer marketing campaigns.

partnrUP aims to improve upon traditional spreadsheet-based workflows while maintaining their familiar functionality. 

Jessica explains the rationale behind it: “Instead of trying to say, ‘get out of spreadsheets,’ we said, ‘Well, what if we gave users something that looked like a sheet, but was connected to their Amazon store and could also pul in channel metrics from the social platforms? The big downside to a spreadsheet is that it is immediately outdated when you type in a follower count or number of impressions.  We’re solving that problem.’”

The platform allows users to input creator handles and automatically pulls relevant data, such as channel size and images. This information is then linked to the creator’s social ID, enabling easier tracking of activations and performance over time.

The same is true for products. A partnrUP customer can connect their Amazon account and pull in their entire catalog so that all campaigns and pieces of content are mapped to their products for easy finding and use in the future.  

Focus on Content Utilization

Creator content is at the center of many brands’ marketing strategies. 

Jessica points out that partnrUP’s primary focus is making the content accessible and findable at lightning speed with our AI search technology. 

“We’re using artificial intelligence to look at every frame of a video to see what is within the visuals themselves and generate transcripts so that every word from the video can be queried,” she states.    

“We’re even taking that one step further with our Vidgrab tool. We’re auto-generating static images from every video and suggesting their usage,” Jessica says.  

“We’re helping the social media manager fill the feed with new and unique content. Proving second, third, and fourth ways to leverage the content invests in working with content creators payout even more.”

Leveraging Data for Actionable Insights

The company will continue to provide comprehensive performance metrics to help brands and agencies optimize influencer marketing campaigns. 

Jessica outlines that the platform’s ultimate goal is to bring more data and analytics into partnrUP around the shoppable media, affiliate marketing, and e-commerce sales impact metrics that the gen.video company is known for today.

“Because of our Amazon connection and some of the other integrations that the company has done with affiliate marketing platforms, we’re bringing in performance metrics for sales in a subsequent release, hopefully towards the end of the summer,” Jessica says.

Enabling Flexible Payment Models

The comprehensive suite of integrations with global affiliate marketing platforms, including CJ, Impact, AWIN, and Rakuten, opens up new possibilities for influencer compensation. Jessica notes:

“Companies will have the opportunity for hybrid payment models. So upfront and commission payments depend on the campaign’s objectives.” 

The flexibility allows brands to align influencer compensation with campaign objectives and performance.

AI-Powered Future: Vision for Creator Partnerships

Jessica envisions a significant role for artificial intelligence in the future of partnrUP. She anticipates AI will dramatically increase content creation volume, making efficient management systems even more crucial.

“I’m extremely bullish on AI and the role that it will play in accelerating the volume of content that gets created,” she says. “If you used to have two pieces of content, you now have ten, 20. Keeping it organized, getting it reviewed and approved… that problem that I believe exists today just worsens if you don’t have good systems to manage it.”

Jessica sees potential for AI agents to enhance partnrUP’s capabilities, particularly through integrations with existing productivity tools. 

“Some of the technology allows you to connect partnrUPto your work email through Microsoft Copilot. We’re in early testing with our agency clients now and will learn as we go,” she explains. “Having our own agency (gen.video) to pressure test things before we release them to the public is helpful.”

Jessica plans to offer local software instances for deeper AI integrations to accommodate enterprise clients’ data security needs while ensuring data privacy.

Ultimately, gen.video’s chief envisions AI not just assisting with tasks like caption writing but managing entire workflows. 

“Imagine signing onto your computer to see your AI Agent prioritize your day, schedule a few meetings, and take a first pass at responding to your client and creator emails. It’s like there were clones of you working while you slept. ,” Jessica says. “That sounds like a crazy thought, but it’s not too far off.”

While partnrUP is tailored for the creator economy, Jessica suggests its potential broader applications: “Even if you’re a novice to the creator economy, if you hire someone to make content for you, such as a production house, UGC creators, or influencers, the intent is that partnrUP can be that central hub for content collaboration, content management and then content utilization.”

Jessica emphasizes the tool’s inclusive nature: “We’ve built something for partnerships so that it’s easier, faster, and more enjoyable for everyone involved, not just for the brand or the agency.”

Jessica says the platform’s beta release will be this month.