How TikTok and creator Anna Sitar think about creator partnerships that convert

TL;DR

• The funnel still exists, but creators can now move someone from awareness to purchase in a single 30-second video.

• Values alignment is becoming the deciding factor in creator partnerships, and it shows up in performance.

• The most ambitious creators are building universes (series, IRL events, product lines). Brands that plug into those worlds get more out of the partnership than they paid for.

The next stop of our Made You Look Tour, an invite-only series of live sessions built for senior marketing leaders, brought us to Ludlow House in New York City during Advertising Week.

Our CEO Scott Sutton sat down with Isobel “Izzy” Sita-Lumsden, Global Head of Business Marketing at TikTok, and Anna Sitar, a creator and entrepreneur who’s been building her audience since 2019. She now has more than 13 million followers, billions of views, and her own product lines. 

They covered a lot of ground, from 30-second sales funnels to wedding content to Taylor Swift as a business model.

Treat one video like the whole funnel 

Creators used to live at the top of the funnel. With TikTok Shop taking off, they’re increasingly closing the sale too, which leaves marketers figuring out how to plan for creators at every stage. 

Izzy’s answer: the funnel hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just compressed.

“Historically, we talk about the funnel as brands and performance being completely separate campaigns and objectives,” Izzy shared. “What we are seeing now is actually the funnel is still there. It hasn’t died, but it’s collapsed. We are seeing rapid-pace, real-time conversion and action.”

A single creator video can drive awareness, interest, desire, and purchase in about 30 seconds. Creators know exactly what keeps their audience’s attention, which means they can carry a campaign from start to finish. 

Take SharkNinja’s Chill Pill launch as an example. Roughly 280 creator videos about the handheld fan went viral, shoppers bought it directly through TikTok Shop, and sales jumped 1,200%, according to Izzy.

Set up checkout before the content takes off

“There’s brand, and there’s performance, but really, just make great content that’s attention-grabbing and engaging,” said Izzy. “Then think about your infrastructure and the mechanics that will support driving action off the back of it. That way, you can do it all in one go.”

In other words, earn the attention first, then make sure people can actually buy the thing when it shows up in their feed.

SharkNinja put that into practice at Cannes. During a stretch of hot weather, the brand handed out free Chill Pills, then went live on TikTok from the TikTok space for two and a half hours. In the corner of the screen, the sales count ticked up as viewers bought in real time.

That raises the bar for product brands. “This bottom-of-funnel commerce element has challenged product companies to be great at virality and great at working with creators,” said Scott.

Choose creators who actually love the product 

Anna admits brand deals made her a little uneasy at first. She started posting on TikTok in 2019 after moving to LA for a master’s in film and TV production, using short videos to practice storytelling. Becoming a creator was never the plan. 

“When I first started, I don’t think brand partnerships were ever part of the conversation for me,” she recalled. “I was just doing something for fun. Early on, when people reached out about making a video with their product in it, I felt a little morally nervous because I’d never done that.”

Her first partnership came from her own outreach. She emailed a skincare brand that had cleared up her acne, asked if they’d be interested in working together, and somewhat jokingly pitched a rate that would pay off her grad school loans. They said yes to a year-long deal. Over that year, Anna grew from 50K to 8M followers.

“I carried it out till the end because I truly loved the brand,” Anna shared. “I think that’s what I learned from the beginning: partner with a brand you enjoy.”

When she believes in a product, Anna said, it’s easier to talk about and more fun to get creative with. That’s especially true when a brand lets her bring her community along for an honest first impression. 

“It’s really important as a creator to maintain that trust with your community, because that’s how you turn over sales,” Anna said. “When you say, ‘I love this,’ your community and your people know you mean it.”

Izzy agreed that creator fit goes deeper than audience size, engagement, or content style. 

“You have to also think about the suitability of values,” she said. Audiences can tell when a creator actually uses what they’re promoting, and that conviction is what makes the content land.

Brief creators, then get out of the way 

Here’s the tricky part for marketers. People still open TikTok to be entertained, so how do you make room for shopping without turning the feed into a storefront? 

Izzy was blunt about the stakes. If TikTok stopped being an entertainment platform, she said, “it would be the death of TikTok.”

Her advice is to teach creators your brand and product, then let them take it from there. 

“No one knows their audience better than the creators,” said Izzy. “They know what’s going to get attention and traction, they know how to create desire and interest, and they know what’s right for their audience.”

She added that audiences are getting savvier and “can see the difference between a repurposed ad versus genuine, tailor-made, authentic native content that’s been built by a creator for that platform and for that brand.” 

If your creator content could run as a pre-roll ad, it probably isn’t native enough yet.

Make sponsored posts feel like the rest of the feed 

Sponsored posts have to feel as natural as everything else a creator shares. That gets harder when several partnerships are running at once, each one competing with the content people actually followed them for. 

Anna’s approach starts with refusing to box herself in. 

“I’m kind of anti-niche,” she said. “You are your own niche. I do so many random things in life, from my undergrad in engineering to my master’s in film, and I bring people along on that journey. I did an Ironman a month ago, and it was really hard, but that’s its own story I get to tell.”

That breadth gives brands more ways into her content, but it also raises the stakes for how they show up. Anna is getting married next year, and she’s thinking carefully about how partnerships fit into something so personal. “You can imagine nobody wants to feel like they’re being sold my wedding,” she said.

She sticks to two rules: only partner on products she’d actually use, and never let one partnership feel like a repeat of the last.

“I think it’s about doing partnerships that are authentic to you, real things you would use,” she explained. “On top of that, I never let my brand partnerships feel like a copy and paste of other brand partnerships. Me sitting here and selling you a product isn’t exciting.”

Treat creators as creative collaborators

Anna’s latest partnership is a good example. She’s working with NBC on The Voice, where the goal is getting people to tune in.

Her pitch played on a trend she’d been seeing from magazines and during Fashion Week: polished videos of influencers posing as interns who are bad at their jobs. She proposed playing a PA on set. Then, the night before filming, she realized PA could also stand for pop artist. The concept turned into a mini series about Anna trying to convince everyone she was there to be a pop star. She brought in two videographer friends to shoot it and spent a full day on set.

The brand got far more than it signed up for. Anna was contracted for one to two videos and now has nine scheduled. 

“It was fun for me to be trusted by a brand to do something cool,” she said. “It’s a chance to practice my creativity and my directorial note-giving. You end up getting more out of it than you expected to invest, because you let the creator run free with these ideas.”

Think in series, then universes

Anna’s partnership with The Voice also points to a bigger shift in how creators are structuring their content. Izzy said micro dramas and micro series are taking off on TikTok, with creators planning storylines across multiple videos, ending on cliffhangers, and investing in higher production value.

“Evolving storytelling into whole series is so exciting,” Izzy said, noting that the format is an opportunity for creators organically and for brands looking to build longer-running campaigns.

Scott tied this to a framework he picked up from Dude Perfect and the Try Guys: create moments, turn them into recurring series, then grow those series into a universe. A good series works like a promise to the audience. When you click on Carpool Karaoke, you know exactly what you’re getting. Over time, series can expand into live events and experiences, and the creator becomes a brand with an entire world built around it.

Anna’s already sketching out her own version. She calls it “the Taylor Swift of my brand,” meaning she wants to grow beyond a single platform the way Taylor Swift went from one album to twelve, plus tours and merch. For Anna, every expansion starts with the same questions: who she is, what she wants to be known for, and who she’s reaching.

“My community online is 98% women, which means I’m for the girls,” she said. “If it’s not something that interests all of us, it’s probably not for me either.” 

That lens shapes every decision, from which brands she partners with to whether she launches a clothing line, writes a book, or acts in a movie. Her long-term goal is a production company that tells stories by women about girlhood and lifestyle. “I’m doing that on a microscopic level now,” she said.

The best creator content starts with trust

Whether a creator is introducing a product for the first time or closing the sale in the same 30 seconds, the partnerships that perform best rest on the same things: creative freedom, shared values, and trust. 

So give creators room to tell the story their own way, pick partners who’d recommend the product anyway, and look for ways to show up in the world they’re building. That trust carries all the way to checkout.

Want help building creator partnerships that work across the full funnel? Explore Later’s Influencer Marketing Services.