A New AI Influencer Marketing Agency Is Here for the Post-Follower Era
It starts with a full assessment of what a brand’s goals are, and how they can get the most people to buy in. “We have them really bring us into the secrets of the brand; of what drives your brand devotion,” Téllez says. “Because that is a big part of what we’re trying to scale when we build a community of thousands of ambassadors.” From there, the Devotion team develops a strategy for the brand, uses its tech to recruit ambassadors, and then implements an end-to-end experience for them, which includes incentivization or gifting, education, event invites, and more.
Téllez grew Parade, a Gen Z favorite intimates brand, in large part via a brand ambassador program built on scale rather than a creator’s reach. Téllez constructed big networks of ambassadors who helped propel the brand to $10 million in annual revenue. Parade’s pursuit of fast growth, however, resulted in financial struggles, and Téllez sold the company, which shuttered last October, in 2023. Building the ambassador program showed Téllez the white space for a tool to help brands work with high volumes of creators at once.
Kroopf most recently built TikTok Shop’s creator affiliate ecosystem and celebrity partnership strategy after 12 years working in the creator economy space. It was his time in China, back in 2022, during his TikTok tenure that most informed his approach to Devotion. “[TikTok] was like, the algorithm is [in its] very early days and what you guys need to understand and help brands prepare for is that there’s going to be an explosion of creators,” he recalls. “The view was that brands really needed to spend resources across a lot of creator partners that would give them better, fresh content, keep them relevant, and make them more successful on the platform.”
Devotion has worked with dozens of brands in stealth, about half of which are fashion and beauty associated, though the founders decline to share names at this stage. They say that brands have seen triple the amount of tagged content on average. Devotion has hit seven-figure revenues. (The company declined to share their fees, but says it varies based on the size of the brand and the scope of its creator program.)
“When we were scaling Away, Instagram was just starting to reshape modern word of mouth — and even then, real scale was limited by manual processes,” Goodwin says. “Today’s algorithmic feeds reward velocity and volume, so I invested in Devotion because Cami and Jon have the vision to build the infrastructure modern brands need to grow sustainable share of voice.”
Scaling intimacy
The scale Devotion works at is only possible because of AI technology, the founders say. AI influencer gifting software is nothing new; a host of companies have launched in the past two years that offer these capabilities, from Spate to AMT, but marketers often aren’t satisfied with existing tech. (One influencer marketer described an AI gifting software she trialed as “absolutely shocking” and lamented that these companies are often run by male developers who have AI expertise but lack understanding of the influencer marketing landscape.) Devotion takes things one step further by establishing a creator ecosystem that includes, but goes well beyond, product seeding.
