Creator marketing platform Captiv8 expands globally

Creator marketing company Captiv8 has expanded globally, growing its presence from the U.S. to Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, it announced on Tuesday. 

Captiv8 hosts a hub where brands can find authenticated creator profiles for their marketing needs and manage the process of working with creators, including handling payouts, scheduling posts and creating affiliate links.

Captiv8 was 95% based in the U.S. prior to the expansion, said Krishna Subramanian, founder and CEO. Now, brands can be connected with creators across the globe through the platform.

“A lot of our customers are in the enterprise category and they started expanding out into other regions,” he said. “As we started to see revenue come from those regions, we started to see a need to jump into that as well.”

Captiv8 works directly with brands, such as Walmart, Ocean Spray, Kraft Heinz and Toyota, as well as with holding companies such as WPP and Omnicom.

Subramanian declined to list specific clients Capitv8 will work with in new markets.

Bill Kantar leads the expansion as head of new markets, and began planning to tailor sales and creator outreach teams locally since stepping into the role in July. Captiv8 began hiring globally two months ago. Currently, 16 of its 250 employees are based in Europe and Asia.

One challenge with venturing overseas has been finding ways to drive commerce through creators in markets with different cultural and consumer behaviors. The hope is that Captiv8 will benefit from working with creators across the world as marketers want an increasingly global presence, Subramanian said.

“Just because things work really well in the U.S. doesn’t mean it’s going to translate the same way,” Subramanian said. “We’ve seen live shopping work really well in Asia and hasn’t had the same traction in the U.S.”

Similarly, the ways creators prefer to be paid vary across regions and require adaptation for new markets.

In August 2021, Captiv8 integrated its services with TikTok’s Creator Marketplace API, allowing marketers to access TikTok’s first-party insights to create more effective campaigns.