Welcome to the Creator-First Era

Today we are thrilled to announce a whole new Tidal, built for the creator-first era. Tidal Marketplace is the industry’s first online marketplace that gives creators an opportunity to pitch their projects directly to brands and agencies.

Creators now have the opportunity to offer turnkey projects to brands for purchase. And brands get instant access to content projects from talented creators. It’s marketing reimagined through the authentic stories of creative individuals.

“Instead of being handed a brief to fulfill, I have the chance to present my ideas on what content will work best for my readers and really showcase my strengths. That means final projects that are much more organic, and, in turn, get way more eyeballs.”
–Jack Archer, leading men’s lifestyle writer and founder of Airows

The Creator-First Revolution

The last five years have been marked by significant change in who is responsible for creating content, how it’s distributed, and what’s capturing people’s attention. But advertising has struggled to keep up.

Consumers, especially Millennials, aren’t watching TV, reading magazines, or really paying attention to ads at all. We used to live in an age of brand-to-consumer marketing. Now we live in an age of consumer-to-consumer marketing.
Creative agencies used to rely exclusively on internal teams to shoot photos and videos. Now they rely on influencers with large social graphs to create authentic branded content. And creative individuals, even those outside of New York and LA, are getting more opportunities each year as advertising dollars flow to them.

Tidal has evolved along with these changing times. We started by enlisting creators for unpaid opportunities, contributing to top media properties and getting great exposure along the way. Then, last year, we started working with brands and offering paid opportunities for bloggers to assist with their campaigns.

Now we’re moving toward a future where the sky’s the limit and creators get a chance to create the campaign, and reap a larger portion of the overall campaign budget. Instead of a top-down content brief, brand to agency to creator, Tidal Marketplace makes it bottom-up, ideated and produced by the creator or influencer themselves.

“When content ideas originate with creatives instead of with a brand or agency, there’s an element of authenticity that the traditional model (of hiring creatives to enact client-born concepts) lacks…organically developed content is more engaging content.”
–Rebecca Smeyne, an accomplished music & style photographer

How Tidal Marketplace Works

We’ve been testing our marketplace with a few dozen beta creators hand-picked from Tidal’s network of thousands of creative individuals and some wonderful friends. An array of video, photo, and other types of creative projects have been submitted by top bloggers, filmmakers, and photographers. You can see these projects from the home screen and filter them by media type or vertical.
Today, any online creator can join Tidal, build their profile & portfolio, assemble a project pitch, and submit it to our strategists for review. Once approved, projects appear in the Tidal Marketplace for brands and agencies to consider and purchase. Clicking into a project allows you to view the brief and see what’s included, for example, video assets, blog posts and content seeding.

If you’re a brand, the Tidal Marketplace provides access to vetted creator teams and their big ideas, to drive authentic engagement through content that resonates with their audiences.  Upon purchase, Tidal manages the entire workflow between creators and their brand or agency partners, including contracts, payments, pricing, and reporting.

If you’re a creative, let us take your creative ideas to the world’s largest brands. Grow your audience and get paid to do what you love.

“By plugging in to Tidal, my project gets seen by potential brand and agency partners who might not find me otherwise. At the same time, I can keep doing what I do best — working on creating new content and programming.”
–Timothy Dahl, an experienced expert in the home & DIY space

What’s Next?

By flipping the advertising brief model, we’re heading into exciting territory and we’ll be using our early learnings to continue to improve our product. We’ll be announcing many new publisher, agency, brand, and tech partnerships in the coming weeks to help us further our mission of empowering individual creators. Get in touch if you’d like to join us on our journey. Because the only thing better than a great idea is a great idea made real.