• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Influencer marketing platform Captiv8, which works with 800 enterprise brands and 15 million creators, has announced a new partnership with AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI to help brands save time while vetting creators, planning campaigns, asking data-driven questions and more. 

The company has integrated Perplexity AI’s newest Sonar models into its platform’s core workflow -- a direct result of seeing clients spend too much time and effort analyzing data or relying on third-party tools to connect with influencers and run campaigns, according to Captiv8’s CEO and founder Krishna Submaranian.

The first piece of this partnership focuses on creator vetting. Perplexity’s models essentially help brands gain a better understanding of creators by replacing marketer subjectivity with a data-driven, AI-powered approach.

Perplexity’s technology automatically combs through Captiv8’s database and suggests which creators will perform best for a specific brand, as well as the content that will perform best.

“Let's say that a brand like Dove wants to partner with creators that don't necessarily talk about Botox, fillers, or plastic surgery, because it's going to create a negative backlash from their audience,” Submaranian suggests, explaining that Perplexity’s involvement will solve that problem automatically by pairing Dove with a creator who meets the criteria.

Submaranian told MediaPost that two years ago, Captiv8 began pairing the data it has been collecting over the past decade with AI and machine learning.

The CEO hopes that experimenting with AI will make a programmatic approach more broadly available to brands that are looking for data-driven proof of their choices and outcomes. 

Although the company’s partnership with Perplexity is not exclusive -- Captiv8 is still utilizing other large language models (LLMs) alongside the integration -- Submaranian says Perplexity’s answer engine is essential to accomplishing the company’s goals.

“It gives us real-time citation-backed insight without holding onto any of our client data,” Submaranian says. “That’s something that generic LLMs can’t necessarily do.”

Submaranian is referencing another aspect of the partnership, which involves brands being able to ask Perplexity’s AI assistant highly specific questions about their campaigns -- such as why engagement rose or fell on a particular date, or even which content drove the most engagement among Gen Z in Eastern Europe.

Perplexity’s answers are fully sourced, and tied to Captiv8’s marketing material. 

Captiv8 is also using Perplexity’s real-time web research functionality to help ensure brand safety by flagging unsafe content, assigning a risk score, tracking creator activity and compiling post-campaign reports with summaries and key metrics. 

The company says its clients have suggested faster campaign planning cycles, improved targeting and increased ROI as a result of using Captiv8’s Perplexity-powered tools, with the time it takes to perform tasks reportedly even cut down by days in some cases.

As Perplexity’s tech continues to evolve, Submaranian is planning to make the AI assistant available to creators as well as brands, allowing creators to gain tips for captions and boosting content. 

If Captiv8 could streamline the back-and-forth between creators and brands with regard to basic metric-rooted questions, Submaranian thinks it would take the company further into a “programmatic world.”