Zoom relies on creators to boost AI search results

Zoom isn’t the only one testing the link between creators and AI visibility. In June, Priceline told Digiday that it had increased its social spend, favoring influencers and content creators for storytelling. And ad agency Modern Impact had a client, a car care company that execs declined to name, that recently wanted to use creators to produce a campaign to spark organic attention.

“In the past, brands would target creators based on their reach, so those creators can share content that gets a reach. But now brands are looking to target creators who are being cited by LLMs,” said Joseph Levi, CEO and co-founder at Noise Media Group.

Zoom’s evolving creator strategy

Over the summer, for example, Zoom launched a campaign with Nayeema Raza, a journalist, filmmaker and host of the podcast, “Smart Girl Dumb Questions.” Across Instagram and YouTube, Raza has more than 30,000 followers. Raza is featured in campaign spots across Zoom’s social channels, and Zoom will sponsor a six-part series in the “Smart Girl Dumb Questions” podcast. Raza will also be a keynote speaker at Zoom’s annual conference in October. Financial details of the partnership were not made available.

Kimberly Storin, CMO at Zoom, acknowledges that there’s no explicit link between creators and AI visibility that marketers can point to — at least not yet. Instead, she said, the partnership with Raza is a bet on building authority and credibility — two variables that factor into how AI chatbots decide what to surface in an AI search response. 

“It’s not a direct correlation at this point, but the influencers, we believe, is so important to that ‘be present and be believed’ aspect of the framework,” she said.

Learning by doing

When it comes to AI visibility, marketers are learning by doing. What they do know is that LLMs have preferred sources. For example, ChatGPT has an estimated 15.4 sources, favoring Wikipedia and Reddit, according to Semrush’s AI Visibility Index. Meanwhile, Google Gemini has 3.3 sources on average, favoring YouTube, Wikipedia and e-commerce sites.

“Being featured on high-quality publications — even if they’re not necessarily the publications that are being cited — it certainly adds towards your overall authority,” Levi said.

In response, marketers are shifting dollars to fuel content budgets to build up authority and credibility, and eventually the LLMs. Levi is pushing clients to publish listacles on the brand’s owned site or “high quality publications” to drive inclusion in LLM responses, Levi told Digiday.

“Ultimately, our job is now to be found, to be present, to be believed, and to be preferred,” Storin said.

Zoom took the task in-house, partnering with Profound AI, a generative AI marketing intelligence platform. Zoom execs are also looking at which sources AI systems rely on when answering customer questions to adjust its marketing and comms strategy, Storin added. 

“We think of this as an AI visibility strategy, but I also step back and say, ‘I think this is just good marketing’,” she said.