It’s Friday and Instagram users are divided on the app’s new wordmark. Is it clean girl chic…or “corporate ragebait”?

SHOW BIZ

The premiere: At the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), a premiere hosted by YouTube and Variety will showcase new work from creators like Mark Vins (of Brave Wilderness) and Ziwe.

The two partners will kick off TIFF’s content marketplace (aka The Market) with a September 10 party featuring a screening of Vins’ Reef To Ridge documentary, which centers around an expedition to the Galapagos Islands. Ziwe’s contribution to the docket includes two new episodes of her series You’d Be An Iconic Guest.

The context: This isn’t the first time creator projects have premiered at a major film festival. Tribeca has highlighted creators within its Tribeca N.O.W. track, while an event affiliated with the Marché du Film celebrated creators at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The TIFF event, however, is a bit different—because Vins and Ziwe’s projects will both become YouTube exclusives after they premiere. The platform’s goal here is to emphasize its increasing influence within traditional film and TV, something it’s previously done by moving Brandcast to upfronts season and making an FYC push for YouTube shows that merited Emmy nominations.

TIFF itself has long supported digital media companies as they attempt to break into mainstream entertainment. As Canada’s best-known film festival, it was an early distribution channel for Netflix and a promotional vehicle for creativity on Instagram. Now, TIFF will provide YouTube with a similar opportunity to raise its profile in the film industry. The 2026 edition of the festival will run through September 20.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

AD WORLD

The report: It’s only been a month since Agentio officially integrated its platform into Meta‘s Partnership Ads, but the AI-powered creator ad company already has some data-driven insights for brands. In a new report, Agentio details the steps advertisers must take if they want to build an “infinite creative engine” that utilizes Meta Partnership Ads as efficiently as possible.

After analyzing 65,000 Meta Partnership Ads (which collectively accounted for $130 million of spend), the ad company determined that Partnership Ads outperform other formats on Meta-owned platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Compared to licensed, user-generated content, Partnership Ads deliver 19% higher clickthrough rates.

Agentio explained the uptick by noting that “the ad runs under the creator’s name with the paid-partnership label, so it reads as a person,” while traditional UGC ads “run from the brand’s handle, which reads as ‘a brand advertising to me.'”

The “price of admission”: Winning with partnership ads, however, isn’t as simple as choosing the right format. According to Agentio, high-volume testing is ultimately “the price of admission.”

Among all ads the company dubbed “winners,” 45% looked like “losers” below $100 of spend. Only a quarter of winners, meanwhile, looked like losers after $1,000 of spend, so Agentio advises advertisers to reach that benchmark before making final decisions.

To effectively identify winners, brands need to test 40 new spots per month and isolate fresh ads from incumbents. Agentio found that too much mixing stifles newcomers by giving them a 20% lower chance to earn their fair share of spend. Building up that stockpile of winners takes a lot of work—which is why Agentio’s platform is designed to efficiently build and execute creator campaigns at scale.

SPOTIFY SLOP

The crackdown: Like other major platforms, Spotify is dealing with an onslaught of spammy gen AI content—while simultaneously encouraging creators and listeners to use AI. That approach has resulted in complaints from people who feel bamboozled when AI content shows up in their weekly recommended playlists without proper disclosures.

It’s also spurred action from watchdogs like SlopTracker, which claims 49 AI music uploaders have sapped roughly ~$2.5 million in earnings from real musicians because people are listening to their tracks instead.

To address those concerns, Spotify is introducing an AI Persona label that will indicate if an entire account is AI.

The exceptions: Spotify has removed tens of millions of generated tracks, but says the difference between those tracks and accounts that can bear the “AI Persona” label is the presence of a real human in the account bio.

“Although there’s a broad spectrum in how artists use AI as a creative tool, the question of whether a profile represents an actual human is one where Spotify can help make a clear determination,” it said. “This badge is about the artist’s public identity, not about how the music was made.”

Generated content uploaders have the chance to self-disclose before AI Persona labels roll out in mid-September, and Spotify says it’ll crack down on them if they don’t. It’s also adding a LinkedIn-like “seems like AI slop” button that will allow listeners to report accounts that have slipped through the cracks.

WATCH THIS 👀

The promise: Earlier this year, San Francisco-based Architect Capital spent $535 million to take a 16% stake in OnlyFans. Now, the firm’s founder and CEO, James Sagan, says he’s using his stake to help OnlyFans creators address challenges with things like payment processors and banks—and, of course, AI. 

Content that isn’t based on real people has become a significant problem for OnlyFans creators. Questionable websites flood browsers with ads that promise to generate viewers’ fantasies without them ever having to ethically compensate a model.

OnlyFans isn’t interested in adding to that onslaught of AI slop. In an interview with The Information Editor-in-Chief Jessica Lessin, Sagan promised that “AI will be something that […] will benefit the platform only to empower creators. We will never use AI in any capacity to disrupt creators.”

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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Drew Baldwin, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen.