Why creator Lola Torres prefers the stability of affiliate marketing over brand partnerships

After years of relying on affiliate sales, retailers are rushing to roll out their own creator programs en masse to make creator commerce more measurable, scalable, and controllable. But creator Lola Torres, who won influencer shopping platform LTK’s beauty creator award in 2024, has built her career on affiliate marketing, and she’s sticking with it despite how labor-intensive it is.

Torres started her creator career six years ago, regularly posting her daily outfits that fell under an elevated but affordable price umbrella for women with her body type. At first, she did a lot of free work, but over time, she leaned more into affiliate marketing, focusing her content on a handful of brands and building a following on both LTK and Instagram.

Most creators make the bulk of their money from brand deals, with affiliate links more of a side hustle for them. But Torres has done the opposite: she’s prioritized the steadier drop of affiliate income over the lumpiness of brand deals. 

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‘They’re going to be extinct at some point’: Why the chief AI officer is a transitional species

The chief AI officer has an expiry date — and that’s the point.

That’s the view of James Chandler, chief strategy officer at the Interactive Bureau of Advertising U.K., who sees the role as a means to an end — that end being a business where AI is so embedded it no longer needs a dedicated executive to champion it. Once that work is done, every function owns it. Nobody needs a dedicated champion anymore.

“You’re starting to see chief AI officers, people that are leading AI, bringing functions at the business together — no different to what we went through in mobile in that sense, right,” said Chandler. “Mobile was going to be huge, so you’ve got to do it. They’re going to be extinct at some point — chief AI officers — but I think you need them to pull the business around this thing.”

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