Category
Insight
Articles, templates, and field notes from the insight collection.
How We Let AI Agents Pay for a Creator Data API: x402, MPP, and API Keys (2026)
The practitioner version of agentic payments for an API. The three rails (API key, x402, MPP), the real 402 handshake, per-call economics nobody publishes, and when each rail is the right call, from the team that shipped all three and wrote the x402 Fastify adapter.
Elliot Padfield
How to Build an Automated Influencer Marketing Pipeline with Claude Code (with working code, 2026)
A real tutorial for building an automated influencer pipeline in Claude Code. Working SDK code at every step: discovery, vetting, lookalike expansion, outreach with a human gate, content monitoring, and the honest read on agentic payments.
Elliot Padfield
The Real Lessons From Coachella 2026's Best Brand Activations
WeArisma tracked $1.7B in earned media at Coachella 2026. The brands that won didn't buy the most reach — they built the most efficient creator mechanics. Four shifts explain what changed, and what brand teams should do for 2027.
Elliot Padfield
YouTube Transcript API: 4 Ways to Pull Captions in 2026 (with code)
Four real ways to pull YouTube transcripts in 2026, with working code for each, real per-1k costs, and the failure modes that show up in production but never in the README.
Elliot PadfieldInfluencer Marketing Statistics: 50+ Data Points for 2026
50+ data points on the influencer marketing industry: market size, creator rates from real transaction data, platform performance benchmarks, ROI metrics, and where brands are spending.
Elliot PadfieldHow to Detect Fake Followers
A DTC skincare brand paid $8,000 for a campaign with an influencer who had 200,000 followers. The content looked great. The engagement seemed normal. But sales were nearly zero.
Elliot Padfield
How Much to Pay Influencers (2026 Guide)
A DTC brand I work with budgeted $5,000 for five micro-influencer posts. Clean math: $1,000 per creator, five pieces of content, done. Final invoice: $11,400.
Elliot Padfield
Your Influencer's "50K Followers" Might Mean 1 Sale
50,000 followers sounds impressive on a pitch deck. But run the numbers and you're looking at maybe 1,000 people who actually engage, 20 who click, and 1 who buys.
Elliot Padfield
When to End an Influencer Partnership
A DTC skincare brand I know fired their best-performing influencer after one campaign. The posts got decent engagement but zero attributed sales.
Elliot Padfield
The Death of Lazy Influencer Marketing
Is influencer marketing dead? No - and it's not even sick. What is dying are one-off #ad posts, follower-count obsessions, and vanity metrics.
Elliot PadfieldInstagram Influencer Search API (2026)
If you're looking for programmatic access to Instagram influencer data, most of what calls itself an "influencer API" isn't really an API. Here's what's actually available.
Elliot PadfieldInfluencer Marketing APIs: 2026 Guide
The phrase "API access" represents perhaps the most misused terminology within influencer marketing software.
Elliot Padfield