Good morning. LinkedIn, Spotify, and now…UberEats? The food delivery app is testing its own TikTik copycat, a vertical video feed that lets restaurants promote specific dishes and give users an up-close look at texture and portion size.

— Hannah Doyle & Nate Graber-Lipperman

Fallen Media, the short-form video studio behind creator shows like What’s Poppin? With Davis! and Street Hearts, recently launched Bite Me, a cooking show with food creator Olivia Tiedemann. 

Their goal? Create Gen Z’s Food Network, complete with personality-driven content and smart sponsorships.

“A lot of cooking videos are ‘chop-chop, throw it in a bowl’ with no story. Our other shows are entertaining and have a lot more meat to them, so we want to bring that to cooking,” Fallen Media founder Sol Betesh told us.

Enter: Olivia Tiedemann. Her edgy, alt-rock soundtracked cooking videos make her personality the star of the show. When Fallen approached her last September, Tiedemann had fewer than 1 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. Now, she’s at 4 million.

Building a strong food vertical takes more than personality, though. Betesh said sponsorships are a crucial part of the business.

Perspective: Bite Me is Fallen’s first foray into the food space. “If you can be the best in a couple of key categories, you can build brand and community over the long-term,” Betesh told us. “And when you’re working with brands—which is most of the business model for short-form creators—you have a much stronger hold.” Already, Fallen has two more cooking shows in the works.

On Sunday, Marques Brownlee released his review of tech company Humane’s buzzy, futuristic “Ai Pin.”

The result? “It’s the new worst product I think I’ve ever reviewed,” Brownlee said in the video.

An hour before his review dropped, we talked to Brownlee about the influence of his reviews, his team’s process, and selling his own products →

Bad reviews don’t tank companies. Bad products do. Brownlee downplayed his individual influence on a company’s business performance (Context: Electric carmaker Fisker’s stock price fell after Brownlee released a critical video about its Ocean model in February). Brownlee instead pointed to the increasing number of tech creators and the cumulative impact of their videos.

“It’d be weird if you had a good product come out, and then a bunch of bad reviews, and then that kills the company…there’s still people going to the store and trying it,” he said.

Brownlee’s team uses a custom-built Notion template to “dial in” every review. As a video gets written, Brownlee and several co-workers are testing the product, comparing notes, and fact-checking the final script.

“Every channel and every video [we create]…has a pre-production and post-production vetting step,” Brownlee told us.

Maintaining trust with his audience trumps all other priorities—including his own sales. Brownlee recently joined Ridge (known for their popular metal wallets) as Chief Creative Partner. He believes his equity stake isn’t a conflict of interest because a) Ridge doesn’t make products in categories he reviews and b) he plans to be honest if Ridge misses the mark.

“Trust is like the ultimate leverage I have as a product reviewer,” Brownlee told us. “If I’m the only one saying it’s great, then everyone else [says] this thing is bad…well, there goes trust.”

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First-quarter sales of Logan Paul and KSI’s PRIME sports drink fell 50% from the same time last year, according to consumer goods magazine The Grocer.

Driving this drop? Declining interest as PRIME becomes more widely available and the initial hype fades, one beverage industry analyst told Marketing Week.

“[Paul and KSI] made a fortune out of it…[they’ll likely] move onto the next thing,” the analyst predicted, adding that it takes “a lot of money and a lot of patience” to make drink brands successful long-term.

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