E.l.f. Beauty Boosts Organic Creator Wins With Paid Spend

E.l.f. Beauty deliberately puts paid media behind creator videos that have already proven themselves organically — and applies the same rule to content from its own agency. Kelly Shah-McDonnell, who leads connected commerce at the company, laid out the approach in a fireside chat at Syracuse University's 'CUSE Creator Con, posted to YouTube on October 29.

"If your video's really good, we tend to boost it with advertising, so we're taking what you produce and making it reach more eyeballs," Shah-McDonnell told students. The policy cuts across every content source. "If our agency posts a video of branded content and it works, then we'll boost that. If an affiliate content runs, then they'll boost it with paid," she said. "So, we're constantly watching the space."

What does this change for creators chasing brand deals?

The mechanics run through e.l.f.'s affiliate program, which Shah-McDonnell called "Elphiliates." It operates mainly on TikTok Shop and is open to anyone with at least 1,000 followers. Creators apply, get a dashboard to claim product samples, and earn commission on the sales their videos drive. Her team then analyzes "which creators drove the most sales," and whether those sales came from short video, live selling or broadcast.

That team of roughly 40 people also runs e.l.f.'s loyalty program, website, app and what Shah-McDonnell called "agentic discovery" — though she said most of its time goes to TikTok Shop, "because it is such a unique engine for us."

Why affiliates come before paid deals

Shah-McDonnell's case for leading with affiliates rests on incentives. "If you can over manufacture it with like a paid deal, it doesn't always come to fruition," she said. "Whereas an affiliate, they're not really working a lot with [an] upfront paid deal in general. They are looking to the, the better my content is, the more chance I'm going to get a sale. And what's going to drive a sale more than authenticity of telling an audience, this is my true opinion of this product."

There are hard limits on what gets amplified. "We don't boost every video," Shah-McDonnell said, pointing to AI-generated content and the "faceless accounts on TikTok Shop" that are "not really telling an authentic message." E.l.f. also refuses tight creative control: "We don't script, we don't hyper hyper brief creators," she said. An honest negative review from a creator whose skin type doesn't suit a product was "okay for us cuz it's authentic."

How the creator operation is structured

Internally, creator work splits by goal across three teams under a "one team, one dream" philosophy:

• Shah-McDonnell's team handles "the lower funnel conversion side" — affiliates who drive sales.
• A separate influencer team buys into audiences for awareness.
• A talent team negotiates celebrity deals.

The company sorts the wider market into five internal groups: creators, affiliates, influencers, talent and broadcasters.

The affiliate engine sits alongside bigger creative bets. E.l.f.'s "Vanity Vandals" mockumentary, made with agency Movers+Shakers, generated three billion press impressions and 40 million social views while keeping the brand's name off screen for most of its runtime. YouGov data NI reported in July showed e.l.f. Cosmetics drew a Consideration score of 28% among Gen Z consumers who discover products through influencers, against 21% among Gen Z overall. A 5W report in June argued beauty brands need programs of 1,000 creators or more to compete on TikTok Shop, citing e.l.f.'s roughly $1 billion acquisition of Rhode in May 2025.

The talk formed part of Syracuse's creator conference, where the university's Center for the Creator Economy also released its "Creator, Defined" study. Shah-McDonnell said e.l.f. is preparing for shoppers to check out inside AI assistants, framing it as a hedge rather than a certainty. "It's not a definite, it's more of a how do we stay agile enough that we can be there if it happens," she said — a signal that the affiliate playbook will keep adapting as discovery shifts from feeds to AI assistants.