Canva for Instagram Reels: License Proven Content Instead of Paying Upfront

Liv Soibelman, head of e-commerce at Blueprint Bryan Johnson, shares the two-part paid media framework she has used to scale small Shopify brands fast. Her first rule is counterintuitive: she never pays a creator upfront. Instead, she watches whether organic content performs on the creator's channel or her own, and only then approaches the creator with a licensing contract to run that proven content as a paid ad on Meta or TikTok.

Her second framework is white-labeling, which means running ads directly from the influencer's existing account rather than a brand account built from zero. She applied this at Blueprint by strategically placing ads on Bryan Johnson's personal account to inherit the audience he had already built organically. She also describes a more advanced version of this arrangement, where high-profile influencers receive brand equity in exchange for running ads on their accounts throughout an entire vesting period.

Watch to see exactly how she structures those contracts and decides which content earns a paid budget.