TL;DR
Starbucks is piloting TikTok's Content Suite to incentivize baristas to create promotional content, signaling a shift toward employee-driven digital marketing. The company is paying employees to create videos that will run as ads, leveraging their existing high level of engagement on the platform.
Starbucks baristas post three times more than employees at similar chains, giving the brand an opening to build a rev-share program around it.
Starbucks baristas have been making TikTok videos for years, filming oat milk steams and seasonal drink launches. Now the company is paying them to keep doing it.
Starbucks announced it’s the first brand to pilot TikTok’s new Content Suite, a tool that lets companies send content ideas straight to employees and pay them when those videos run as ads, according to Marketing Dive.
The move makes sense. Starbucks employees post about the brand three times more than workers at comparably sized chains. “They are sharing those moments with the world online in authentic, creative and unique ways,” said Erin Silvoy, Starbucks’ senior vice president of global marketing.
It’s part of a bigger shift towards employee-driven marketing. A Staples employee nicknamed the “Staples Baddie” recently racked up nearly 600,000 TikTok followers filming ASMR videos about her job, and the company embraced it rather than shutting it down.
In this story
This story was originally published by Jonathan Small in Entrepreneur Franchise on June 30, 2026. Burnaze summarizes and links to the original reporting.
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