Klarna’s Influencer Marketing Strategy, Broken Down

What are the three layers of Klarna’s creator strategy?

A celebrity layer that builds the brand, a creator layer that drives shopping, and an AI layer that keeps the creative coming. Each one does a different job, and each would be a mistake on its own.

Here’s the part people miss: Klarna is a shopping brand as much as a payments brand. Its creators sell products from retailers while Klarna sits at checkout. That’s a different model from a neobank or a trading app, and it shapes everything below.

Splitting a creator program into layers with different goals means different creators, briefs and success metrics for each. INFLUENCE sets those up as separate tracks inside one campaign plan, so the brand-moment creators and the everyday creators are each measured on what they’re actually there to do.

What did Klarna’s celebrity campaigns actually do?

They gave a payments company a personality. “Pay in four” isn’t exciting. “Smoooth” is.

The highlights, from public reporting:

• 2019, Snoop Dogg: Klarna turned him into “Smoooth Dogg” for its “Get Smoooth” campaign, and he became a minor Klarna shareholder too (FinTech Futures).

• 2021, the Super Bowl: Maya Rudolph starred as multiple mini versions of herself making small payments, a literal take on splitting a purchase (Influencer Marketing Hub).

• 2023, Paris Hilton: a global campaign with Hilton’s 11:11 Media around the “That’s Smoooth” line, with creator Bretman Rock appearing too (same source).

The thread: one word (“smooth”) repeated for years, carried by personalities who fit it. That kind of consistency is rarer than a famous face, and it’s worth more.

Most fintechs won’t book a Super Bowl spot. But the “one line, many voices” idea scales down nicely. INFLUENCE builds that consistency into every creator’s brief, giving each one the same anchor line while leaving the rest of the video in their own voice, so the brand repeats without sounding scripted.

How does Klarna’s Creator Platform work?

It’s an affiliate marketplace: creators pick products from Klarna’s retail partners, share affiliate links and earn a commission on sales, while Klarna handles the invoicing and tax admin. Retailers use it to find creators and track performance live.

From Klarna’s own November 2022 announcement:

• It launched in the U.S. in October 2022 and then expanded to all of Klarna’s markets.

• Retailers could search a pool of over 500,000 creators worldwide.

• Klarna had 450,000 retail partners at the time.

Why it fits Klarna: Klarna makes money when people shop with it, so a giant network of creators linking to products, with Klarna at checkout, is a natural extension. It’s built for volume, which matters when you have hundreds of thousands of merchants.

What it isn’t: it’s not a managed campaign. Creators choose what to post, and retailers pick and manage the creators they work with. That’s great for always-on shopping content, and less suited to a fintech that needs a tightly briefed, compliance-reviewed launch.

If affiliate is the right model for you, great. We compare it with pay-per-view in pay-per-view vs affiliate deals for fintech creators. If you need a managed launch instead, that’s the gap INFLUENCE fills: we pick the creators, brief them, review every draft with you and run the campaign end to end.

How has Klarna used AI in its marketing?

To make more creative, faster, with fewer outside vendors. That’s leverage on the production side, not a replacement for the people in front of the camera.

In Q1 2024, according to Payments Dive:

• Sales and marketing spend fell 11%, even with more campaigns running.

• AI accounted for about $10 million in annualized savings.

• Spending on outside agencies fell 25%.

• Image production time dropped from six weeks to seven days.

There’s a useful distinction in there. AI helped Klarna produce brand creative faster. It didn’t replace the trust a real person brings when they show a product in their own life. For financial products, that trust is still the scarce thing.

INFLUENCE thinks about AI the same way: as leverage for people, not a substitute for them. We use software to coordinate the heavy lifting (matching, pricing, briefs, measurement) so that real creators can do what they’re good at, at a scale that would otherwise take a whole team.

What can a fintech brand borrow from Klarna?

The consistency, the layered thinking and the fast creative cycles, but with your product’s rules in mind. One big caveat for BNPL brands first: TikTok’s published U.S. branded content rules (last updated October 2025) list buy now, pay later services as prohibited in creator content, so Klarna-style TikTok creator posts aren’t an option for most BNPL brands there (TikTok). We cover the alternatives in influencer marketing for BNPL brands.

Worth borrowing:

• One line, for years. Pick your “smooth” and repeat it.

• Separate the jobs. Brand moments, everyday creators and production each need their own plan.

• Shop where your customers shop. Klarna’s creators sell real products; your creators should show real moments.

• Use AI for speed, people for trust.

Less worth borrowing:

• Celebrity first. Without Klarna’s budget, a single star is a big, risky bet.

• Open affiliate at scale for regulated products. Volume is great until a creator you’ve never vetted makes a claim you can’t defend.

Klarna also proved the model works at scale: it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2025, pricing at $40 a share under the ticker KLAR (Business Wire).

Turning “borrow the consistency, skip the celebrity” into a real plan is mostly about composition: the right mix of creators, one anchor message, and a brief per person. That’s the core of how INFLUENCE builds campaigns.

How does INFLUENCE compare with the ways Klarna-style programs are usually run?

Each model fits a different job. Here’s the honest side-by-side, including where INFLUENCE isn’t the right fit.

Where we’re better: you get many real creators with personalized briefs and full review, priced on delivered views, with no retainer and no markup on the CPM. Where we’re not: if you want one celebrity, a PR stunt or a long-term ambassador on retainer, that’s a different kind of partner, and we’d tell you so.

That’s the gap INFLUENCE is built for: Klarna-level creator volume, without the Klarna-sized team to run it. Start with our guide to influencer marketing for fintech companies, or see how pay-per-view pricing works.