Sponso for Brands is now in Claude (and ChatGPT, and Cursor)
Or: why your AI assistant should be running your influencer campaigns with you
You run marketing at a brand, or you run a couple of brands at an agency. It's 10:42 AM. You have a slide deck due by noon, a client (or your founder) just pinged you about a campaign that hasn't launched yet, and there are 47 creator applications sitting in your Sponso inbox that you keep meaning to triage. You've got Claude open because you were using it to rewrite a brief, and the third tab is Sponso, and you're about to switch between them for the eighth time today.
We've watched this happen. We've done it ourselves. So we built the thing that should have existed a year ago.
Sponso for Business is now available as an MCP server. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, any AI assistant that speaks the protocol can now run your campaigns, your applicant pipeline, and your reporting from inside the chat. No more "let me pull that up." No more 14 tabs. You ask, it does.
What that actually means
Open Claude. Type this:
Show me every application on the Diwali Hampers campaign with over 50k followers, then draft a personalized acceptance message for the top five and a polite decline for the rest. I'll review before anything sends.
Claude calls our list-applications tool, filters by your follower threshold, ranks by our internal match score, drafts copy in your brand voice, and shows you the queue. You skim, edit two lines, hit send. The same task that used to eat half a Tuesday afternoon takes nine minutes.
Or this:
Spin up a campaign brief for our new wireless earbuds. Target tech reviewers in India, ₹15k–₹50k budget per creator, deliverable is a 60-second integrated review, deadline three weeks. Use our usual template.
Sponso's create-sponsorship tool builds the draft. Claude fills in the brief, applies your default terms, sets the budget band, and shows you the preview. You review and publish. The whole thing took longer to describe than to do.
What's in the box
We shipped 40+ tools for business teams and agencies. The interesting ones, in plain English:
- Campaigns: create, edit, publish, pause, and close sponsorships; clone briefs from past wins; schedule launch windows
- Applicant review: list applications, filter by platform, follower count, location, language; bulk-accept and bulk-decline; auto-score by fit
- Content review: pull scripts, demos, and final deliverables; comment back; approve or request revisions
- Payments: trigger payouts on milestone completion; check campaign-wise spend; pull GST-compliant invoices
- Reporting: campaign performance, cost-per-engagement, ROI estimates; export to CSV for the spreadsheet people
- Team coordination: assign applications to teammates; leave internal notes; see who reviewed what
None of these are new features. The Sponso business portal has had them for a year. What's new is: you can drive all of them without opening the portal.
How to plug it in
Easiest path, Claude.ai web:
- Open
claude.ai/settings/connectors - Click Add custom connector
- Paste:
https://business-mcp.sponso.in/mcp - Sign in with your work email when it asks (same login as
business.sponso.in) - Done. Go ask Claude something.
Setup time is under a minute. If you use Claude Desktop, ChatGPT (Plus/Team/Enterprise), Cursor, or Windsurf, we have config snippets for each. Head to sponso.in/mcp.
The connection respects your existing role and permissions. If you're a campaign manager on one brand, Claude can act on that brand. If you're an admin across the agency, it can act across all of them. If you're read-only on reporting, the AI is too. Nothing gets escalated.
Why this is a bigger deal than it sounds
For most of internet history, marketing tools lived in dashboards. Each one had its own login, its own filtering UI, its own export quirks. Your job, somewhere underneath the strategy, was to be the connective tissue between fifteen of these. You pulled the data out, pushed it into a deck, copy-pasted names into emails, screenshotted charts for Slack.
MCP changes that for one specific reason: your AI assistant becomes the connective tissue. Instead of you learning fifteen dashboards, your AI learns fifteen protocols. You stay in one chat, and the data shows up.
For Sponso, this is the first time we get to meet business teams and agencies where they actually work. We've watched marketing leads and account managers draft applicant rejection emails in ChatGPT for months, copy-pasting names and campaigns by hand. Now they don't have to fight that anymore. We plug into it.
The other thing nobody's saying out loud: within twelve months, every serious influencer platform will have an MCP. The ones that don't will feel like SaaS tools from 2019. We'd rather be early than have to catch up later.
What it doesn't do (yet)
Some honesty so you're not surprised:
- It can't replace looking at a creator's content. If you're about to greenlight a ₹2L campaign, you should still open the creator's last three videos. AI summarizes audience and fit, but it can't tell you whether the vibe matches your brand. Watch the work.
- It doesn't run payments without confirmation. Every payout, every refund, every disbursement still asks you to confirm. We deliberately did not build "auto-pay" because the failure mode is too expensive.
- It's brand-new. We've tested hard, but if you hit something weird, tell us. The fastest way is the in-app support button. It flows into the same inbox as everything else.
- It's role-aware, not org-aware. If your finance team needs to see invoices but doesn't have a Sponso seat, the MCP can't see those invoices either. Get them a seat first.
A few things we noticed during testing
One of our beta brands built a Claude project where every conversation starts with "I run influencer marketing for a beauty brand in India. Here are my last 12 campaigns and their CPE." Then they ask Claude to pre-screen every new applicant against their pattern of what's worked. They told us their applicant-review time dropped by ~70% and their conversion rate on accepted creators went up, because Claude was systematically catching mismatches they would have rubber-stamped.
An agency running campaigns across 11 brands used the MCP to do something we genuinely did not anticipate. They asked Claude to take their last quarter of campaign data across the entire portfolio, find the three creators who delivered the highest ROI per rupee across multiple brands, and draft personalized "want to work with us again on the next thing?" messages tailored to whichever brand was the best next fit. Three of three said yes. Two of three negotiated lower rates because they'd already built rapport. The account lead told us this was worth the whole tool by itself.
A third (this is the one we tell at dinner) was a small DTC founder who'd never run an influencer campaign before. They opened Claude, said "I'm launching a candle brand, help me think through a 5-creator launch campaign on Sponso," and Claude walked them through brief design, budget allocation, applicant filtering, and contract terms. Their campaign launched 48 hours later. We didn't design Sponso to be self-onboarding for first-time marketers. Claude made it that way anyway.
We didn't predict any of this. We just made it possible.
What does this cost?
The MCP is free. The Claude/ChatGPT subscription is on you. Tool calls don't cost extra. They run against your existing Sponso plan and use the same campaign budgets, same payouts, same everything. We're not double-charging.
Privacy: Claude only sees the results of tool calls you explicitly trigger. It can't passively read your inbox, can't see other brands' data, can't see creator messages you haven't pulled, can't see anything outside the role-scoped data you've granted to it. Every tool call shows up in the chat, so you can review what got called and what came back.
Security: tool calls are scoped to your authenticated session. If your account gets logged out, the connection drops. If a teammate leaves your org, their Claude tokens stop working the moment their Sponso access is revoked. We treat this the same way we treat any other API surface.
Where to next
We're already prototyping a few things:
- Auto-pilot campaigns: ask Claude to run a Diwali campaign in the ₹20k–₹50k range for tech creators, ship the brief by Wednesday, recommend creators by Friday. Claude handles the prep, you approve the final list
- Cross-campaign analysis: ask Claude "which categories have delivered the best ROI for us over the last 6 months, broken down by region" in plain English
- Brief refinement loop: Claude reads your last 10 successful briefs and helps you write a new one in your brand voice
- Agency multi-brand orchestration: for agencies running 20+ brands, batch operations across the portfolio without switching contexts
If any of those are interesting to you, tell us. We pay attention to teams who actually use what we ship.
Try it
Open Claude. Hit claude.ai/settings/connectors. Paste https://business-mcp.sponso.in/mcp. Sign in. Ask it something. Tell us what worked, what didn't.
We're at the start of something here. The next twelve months of AI assistants getting genuinely useful for marketing operations is going to be wild. We'd rather you experience it on our infrastructure than someone else's.
The Sponso team
Got questions? Reply to this post, ping us on X (@sponso_in), or open Claude and ask it to contact your account manager. It can do that too.
Sponso is India's largest creator network. The Business MCP is built for brands, agencies, and DTC founders who run creator campaigns on Sponso. Learn more at business.sponso.in or open the dedicated MCP page at sponso.in/mcp.