By James Hacking, CEO at Socially Powerful
Sending gifts to influencers – otherwise known as product seeding – has become a staple in the modern marketer’s toolkit. It’s a surefire way of getting your product in the hands of voices that command attention for a generation that looks to social for intent, discovery and even purchase. But while almost every brand is doing it, very few are doing it right.
Indeed, in our recent study, Intent vs Impact: A Data-Backed Guide to Fixing Flawed Influencer Seeding, we surveyed hundreds of senior marketers from global enterprises and discovered an uncomfortable truth. While 94% of marketers send free products to influencers, fewer than one in five (19%) see any meaningful advocacy in return. The gap between intent and impact is widening – and brands are shoveling millions of dollars’ worth of product into a void.
The Seeding Boom and Its Breaking Point
As influencer content becomes one of the top areas of investment for marketers heading into 2026, the temptation to scale gifting fast is strong. But scaling without strategy is precisely what’s breaking the model.
Just under half (43%) of marketers admit that identifying the right creators is their biggest challenge, and more than a third (35%) say their campaigns are losing effectiveness because creators are fatigued. In trying to reach everyone, brands risk reaching no one – overwhelming creators with irrelevant products and eroding the authenticity that makes seeding powerful in the first place.
The irony is hard to miss. Seeding can be marketing’s most cost-efficient channel. When done right, it drives earned content at scale, builds genuine trust, and delivers a far more cost-effective solution. This value, however, is only unlocked by working with the right voices.
The Trust Economy Has Changed
Peer-to-peer recommendation has always shaped what people buy – the 2012 Nielsen study showed most consumers trusted word of mouth above all else. What’s changed since is the scale and medium. Today, we’re buying fewer products but with greater intent: our report shows half of people vet brands on social media, and 92% trust peer recommendations more than any other form of advertising.
In a crowded market where consumers are adept at tuning out overly promotional content, advocacy has become one of the few things that truly cuts through. When someone you trust shares an authentic, unpaid review, it resonates more deeply than a polished brand campaign – not because it’s louder, but because it feels real.
Seeding is designed to unlock this, but only when it is done with intent and long-term thinking.
Seeding Without Strategy
So why are most brands still failing to make the most of seeding? Because they’re mistaking activity for strategy.
If we consider the levels of sophistication that marketers are at in terms of their seeding activity, of our respondents only 19% of marketers operate at the highest level and have seeding that is fully integrated, data-led, precisely targeted and robustly measured. The rest are caught in a cycle of ad-hoc activity – sending products to mass lists of creators, measuring success by volume rather than value, and wondering why advocacy doesn’t follow.
This “spray and pray” mindset undermines everything seeding is meant to achieve. When brands chase visibility over relevance, creators switch off, authenticity drops, and earned media dries up.
How to Seed with Intent
The path forward isn’t more gifting, it’s smarter gifting.
To build long-term brand advocacy, marketers must move beyond vanity metrics and identify creators whose values, audience, and content genuinely align with their product and brand. They must also switch from engagement rates to outcome-led KPIs to understand the full picture of seeding performance.
At its most sophisticated, seeding becomes a connected system: every creator interaction is deliberate, every piece of content measurable, and every campaign optimised for long-term influence rather than short-term impressions.
The Future Belongs to Intent
The pressure to ‘win’ with seeding has created an industry obsessed with volume, but the future belongs to those who prioritize intent. When you seed with purpose, you create a compound effect of advocacy that paid media can’t replicate.
True brand power comes from people talking about you because they want to – not because they were paid to. This is what turns one product drop into a movement, one creator post into a community, and one gift into a lasting brand relationship.
