By Mike Craddock, Co-founder & CEO of NewGen
Influencer gifting has always followed a pretty simple process: brands send products to a long list of creators, hope some of them post, then count the impressions as they roll in. At its peak, it felt like a win for everyone involved. Creators got free stuff, brands got coverage and audiences got content they enjoyed watching. But that dynamic has changed as brands scale campaigns and increase budgets.
Even before the latest pressures came into the picture, there were good reasons to question the ‘hauls for all’ model. High-volume, low-alignment gifting was never really about relationships, it was about reach. When a creator is one of hundreds of people posting about the same product in the same week, nobody’s fooled. Audiences are sharp and they can tell the difference between genuine enthusiasm and a creator going through the motions. One builds real brand affinity, while the other barely registers.
Recent research highlights that while 93% of marketers send free products to creators, only 19% receive meaningful brand advocacy in return. Proof that reach without credibility has a pretty short shelf life.
Freebies are no longer free
Now, tax authorities are accelerating that reckoning. The HMRC in the UK and the IRS in the US are increasingly treating brand gifts received in exchange for content as taxable income. In practice, that means creators may need to declare the fair market value of everything in that haul, whether they asked for it or not. Suddenly, a creator who receives a pile of products they feel lukewarm about isn’t just inconvenienced, they could be sitting on a hefty and unwarranted tax bill. So it’s no surprise they’re starting to think like consumers and ask themselves, would I actually spend my own money on this? Because in many ways, they effectively are.
For brands still relying only on mass gifting, this is the moment to pay attention. The best creators are becoming increasingly selective about what they accept and rightly so. The ones still saying yes to everything may not be the partners any serious brand should want.
Partnerships are paying dividends
There is already a more promising model taking shape among the brands paying close attention, one that starts from the premise that creators are partners rather than a distribution network. And the commercial logic is not hard to follow.
It is visible in the way something like the brand trip has been reimagined. Clean skincare brand Cocokind, for example, has flipped its creator campaigns. Rather than just fly creators somewhere photogenic and wait for the content to arrive, it is building community-first experiences designed around people who genuinely use the brand. They’re even teaming up with complementary brands like Olipop to produce something that feels more like a collaborative creative project.
Pepsi’s “Pepsi Pioneers” programme shows how far this thinking can go when applied to ambassador relationships. By building a consistent group of creators who contribute across the full breadth of the brand’s marketing calendar, Pepsi has developed partners who have become something closer to custodians of how the brand shows up in culture than traditional paid promoters. That kind of ongoing involvement creates depth that a one-off gifting arrangement simply cannot replicate. The brands building genuine relationships are not just getting better content, they are able to attract the right creators to work with them.
The trust that creator audiences place in the people they follow is not something that transfers automatically to whichever brand sends the largest haul. It builds gradually through consistent, credible association. A creator who keeps coming back to the same brand on their own accord is delivering an endorsement with real weight behind it. Creators who have genuinely invested time in understanding a brand and chosen to associate their name with it, are easy to spot. It is clear to see their reputation is connected to how that association lands, it is demonstrated in the level of commitment and creative care to the work they produce and that is something a generic gifting campaign can’t match.
What needs to change
The shift required is not complicated, even if it demands more intention. Be more selective, go deeper with fewer creators and bring them into the process earlier. Give them genuine input into how the work takes shape. The tax changes and evolving creator behaviour are not obstacles to navigate around. They are a prompt to do something that should have happened sooner.
It is also worth remembering what is actually at stake on the consumer side. Research shows that 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations more than any other form of advertising. That is an enormous amount of influence sitting inside the creator economy, but it only converts into real brand value when the association feels genuine.
Brands that move toward committed, selective partnerships stand to gain more than budget efficiency. They will build relationships with creators that are actually worth something: ones where both sides have chosen each other, where the association feels credible to audiences and where the work is better for it.
