In this op-ed, B&T Award winning agency Social Soup‘s head of growth and partnerships Cara Norris reflects on the stunted growth of gifting as part of the creator economy strategy, and what marketers can do now to boost it.
Last week, our business turned 18 years old. As part of our celebration, we created panels that summed up all of our campaign work across every one of those years and reflected on how influence itself has evolved over that time: from word-of-mouth and grassroots advocacy in a pre-social media era to the birth and growth of influencers to the billion-dollar creator economy we know today.
What struck me, however, is that while nearly all aspects of this economy in 2025 have moved through the Gartner hype cycle and become more tailored, addressable and accountable, one area hasn’t seen brands demand more: gifting. It’s about time that changed.
While brand marketers have demanded more and more of virtually all channels – not just those we’re experts in – gifting remains the only spray-and-pray tactic where it is apparently suitable to send thousands of dollars’ worth of product into the abyss in the hope of a post or a word-of-mouth recommendation. It doesn’t have to be.
It’s strange when you think about it. Marketers have spent years refining influencer strategy and developing tiered approaches that balance the reach of the macro with the authenticity of the micro and nano creators. There are dashboards, attribution models, ROI frameworks, you name it, that track the impact of every dollar spent. But gifting as we know it – the mass send-outs, no accountability, no behavioural data – was built for a pre-AI, pre-social search era.
To be clear, gifting campaigns are still around because they have excelled. What we were doing in the early years with brands like Neutrogena, Aussie Bodies and Special K delivered great results for an environment that hadn’t yet developed to its current level of sophistication.
But now, given that gifting still represents a significant chunk of influencer marketing spend, marketers should demand more from their partners. For many brands, it’s the first touchpoint in the creator relationship, even if it’s the least measurable.
The next phase of gifting requires what other marketing channels already have (and do well): verification, precision and measurement. Smarter, tech-enabled models are now emerging as the logical evolution of gifting. Instead of guessing and the back-and-forth of who received what, brands can close the loop with gifting tech that confirms the item has been acquired, trialled, content is made, sentiment and, ultimately, conversion.
The shift we’ve seen in tiered influencer strategies offers a roadmap to how brands should approach this evolution. Take our current understanding of micro and nano influencers, who often deliver higher engagement and deeper trust than single macro posts, given they’re embedded in real communities. Gifting, done right, could work the same way: small moments of authentic advocacy, multiplied at scale, but only if we can measure and optimise them.
Another brief note on authentic advocacy should also be addressed: when a person of influence receives a beautifully packaged, almost experiential gift in the mail, this does not represent the true customer experience with the product. Sure, it fits certain archetypes for luxury brands, but a more sophisticated method for most brands would be to incentivise content that mirrors the general users’ path to purchase. This is what consumers now turn to content for in a late-stage social media environment.
The irony is that gifting was once the foundation of influencer marketing. It helped build the early creator economy. But the landscape has changed. Creators are now sophisticated partners in brand storytelling, operating more like strategic consultants than content hobbyists. They know their audiences deeply. They understand which messages will resonate.
In fact, new research from System1 found that creators deliver greater ROI than every other media channel in the long term. They are the first digital channel with clear and massive lasting advertising effects.
The real opportunity is not to abandon gifting, but for marketers to expect their partners to deliver more from it. To turn it from an untracked expense into a measurable investment. That can mean building a bespoke system for verification and feedback – understanding not just who received a product, but what they did with it, what they thought, and how their audience responded.
The brands that win in 2026 will be the ones that stop treating gifting as a questionable, but unavoidable, campaign element and give themselves a competitive edge by evolving that spend into a personal, measurable and effective introduction to influence.
