Influencer gifting has become a controversial strategy for brands, with creators calling out the practice as wasteful. And new data shows that gifting is, in fact, inefficient for many brands, with very few gifted products actually appearing in creators’ social posts.
Over 60% of 300 marketers surveyed by influencer marketing platform Traackr reported that less than half of the creators they gifted products to actually posted about those products on social media. But despite these lackluster results, 65% of marketers said they will continue to send gifts to an influencer who didn’t include those gifted products in their content.
“Not only does this indicate that brands are wasting valuable time and money, it has major implications for the negative impact that product seeding campaigns can have on the environment,” the report states. Several now-deleted TikTok videos from the past year have shown people finding thousands of dollars worth of unused, gifted products thrown away by their influencer neighbors. And the ongoing de-influencing trend, which peaked earlier this year, has rekindled online conversations about the sustainability issues involved in influencer marketing, including excessive gifted products.
Read more: Inside TikTok’s de-influencing trend
At the same time, however, brands have continued to invest large sums of their influencer marketing budgets into product seeding over the past year. The Traackr report found that 28% of marketers spend between $10,000 and $50,000 on product gifting campaigns each year, while 25% spend between $50,000 and $200,000. And about one in five marketers reported spending more than $200,000 in a single year on gifting products to influencers.
