Why influencer gifting can help brands build the creative variety they need for Black Friday, Christmas and beyond.
There’s a familiar moment in holiday campaign planning. The hero video is approved. The photography looks beautiful. Everyone has spent weeks getting the assets right. Then Black Friday arrives, Christmas follows, and those one or two pieces of content have a lot riding on them.
They need to introduce the brand, explain the product, build trust and sell the offer. All while resonating with everyone, from first-time browsers to loyal customers shopping for gifts.
And that carefully crafted UGC video? It looks like everything else in the feed. It follows all the “rules”: hook, problem, product reveal, call to action. The formula someone found on a blog or asked ChatGPT to write. The boxes are ticked. But what makes it relevant to the person watching?
Different people need different reasons to care. Expecting a couple of assets to connect with everyone throughout the busiest shopping period of the year is a big ask.
Do you have enough ways to tell your story, and enough room for creators to make it their own?
Meta is asking for creative variety
Meta has been clear about the importance of creative diversification.
In a Retail Brew interview, Karin Tracy, Meta’s head of industry overseeing retail, fashion and luxury, described an emerging best practice for Advantage+ Shopping campaigns:
“at least 20 different versions of creative in order to see the best results.”
That recommendation was made in 2024 and specifically concerned Advantage+ Shopping. It gives brand marketers a useful indication of the breadth Meta encourages, rather than a universal quota for every campaign.
Tracy also explained the purpose of that variety: giving the system different ways to tell a brand’s story so it can connect each creative with the people it appeals to.
Meta’s own creative diversification training reinforces the approach, covering different concepts, customer motivators and formats.
For marketers, the implication is practical. Your media plan needs a content pipeline capable of supporting it.
You can’t pick every winner in a meeting
Anyone who has worked in marketing has seen it happen. The asset everyone loves gets a lukewarm response and something simpler, less polished or more unexpected gets people’s attention.
You can make informed decisions about what might work but predicting the best-performing creative before it reaches an audience is much harder.
Different people respond to different things. One customer wants a demonstration, another wants to hear someone’s honest reaction whilst another needs to see how the product fits into theit everyday life.
During the holidays, those motivations multiply as people are shopping for themselves, buying gifts, looking for value and planning activities for the school break etc.
A broader creative library gives you more opportunities to discover what resonates across those moments.
The trap of making everything look the same
Commissioning more UGC doesn’t automatically solve the problem as brands can recruit a group of creators, give everyone the same tightly scripted brief and receive a collection of videos that feel remarkably similar. The same opening hook. The same product reveal. The same talking points, delivered in the same order.
When that brief also resembles the one every other brand is using, the content starts to blend into the feed.
A useful brief gives creators direction: what the product does, which claims are accurate and what the campaign needs to communicate. It also leaves room for their own voice, setting, humour and perspective. That freedom is where much of the variety comes from.
Vaseline: one brief, many interpretations
Our Vaseline Lip Trio campaign is a great example.
Ernie seeded the range with 500 relevant creators and as a result generated Unilever a library of 515 pieces of UGC to choose from.
What the client particularly loved was the diversity of the content. There was a brief, but creators had the freedom to interpret it according to their style - personalities, routines, filming styles and product experiences and in turn gave the brand a much broader collection of content than a tightly controlled execution could have produced.
The brand went on to use a wide selection of those assets in paid media, extending the value of the campaign beyond the original creator posts.
That’s an important part of the gifting opportunity. Alongside organic awareness, a campaign can help build a creative library for future marketing activity, with the appropriate usage permissions agreed.
Why gifting works at scale
Large-scale influencer gifting gives a product to many different people, each with their own way of experiencing and sharing it.
A beauty product might appear in a getting-ready routine, a handbag essentials video or a conversation about affordable favourites. The product remains the same, but the reasons to care change.
For holiday campaigns, that creates possibilities across gifting ideas, travel essentials, party preparation and everyday use.
The work starts with choosing relevant creators and giving them something worth experiencing. It continues through clear communication, thoughtful briefing and managing the content that comes back.
Yes, gifting does need realistic expectations as not every recipient may post, and paid reuse needs to be agreed but planned properly, it can create a valuable combination of organic conversation and content for the brand’s own channels.
Fever: keeping the content flowing
The same principle applies to experiences.
Fever has been an Ernie partner for more than two years and during that time, we’ve partnered with over 2,000 creators to generate organic awareness and content to fuel paid promotion for experiences across the globe.
Event gifting creates opportunities for people to show what an experience feels like through their own eyes. A parent captures a family outing. A couple shares a date night. Another creator focuses on the atmosphere, the setting or the moments they didn’t expect.
Those perspectives help potential visitors picture themselves there.
For Fever, the ongoing approach supplies fresh stories as experiences continue to run, giving its marketing team content beyond a launch burst and it’s particularly relevant as people start looking for Christmas gifts, holiday activities and things to do together
Build the library before you need it
With Black Friday and Christmas approaching, now is the time to look at the range behind your campaign.
Do you have different people telling the story? Different reasons to buy? Enough material to test, learn and refresh throughout the sales period?
A beautiful hero asset can set the direction however a diverse content library gives the campaign more room to work.
At ernie, we help brands build that library through influencer gifting at scale, connecting products and experiences with relevant creators and giving them room to make something of their own.
Because the next piece of content your audience responds to might be the one you would never have thought to brief.