Summary:
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Digiday reported a decline in high-production creator brand trips due to tightening budgets and audience backlash on luxury.
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Instead of costly brand trips, brands like Air France and Rent the Runway are opting for contracted partnerships.
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The shift is towards longer partnerships with specific deliverables, rather than short trips hoping for good content.
Digiday reported this month that the high-production creator brand trip, the kind that flies a group of creators to a resort for a few days of content, is losing ground as marketing budgets tighten and audiences turn on visible luxury.
]Sarah Tam of Rent the Runway told Digiday that a typical brand trip runs into the high six figures once every deliverable is added up. OpenAI’s recent trip to Wildflower Farms in upstate New York booked around 30 creators into a resort where rooms run $2,200 to $5,400 a night.
Revolve and Kendall Jenner’s 818 tequila flew realtors to Coachella this spring and caught similar backlash online.
Compare that to what Air France and Rent the Runway did instead.
Their “Runway to France” campaign contracted creator Candace Marie Stewart for a month, with the deliverables written into the agreement as a number: 37 posts total, 20 of them Instagram stories. Rent the Runway described the cost as comparable to one piece of a typical brand trip, and called it a better deal on both value and content quality.
The shift is about contracting, not creative. A trip buys an experience and hopes good content follows. A longer partnership buys the content directly and specifies exactly how much of it, in what format, over what period. That gives both sides something concrete to hold each other to, which a loose trip itinerary never did.
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] Creator and consultant Heike Young told Digiday that brand trip content has become interchangeable, since any creator could be swapped into the same resort room without the output changing. Thirty people in one location for one weekend tend to produce content that looks the same, because the lighting, the setting and the schedule are identical for everyone.
None of this means brand trips are dead. Digiday didn’t report that, and expensive trips are still running at full scale this year.
What’s changing is where new budget is going, and increasingly it’s toward contracted output over time instead of one concentrated event.
