Social Rocket
Paid creator posts average 334.055 video views in the new Digiday analysis, posts after product gifting reach 48.008. The study, published on the 4 November, of 1.755 posts from 20 brand campaigns offers an important lesson for social teams: whoever ships products builds a different campaign model than someone who buys reach and production.
What product seeding can do – and when paid creators are needed
With gifted products, creators receive goods without a paid posting agreement. This can lead to credible product tests, but it requires different expectations for distribution. Paid collaborations are planned, produced and often additionally amplified with media budgets.
The video views of the two groups are therefore not a pure quality measure: sponsored campaigns often involve paid distribution. A second detail of the Digiday Creator Marketing Index is interesting: gifted products performed especially well in engagement for explanatory product demos, while staged product shots stood out among paid posts.
For cosmetics, nutrition or tech, this suggests a simple creative split: if you want honest usage experiences, work with product samples and good briefing information. If you need a precisely staged launch with defined assets, you should pay for production and usage rights.
Instagram delivers many winning posts, TikTok the stronger peaks
Among the best-placed hashtag posts of the 20 campaigns studied, Instagram appeared particularly often. The most successful TikTok posts, however, achieved more interactions on average. For Instagram, Digiday found 11 percent engagement rate for Reels, 7 percent for single images and 5 percent for carousels – in each case relative to follower count.
These are figures from a selected set of brand-related campaigns, not general platform averages; TikTok video views were not available in the data collection. That is precisely why it is worth separating metrics by content format, platform and paid share in your own analysis. The comparison of different engagement benchmarks shows how strongly the definition of the metric changes the result.
The best hashtags also need the brand itself
The most exciting examples are not pure influencer campaigns. Charlotte Tilbury's #exaggereyes ranked first in the index and combined paid posts with an unusually high share of gifted products. Material from users also came together via the product testing platform Influenster. Neutrogena's #hydroboost reached second place and likewise relied on product shipments, collaborations and a combination of brand and category hashtags.
Both cases show that companies should not rely on creator reach alone. The company's own channel must explain content, repeat it and pick up comments. Especially for retail and beauty campaigns, the combination of product test, creator content and a purchase option is interesting – for example in the Rossmann creator approach in the K-beauty business.
Creator programmes become lasting infrastructure
A further study adds the organisational picture: according to the LTK/Northwestern study of 21 October, 91 percent of the 209 senior marketers surveyed at brands work with creator programmes that are a permanent part of their activity. 50 percent use creator content in display advertising and 36 percent on connected TV. This makes clear why image rights, storage, reuse and campaign measurement are no longer side tasks.
For marketing teams, this leads to a manageable model: product samples for genuine usage experiences, paid creators for plannable content, and media budgets for reach. Before launch, all three building blocks should be planned separately, including their goals. How creator-led Instagram collaborations perform in large post datasets offers a further point of comparison.
Sources: Digiday+ Research, 4. November 2026; LTK/Northwestern, 21. October 2026; LTK study page.