Poppi's Marketing Goes Tarte

The problem with experiential gifting.

Last week, prebiotic soda brand Poppi sent branded vending machines to the homes of 32 influencers. The machines were stocked with unlimited beverages for creators like Vidya Gopalan, Jake Shane, and Phaith Montoya to enjoy during the Super Bowl.

I could talk about how the videos the influencers posted got over 35M organic views. I could break down how the alleged $25K cost of the vending machines (Poppi claims it’s less) is still cheaper than the sponsored post fees of the people they were sent to. I could point out that the reason the posts got so many views was because of the spectacle of a huge vending machine and not, say, a mini fridge. I could highlight that a $0.02 cost-per-view is very impressive. I could note that other brands likely spent way more on their influencer activations leading up to the Super Bowl. I could tell you that the machines are temporary and will likely be repurposed.

I could talk all about why Poppi’s vending machine stunt “worked”—but good marketing doesn’t exist in the context of bad sentiment.

Influencers show off their new vending machines.

Like the Tarte influencer trips and sponsored concert suites before it, Poppi’s big marketing splash is being met with TikTok criticism. Users are calling it “a waste of money” and “out of touch”. Which, if I take off my this is what I do for a living hat, most marketing is. Brands buy cars, sponsor sports teams, and run $8M Super Bowl ads in pursuit of eyeballs—what about this activation in particular made people so upset?

Videos criticizing the stunt are going viral.

When a brand wants to engage with an influencer they typically have two options:

• Pay the influencer to post about their product

• Gift the influencer their product and hope they post

As fees to work with influencers have grown and traditional gifting has become more crowded, brands have gotten creative. This has introduced a third option that I call experiential gifting.

Experiential gifting is when a brand creates an over-the-top, all-expenses-paid experience that essentially guarantees the influencer will post about them. This strategy gets lots of views both because of the extravagance and the lack of #sponsored disclosure. Some examples of experiential gifting might be a brand trip, tickets to an event, or a stunty delivery. From a marketing perspective, I understand the mechanics behind it. Brands move sponsored post dollars over to create an experience that garners the same (if not more) views.

Examples of experiential gifting.

There’s a big problem though: the audience optics between a paid sponsored post and an experiential gift are very different.

Influencer fees are, for the most part, a mystery to the average consumer—the transaction of a sponsored post happens behind closed doors. It has also become a widely accepted form of income for influencers, with comments reading “get that bag 💰”. Importantly, the content of the resulting post focuses on the product and why it works.

With experiential gifting, an influencer’s audience can essentially calculate the fee. All of a sudden, the cost becomes very visible. It’s in your face. A four night stay in Bora Bora? With thousands of dollars of free product? All food and drink included? A Hermès bracelet? New iPad? Tickets to Taylor Swift? Suite at the U.S. Open? The influencer posts tend to focus more on the lavish details and less on the brand or product itself. It feels excessive, even if the total amount spent is still likely less expensive than the fee for a sponsored post. An at-home vending machine with unlimited free soda falls into this category. It’s marketing a free experience that actual customers will never have access to.

Mixed reactions to Poppi’s vending machines.

It can’t be ignored that this is all set against the backdrop of a real rise in customer-first marketing. It’s a trend that’s in direct opposition to experiential gifting for influencers. Taco Bell’s big super bowl ad featured hundreds of their fans—the caption for the social post said “WE PUT YOU IN OUR BIG GAME AD 👀Because you are what makes Taco Bell…Taco Bell”. In a recent post from cocokind’s first customer brand trip, they wrote “We didn’t spend money on caviar for our customers…instead our founder went mom mode and packed everyone lunches with her favorite treats.” Owala held a big water bottle reveal event just for their biggest fans. A TikTok from AriZona Iced Tea reads, “Instead of spending millions of dollars on a 30 second ad we trust our product and pass that savings on to our customers who are what is important to us.”

The customer is becoming the influencer.

With experiential gifting, brands are taking real things that their very own customers save up for—vacations, concerts, groceries—and handing them out to influencers who likely already have the means to pay themselves. Sure, you can try to explain it away as “that’s just how marketing works” but it doesn’t feel good to the consumer. And what is marketing, if not a feeling?

Thanks for reading! This week’s paid newsletter will go out on Thursday. It’ll have five post format ideas, my case for posting less, a video about storytelling, and more.