When creator Olivia Marcus was surprised with a giant, lipstick-shaped PR package from MAC Cosmetics filled with confetti and 19 lipsticks, her reaction was not one of delight.

Instead of posting what the makeup brand may have hoped would be a fun unboxing video, Marcus instead posted about how “wasteful and gluttonous” unprompted influencer gifting can be, along with the annoyances of “glitter bombing.” (MAC did not respond to Marketing Brew’s requests for comment; Marcus declined to comment.)

Conversations around influencer gifting and wastefulness have been ongoing for years, but they have perhaps found even greater resonance at a time when people are being told to eat cereal for dinner and when “winter heat waves” are happening.

• Tarte recently received pushback for sending influencers products ahead of a paid brand trip, and earlier this year, one creator was criticized for a video showing her closet full of unopened packages.

Believe it or not, brands are also concerned about the costs and waste from sending products that don’t get posted or resonate with creators, Holly Jackson, global professional services director of influencer strategy and measurement at influencer marketing platform Traackr, said.

“It’s almost like the creators and the brands are questioning the strategy around product seeding and gifting that has been in play for years now…but from different angles,” she told Marketing Brew.

Think ahead: Emily Brown, senior manager of strategy at influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, told us that overall, influencer gifting has “gotten less popular, but more intentional,” which could end up being a good thing for everyone.

“The surprise and delight—I feel like most influencers are kind of over it,” she said.

Continue reading here.—KH

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These days, TikTok is omnipresent in the culture. And advertisers are taking advantage.

In Q4 of 2023, ad spend on the platform reached $1.2 billion, according to a report from MediaRadar; that was a 43% increase from the $805 million advertisers spent in the first quarter of the year.

• Amazon, Apple, Comcast, DoorDash, and The Walt Disney Company spent the most money advertising on the platform in 2023.
• On average, 11,800 companies spent $318 million per month.

Ad spend climbed throughout the year, hitting $896 million in Q2 and $962 million in Q3. In all of 2023, almost 30,000 companies advertising more than 35,500 brands spent $3.8 billion on TikTok, the advertising intelligence platform found.

TikTok’s popularity appears unlikely to slow anytime soon; it’s on pace to pass Facebook in total daily minutes in 2025, according to a 2023 analysis from Insider Intelligence and eMarketer.

Deep pockets: Media and entertainment providers spent more than $1 billion on TikTok in 2023, accounting for almost 30% of total ad spend last year, the MediaRadar report found. Retailers spent more than $500 million, while technology advertisers (including electronics, software, and telecom companies) spent $314 million.

“TikTok’s massive growth in the last few years provides a key outlet to reach the highly engaged, often young audiences as they are scrolling through their feeds,” Todd Krizelman, MediaRadar’s co-founder and CEO, said in a press release.

Read more here.—JN

AI, AI, AI: It’s the hot new buzzword on every marketer’s mind, but does anybody actually know what they’re talking about? (We’re assuming, dear reader, that you’re not Sam Altman.)

While Altman didn’t appear at Marketing Brew’s event, The Marketer’s (Early) Guide to AI, we did speak onstage with a number of agency and brand executives to hear how they are incorporating generative AI in their marketing. Read some excerpts from the onstage conversations below.

Nigel Storey, CTO of Zappos, on which AI tools to have in your arsenal: My guess is everyone here is probably already using ChatGPT, but ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity are the primary three that everyone should be testing, playing with, seeing how they work. I think Perplexity is pretty clever and cool in the sense that it cites the sources.

Michael Cohen, global chief data and analytics officer, Plus Company, on crafting safety guardrails around generative AI: We have an AI community practice. Within the community practice is a policy group set up by myself and our general counsel. That’s the team that needs to come together. When I think about the two things that we need to really keep a sharp eye on for agencies, it’s the data that’s going into the AI and the license agreements that the software has. The first thing that we lead with is, Do we feel protected with the license agreements for a particular software?

Devika Bulchandani, global CEO, Ogilvy, on using AI without fearing it: Every single time we’ve prognosticated that something’s going to come and kill us, including Covid, it didn’t. We prevailed...By the way, we create most of these things. It’s not like somebody else from Mars came and created it.

Keep reading here.—JS

Take a guess. Ever wonder which teams spend the most time on communication per week? And what percentage of employees know how to use generative AI effectively? Find the answers in Grammarly’s 2024 State of Business Communications report. Get insights into how communication + AI are transforming work as we know it.