Online gift guides are playing a bigger — and more difficult — role for brands

Traditionally, brands had the upper hand in the in-store discovery of the past — showcasing the products they wanted consumers to pay attention to in their own storefronts or investing in paid partnerships to secure premium floor space in big box stores. However, many of the top-searched and most-visited gift guide results today are held by third-party media outlets like New York Time’s Wirecutter or New York Magazine’s Strategist that don’t accept paid placements.

In the past, brands could pay to play in holiday product roundups in glossy print magazines. Today’s product roundup landscape is more egalitarian, focused on top reviews from thousands of consumers, elaborate product testing processes or third party perspectives. Moreover, this media shift is occurring alongside a major acceleration in e-commerce over the past year and a half.

At Wirecutter, explained deputy editor Jason Chen, product selection is an elaborate process. While brands can and do pitch products for consideration, the editorial team also scours the internet for every popular iteration of any given product. The team then puts these products into a comparison table of how each meets different, preselected criteria. From there, the editorial team calls in products to be tested by a team of people of different ages, sizes, backgrounds and interests for both short term and long term testing. Write-ups are often thousands of words, and end up closer to a scientific experiment than a brand-led, pr-pitched guide.

“Compared to other gift sites that might just bop around on Amazon and round them up into a guide, that’s not our bag, we don’t operate that way,” said Jason Chen, Wirecutter’s deputy editor.

Gifts guides have a little more leeway than Wirecutter’s regular roundups, sometimes featuring one staff member’s favorite item for example, but often also include the best products from earlier product testing articles. “It’s kind of taking the best of what has risen to the top of the Wirecutter process, and then adding in a couple of things that are delightful and surprising and beautiful,” said Chen.

Chen said that, in the past, consumers may have used the site as a complement to in-store shopping, reading up on a product online before going to a store to experience it in person, but now many are buying directly after reading.

“You’re almost relying completely on the word of a site on the internet, a reputable site on the internet, but we take that responsibility very seriously,” said Chen.

Strategist, like Wirecutter, also doesn’t accept paid placements. “I think the value that we bring to the table in that sense, is, we do have this bird’s eye view,” said editor Maxine Builder. 

However, other media outlets do offer paid spots. As print dollars dry up, fashion and beauty publications like Elle, Vogue, and Glamour have increasingly embraced explicitly branded content online where fashion and beauty brands can pay to play. Brands can invest in these paid placements or in their own product-focused editorial content on brand sites. However the scale of these efforts under-pace third-party sites like Strategist and Wirecutter in site visits.

The Strategist has 10.7 million monthly views. Goop, one of the few brands or retailers to even build out a full editorial site beyond a branded blog, for example, still only has 2.6 million monthly views, according to Similarweb.

Brands invest holiday dollars elsewhere

Thus, while interest in online gift guides may be skyrocketing, brands’ ability to control the space is diminishing just as quickly. While startups like Siblings are trying to double down on strong PR narratives to speak to this independent media, others are focused on traditional paid advertising rather than gift guides. 

Two year old CBD skincare brand No, Thank You, for example, investment is instead centered on direct advertising and only “supplemented” by third-party paid gift guide placements and organic PR pitches. Holiday advertising, while easier to control through spend than gift guides, still has its challenges however.

“We support our gifting initiatives with online ads,” said No, Thank You co-founder Graham Smith. “That can be tricky in our business… [as] all our products contain full-spectrum CBD… [and] the holidays result in competitive ad bidding so there’s a huge focus on making sure we only run ads that perform well.”

When all else fails, however, brands are betting that 2021 may have more of an in-store focus. Smith said his brand plans to distribute offline for the first time later this year. Siblings is continuing to invest in retailer partnerships with companies like Nordstrom.

“We still believe in the in-store discovery, as it’s hard to replicate that feeling of finding something unique and fun while shopping in-person over the holiday season,” said Bronkie. “Everyone has preferences, and as a brand, we try to be where the customer is and provide the best experience for them.”