An anatomy of the creator brand trip’s midlife crisis

“People are struggling,” said Victoria Bachan, co-founder and CEO at creator management agency Hyphen HQ. “If the creator economy is a mirror to the wider economy, you cannot sit outside and separate from it, you have to live within it.”

OpenAI isn’t alone here. The same claims were levied at a raft of brands this year, including Revolve and Kendall Jenner’s tequila brand 818, both of which flew realtors out to Coachella in the spring. Unlike those trips, though, OpenAI’s hit every beat of the brand trip playbook that’s currently backfiring. The price tag — rooms running $2,200 to $5,400 a night — became the headline rather than staying in the background.

The activities read as curated rather than lived-in. Farm-to-table meals, a beekeeping session, wellness programming and OpenAI workshops are exactly the kind of stage management audiences have gotten sharp at noticing. And the optics collided with the brand itself — a company whose own tech is upending the livelihoods of the same creative class it was busy wining and dining. The trip didn’t read as generous, it read as tone deaf. 

“The bigger responsibility sits with brands to understand the cultural context they’re operating within and design experiences that actually make sense for their brand, their creators and the moment.” said Olivia Ormos, founder of creator marketing platform MAVN.

Gone are the days when people craved seeing over-the-top luxury or endless branded Coachella posts. The world is a tougher, more meager place now, and marketers can’t buy broad appeal with unattainable excess. 

The same goes for the creators themselves. They’re recognizing that many of these trips don’t fit into their personal brand, and the content that comes out of them don’t resonate with their communities.

“The content is becoming so cut and paste. Any creator could have been swapped into any of these hotel rooms,” said Heike Young, a creator who is also a content consultant for brands. “You can’t just offer a free ticket and expect creators to come. There has to be value for their audience, something that they can only learn there.”

Young told Digiday she turned down brand trips to both Coachella and Cannes Lions this year because she didn’t see any value in them for her audience. 

“A great creator trip should build relationships, not just content,” said Ormos. “The real ROI can be that 20 creators leave genuinely loving the founder, understanding the brand and feeling connected to each other. Those relationships can continue producing value months or even years after the Instagram Stories disappear.

As the creator economy grows up, the creators with purchasing power and a strong personal brand are increasingly realizing these carbon copy brand trips no longer serve them. They see through trips built around quantity — cramming as many creators into one location to justify the six-figure brand trip — rather than quality, and they steer clear. 

“I highly doubt we’ll see many more of these trips where it’s just like show up, get treated to the gifting suite, take a picture of your nice hotel room, and post it with the brand’s name,” said Young. “I don’t think a lot of creators would engage in that.”

Storytelling and substance over glitz and glam

For some marketers, all this will read as a bit twee. They’re already rebuilding the format from the ground up rather than just tweaking the guest list or the itinerary.

Like Air France and Rent the Runway, which teamed up to offer a new take on the creator brand trip that just launched: a month-long tour through France alongside creator and brand consultant, Candace Marie Stewart. 

RTR chief merchant officer Sarah Tam told Digiday the companies wanted to avoid super compressed brand trips with a ton of content posted during a short period of time. 

“We wanted to experiment with the opposite model, give one creator the time and space to live in the experience,” she continued. 

It’s why the involvement of someone like Stewart is so crucial. Framed as a “content sabbatical” (though she’s obviously still making content), she has the freedom to post what she wants and when, to tell her own story as it relates to the two brands. Over a months-long trip, she’s on the hook for 37 posts, 20 of which will be Instagram stories. 

“The story evolves with her rather than feeling like a compressed campaign moment,” Tam explained. “We want to prove that there’s an appetite for a more thoughtful kind of creator storytelling, where depth can be just as engaging as speed. 

Interestingly, the cost of this kind of brand trip is lower, as well. Tam and RTR partnerships team member Amanda Kelly said brand trips often reach into the high six figures, especially when deliverables are added up. While they wouldn’t provide figures on how much the Runway to France campaign costs, they did confirm it’s comparable to “one part” of a typical brand trip, and that the company feels they’re “getting a bargain” based on the value and quality of content Stewart is already delivering. 

That word “typical” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, since brand trips range wildly in cost from a few flights and hotel nights to the kind of five-star build-out OpenAI put on. Still, it’s clear RTR feels this approach is the more cost-effective one. 

“It did cost less, but this isn’t less ambitious commercially,” said Tam, who noted the campaign goals include social CRM, press, driving signups to RTR, and impressions.

Sooner or later more marketers will be saying the same. Ormos, for one, praised the approach, pointing out that partnerships like this don’t just allow for an actual narrative to develop rather than a manufactured, 48-hour brand trip posting spree.

“We’ve spent years telling brands that creators know their audiences better than anyone, and then we hand those same creators a two-page list of talking points, mandatory shots and posting requirements. Those two ideas contradict each other,” she said.

Tam calls it “creator participation” rather than “creator placement.” And though not every brand can do a month-long experience with a single creator, the philosophy behind the Runway to France campaign is one that arguably indicates a wider industry shift away from fewer forced moments, toward deeper relationships and more trust in the creator’s ability to tell the story. Its a move that;s arguably been lost in the industrialization of creator marketing, and one that only seems to be correcting now, with a few casualties along the way.

“Long gone are the days of us being frivolous consumers… the brands that are going to win these trips are hyper-intentional about the communities they are trying to attract,” said Bachan.