EVERYONE’S DOING IT. NOT EVERYONE’S DOING IT RIGHT

By now, the question isn’t whether brands should work with creators. That ship sailed years ago. The real question, the one nobody seems to be asking out loud, is what makes creator collabs in 2026 actually matter. Creator partnerships have become one of the most standard tools in modern marketing, and for good reason. As a PR agency that runs these campaigns for a significant portion of our clients, we’ve seen what works, what doesn’t, and what looks good on paper but evaporates by next Thursday. The honest answer is more complicated than most brands want to hear.

THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE. BUT THEY DON’T TELL THE WHOLE TRUTH EITHER

Let’s start with what everyone agrees on. A collaboration is successful if it delivers results: sales go up, follower counts grow, the brand reaches a new audience. Fine. That’s the spreadsheet version of success, and it’s not wrong.

THE CAMPAIGN WAS A SUCCESS. NOBODY REMEMBERS IT

Here’s the thing about 2026: creators are busy. Professionally, structurally, existentially busy. Social media is their job, and if you’ve ever watched a creator’s feed for a few weeks, you’ll notice something. The collaboration you invested in, the one that felt meaningful and well-placed, is buried under three product tests, two „what I eat in a day“ videos and a brand trip to somewhere warm within about a week. Not because the creator doesn’t care, but because that’s the nature of the feed and of course, it’s their job. Content moves fast, memory is short, and your campaign lives in that ecosystem whether you like it or not.

BUSY IS NOT THE SAME AS INVESTED

We’ve also worked with creators who will only engage when payment is on the table. Which is, to be absolutely clear, completely understandable. Unpaid seeding requests and event invitations flood creator inboxes daily, and nobody should be expected to work for free. But there’s a version of this that reveals something telling. When a brand has run three or four high-investment collaborations with the same creator, and that creator can’t find an hour to attend a brand event, unpaid and without a camera crew, you start to wonder. Not whether they were busy. Whether they actually care about the brand at all.

YOU CAN’T BRIEF SOMEONE INTO CARING

What we’ve come to believe, through years of running these campaigns and watching what sticks and what doesn’t, is that the most successful collaborations are the ones that build something real. Not a post. A relationship. A creator who genuinely uses the product, who mentions the brand in private conversations without a contract prompting them to, who shows up at events because they want to, not because the rate was right. That kind of ambassador, whether they have 5.000 followers or 500.000, does something for a brand that no campaign brief can manufacture.

The industry talks a lot about authenticity. It’s practically a cliché at this point. But authentic isn’t a tone of voice or a candid-looking photo. It’s what happens when a creator is actually a fan, when they’d talk about the product even if nobody was paying them to, when the relationship between brand and creator outlasts the posting schedule.

FIND THE FAN FIRST. THE FOLLOWER COUNT CAN WAIT

Our ask to brands, if we’re being direct about it, is this: stop measuring success purely in the moment of posting. Start asking whether the creator you’ve invested in would still talk about your product six months from now, in a conversation that has nothing to do with a campaign. Start investing in creators who are genuinely interested in what you make, even if their follower count doesn’t immediately justify it on paper. Niche creators with real conviction move product and build communities in ways that prestige not always does.