Spend five minutes scrolling through Instagram in the weeks leading up to the holidays and you’ll inevitably be bombarded with a slew of posts announcing brands’ holiday giveaways. 

This year, though, dozens of those holiday prize pools have included products from multiple brands. These co-branded giveaways reflect a larger shift in how brands such as Not Your Mother’s Haircare, Olipop and vitamin brand Olly intend to work similar brand collaborations into their 2024 social strategies. 

Not Your Mother’s last week announced it would be launching a six-day series of back-to-back holiday giveaways in partnership with “some of [their followers’] favorite brands,” teaming up with Essence Cosmetics, Peace Out Skincare, Little Words Project and Gilly Hicks, among several others.  Referring to those brands as their followers’ favorites isn’t hyperbole. Not Your Mother’s has spent the past year closely analyzing their consumer base and digging into what makes them tick—particularly when it comes to the other brands they’re using beyond haircare, said Gavyn Melgar, VP of marketing at Not Your Mother’s.

“Because of that, we’ve also built in a lot of different partnerships, whether they’re with more traditional beauty influencers, some influencers outside of beauty and with other brands,” she said. “Through that, what we have realized is [our consumers] really like these collaborations and giveaways that we do—but particularly when they're with brands that they’re already purchasing and integrating into their life.”

The haircare brand’s holiday giveaway collaborations are just one element of a larger series of partnerships Not Your Mother’s has entered throughout 2023, which have similarly revolved around holidays or other calendar moments relevant to the brand’s Gen Z audience, Melgar said. For example, Not Your Mother’s partnered with fashion brand Princess Polly, providing dry shampoos and other hair products for the latter’s spring break beach activations in March, she said. 

Also read: Inside General Mills’ partnership team

Though Not Your Mother’s had run several social media giveaways and teamed up with a few brands before 2023, “the ones that we’ve done this year have performed the best to date, and I think that’s really because we spent the past year understanding our consumers and know what other brands they're already using,” Melgar said. Not Your Mother’s giveaway partnerships over the past several months have received 77% more engagement than those in 2022, and led the brand to amass 318% more followers from its giveaways this year than it did last year, she said

“These days, acquiring followers is very, very difficult,” said Nathan Jun Poekert, founder of consultancy JUN Social and former director of social media, branded content and digital innovation at American Eagle. “Basically, you either need a viral post or you need to have some level of buy-in on your kind of aesthetic [Instagram] grid. So, [collaborations] are a really logical way to get followers that is very inexpensive and very low-lift for both brands.”

The boosts in followers that accompany giveaways, which generally require entrants to be following the brand’s account to be eligible, are often temporary, and Not Your Mother’s largely sees a drop-off in its following in the two weeks after the winner of a giveaway is announced. But according to Melgar, the exodus of followers stemming from its co-branded giveaways is much lower than from those taking part in solely Not Your Mother giveaways—98% of the consumers who follow the brand for its giveaway partnerships will continue to do so for at least several weeks.

Prebiotic soda brand Olipop isn’t as concerned with the metrics behind its recent giveaway collaborations, said Steven Vigilante, the brand’s director of growth and partnerships. Rather, the goal of its recent team-ups with brands including Cheez-It, Dunkin’ and Halo Top ice cream has been to “do things that grab people's attention and get them to stop the scroll and share [the posts] with their friends,” he said.

“It’s hard to cut through the noise [with giveaways]. Everyone does them all the time now,” Vigilante said. Olipop sought to stand out from the crowd through the unexpectedness of a relatively new gut health soda brand partnering with more established brands on its giveaways, he said.

Those brand relationships and the resulting giveaway collaborations arose from Olipop becoming “social friends” with them in the comments sections of TikTok videos and in playful back-and-forths on Threads, Vigilante added. Olipop simply reached out to Dunkin’ and its other giveaway collaborators in the DMs on those platforms to get them off the ground, he said.

Vitamin brand Olly has also leaned into giveaway partnerships both in the weeks leading up to the holidays and throughout the year, Halee Edward, the brand’s social media manager, wrote in an email. Though Olly isn’t new to co-branded giveaways, the brand sharply increased its number of giveaway partnerships this year because of the “really positive impact” they’ve proven to have on Olly’s social media engagement, she said. 

For the holidays, the brand teamed up with Eos, Eva NYC and Overnight Beauty, co-creating a sleep-themed gift set with the latter, Edward said. And Olly already has several giveaway partnerships lined up for the first few months of 2024, she said.

“Collaborating with brands is a great way to get in front of their audience, as well as share our audience with them,” Edward said. “We see strong results when we partner with another brand that our community loves, whether it’s for back to school, a new product launch, or just a timely seasonal giveaway.” In February, for instance, Olly partnered with mattress brand Casper on a giveaway oriented around daylight saving time.

Uber and luggage brand Away took a somewhat different approach to their holiday collaboration, partnering on an Instagram Reel themed around holiday travel rather than a seasonal giveaway. In a LinkedIn post highlighting the brands’ partnership, Poekert called their post “the future of social.”

“[Uber and Away] were able to kind of pull this off in a way that was nothing more than trying to bring a moment of entertainment to their followers and also give themselves the opportunity to have double the exposure and reach,” he told Ad Age. “I think more brands are realizing that, at the end of the day, we're just trying to do unexpected things that spark joy in our followers. Collaborating with another brand that might be targeting the same customers is definitely a smart way to do that.”

Poekert anticipates brands will continue to collaborate beyond co-branded giveaways in 2024 (think Duolingo and Scrub Daddy’s bizarre birthing video). Not Your Mother’s is planning to be one of those brands, Melgar said. 

“The social team is already coming to me with the list of all the brands that we should work with next year,” she said. “I think now it’s about trying to figure out, ‘Do we continue working with them just on these giveaways, or are there bigger ways to continue with partnerships?’ They’re really what the consumer likes to see, because it feels less like “I'm trying to sell you a product” and more like “I'm trying to figure out how my product can integrate into your life and help you out.’"