Tarte Cosmetics landed itself in yet another online controversy last week after a group of TikTok influencers discovered the brand had sent out PR packages containing drastically different gifts. 

Some, including fashion and beauty influencer Halley Kate and celebrity makeup artist Alexis Oakley, excitedly showed off the $700 Hermès bracelets they had received in addition to a handful of Tarte products. However, others such as beauty influencer Paloma Sanchez and Ken Eurich, a vlogger and comedy creator, instead tore through layers of cardboard and tissue paper to find earrings and necklaces valued between $10 and $30. One pair of earrings Sanchez unwrapped only contained a single gold hoop, with its match seemingly gone missing in transit.

Marketers are eager to set their influencer gifting campaigns apart from the sea of unboxing videos and avoid ending up in the stacks of unopened PR packages increasingly appearing in the background of influencers’ content. The controversy and widespread confusion stirred up by Tarte’s latest gifting campaign highlights the growing need for brands to carefully curate their product seeding strategies—and closely communicate with the influencers receiving those products to prevent a misunderstanding from going viral.

In total, Tarte sent Hermès bracelets to 100 influencers, 29 of whom have under 10,000 TikTok followers and five of whom have audiences of fewer than 2,000, a Tarte representative said in an email to Ad Age. Tarte’s latest round of gifting is tied to the upcoming launch of holiday gift sets of its viral “Shape Tape” concealer, which the representative called “one of [Tarte’s] biggest holiday launches of the year.” 

“Shape Tape is on the verge of hitting a billion dollars in sales and we wanted to celebrate in a way that reflects its status as a game-changing product,” the Tarte representative said of the Hermès bracelet gifting campaign, which, with each bracelet retailing at $700, cost the brand at least $70,000. “This thoughtful touch was our way of showing just how much we value this milestone—and those who have helped us get here.”

Extravagant gifting isn’t a new element of Tarte’s influencer marketing strategy. Just a few months ago, for instance, the brand promoted the release of its “creaseless concealer” by including tubes of the new product in PR packages that also contained purple iPads. And neither sending luxury products to influencers nor tailoring PR packages to specific influencers are inherently problematic gifting strategies, said Julianne Fraser, president and CEO of Dialogue New York, an influencer marketing agency that isn’t working with Tarte but does work with other beauty brands. 

Rather, the controversy spawned by Tarte’s holiday gifting campaign stems from the brand’s decision to ship out multiple PR packages over the course of just a few weeks, with most containing much cheaper items than the Hermès mailer—and to not offer recipients a clear explanation of how it determined whether to gift an influencer a luxury bracelet or a $10 pair of earrings, Fraser said. Indeed, several of the disgruntled influencers who didn’t find a Hermès bracelet in their PR package, as well as outside spectators breaking down the so-called “Tarte Cosmetics Hermès bracelet drama,” said they were confused about which qualities Tarte considered when assigning its gifts. 

The aforementioned Halley Kate and Ken Eurich, for example, each have roughly 1.5 million TikTok followers—while Kate received the Hermès bracelet, Eurich instead unboxed a $30 EvryJewels nameplate necklace that was part of a “Sex and the City”-inspired mailer.

Some confusion also arose among influencers about whether the PR packages containing cheaper items were from the same gifting campaign as the Hermès bracelet mailer. Sofiyat Ibrahim, a creator and founder of fashion and lifestyle platform The Odditty, shared a TikTok on Sunday combining two videos she filmed at separate times—one when she opened an earring-filled pouch similar to Sanchez’s, and the second two days later when she received the Tarte package containing an Hermès bracelet. 

In the video, Ibrahim reveals the first mailer was part of a simultaneous gifting campaign to promote Tarte’s collaboration with beauty creator and singer Angelica Torres for Hispanic Heritage Month.

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Tarte didn’t make a statement on social media to clear up the misunderstanding around which mailers corresponded with which gifting campaign, instead effectively fueling the TikTok controversy by not attempting to quell the rampant speculation around why only some influencers received the Hermès bracelets.

“What I was immediately sort of struck by when I saw these videos is that nobody understands the hierarchy of the gifts and who receives them—not the people who are receiving them or the people who are consuming the content,” said Amy Cotteleer, ​​​​chief experience officer and partner at independent agency Duncan Channon. If advising an agency or brand that opts to run multiple gifting campaigns simultaneously, Cotteleer said she would suggest they “make sure you’re really clear on what you’re doing, so that the intended audience—in this example, the influencers—are clear on why they’re receiving these things and what they did to earn them.”

For example, the comments section of an unboxing video from Paloma Sanchez, the influencer who received Tarte’s Hispanic Heritage Month mailer (with an incomplete set of earrings), is filled with criticism of the brand from TikTok users under the impression that the earrings are part of the same gifting campaign involving the Hermès bracelets. One comment read, “the fact that they sent a full package to other influencers and a goodie bag for you 😭 [crying face emoji]. tarte’s pr is insane prima,” while another said, “If they don’t send you that Hermes 😭😭 [two crying face emojis] @tarte cosmetics.”  

Given Tarte’s history of controversy in its influencer marketing efforts, such as its polarizing trips to lavish destinations such as Bora Bora and Dubai, the brand’s decision to not address the misunderstanding surrounding its simultaneous gifting campaigns could have been intentional, said Arabella Johnson, head of beauty at influencer intelligence and trend forecasting platform CORQ.

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“This is a dream for a brand, to be honest, because everyone’s trying to work it out and unpick the mystery, and that’s just generating so much content for them that they’re not even having to work at this point,” she said. “Random people who haven’t even received the mailers have no affiliation to Tarte are making videos that are getting hundreds of thousands of views.” 

In Tarte’s case, though, the controversy swirling around its latest influencer gifting efforts detracts from any focus on the brand’s products included in those packages, such as the holiday product sets that accompanied the Hermès bracelets, Cotteleer said.

“With all of these controversies—the F1 [trip], the Bora Bora [trip], the Dubai [trip] and now this—I don’t know what the product Tarte’s promoting is,” she said. “I could sit here and talk for an hour about the social implications and the impact of their choices on how you choose to market, but I couldn’t tell you anything about the products they were trying to highlight.”

Tarte’s strategy

Several TikTok users openly speculated as to whether race played a role in Tarte’s selection of the influencers who received a bracelet, especially given that several influencers of color have previously accused Tarte of treating them differently from their white counterparts on the brand’s influencer trips. According to the Tarte representative, half of the influencers who receive PR packages in each of the brand’s gifting campaigns are influencers of color, and 33% are Black creators, specifically. 

The Tarte representative initially declined to comment on how the brand selected which influencers would be sent the Hermès bracelets.

“We rotate who receives our mailers to ensure inclusivity across our creator community,” they said, adding, “we plan our product mailers to connect product launches with creators’ preferences—some love a bold lip, others a great palette.”

Later, Tarte elaborated in a statement to Ad Age, adding that its “mailer gifting strategy is managed internally by our team, with creator selection guided by an assessment developed by our DEI agency” and that its “assessment looks at a variety of factors, including followers, engagement, content type, vertical focus, alignment with tarte values, brand loyalty, new reach potential and DEI. All criteria are equally weighted in our decision-making process, ensuring a fair and balanced distribution.”

Establishing ‘relationship roadmaps’

“How Tarte executed this—all in one go, and it being really visible and obvious that there were unequal experiences or gifts for different creators—is not a strategy we would recommend,” Fraser said. “The whole purpose [of influencer gifting] is for the creators to share what they’re receiving on social,” and if those creators are unwrapping wildly different items, “it opens brands up to scrutiny.” 

A brand sorting influencers into tiers “based on something arbitrary, like their reach or their followers or engagement” and doling out gifts that way is “not the most logical [approach] to relationship-building," Fraser said.

Instead, brands should base their influencer gifting on the “relationship roadmaps” they develop with individual creators, with those gifts becoming more personalized and elaborate the more the influencer posts about the brand or actively communicates with the team, she said. For those so-called “evangelists,” Fraser said, “we’re finding ways to maybe invite them to exclusive events to meet the executive team at the brand; or, if we're doing a more robust round of gifting, that group of individuals will get it.”

For example, when Fraser and her team noticed that influencer Emma Chamberlain often included products from one of Dialogue New York’s former clients, beverage company Swoon, in her YouTube videos, they initially reached out to Chamberlain offering her gifted products. After “nurturing that relationship” over several months, the agency was able to facilitate a product collaboration between Swoon and Chamberlain’s coffee brand.

Many influencers, too, would prefer a deeper relationship with a brand over excessive gifting from a brand whose team they barely know. In a recent survey of over 500 creators by influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, one-third of them agreed brands should “build or maintain a strong relationship [with influencers] during the gifting partnership,” and 27% said brands should personalize the gifts they ship to influencers. 

Indeed, influencers who receive personalized mailers that “make the influencer feel like an individual” and contain products they’re truly interested in trying out or already enjoy are also far more likely to become the subject of an influencer’s unboxing video than a fleet of identical PR packages sent out to dozens or hundreds of creators, said Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Obviously. 

Before shipping out any gifted products to an influencer for one of its brand clients, Obviously reaches out to that influencer to ask if they’re interested in receiving products from the brand in the first place and whether there are any specific products they’re eager to receive, Karwowski said. The agency also combs through the influencer’s social posts to see if they can use any recent developments in their life to further personalize the PR package—for instance, if the influencer recently adopted a puppy, Obviously could add a dog bowl or other item into the package and nod to it in an enclosed note, she said.

With that strategy, Obviously’s clients see anywhere from 25% to 60% of the influencers they mail products to include those packages in their social content without any additional compensation, she added.

“That level of individualization is really important, because then audience members aren't left scratching their heads wondering, ‘Why did one person get this and another person get that?’” Karwowski said. “A message I would not take from this controversy is that you should give the same thing to all people, or that you should only do one [gifting campaign] at a time. Brands do concurrent gifting all the time. It’s actually a really smart thing to do … and being able to keep track of who received what products and how they feel about them really gives you a leg up on the competition.”

The influencer gifting space is also more saturated with brands than ever, which may be pushing brands such as Tarte to “up the ante” and mail out luxury items to improve their odds of being featured in creators’ content, Fraser said.

A report from influencer marketing platform Traackr found the number of TikTok posts from beauty influencers using words tied to product seeding, such as “gifted,” increased by 87% from 2022 to 2023. Over half of the marketers surveyed for the report said they send the influencers on their PR list anywhere from one to five packages each year, while more than one in four send upwards of 10 PR packages annually to each influencer on their lists.

“If you think about it from the influencer’s point of view, they’re getting so many packages, over and over and over, especially in beauty,” Fraser said. “And it takes time to try the makeup [and determine] ‘Do you like it? Does it work for your skin?’ But if you’re giving them a really thoughtful, creative, inspiring experience in their home, you’re far more likely to get that excitement from them to post in kind. So, creativity over dollar value I think is the way to go when it comes to influencer packages.”

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Marketers aren’t likely to abandon influencer gifting any time soon, Johnson said, due to the continued ability of attention-grabbing PR packages to spur “game-changing” viral videos for a brand. 

“Gifting is a lottery,” she said, “but if you did send a gift to Mikayla [Nogueira], and she did post about [your brand], you’ve won. That could be your greatest success of the year and make you so much revenue. Now, to break through, you do need to do something a bit different, which is what Tarte is doing here with the bracelets or other brands [like Gisou] are starting to do by literally sending someone a mini fridge full of products … These viral moments can sell out the whole stock overnight, and that’s such a powerful marketing tool.”