Most gifting campaigns deliver some posts and a prayer. Beacons' Holiday Beauty Box delivered 24x earned media value from the initial investment, because our creator selection ran on first-party behavioral data.
$120,000
Earned media value
24x
Return on brand investment
Campaign details
Brand
Milani, Soshe, U Beauty, Chemist Confessions, and Mixik
Type
Creator gifting / PR seeding
Platforms
Instagram, TikTok
Objective
Earned media + engagement through creator gifting
Creators
100
The Challenge
Five beauty brands needed gifting that actually performed.
For beauty brands like Milani, Soshe, U Beauty, Chemist Confessions, and Mixik, the typical gifting problem is selection: brands send product to creators who match a category filter, not to people whose audiences will genuinely respond. The result is low engagement, forgettable content, and CPMs that can't compete with paid social.
Enter Beacons, with a different angle. Our first-party data powered a selection process that resulted in outsized impact for the brands included in our holiday beauty box.
How beacons did it
Every creator in the Holiday Box was selected through behavioral affinity signals on the Beacons platform, not keyword tags.
Our data surfaces which creators had referenced similar brands, how their audiences respond to beauty content, and which formats drive real engagement. Our platform data showed these creators had audiences who would care, and that the creator was ready to create content that felt native. These were known quantities before the campaign even launched.
Data powers greater EMV
Milani saw $64,000+ in earned media from 24 posts in a single gifting wave. That's not a coincidence; it's Beacons' creator selection.
Visual storytelling wins out.
Brands with products built for visual storytelling — tutorials, before/after, routines — drove the highest returns.
The results
$120,000 in earned media value from a ~$5,000 brand investment — a 24x return. Across 100 activated creators, engagement ran 15% against a 3–5% industry benchmark, at a $10 CPM competitive with paid social. The campaign drove 502,800 total impressions.
24x return on investment in EMV
5% engagement rate vs. the 3–5% industry benchmark
$10 effective CPM, competitive with paid social benchmarks