4 Tips for Working with Creators During the Holidays

Traackr’s 2026 State of Holiday Season report found that in Q4 of 2025 creator content volume rose 73% YoY, while attention per holiday post fell 28%. 

It’s harder than ever to break through, so we brought together experts to dig into the practices brands need to take in order to break through this holiday. 

Here are the top tips that came out during the conversation. 

Tip #1: Start booking talent for Q4 now

Is there a spike in creator premiums during Q4? Absolutely. 

Lumanu,* which processes more than $1.5 billion in creator and vendor payments annually across a network of over 500,000 creators and vendors, found that total creator spend rose about 60% from spring to its December peak, and that the median payout hit $1,750 in December, up from roughly $1,100 to $1,200 in a typical month.

And that premium gets locked in earlier than you might expect. 

"The most payouts happen in December and January. But for talent managers, late July through August are the biggest booking months. Brands are locking in Black Friday and holiday while calendars are still open." —Paul Johnson, Cofounder & Head of Operations, Lumanu

Paul also shared that the same brand showing up and booking last minute going into Q4 is likely getting quoted 50%+ higher rates for a single post. Q4 is often the busiest window for creators, so locking in early and positioning yourself as easy to work with is key. 

Lumanu's data found the same creator charging up to 10 times more for one partnership than another. The reason is not the work but the terms. Reaching out to a few talent managers, Paul learned that rates often come in 60% to 70% lower for brands that pay quickly and book several posts at once, because those deals are easier for creators to manage. 

*Lumanu figures are based on a representative sample of full year of payments activity, covering approximately $600 million in brand-to-creator payments processed in 2025.

Tip #2: Prioritize your loyal creators 

Traackr’s holiday report found that top brands earned 57% of their holiday attention from retained creators, versus 51% for the rest of the market. ShopMy ran the same question against revenue and found an even starker gap.

"We looked at holiday performance from 2025 and said, all right, let's look at the time frame of when these brands first started working with these creators. And in fact, over80% of revenue that was driven in holiday was from relationships that started prior to October." —Jack Riker, SVP & Head of Sales at ShopMy

It’s imperative to your Q4 plans to understand who your top-performing creators were for H1 of 2026 (and even Q4 of 2025) and determine how to re-engage them. Now this doesn't always mean re-signing the same creators every quarter, but finding unique ways to keep your top creators engaged with your brand. 

"Retention isn't necessarily paid partner quarter over quarter. It's not just using the same paid partners, but it's keeping that relationship and potentially moving between organic mention, paid, paid back into organic, going beyond that single campaign." —Holly Jackson, VP of Insights & Innovation at Traackr

Consistency is what makes a holiday recommendation land in the first place. The gold star is to have a creator mention they've been using your product the whole year and just has to share this deal with their audience so they can have it too.

Because gift recommendations are exactly where holiday attention went last year. Of every major holiday theme tracked, gift guides were the only one to grow both post volume and attention per post, up 20% and 17%, while every other theme added posts and lost efficiency. Your loyal creators are the ones who can carry your brand into that format credibly. 

Tip #3: Brief against the holiday instinct

Does holiday content perform best with a single product focus? The data says no. 

Traackr’s AI multimodal analysis found that Instagram posts with six to 10 brands in frame are saved 2.44x as often as the platform median, while single-brand posts fall to 0.66x.

Now, letting go of your brand being the single focus in a creator's post isn't always easy or possible to accept, especially in a paid capacity. One option that was brought up in the discussion is to swap total exclusivity for category exclusivity.

"Swap total exclusivity for category exclusivity. A beauty brand could sponsor a post that's a gift guide for your mom or your teenage daughter, and brief that there are no competing beauty brands in there, but you can also add fashion or food or squishies or whatever. So you still get that same attention to the post. You still get the save, but the guidelines are a little looser, and it gives more creative control." —Holly Jackson, VP of Insights & Innovation at Traackr

For teams that can't get category exclusivity approved, Holly offered a second route: search your creator network for people who built gift guides in the past few years, then bring them in through gifting or an affiliate offer rather than a full paid brief. That was one of the ways she saw creators monetize gift guides last year.

Exclusivity is only one part of the brief the data argues with. The same multimodal analysis of 10,279 creator posts found that the choices that read as "holiday" are often the ones costing you the save:

• Shoot close, and at home. Close-up framing earns 1.17x the median Instagram saves and home settings 1.13x, while full-body shots fall to 0.73x and event or red carpet content bottoms out at 0.43x, the floor of the dataset.
• Skip the festive metallics. Warm palettes drive the strongest conviction in the data, with peach reaching 3.54x Instagram saves and burgundy 2.67x. Silver drops to 0.56x TikTok saves and metallic to 0.62x.
• Just ask. Posts with a clear call to action are saved 1.35x as often on Instagram and 1.16x on TikTok, and only 24% of posts include one, making it the rare lever that's both reliable and wide open.

Tip #4: Look where nobody else is pitching

Affiliate content now accounts for one in eight holiday creator posts, and the number of unique creators posting affiliate content is up 35%.

What’s interesting is where affiliate lives now. Attention on TikTok Shop grew 161% YoY and ShopMy grew 157%, while LTK fell 19% and Amazon fell 15%. 

When it comes to affiliate, it’s important to remember that consumers want better recommendations from people they trust. Shoppers turn to tastemakers to cut through the noise, and some of those tastemakers might be outside the traditional feed. 

"If we look at the conversion rate from affiliate links posted across different platforms over the past 365 days, Substack has the highest conversion rate. And yet for a lot of people when they think about working with creators, they're solely thinking about these more public social channels." — Jack Riker, SVP & Head of Sales at ShopMy

Affiliate is the right vehicle for this kind of test because it comes with proof attached. As Jack mentioned, it’s getting harder to fund brand building without an ROI justification. Affiliate gives you a trackable path from a creator's recommendation to an actual purchase. That makes a small bet on an unproven channel far easier to defend internally than the same spend on awareness.

What to take into your holiday planning meeting

None of these plays are about doing more. Q4 2025 was the most crowded creator window on record, and the brands that pulled ahead did it with relationships built earlier, briefs written against the seasonal instinct, and an affiliate mix that follows where commerce is actually going. 

"The moves that won last holiday were the quiet ones. Relationships built early, start now, organic momentum, briefs loose enough to let creators do what actually earns a save." —Lia Haberman, Founder of ICYMI Newsletter

Four things to leave your planning meeting with:

1. Pull your H1 2026 top performers and get them on the Q3 and Q4 calendar before September, then pace activations across the full quarter rather than crowding into BFCM, where attention per BFCM post fell 63% last year.
2. Package deliverables instead of buying posts one at a time, and commit to paying on delivery.
3. Revisit your briefs with the save in mind. Consider trading total exclusivity for category exclusivity, and ensure you have a clear call to action. 
4. Move a slice of affiliate budget toward TikTok Shop and ShopMy, and test one channel your competitors aren't pitching.

Watch the full session on demand, and download the 2026 State of Holiday Season report for category-level breakdowns across Beauty, Fashion, Personal Care, Food & Beverage, and Adult Beverage.