Stop Renting Attention – Start Earning It

Briony Kent is the Head of Marketing at Salomon ANZ and will appear at the 2026 BIGSOUND conference.

Global spend on creator and influencer partnerships hit $44 billion this year, up nearly 20% on 2025.

Brands are chasing partnerships at a rate like never before, all fighting for the same finite pool of human attention. We’ve been calling this the attention recession, and everyone at BIGSOUND this year will leave having heard the phrase at least once. But here’s what nobody wants to admit: the recession isn’t a shortage of attention. It’s a shortage of any brand actually earning it. 

Right now, it feels like most brand partnerships are rental agreements. A brand buys two posts on a musician's or influencer's feed, matches the aesthetic, borrows the TOV and calls it “authentic.” It isn’t.

Consumers can tell the difference between a true partner and paid guest almost instantly, and that gap is only getting harder to hide as every brand in the market is running the exact same playbook at the exact same time.

The partnerships that actually cut through don’t tie back to a look or a caption hook. They tie back to a whole life. Before you sign anyone, look at the corners of their life nobody’s paying attention to: what they do on an ordinary Tuesday, who they spend time with, what they show up for when there’s no camera and no brief attached. Are they already living inside the world you brand occupies, the same events, the same rituals, the same communities? Or are they only standing there because it’s a paid appearance.That’s the test. Then think past the single campaign. A real partnership plays out over years, not months. It needs to show up in the places a media plan never reaches: through their friends, through their family, through the events they are hosting and not just the ones your brand is funding. It has to move off the feed and into real life, into your stores, your communities, the rooms your customers are standing in. If the only place the relationship exists in is sponsored posts, it was never a partnership. It was a placement.

That’s the part most brands skip. Staying.

There is a persistent belief in marketing that visibility has to be constant, that a partnership only works if the brand is in someone’s face on every post, every week, every platform. I believe it’s actually the opposite. The magic is in the peaks and the troughs. When a brand is quiet and humming along in the background, doing the unglamorous, unremarkable work of just being present in a community, that is what buys the right to have a genuinely loud moment later.

If you’re loud all the time, nothing you do actually reads as an “event.” People stop looking. But if you’ve been quietly consistent and then you show up in a big way, say at a festival or a race day, that moment gets noticed, and it gets remembered.

Longevity is the other half of the equation, and it’s the part that’s hardest to fake with budget. When people see a brand working with the same partner across multiple formats over an extended period of time, a post here, an event here, a campaign there, it reads as commitment rather than a transaction. It’s the same instinct that makes a long friendship feel different to a first date.

So before signing anything, we ask three questions. What’s the season? Meaning is this a one-off flare, or are we planning for this to still be true in two years? What’s the point? Meaning does this partner's actual life and values overlap with ours, not just their grid. And what’s the 360? Meaning can this live across content, retail, events and community, or does it collapse the moment the campaign ends?

Any brand with enough money can buy awareness. Awareness is the easy part. What money can’t buy is consideration, and it definitely cannot buy brand love.

Those only come from partnerships that hold up under scrutiny over time, the ones where a consumer could go looking and find loads of evidence and not just one sponsored post from March.

The smartest brands in the room at BIGSOUND this year won’t be the ones who signed the most names. They’ll be the ones who ask the questions, build a connection and understand something other than just the acts' next big hit.