Campfire hosts its first event, Around the Campfire

Campfire has hosted its very first event. Around the Campfire took place on 17 September 2026 at Tangerine in Salford, bringing brand marketers, creators and talent managers together for an afternoon of talks, networking and hands-on activations.

We've spent years building experiences for creators on behalf of brands, from launch events to a ski trip in the Alps. This time we wanted the people who usually commission those moments to experience one themselves. So every guest was handed a creator brief at the door and invited to make something: a signature scent blended with a professional perfumer, a message in icing at the doughnut bar, a scripted piece to camera, a 30-second product pitch at our TikTok Shop station, or a print from the magic mirror photo booth.

Marketers from brands including Coty, Rimmel London, Unilever, Vaseline UK, Lookfantastic, THG and Channel 4 spent the afternoon with creators, talent managers and our team.

The participation economy

Alex Brown, our CCO and Co-Founder, opened the afternoon with a talk on the participation economy and what it means for creator marketing. His argument ran roughly like this:

• Creator content has become so optimised (briefs, hooks, talking points, discount codes) that a lot of it now looks like the advertising it was meant to replace.
• As feeds fill up with content that's easy to make, the things people can only get by taking part, like finding, collecting, attending and making, carry more weight. Scrolling, watching and liking is a very different relationship from "I was there. I found it. I made it. I'm part of it."
• So brands should create something worth experiencing first, and treat creators as an invitation into it rather than an endorsement vehicle.

He used two of our own campaigns to show it in practice: Holiday Lip Cuties, which turned Vaseline's travel-size lip balms into blind box collectibles, and the Vaseline UK ski trip, where creators kept posting long after they got home.

The panels

Behind the Influence: the creator and manager perspective. Creator Chisom Aimee and Jessica Henig, CEO of Unlocked Branding Talent Management, joined Gina Deen, our Head of Creator Marketing, to talk openly about why brand deals stall. Three points stuck with the room:

• Deals slow down when the first email lists deliverables but no fee or objective. Open with a fee band, and be clear whether it's indicative, pencilled or confirmed.
• Briefs arrive heavy because they're written for legal rather than the audience. Split them into a one-page creative brief and a separate approved-claims sheet, with one must-say and freedom around the rest.
• Share the objective at the start and the results at the end, because creators can't improve against a target nobody tells them about.

TikTok Shop, from brand and agency. Alice Nardeosingh, Head of Digital Marketing at Coty, and Lucy Warren, our TikTok Shop lead, walked through how Rimmel London turned the serving cappuccino trend into a TikTok Shop sell-out, and what had to change internally for a beauty brand to move at TikTok's pace. The thread through it all was that the winners on TikTok Shop aren't the biggest spenders, they're the brands that can say yes fastest.

What's next?

Around the Campfire will be back in 2027. If you'd like an invitation to the next one, get in touch and we'll let you know when dates are set.

Thank you to every speaker, guest and creator who came, and to our gift partners Vaseline, Fortnum & Mason, Westlab and Mooncup for filling the goody bags. You can watch the highlights video to see how the afternoon went.