But when you include a named person, a specific number (like a % that something changed), and sprinkle in enough detail so that people can tell it’s real, that’s when it really converts.

Let’s look at a few examples of case studies done well:

Miro x Endava

Endava is a London-based tech services business with just over 10k staff. They rolled out Miro across the business in 2026.

Miro didn’t just ask for permission to put the Endava logo on their website; they did a full video production with the CTO, Matt Cloke, at Endava’s HQ in London.

The original plan was to put their CEO on camera, but it fell through and they went with the CTO. Which is better in my opinion because the CTO is much closer to the action when it comes to things like Miro because he has to understand the tech engineering side of the business, and that’s where Miro comes in.

The lesson here is that the biggest title doesn’t win. In fact, to the ICP, it would have diluted the message. Prospects can hear the difference when it’s coming from an end user.

And it didn’t stop there. Endava’s leadership have since told this story on Miro’s conference stage across the world. That’s gold and I’d bet it was baked into the contract.

What’s in your contracts?

Langfuse x Ramp

Langfuse is a software company that helps engineering teams monitor their AI agents. Something pretty crucial in the agentic era we’re all living in. Their customer story isn’t a testimonial like the Miro one above, it’s a recording of a demo by their customer (Ramp) at a conference.

Two real engineers with real names and faces. Actual dashboards on screen. Why they chose to use Langfuse and the results: 30% faster, 15% fewer tool calls.

Think about that. Imagine if one of your customers just randomly stood up on stage and gave a huge demo about why your tool has been amazing. That’s unfakeable. And invaluable.

The only thing Langfuse had to do was say thank you and put it at the top of the customer page!

Lights, camera, action

A recent study showed that around 36% of B2B SaaS companies include video in their case studies. However, when companies choose which case studies to prioritise, they choose the ones with video in them, to the tune of 90%.

So they do know that video is king. It’s just most can’t figure out how to get customers on camera.

And this all boils down to difficulty. Video is hard. Which means there’s a big barrier to entry. Most marketers are comfortable writing a blog post, but ask them to plan, shoot, or edit a video, and we see that most aren’t comfortable here. Which is why they end up hiring an agency for it. Which is why it doesn’t get done.

The Lesson

Get video testimonials in your contracts where you can. Get the real users of your product or service on camera singing all the praises with real numbers and real problems being solved.

Don’t just rely on blogs and logos.

Until next time,

Gary

One of the things that you’ll notice if you look at any sponsorship material online is that a lot of it is terribly average.

And usually, that’s because the sponsor isn’t going for a long-term relationship with the person being sponsored. It’s just a short-term engagement for one to a few pieces of content.

One of the things that the industry needs to do better is to find good creators with ambitious content that they can engage with for a minimum of a year, not too dissimilar to how sports teams do it.

In this blog, I want to talk about companies that are doing it really, really well. We’re going to go deep and figure out if there is a recipe for how to do sponsorships well.

And I’d like to start with this opening point, which includes a case study about Kirk:

Virality is random; dominance isn’t.

I’ve got videos that are highly produced, they took months to research and edit, and they are in the 10,000 views range. But I also have videos that are simple screen recordings with voiceover and they have over 450,000 views at the time of writing this. I never expected that wide range of results.

If a brand sponsors a single video, it could get them 10,000 impressions. But if they form a partnership with the creator and have some way of being in every video (link in description, logo on t-shirt like a sports team jersey, a simple “brought to you by…” readout at the start of the video) then the brand increases their surface area significantly.

You only have to look at your favourite creator’s profile and you’ll see a significant range of results. Here’s Kirk Lepiten’s Instagram Reels. He's got just shy of 70k followers and the views range from 24,300 to 2,000,000.

Like I said: you can’t predict this. Even HE can’t predict it.

You’ll notice Kirk wears a Pirelli hat. I’d love it if Pirelli were actually a partnership-style sponsor of Kirk’s because then they get exposed to ALL of these views.

Sephora Squad

Sephora absolutely nailed this. They developed a 12-month-long paid ambassador programme called Sephora Squad and it still runs to this day.

And the selection criteria prioritise a creator’s impact in the community over their follower count, and applicants have to collect testimonials from their own followers as part of the application process.

You can see below that on the Sephora website, each of these ambassadors has their own storefront, a bit like the Amazon Creator storefront. The ambassadors typically link to this from their LinkedIn bio on socials.

And some of the CMOs out there might be wondering, “But what was the ROI of this?” The 2022 cohort of ambassadors delivered 99% social growth across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube over the year.

Applications for the 2023 cohort were over 16,000 strong, which was a 43% jump.

And they did an international extension of the programme between 2024 and 2025, which saw engaged reach move from 73 million to 120 million.

If you can’t see the ROI in that, you might want to get a different job.

What’s also cool about the Sephora squad is that former members become mentors to new members. Which is pretty close to what employee-generated content programmes look like, but instead, Sephora has applied this to creators instead of staff.

Here’s a thought exercise for you:

If you could identify a couple of creators who are always speaking positively about your product for free and they have engaged audiences, how much would you be willing to pay them to formally form a partnership?

Gymshark x Chris Bumstead

Gymshark takes it one step further. Gymshark has ambassadors that they work with on a regular basis, but there’s a whole level above that called Gymshark Athlete and Ben Francis, the CEO, is extremely picky around who they work with.

There are people that have contractual partnerships, who are expected to participate in Gymshark events, do campaign integrations, and even co-create products or own part of the company.

And that’s exactly what happened with Chris Bumstead, also known as Cbum.

Cbum signed with Gymshark in 2018, left after 4 years and then rejoined in 2024 as a part owner of the company. That’s an epic arc and he carries all of his personal brand equity into the business.

And even the little break that he took after leaving the programme before then rejoining is interesting because it’s clear that he wanted to be back in the business and part of the Gymshark brand.

Another thought exercise:

What influencer or content creator would you like to work with in the same way that Cbum works with Gymshark? You give them a piece of the business, and they bring their audience amazing content. How much of the business do you think that would be worth?

Dan Suzuki

Dan is an influential member of the sim racing community and works for a company called GSI. They make high-end racing simulator steering wheels. In fact, I own one.

Dan has a highly engaged audience on YouTube and frequently works with brands on content. Some of it sponsored, some of it not. But what’s really interesting about Dan is that he doesn’t just promote GSI products. He also talks about other companies that make steering wheels and sim racing gear and creates reviews that are very well balanced. You get a real sense from his content that what he’s saying on camera is what he genuinely believes. He’s even spoken negatively about certain features within GSI’s own products and where other companies are doing things better.

And this has been going on for years. Clearly, if GSI had a problem with it, they would tell him to stop doing it. But clearly, they haven’t. My take is that GSI values his transparency with the community and it probably even motivates them internally to make better and better products.

Thought exercise:

Can you dream up a world in which you have an employee who’s an influencer and helps you promote your products, but they also help other companies in your sector promote their products!? think about what that might look like internally, who might not be happy with it, and what you would have to say to win them over.

How to erode trust

If you want to look at an example of a sponsorship that absolutely does not build trust for anyone involved in the deal, we have to look no further than Kim Kardashian promoting a crypto company.

In 2021, Kim posted about a crypto token called EthereumMax to her 250 million Instagram followers.

She was paid $250,000 for it.

In October 2022, the SEC charged her with unlawfully touting a crypto security. She settled for $1.26 million, which means she lost the original fee and was stung for an additional $1 million penalty, and agreed to not promote crypto assets for 3 years.

This is literally an inversion of all of the sponsorships above.

• There was no existing relationship between Kim Kardashian and EthereumMax.

• There was no track record with that product category.

And there was no disclosure.

Let’s flip it: if Kim had promoted Sephora’s makeup, you can see a much more natural alignment.

What to actually do with this information

Stop buying posts and start building relationships

If you have a marketing budget for 12 creator posts across a year or one creator for the whole year, take the one creator for the whole year.

Find people already using your products

All the examples above (apart from Kim’s) worked because they started with something real. Sephora made applicants prove that their audience trusted them first. Gymshark promoted people up the ladder over the years. Dan is an expert in the racing category.

Give them something to lose

Equity, a title, even a seat at the table. Whatever makes sense. When you make them own a piece of something, they behave completely differently to someone who’s just cashing in an invoice.

Always disclose

Whenever you label an ad as an ad, it costs a tiny bit of credibility, but when you don’t label it as an ad and people find out that it’s an ad, it costs you all the credibility.

Final Thoughts

Sponsorships are an amazing opportunity for brands to grow in near-exponential ways. Meaningful and trustworthy results in this space can only exist over longer time horizons.

Don’t rush it.

You don’t rush it with your own employees. The real question here isn’t whether you can build the trust Sephora and Gymshark built. It’s whether you’re willing to spend the years it actually takes.

Until next week,
Gary

Want to scale your brand with us? switchfire.co

Here’s the problem with a typical press release: everyone knows that it was bought and paid for.

Money swapped hands. And that makes it so much harder to trust.

You can wordsmith the best press release in the world and it’ll still hit like an advert, because it IS one.

That being said, some companies are doing it right. Let’s look at four who are and one who didn’t.

Tony’s Chocolonely publishes the tragic reality.

Every year, Tony’s puts out this huge report that actually discloses the child labour they find inside their own supply chain.

Not their competitors. Theirs!

3,448 cases were in the 2024/2025 report; more than double the year before.

Think about that. Any normal PR team would bury that in an appendix. Or they’d try and dress it up:

They certainly wouldn’t LEAD with it. But that’s exactly what Tony’s does. No journalist could ever miss this figure in Tony’s reports. That’s why it gets written about year after year.

The lesson? Lead with the bad news. Own it.

CrowdStrike breaks the Internet.

In July 2024, CrowdStrike issued a faulty update to their security software and took down almost 10 million Windows computers in the time it takes to watch a film.

Flights were grounded. Hospitals stopped. Banks couldn’t trade.

The estimated losses were around $6 billion USD.

A NIGHTMARE scenario for a globally trusted security company.

But.

Just a short while later, they published an update that highlighted the issue with a sincere apology from George Kurtz, the CEO, and links to where people can keep an eye on the latest information about the issue as it develops.

They could have published the typical: “we value and respect your privacy and take security seriously” response, but they did so much more than that.

The 12-page document told the whole story, even CISA (the US Government’s cybersecurity agency) pointed people to CrowdStrike’s reports as the definitive source. That’s pretty high praise from a government body.

That type of coverage can’t be bought.

The lesson? Be transparent, even if you’re bleeding and hurting. Not only will you feel better about it (because you’re not lying) but your customers will feel the difference.

CrowdStrike did make one little error in all this. They sent affected clients $10 Uber Eats vouchers for their trouble. Some of these vouchers even got flagged as fraudulent. I understand where they were coming from: thinking about the late nights the IT and cyber teams had to work to get systems back online, ordering food in would be a nice gesture. It just wasn’t received that way by everyone.

GitLab livestreams their disaster.

In 2017, an engineer at GitLab deleted production systems instead of a replica database. 300GB were gone. Which was around 5,000 projects and 700 user accounts. 18 hours of downtime.

If you don’t know, GitLab is:

So this was a complete disaster that called into question the very fundamental nature of what they do.

So what did they do next? Livestreamed the entire recovery process on YouTube.

5,000 people watched them in real-time. A few engineers on a Zoom call, fixing this disaster. Fully visible on YouTube. I managed to find a copy too, have a scrub through this so you can see the vibe:

The industry responded with the hashtag #HugOps - very sweet.

Can you imagine the banks going live on YouTube during the financial crisis? I certainly can’t.

Something notable though, they did get called out for naming individuals in the review of the incident. Don’t throw your people under the bus.

But if we look at CrowdStrike and GitLab, two tech companies with huge incidents years apart. Both being transparent and brave. This is where B2B should be at, instead of constantly trying to pull the wool over customers’ eyes.

Buffer publishes everyone’s salary.

This one isn’t a crisis like the others.

In 2013, Buffer (the social media scheduling app) published every employee’s salary, the mathematical formula behind it, and the equity. All on a live dashboard.

Business Insider, Inc, Fast Company, and Forbes all wrote about it. And Buffer are still publishing it to this day.

No press release. No PR agency. They just put the data on the site and don’t make a big song and dance about it. They let it speak for itself.

It’s a taboo topic in most cultures, but Buffer just tackled it head on.

They didn’t need a disaster to strike to get PR, they just showed their radical transparency.

The lesson? Put one thing on your website that makes you a little nervous.

Southwest Airlines: How not to do it.

It’s the Christmas holidays in 2022 and 16,000 flights have been cancelled. Southwest cancelled 59% of their flights, but other airlines were only cancelling about 3%.

The CEO, Bob Jordan, issued a 3-minute long apology that didn’t land well.

The Transport Secretary wrote him a letter pointing out that everyone else had the exact same weather and that they all recovered.

The comments on the above video paint the picture of underinvestment in critical systems and a culture of profit. If he’d have come out and said, “the reason this happened is because I didn’t prioritise upgrading our systems, I’m going to forfeit my bonus and stay on to help right the ship,” things might have been received in a better light.

Tips for writing these statements

Remember, all of these statements are written under pressure. So you need to practice. There’s a couple of sayings in the military:

Practice bleeding.

and

Train hard; fight easy.

You need to publish brave things that will get picked up in the press, when a crisis ISN’T happening. Put yourself in the firing line. Get used to how it feels.

You need to pick the named person and train them. Their media training needs to cover admitting fault on camera, not just answering simple questions.

You need to get the facts straight. Fast. Gather the facts as they come to light. CrowdStrike and GitLab could publish quickly because they documented everything as it happened. Do the same.

A challenge

Pick an uncomfortable thing, and publish it this month.

Until next week,
Gary

Want to scale your brand with us? switchfire.co

The vast majority of paid media buys attention. It doesn’t buy trust.

And in a world now plagued by unchecked AI-generated content, trust is a crucial business asset that brands need to protect.

Brands can borrow a slogan, license a jingle, or hire a celebrity’s face. But what they don’t want to risk is saying something that works against its own short-term interests. Which, is short-term thinking. That’s what separates paid media that builds trust from paid media that just buys reach.

I’ve scoured the Internet and found five great examples that built trust with paid media, and what the commercial results looked like when they did.

1. Patagonia: “Don’t Buy This Jacket”

On Black Friday 2011, Patagonia ran a full page advert in the New York Times. It had a photo of their best-selling jacket with a headline telling people not to buy it! The copywriting underneath went into all the details on the terrible environmental cost of making that single product.

It was the complete opposite of a typical Black Friday ad.

Those ads are typically focused on driving impulse buying with reduced prices and scarcity language. Patagonia’s ad didn’t conform to this mould. Their ad made people think, the opposite of making people act on impulse.

Sales rose roughly 30% over the following nine months, and the company was doing $1 billion in annual sales within six years.

Why it worked: Patagonia had already switched to organic cotton at triple the cost and had been sharing its supply chain data with competitors for years before this ad ran. Anyone can buy ad space. Nobody can retroactively buy six years of tactical and strategic decision making.

2. KFC: “FCK”

In February 2018, a delivery partner switch left around 800 of KFC’s 900 UK stores without chicken (I remember it well!). KFC’s response was a full-page ad showing an empty bucket with the letters cleverly rearranged, along with a plain language human apology.

In the middle of a crisis, KFC made potentially annoyed customers laugh. The ad generated almost 1,000 press articles and reached close to 800 million people.

Why it worked: KFC never publicly blamed the delivery partner, even though the fault sat with them and they played on the obvious expletive using their name and brand typeface. Taking a hit they could easily have deflected is what makes an apology believable rather than just performative.

3. Hans Brinker: “The Worst Hotel in the World”

Since 1995, this Amsterdam hostel has run ads describing itself as the dive it actually is. The reviews on Tripadvisor are like the Wild West. The ads play on these negative reviews and span a variety of visual styles.

Occupancy rose 42% since the campaign began, and it’s picked up awards at Cannes Lions and Effies too.

Why it worked: The audience is young travellers looking for a bargain who already assume that most marketing is lying to them. Telling the truth about a real stay was one thing that none of their competitors were doing, so they embraced it, and it worked. Use this tactic at your own discretion! It won’t work favourably for every sector: healthcare for example.

4. Domino’s: “Pizza Turnaround”

By 2009, Domino’s had a pretty bad reputation, with focus groups describing the crust as being like cardboard. Rather than secretly changing the recipe and praying that customers would notice, Domino’s made a four-minute documentary-style ad. In it, their actual executives, including their president the time, read the harshest criticism aloud on camera, and then announced a full recipe overhaul.

Q1 2010 sales rose 14%, and the stock rose 130% over the following year.

Why it worked: The sequence is the real tactic here. Domino’s changed the product first, and then filmed the confession tapes. Brands that do it the other way (film the confessions and then say we’ll work on the fix) tend to get worse positioning afterwards since the failure is now on record twice rather than just once.

Another great example of the wrong way is Wells Fargo’s “Re-Established” campaign in 2018. They admitted their old behaviour was bad, then kept getting caught doing more of it. The confession came before the fix, not after, so every new headline read as the company contradicting its own ad campaign in real time.

5. Liquid Death: “Greatest Hates”

Liquid Death has spent years posting its own worst reviews and social comments on its website. In 2023, they turned a collection of genuinely hateful comments into a full music album.

The launch month was one of the brand’s strongest for customer reviews.

Why it’s a different mechanism to the other four: The other four are admissions. Confessing something true and usually uncomfortable. Liquid Death isn’t confessing anything, it’s redirecting. They’re saying “your insults doesn’t hurt us.” They’re projecting confidence rather than just honesty.

The pattern across all five

Four are admissions, one is a redirection, but all five required the brand to spend money doing something against its own short-term interest, and that cost is what makes it believable. CFO’s have a hard time signing this stuff off, which is why you don’t see it very often!

Paid media that just repeats a claim doesn’t build trust, regardless of the budget behind it. Paid media that costs the brand something real, does.

Until next week,
Gary

Want to scale your brand with us? switchfire.co