The uproar over OpenAI’s luxury creator trip to New York — in which around 30 creators stayed at a high-end farm resort, ate farm-to-table meals and learned beekeeping — has died down. The backlash exposed that brand trips can work, but the format needs to change. If brands continue to rely on in-your-face luxury or overly curated events as ways to activate creators and reach their loyal (and increasingly discerning) audiences, they could end up facing online backlash, too.That’s really why OpenAI got lambasted last week. Creators are predicated on the promise of access and authenticity — the sense that they give their audiences something unscripted, uncompromised and real. A swanky trip to the high-end Wildflower Farms resort in upstate New York for a weekend of eco-friendly activities seems to fly in the face of that. So much so that the backlash caused some of the invited creators to delete their posts, while others locked their comments.
“People are struggling,” said Victoria Bachan, co-founder and CEO at creator management agency Hyphen HQ. “If the creator economy is a mirror to the wider economy, you cannot sit outside and separate from it, you have to live within it.”
OpenAI isn’t alone here. The same claims were levied at a raft of brands this year, including Revolve and Kendall Jenner’s tequila brand 818, both of which flew realtors out to Coachella in the spring. Unlike those trips, though, OpenAI’s hit every beat of the brand trip playbook that’s currently backfiring. The price tag — rooms running $2,200 to $5,400 a night — became the headline rather than staying in the background.
