Pepper wins three Global Influencer Marketing Awards 2026

We’re very excited to share that Pepper picked up three awards at the 2026 Global Influencer Marketing Awards, including Gold for Influencer Marketing Team of the Year.

Alongside our team win, two brilliant pieces of client work were awarded Silver - our level crossing safety campaign with Network Rail and 23red, and our research-led travel campaign with Tripadvisor and Go Türkiye.

Three awards celebrating three very different areas of our work, but all grounded in something we care deeply about at Pepper - making influencer marketing more effective, more thoughtful and more responsible.

Gold: Influencer Marketing Team of the Year

This is a particularly special one.

Since Pepper was founded in 2019, we’ve been building a creator-first agency designed around the way people actually experience brands today - bringing together influencer marketing, organic social, UGC, paid media, production, strategy and research.

Today, that means a team of 25+ specialists working across the UK, US and Asia, delivering work for brands including the Financial Times, Network Rail, Celsius and H&M.

But we’ve also been working towards something bigger than the campaigns we deliver.

We want the experiences of our team, clients and creators to be as positive as possible, while using our position in the industry to help influence how marketing affects creators, young people appearing in content and the wider influencer marketing landscape.

That thinking has been central to the development of our Responsible Kidfluence Code - our framework for creating more ethical standards around children and young people in influencer marketing. The Code has since been incorporated into UNICEF’s Industry Toolkit on Children’s Rights and Digital Marketing.

It was something the GIMA judges specifically recognised:

“The Responsible Kidfluence Code is an important and intelligently put together piece of best practice.”

Receiving Gold for Influencer Marketing Team of the Year - and seeing this work highlighted as part of that recognition - means an enormous amount to us.

Silver: Best Small Budget, Big Impact Campaign

Level Crossing Safety That Hit Different - Network Rail x 23red x Pepper

How do you make a young audience pay attention to a safety message they may have heard countless times before?

Following fatalities linked to distraction, Network Rail needed to raise awareness of level crossing dangers among 16-to-34-year-olds, working with a modest budget and an audience increasingly desensitised to traditional public safety messaging.

Our answer was to make the message feel native to the content they were already choosing to watch.

Working with tech creator Ben Rowlands, the campaign began with familiar creator content before suddenly interrupting it with a shocking near-miss moment - reflecting just how quickly distraction at a level crossing can become dangerous.

A three-part storytelling format across TikTok and Instagram combined entertainment, education and behind-the-scenes content, earning attention before reframing the risks of distraction. The campaign went on to significantly outperform its KPIs despite its limited budget.

The judges said:

“A strong public safety campaign that used creator content intelligently to earn attention from a hard-to-reach younger audience.”

Silver: Best Data-Driven Influencer Campaign

Find Your Wanderer: Travel Content Worth Wandering For - Tripadvisor x Go Türkiye x Pepper

Our second Silver celebrated something else that’s incredibly important to the way we approach influencer marketing at Pepper - using research to understand audiences before deciding which creators should speak to them.

Go Türkiye wanted to inspire UK travellers aged 18 to 35 in an incredibly competitive tourism market, at a time when highly polished, traditional travel advertising was struggling to connect with younger audiences.

Rather than starting with a creator shortlist, we started with the audience.

We conducted research with 486 UK respondents, exploring how people discover destinations, which platforms they trust and what ultimately influences their booking decisions. The research identified Instagram as the primary platform for trust and inspiration and showed a preference for authentic, personal travel experiences over polished advertising.

Those insights then informed creator selection, matching storytelling styles with the motivations we had identified through the research. Creators Temwa, Priya (@thedateconnoisseur) and The Fishers (@traveltheworldfamily) brought Türkiye to life through immersive, relatable content designed around how younger travellers actually discover and consider destinations.

The judges summed up exactly what we wanted the approach to achieve:

“The data and research are the golden thread throughout this entry, and clearly the campaign.”

Three awards, one very proud Pepper team

What makes these three awards particularly special is the breadth of work they recognise.

From responsible influencer marketing and industry best practice, to creator-first public safety communications, to research-led influencer strategy, they reflect a lot of what we’ve been working towards as an agency.

None of it happens without brilliant people.

A huge thank you and congratulations to our wonderful Pepper team, our clients and partners at Network Rail, 23red, Tripadvisor and Go Türkiye, and the creators who trusted us to make this work together.

And, of course, thank you to the Global Influencer Marketing Awards judges for the recognition.

One Gold. Two Silvers. A very happy Pepper team.