A brand-partnership agreement — the deal of cooperation between a creator and a brand — does not exist in Georgian legislation as a distinct contract type. The statutory skeleton of this relationship grows out of the rules on sponsorship and ordinary contract law, and this should be said plainly: there is no special brand-partnership statute; what operates are the sponsorship provisions of the Advertising Law. This page explains that framework on the basis of articles thirteen, fifteen, twenty and twenty-one of the law.
When a Deal Qualifies as Sponsorship
Under article thirteen, sponsorship is the contribution by natural and legal persons to the activity of another natural or legal person — in the form of money, property, results of intellectual activity, the rendering of services, services rendered, the performance of work — on the condition that advertising of the goods produced by the sponsor is distributed. A sponsorship contribution is regarded as the value of the advertising, the sponsor as the advertising customer, and the sponsored party as the distributor of the advertising. A brand's deal with a creator, where the brand asks for mention of its product in exchange for compensation, falls precisely under this definition; and since the sponsorship contribution is regarded as the value of the advertising, its amount and form must be reflected in the agreement accordingly.
The sponsor has no right to interfere in the activity of the producer and the distributor of the advertising — this norm is the guarantee of the creator's creative independence. Nor does the right of sponsorship belong to a person whose product or activity may not be distributed under the law. Direct or indirect — that is, through another natural or legal person — sponsorship by manufacturers, importers and sellers of tobacco products, tobacco accessories or devices intended for tobacco consumption is prohibited. For a brand this is a categorical boundary: concealing the role of a prohibited sponsor through an intermediary cannot justify a breach of the law.
The Duty to Retain Materials
Article fifteen obliges every participant: the advertising customer, the producer and the distributor must keep the advertising materials or copies of them, including all subsequent changes, for 2 months from the day the advertising was last distributed, and where the material becomes disputed — until the dispute is resolved by the corresponding organs. For every participant in a campaign this means that the files of the content and the record of changes must be preserved for at least two months; the version history is precisely the evidence that supports each party's position in a dispute.