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TACTICS

When you do a deal with a brand, the marketer you are doing a deal with is a human being. Though you might say you are working with Brand X, you are actually working with Person Y.

(Even if it ends up being AI agents chatting with you through email, there will still be a human marketer directing that agent.)

If you ever worked a corporate job, you will already know this:

The marketers you are doing your brand deals with are always, always dealing with some shit.

That’s especially true these days, when layoffs are in the news daily and fear permeates the economy.

A study from Traackr and EMARKETER found the five top challenges for marketers compensating Creators:

These are all straight-up job related:

• Internal budget constraints - Adjusting a team’s budget only happens once or twice a year and requires Game of Thrones-level political combat. Spoiler: lots of people died in Game of Thrones, so it’s easier to just pass.

• Lack of standardized pricing benchmarks - I've seen, used, and even created many models for Creator partnership pricing - they are as varied as bugs on Earth (fun fact: there are 30 million insect species). Getting deals approved (and avoiding getting fired if something goes wrong) is much easier if a marketer can say “this is the industry standard”. Unfortunately, no such standard exists.

• Unclear ROI metrics - High interest rates, rising prices, and falling consumer demand is forcing more and more companies to take an ROI-based approach to marketing. If a marketer can't easily “prove” that they will generate a meaningful profit directly from a deal, they won’t get it approved.

• Inflexible or high rates from Creators - It's way easier to blame Creators for overcharging than to acknowledge (or explain to a boss) that no one wants the product or pricing expectations are unrealistically low.

• Time-consuming negotiations - If a marketer’s job is to get a campaign done in a certain amount of time, and you (or your agent) may delay their timeline due to a protracted negotiation, they're just going to move on. Nobody wants to get fired because someone else took forever.

The takeaway here is to understand that a partnership negotiation often isn’t personal for the other side, unless you’re negotiating with the owner of a small business. For you, this is your life’s work; for them, it’s another day at a job they are probably trying to keep but may or may not like.

Communicate and make decisions accordingly.

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Written by Avi Gandhi, edited by Melody Song,
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