Everything I'm sharing here is based on my personal experience and perspective. These views are mine alone and do not represent any current, former, or future employers.
My intention and hope in writing this is to offer a more thoughtful perspective than can fit in an unpaid short form post from somebody who has been on nearly all sides of the sponsorship conversation, including the creator side. This post is the culmination of 10 years in the creator space, more than half of it on the industry side.
The post ahead is very very long but it covers incredibly useful information and has four main sections:
Brands – How they come to make decisions, budgets, types of ROI, and how they leverage agencies
Types of Partnerships – Tackling the myth that a partnership is only real if you're paid, different types of partnerships, and the benefits of each type
Improving Sponsorship Odds – Creating brand ready content, building out case studies, content bundling, communications, and some unfortunate realities
Talent Agents – What they're for, their goals, why you'd want one, the pitfalls you might experience, and an alternative that might work for some creators
There is surely something you will disagree with in this post and I want to be clear that this represents a singular perspective: mine. And if I could be so bold to offer you some instruction: simply take this post for what it is (my perspective) and leverage it against your own experience, knowledge, and opinions.
I've put up a subscribe with email to read further because I want this information to reach people who are genuinely interested in learning about the business side of creator partnerships. I don't post frequently to this blog and I'm not trying to monetize anything – feel free to unsubscribe after you read. I ask that you do not repost or repackage this content into other formats.
Note: All examples are made up and are fictional, but are representative of many instances over the years.
Big Bad Brands
They're just out here to screw you over and get you to do free work—well no, but kinda yes. Every marketing department is told to do as much as they possibly can to hit outrageous goals with as little budget as possible. Marketing has gone through a bit of a reckoning with an overreliance on Big Data to make decisions that caused a shift from storytelling to performance-driven marketing tactics. I have faith that non-marketers will come back around to understanding that marketing is both science and art, realizing that it cannot be distilled down to singular performance-driven tactics. Nike already has, they were a powerhouse of marketing for years, the platonic ideal of a marketing team. They hired a CMO that was all about Big Data and their sales went down... they're making a u-turn back to storytelling but it'll be a while before they recover (you can learn more on the interwebs, smarter folks than I have analyzed it). Though, much to my and others' chagrin, marketing is still likely to continue to have to fight for a seat at the table earlier in planning to achieve success.
Unfortunately for creators, most influencer marketing is all about Big Data. This means all of the conversations about "creators are more than their numbers" are hurting you because at the end of the day it is all about the numbers and ROI. Even if the person you're working with on the brand or agency side thinks you are a perfect fit and your content would go well with the campaign, if the numbers don't work they won't be able to move forward in partnering with you. We'll come back to this in more depth shortly.
Budget Decisions
When a brand (e.g., consumer product, game studio, etc.) decides they'd like to do an influencer marketing campaign (organic or paid), they're looking at the importance of that particular moment, the overall budget they have for the year, and the targets they need to hit. To keep it simple and most relevant to the audience I believe will be reading this, let's use games.
A game has many beats over the course of the campaign (hopefully, lol) leading up to launch and a fixed limited budget. A lot of truly independent (no publishers or investors) game studios with small teams are run on limited budgets (unless they've had a breakout success before) and set aside as little as $5,000-$10,000 total for all of their marketing. These games rely heavily on organic influencer marketing, creators covering their game because they want to or they find it interesting, not because they're paid to. Some of these studios may decide that if they can get one unicorn of an influencer that is good at moving their audience (a few large creators get cited A LOT) that it will be enough to drive success.
What about game studios with publishers? There are a lot of different models for how publishers support games, including doing the marketing for them in-house, but for the sake of this post let's focus on publishers who let the game studio handle their own marketing and instead give them a budget. That budget is often unlocked over time and connected to specific milestones that the studio has to hit. This means when they launch a game demo it is very likely there is no budget tied to that marketing beat, which is why you get a lot of emails asking you to check out the demo with your community. It's a milestone where they can collect feedback and get market validation. If the demo doesn't perform as well as the publisher expects it to, it can impact how much more investment (budget) the publisher puts into that game.
Not to mention the most important marketing moment for many game studios is launch, and so many (if not most) spend most of their budgets around launch because that's the only time they'll be able to start recouping some of their expenses and making money. In the section on improving your odds of sponsorship, I'll explain later on how you might leverage this knowledge into being sponsored.
So when it comes to deciding when to lean into influencer marketing and when to spend budget, it's often tied to a lot more complicated metrics unrelated to you, and the idea that if a game studio really wanted to work with you they'd be able to unlock more budget is narrowly true in some cases. Most of the time there is a set amount of budget for marketing for the whole year and every dollar spent in one place is a dollar not spent in another.
For non-gaming brands, it depends on if the product is a high margin product (low cost to make and sell), whether it's considered "upscale" or luxury, if the brand has a notable reputation (i.e., they're highly desired), and where in the marketing cycle that product is at.
Budget Allocation and ROI
Now that you've got a high-level understanding of how decisions are made, let's dive into budget allocation and ROI. When an influencer marketing budget is set aside it usually comes with a set of goals. To illustrate the point, here are two fictional influencer campaign overviews that might exist for a game's marketing beat: