Influence Weekly

Every March you build the list again. Thirty, forty, sixty creators, new negotiations, new briefs, new product shipped to people who have never touched it. Three weeks later you pull the recap deck and the budget goes back to zero. Then the next quarter starts and you do all of it again. Here is the part nobody puts in the contract. Every first video a creator makes is their worst, and a campaign only ever buys that first video. You are paying full price for the draft, four times a year, and ...

Your agency is sending offers out under your logo right now. Somebody on the other side is reading them and deciding whether your brand gets a reply next quarter. Gigi Harville manages talent, and she has been doing it since 2009. She sees what hits creator inboxes: three TikToks, a story, six months of exclusivity, ad rights, $250. She says no on the spot. Then she tells the other managers, and they tell theirs. No one sends you an email about it. Your shortlist just gets thinner, the creato...

Your shoppers are not browsing anymore. They are following one person who eats, breathes and posts a single subject, and they buy what she tells them to buy. Your deck still ranks that person by follower count, because that is the column your agency sends you. Here is the part that should keep you up. Your creator money is sitting in the wrong line item. It is filed as publicity, as social, as a nice moment, which means when finance pulls the report there is no media plan to point at. You are...

Your customers are not asking you how they found the product. They saw a video from someone with 500 followers, trusted her, and bought. Then Google took the credit for the sale, and the number sitting on your brief, the one your agency keeps optimizing against, had nothing to do with it. Here is the part that should land in your budget review. There is no agreed price for any of this. Kristen Wiley, founder and CEO of Statusphere, has spent fifteen years watching the range stretch past anyt...

In this October episode, hosts Ceci Carloni and Nii Ahene break down three stories that together show what brands are actually paying for in creator marketing right now: what a view is worth, what a fee is buying, and who owns the content after the campaign ends. Your UGC is dead by Thursday. Not underperforming. Dead. Most creator posts stop moving two days after they go up, and the next batch does the same thing, and the line item keeps getting approved because nobody has said it out loud ...