Stop Buying the Worst Video a Creator Will Ever Make w/ Dan Albert (456 Growth Talent)

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 paying again to rediscover, rebrief, reship, and renegotiate on top of it. The brand next to you is on month nine with the same creator, running content already tested against real sales data. Dan Albert represents more than 600 social sellers driving around $40 million in GMV a month. He watched QVC scrap the loyalty tiers its creators had built three years of their feeds around, and the earnings drowned out overnight. He has 200 creators on retainer, some with fewer than 6,000 followers, earning $25,000 to $100,000 a year. And he says the thousand dollar post is almost never the cheaper option, it just looks like it on the line item. If your creator budget resets to zero every quarter and you have been calling that a strategy, this is the episode that shows you what the resets are actually costing you, and what to protect before the next one. Chapters  00:00 Teaser  00:15 Cold open  00:45 Why the campaign budget goes back to zero and the retainer one does not  04:30 Every first video is the worst one, and campaigns only buy that one  08:21 The trust that only shows up after the fourth post  12:37 What happened when QVC changed the rules on the creators who built it  14:37 Killing the program before the data says anything  18:24 How to defend this to a CMO who wants the number now  21:30 Deciding which creators have earned a year of your budget  25:07 The exit clause that protects the brand and nobody else  33:46 What brands actually pay per creator per month  40:16 When a campaign is right, and when a retainer becomes the trap  44:03 What to change before next year’s budget is set Music licensed through Soundstripe.  Code: Z0GL7ZKEM0NAFLCI The Big Three by Influence Weekly: 3 Biggest Stories. 1 Essential Conversation.