Brand Deal Sources
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Brand Deals and Sponsorships can come from many different types of companies. Watch to learn more about the Influencer Marketing Landscape and the difference between advertising agencies, media agencies, brands, influencer platforms, or influencer agencies!
Brand Deal Sources - Influencer Marketing
Sourcing Brands / PR Agencies
Most brands are reaching out to creators directly to forge partnerships. Pretty much all major brands have someone handling influencer marketing now. They're getting much more sophisticated at doing campaigns with creators. You're also seeing a lot of brands shift from campaign based typically kind of one off partnerships to, or something that they're only doing one or two times a year to what's called always on campaigns where they're working with creators every single month doing sustained promotion.
These are agencies like Ketchum or Edelman. A lot of brands still outsource creator partnerships to their agencies. Traditionally most would argue that creator/influencer/celebrity ambassadorships have always been the purview of PR agencies. It's really important to understand as a creator, how most agencies approach the media. There's three types and the first is called earned media. This is when the press like journalists or other media publications talk about a brand totally organically. And this is unpaid, right? These can be super significant and these mentions are really, really prized. This could also take the form of a brand sending, let's say free product to a creator or an influencer in exchange for a review.
Earned, Owned, & Paid Media
Earned Media is when the press/journalist talks about the brand organically (or a brand sending free product to a creator)
Owned Media is an online property owned and controlled by a brand, such as a blog, website or social media channels.
Paid Media is TV Commercials, Billboards, and paying creators to make content (Facebook Ads & Instagram Ads)
Sourcing Media Agencies
Influencer Marketing Agencies - These agencies work exclusively on connecting brands with creators. It can get a little confusing because sometimes influencer agencies will not work directly with the brand, but rather the brand's PR agency or media agency to execute the deal. This typically happens because the brand or the agency doesn't have the ability to activate all the creators it wants to at scale. Maybe they want to partner with a hundred micro-influencers or 30 mid-tier creators, and they just don't have the capacity to do it themselves.
Influencer Platforms - These are companies out there which are more like software platforms which allow brands to create their own accounts and create a campaign that creators can apply to work on. And this includes platforms like Influence Central, Grapevine Logic and more. One of the most interesting dynamics that has emerged is that all of these different types of players are kind of fighting it out in a turf war for all of this influencer marketing money.
Who is the Best to Work With?
If you have a distribution channel that so many different folks want to tap into. So it's the brand directly or their agency or an influencer agency, or even a platform. As long as they're compensating you fairly, it shouldn't really matter. I will say though that the best case scenario is really to have contact directly with the brand. Because at the end of the day, they're the ones who ultimately control the budgets and they have the decision making power. With PR agencies the biggest challenge is, there can be a lot of turnover.
I always recommend even with the brands directly with the brands, try and get at least two contacts there. With influencer agencies, it's much more likely that they're trying to work with you on a one-off deal rather than like a longterm partnership. And that's just the nature of the types of projects they do and that's kind of the same with influencer platforms.