The Creator 'One Off' Problem
Big brands love testing and ROI, while talent likes to build over the long term
Eric Decker isn’t afraid to say no to brands.
The YouTuber, better known as Airrack, isn’t afraid to turn down advertisers. His preference is to work with brands on year-long deals, as “one-offs” are no good for both parties, in his view.
Decker’s business partner, Zack Honarvar CEO of One Day Entertainment, said this is an increasingly common position for established creators. It helps that Airrack has 15 million subscribers, and steady flow of brands willing to sign up for yearly commitments.
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According to Decker and Honarvar, one-off deals are bad for creators, who want to stay true to their audiences, and often view brands they work with as creative partners, not just advertisers. And in their view, one-time deals aren’t good for advertisers, since they don’t get to benefit from a creator’s audience connection over time.
However, this very much bumps up against the ad world’s cautious mentality. “The best way to learn is to test, right? And see if it works. And then if it doesn't work, move on to the next, right?” said Digitas Chief Digital Officer Megan Jones.
This would seem to be a challenge for a medium that is clearly growing in importance, but is still finding its place in the media-buying pecking order - one that is particularly short-term and ROI-obsessed.
Honarvar said that is changing. "A lot of big brands prefer this strategy and come to the table with longer term partnerships," he said. "Usually smaller brands are more likely to push one off brand deals as a test before they go into something longer, but that’s totally understandable given they don’t have the same room for error in their marketing budget."
Many big brands don’t have much wiggle room in budgets - yet they know they must move more dollars to creators in order to reach their customers.
This would be conundrum begs several questions:
Are a select group of large creators going to be able to command upfront deals some point soon?
Will brands go for that?
How will this work with budget allocation, measurement?
Who might facilitate such deals?
As Jamie Gutfreund, founder of Creator Now, said recently, “Big media agencies can't contract with individual creators. It just doesn't make sense. They're big corporations. They're individual creators. You can't do deals like that.”
Maybe that is the kind of role that Ensemble, the creator media focused firm funded by Issae Rae
I had Ensemble CEO Ian Schafer on my new Next in Creator Media podcast this week, where he talked about the push for long-term creator deals, and the potential resistance from brands.
“A lot of the reason why [one-offs] continues to happen is because of where the, like what budgets the money is coming from,” said Schafer. When social video or PR firms work with creators (or in their eyes, ‘influencers”) the deals become “transactional,” he said.
“A lot of creators are in the ‘inventory phase, which is very transactional. It's like, this person has 30,000 followers. I want to reach their audience….We'll pay them a couple thousand dollars to make a video. Right? That's kind of like an inventory phase. Where the best need to get to is a collaboration phase.”
What brands want, he argues, “is a long-term partnership that results in long-term or longer-term, not only brand growth, but sales,” he said. “Where we've landed is that the budget should be coming out of media budgets. This is working media.”
At least, that’s the hope. The question is whether enough brand and agencies will streamline the way they fund these deals, and resist optimizing every interaction to a cost-per-view, or something along those lines.
“The best content that's going to come out with this person is through a relationship that evolves over time,” said Schafer. And that is not the way [brands are] used to working.”
Pivot to Video, Followed by a Pivot to Video
Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson of Broad City cracked up the crowd as they talked up the moment ahead of us - more short form video content was coming to your mobile phones from the likes of Comedy Central, ESPN and NBCU. Creators were coming too, from companies like Maker Studios and Nerdist.
Finally, Spotify was set to become not just a primarily-audio, music-heavy platform, but a hub for professional and user generated video, in a move that would transform the platform.
A similar proclamation was made a few years later around podcasting. And again this week, as Spotify announced it was - going big on video, and creators. “Each time we’ve embraced a medium, we’ve also successfully grown the pie and that’s because Spotify really exists to be the best platform for audiences and the best partner for artists, authors,” said founder and CEO Daniel Ek. Maybe. It’s true that Spotify excels at podcasting, and increasingly podcasters are video creators and vice versa. So perhaps there’s a shot here.
But more often, after you’ve been in people’s lives for over a decade as a ‘listening vehicle,” you kinda are what you are. So we’ll see.