Sponsorship Experts Explain Brand Deals

- You will literally make 10 times the amount of money by doing customized bespoke recommendations. - Is there a better opportunity somewhere other than YouTube long form right now? - I think more craicers need to see themselves as a business. - How do you know how to price that? - Well, I'll tell you what not to do, Devon, which is to just spit back one number. - 2000, if you have these big visions for your work and your creativity and your art, and you want them to impact more people. - This is an excellent episode of The Gimbal Podcast because we're talking about sponsorships and monetization. It's one of the most important parts of the creator economy and also one of the most misunderstood. So in the episode we've got Angus Parker, the general manager for Allie of Doll. - Been with Allie for the last six years and gradually grown his YouTube channel from 400,000 to six million. Also growing the revenue from around 100 came out to consistently around five or six million USD. - And Justin Moore, someone who's been in the game for 15 years. - My name is Justin Moore, along with my wife April, I have closed over $5 million in sponsorships, done close to a thousand brand deals through an ad agency that I ran, and I'm on a journey to help creators big and small land a million sponsorships in the next 10 years. - Justin, my first question is for you, it's the year 2026, can you give a lay of the land of what sponsorship looks like this year compared to past years, what's winning, what's losing, what are the clients asking for? - I think probably the most apparent thing that I've noticed as well as a lot of our clients and perhaps you listening or watching that it's just kind of harder to get brand deals, oftentimes right now than it used to. I think there was this heyday, especially like maybe four or five years ago where there was just a ton of inbound, especially for a lot of YouTubers in particular, there was just lots of brands reaching out, lots of agencies reaching out, and brands didn't seem to have much discernment over how much they were paying, or whether there was a return on the investment, right? And so it was relatively easy to close relatively lucrative deals, and I think a lot has changed. Like brands have become a lot savvier, a lot of brands have hired this competency in-house now rather than delegating this to their agency, whereas before they were just like a, you know, influencer marketing was kind of like a rounding error of their marketing budget, and now for a lot of brands working with creators represents, you know, 20 to 50% of their budget, especially if it's like a direct-to-consumer company. - What is the avenue that is the easiest win this year? - I think the most obvious win right now to land more deals is to have a more transparent dialogue with your audience about not just what types of brands and products and services they'd be interested in, but also seeing if there's anyone in your audience who could potentially be interested in sponsoring you. I think a lot of times a lot of creators think of like these, it's gotta be the giant brands, the giant companies, you know, who I could partner with, but like, I guarantee you there's probably a decision-maker at a company, or even someone in your audience that offers products and services that would be dying to get in front of your a million YouTube subscribers or something like that. And so I think a lot of times we have this caricature of what a sponsorship or a brand deal is, especially if you're in a very concentrated niche, you have deep subject matter expertise. You don't need that large of an audience to be able to land brand deals, especially with like, let's say, mid-tier companies. - Angus, what are you seeing in the alley of doll world and how has your strategy shaped around this year in particular with brand deals? - For us, brand deals have always been far more about consistent cash flow for the business because we have a wider product suite and therefore I've always been keen to ensure that we maintain our sponsorship revenue at certain level so that we're able to essentially kind of cover the main costs of the business through those brand deals. I think one thing that I have noticed over the past a couple of years to Justin's point is there seems to be periodically these sort of heard migrations for brands in terms of like, maybe two years ago it was like podcasts and it sort of went to news that this year it seems to be moving more towards LinkedIn and they kind of, they just seem to sort of follow the heard in a lot of ways and YouTube doesn't really seem to be having that much of a heyday at the moment but that's, I think also partly because Yalgam has changed such that the different content is being surfaced to different people and larger channels are suffering as a result in terms of their overall views which is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of allowing smaller channels to get visibility but that has impacted, you know, our rates on YouTube content brands not having as much faith in the kind of consistency of views. That consistency is a big reason why a lot of brands seem to be more nervous now. I've done a lot more sort of blended deals this year than we've done in previous years in the sense of a lower flat fee but more of a performance-based second part and that obviously spreads the risk a bit more for brands and I think if we were more active on LinkedIn I would probably double down more on trying to drive up the sponsorship and rates over there more so than on YouTube at the moment. - I think a lot of sponsorship thinking, at least the way that I look at it, comes around with YouTube long form these 60-second ad reads or perhaps on a podcast. Does this open the door for creators who aren't super diversified in, you know, their platform coverage to be thinking about ads for short form, for LinkedIn? Like is there a better opportunity somewhere other than YouTube long form right now? - 100%, like I can speak to this with a lot of credibility because again, I ran an agency for a long time and brands are always going to, or at least, you know, for the foreseeable future, going to be very interested in short form video simply because of the repurpose ability of it, right? When you do a long form landscape, you know, 60-second, 90-second ad read on YouTube, if that brand wants to get additional mileage out of that footage they have to cut it down. They have to create a version of that that they could run on YouTube TrueView ads or if they wanted to run it on short form, they're gonna have to crop that video, right? And so that's why a lot of the budgets that I've seen have shifted from YouTube long form to short form because, you know, you can publish this asset natively on, you know, Instagram or TikTok or Facebook Reels or whatever, but you can also, you know, put it on these new surfaces, Reddit has video feed. Now, X has a video feed. Now, a lot of these, you know, LinkedIn, obviously. And so not only are these brands able to repurpose this video organically to repost it on their social handles, but they can run paid advertising now with it. So in addition to the talent fee that these brands are paying the creator to generate the content, they now realize that they don't have to pay a production company or another agency to generate creative that they can use in their advertising. And so one of the things that we've been advising our clients is like being creative with the ways in which they're generating this content. So for example, if a brand does hire you to create, let's say a short form video, you can offer to create two different versions of that. So you've got the native version where the call to action is a bit more organic, you know. So for example, I did a partnership with Circle, which is my the community platform that I use. And the, you know, the ending of the CTA, the call to action of that video was like, you know, let me know below in the comments like, what's your biggest obstacle creating your community this year or something like that, right? But then I created an identical version of that video. The first 55 seconds were the same, but the last five seconds were click below to start your free trial of circle today. And I delivered two versions of those, of those assets to them. And now they can use that. There's, there's more mileage out of those assets. So part of this is like starting to be a bit smarter in terms of how you're advising your, your brand clients. Justin, have you ever been on the other side and represented the brands? I mean, when I ran my ad agency, that was exactly what we did. So I've done, you know, a thousand plus campaigns. And I was in the rooms with these brands. And I would, we would also be subcontracted by larger media agencies who they would say, hey, we don't really understand influencer marketing. That was per, our agency was purpose-built to do that. And so they would just say, here's our budget 500K or whatever, like find the creators for us. We were basically the intermediary of the liaison to do all the legwork for the campaign. And so I was in these rooms. And that afforded me a really interesting perspective. Oftentimes about why they chose certain people, why they passed on certain people. Because a lot of times these agencies or these brands will never say these things to your face. Oftentimes they'll just ghost you. Although, say, no, it's not a fit. We went in a different direction. It's pretty interesting how, you know, these brands are like, for example, if it's a very traditional brand. If you are doing anything even remotely controversial on social media, on X or on your YouTube thumbnails or kind of, you know, risque or click baity or whatever, a really traditional brand might just look, might not even watch a single video. They'll just like, look at the page, get a vibe check and be like, this person doesn't seem very brand safe, pass. Like, that's another thing to consider is like, yeah, you may be like maximizing your CTR on your YouTube thumbnails. But like, what is your creator brand looking like to potential partners? Justin, so your book is all about attaining sponsors. And we've also got Angus on the line. And he represents Ali Abdal, who speaks to people who want to be creator economy creators who've got part time YouTuber Academy. Let's say you wanted to sponsor an Ali Abdal video. How would you introduce that conversation to Angus? And then I'm curious to hear how Angus would respond to that. - Well, I would send him a gift on WhatsApp with like a guy showing a sliding up with like a bunch of money and be like, Angus, can you give me a sweetheart deal here 'cause we're BFFs? Let's assume that I didn't know Angus though and that's not my first step. I mean, my first, like honestly, if I wanted to like get my book in front of his audience, like the first thing I would admit to myself is that it's gonna be really hard to get his attention, right? Because like, I'm not a gigantic brand. I'm not a Fortune 500 brand. I would just assume that like, you know, it's gonna be minimum five figures to do like a YouTube integration if I were to hire him. So like, my first thought would be like, what can I propose that they would really value? That's non-monetary. So what I would be thinking would be, you know, you guys, you're doing this summer refresh. What's it called? Angus the summer refresh challenge or something like that? We did a summer reset workshop, is that's what you mean? Yeah. a summer reset workshop. So because I'm an authentic Ali Abdul fan and I've been on his newsletter for a long time and I pay really close attention to this stuff that they do, I would come to them and say, Angus, how can we create some sort of collaboration here where I promote your summer reset challenge to my newsletter of 30,000, you know, I'm a brand too. I'm a creator brand, right? I've got 30,000 people on my list. And in exchange, you guys either include me in some sort of roundup of like books to watch if you're a creator on the YouTube channel and maybe there's some cash involved, maybe it's like a hybrid thing where it's like this plus. And in addition to that, I will also blast about your stuff to my newsletter. I would always be thinking, if I was a brand, whether it's a real brand, you know, like a consumer brand or a creator brand, I would be thinking what's a win-win type of partnership that I could propose where like I understand what's important in their universe. So they probably would just outright reject me because I don't have the money to like, you know, to sponsor YouTube video. - This has been an interesting conversation because it seems like bespoke solutions will almost always lead to the best outcome for both sides. You know, bespoke offer from the creator side will lead to something that is better suited to the brand side. I spent three years working with Mark Manson and he was a big name and, you know, we did a number of brand deals, but we always funneled it through an agency. And now having heard this conversation, I'm starting to think, oh, maybe the, like we can't guarantee that the agency is thinking about Mark or the company in such a detailed way. Like, I actually think we had a brand kit and now I'm thinking maybe money was left on the table for three years as a result. - I have an extremely spicy take on this, Devina, you ready? I believe 99.9% of creators should not have managers or agents. - Just killed an entire sub-industry in this. - Well, frankly, frankly, I have a bunch of people who hate me when I talk about this because not only do I have friends who are managers and agents, I've been in this industry a long time, not only have my wife and I been, had just terrible experiences over the years. You know, we've been YouTubers ourselves since 2009, so a long time and have had just lots of horror stories. But just so many people hundreds, thousands of creators that I've known over the years now have just had really challenging experiences and it's for a lot of the same reasons that we discuss on this call. It's like, if there's always this person in between you and the brand, not only are there a lot of hidden signals that you're missing in terms of like what you're providing value to them, you know, how you're providing value to them. But you are much more of a commodity in that managers or agents mind, I'll tell a quick anecdote, to clarify, I ran an ad agency, not a talent agency. So I never represented creators. I was serving as our clients were the brands, right? And so we would go and then find the best suited creators for that campaign. And so what would happen sometimes is a brand would reach out to us with a brief or called an RFP request for proposal and they would say, "Hey, we want to do an influencer campaign. We think this is kind of roughly the types of creators we want to work with, go find us some people basically." And so we would then find some people, we would develop a long list. So it would be like these 50 people seem roughly good. We would show that list of the brand, the brand said, "Hey, among these 50, we think these 10 are good." So then then we would go and reach out to the creator. So we'd reach out to the creator, we'd go in their bot, their bout section on YouTube, we'd get their email address or whatever, their bio on Instagram. And it would be their managers email address. So we would email the manager and we would say, "Hey, you know, we've got this, we're representing this brand, we're doing this campaign. Would your client be interested?" And this happened many times, not just one time. The manager would say, "Oh yeah, thank you so much. I think, yeah, I think she might be interested, but do you need more creators?" 'Cause I also represent these 19 other people. And here's their rates and here's all their links. And so I was always horrified with that happened because I imagine like a less scrupulous brand or agency would be like, "Oh yeah, those three other people are better and cheaper. Let me just work with those instead." So when the only way in which your manager agent is eating is there 20 or 25% of your deal, they do not care where that 25% is coming from. This is just one small example of the first financial incentives that happen in these types of percentage-only setups with brokers and agencies and things like that. I'll stop here because I'll get heated. But yeah, I honestly think it makes way more sense to hire someone on your own team, develop this competency in-house, hire our company to help you with coaching where we don't take a cut. Obviously, that was a total chill. And I'm gonna do that, keep doing that. But really, honestly, I think it's just in your mud, it's in your best interest to own this competency. - Interesting, Angus, what's your take? - Yeah, I mean, I will cover out all of this by saying that we are associated with an agency, and that's mainly because I don't have all the resources that I need to and having them bring in about 15% of our 10, 15% of our deals is useful. However, I do agree with Justin that I think for 99% of creators, the incentive misalignment has never made sense to me for most people because the agencies are incentivized to make as much money for themselves as an agency, they're a business, right? Like, I don't get enough, you know, throw any shade at them in that because that's their business model. But that doesn't mean that it's the best deal for the creator at that particular time. Like, the agencies are incentivized to almost inflate the deals beyond where they should be because they're a couple of us be bigger and, you know, you might be sort of, if, for example, as a creator, you wanted to be really hard with just saying that I want 10K take home from this particular integration. If you charge a brand 10K, the brand will pay 10K. If you're like to the agency, I want 10K take home. The agency are going to add 25% onto that because they don't want to make like they, they want their cut. And the other kind of thing that what I will say even, even with our agency is that whenever we do deals through agencies, what you will often find is the brand will add advertising agency, like Justin used to be. The advertising agency will work with the creator agency and then they'll be the creator. And so you end up with this like four lines of communication and suddenly like what the brand actually wants is translated through two people before it reaches us. The number of times I've almost pulled my hair out over the last couple of years when negotiations have either been taking ages or approvals have taken ages, it's always when that dynamic exists, when there's just like four lines of communication. And maybe it's like, yeah, functions, functions well from an economic perspective, but I think a lot of creators just assume they need that. When actually if they went direct to the brand, the brand would probably end up paying less, the creator would end up getting more. I sell that with a complete transparency that we do have an agency. And I don't want to like throw any shade on them because they're very good. But the default that creators have is seemingly to get a manager get an agent. I don't think it's worth it. I got another hot take addition to this, are we ready? I think it's a total cop out to say that like, well, I'm a creator. I just want to focus on my zone of genius, which is the creative stuff. And 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing. That's another objection that I hear when I share the first hot take. You legitimately, unless you are in the 0.01% that I mentioned, that is a luxury that you are not afforded. You are the CEO of your creator business. You have to take this stuff seriously. You can't delegate the financial and economic engine behind your business to someone else who has a different financial instead of incentives as you. No one is ever going to care about your business and your creations as much as you. And so if you have these big visions for your work and your creativity and your art and you want them to impact more people, it is your job to care about the financial stuff. And you have to own this stuff. There's irony because when you decide to join the creator economy, one of the earliest steps is like learning how to win. And you pour all your energy into figuring out how to play that game and you learn outlier theory and you understand what makes a video succeed versus fail. And then there comes a time when you're starting to get approached by brands. And it sounds like people are just like, I'm not actually interested in learning that. That's not what I'm here for. I need the money, but I'm not actually here to become the brand person. And it sounds like when that period comes, the advice that both of you are giving is pivot your attention to becoming an expert at being able to sell yourself and understand how brand deals work. And so it sounds like there's a couple different directions you can go at that point. The first one is you can hire you, Justin, and you will help them navigate that treacherous path forward. But maybe there's also an opportunity where you actually do take on an agency, but you do it with the intention of like, I need to learn what they're doing because they're only a short-term solution for me. They have the knowledge that I don't have. So I'm going to join them a little bit. The compromise is they don't understand me that well. They're pitching me out as well as shopping their other clients, but at least I'll be able to see firsthand how they're interacting with the brands. So then I can go and do that myself. - I totally disagree. - Sick, let's go. - That's a dangerous drug to get addicted to because the moment they start bringing you deals, now all of a sudden there's this fear that if I ultimately fire them, even though they, I do have a steady stream of deals coming in through them, but there's this big unknown of like, okay, well then I got to like start from scratch and I don't know where to begin and all that. I think it's like, it's just a dangerous, a slippery slope. It's a getting, hiring an agent is a gateway drug. You heard it here first. You should start, my advice would be to start from the very beginning by learning this stuff because you don't have any sort of reference point and you'll only, there's only upside. You're gonna learn, you're gonna make mistakes, of course, but like, and of course, like hire, eventually when you can, hire someone to help you with this stuff. I'm not saying that you as the creator have to be doing all the pitching and all the emails and all that, no, I have, I have a team, but I just, I don't agree. I think that, sure, if you're the Mr. Beast of the World and you have a very, very large creator and you have professional broadcast movie TV aspirations, yeah, get a manager, get an agent, be, go to CAA, get a William Morris, like great. Yeah, sure, you should have all that stuff. But like 99.9% of creators will never need that. How do you understand what kind of deal to put together and how are, how are you creative about what the right solution is? - The thing that I've noticed with a lot of brands is they often haven't even thought about ways that you could as the creator provide them with the most value. And so they might have pitched you, I don't know, like this argument is like numbers 10k for like a real, but they've not even thought about, actually, maybe you could pitch them 10k for the real, but then offer them, the three months usage or then offered to create a bespoke ad for them and so I I encourage creators in like the YouTube Academy to think beyond just what they've offered as like the upfront value because often creators see the an offer coming in like oh my god someone's bottoming money like I must take it. I often think that the brands actually haven't been that imaginative and they're not that imaginative really and you can go back to them and think about okay what is a more compelling package that would enable this to feel more like a partnership than a transaction and I think that's the issue and the mistake I see a lot of creators make is just jumping into these sponsorships as transactions rather than partnerships one thing again we try to do this year is move more towards like long-term retainer packages that are like three to six months long where we have the agreed set deliverable to each month and it's an agreed amount each month and that just sort of I think erodes the idea and the audience to smile this is purely a transaction is more just like an actual partnership over many months. I totally agree and guess and I think that the biggest like change that you need to make when you get a brand coming inbound asking about how much you do for a you know a real or a YouTube video is just slamming on the brakes and being like hold on a second here first I need to understand what your goals are because if I don't know what your goals are how do we know whether a YouTube video or a real is the best prescription for that challenge that you're facing and so this is what I encourage people to do is the ideal scenario is to get on a call say hey we'd love to jump on a call I'm very excited interested in this you know we'd love to learn more about how you're envisioning you know we bring this to life and then that basically the very first question that you asked them on that call is like what would success look like and oftentimes they'll say something completely unexpected and you have to then say well you know what I actually don't think a YouTube video is going to number one get you closer to that objective and number two you probably didn't even know like Angus said you probably didn't even know that we have these other surfaces that we could actually collaborate on whether it's a newsletter an in-person event a community or whatever it is podcasts they didn't may not even have known you had those assets and so you are serving as almost like a triage nurse in a hospital or something and you you are basically learning what their their ailments are and you're writing them a customized bespoke prescription brands often don't know what they want and again as I say I don't think that's like a fault on on them necessarily but they might yeah as Justin said they might think they want a YouTube video because take out as an example he's got six million subscribers on YouTube but actually in terms of audience alignment it might be better that they do learning tempos because their audience seems to overlap more with the audience we have there and so the point of like the goals another thing I just wanted to actually get Justin's thoughts on because I think I've seen this as well it in terms of like the state of 2026 it does feel like there is an increasing divide between when I think about sponsorships and goals I think it's either like basically brand awareness or conversions you have perfectly described a framework that I I listened my in my book sponsor magnet called the arc framework right the acronym is ARC so like you said Angus its awareness is one goal R is repurposing this also can be a big goal the reason a brand would hire you is to like actually get content that they can repurpose right and then like you said see conversion sales and all that another I think compounding factor though Angus is that there's just a ton more creators out there now to right think that's the other thing we're not factoring is that like not only are some of these dynamics occurring for sure on either end of the barbell but there's just like a lot more people to choose from like if you if you think about a platform like tiktok for example there's this huge wave a new type of creator that was you know basically tiktok massively lowered the barrier to entry to create right so you've got for example a dental hygienist who's got 60,000 followers on tiktok or something a brand like crest like a toothpaste brand or something previously they probably would have hired a mom influencer or a lifestyle influencer or something but like now they can actually hire someone who's an actual you know dental hygienist or dentist or a professional right who could speak maybe a lot more credibly to their product or service than another type of more generic creator and so I think that not only is the supply massively increasing but brands again they just are getting more sophisticated with how they're you know analyzing people's audiences so I think I do think that they're but by the same token though I started this this company thinking that my ICP my ideal customer's persona was going to be influencers right the people who are doing the traditional brand deals on Instagram tiktok YouTube et cetera but like more than 50% of our clients in our coaching program now are what I would say more like professionals or thought leaders now where they've got a large they have a deep subject matter expertise or a niche and like for example doctor Alex she has a podcast called digital pathology place she's got less than 10,000 subscribers on YouTube and on our podcast and everything but she nerds out over this topic of digital pathology she's like one of the world's foremost experts on this she recently did a LinkedIn live stream and she uh mentioned that she sold a $250,000 piece of medical equipment and there was like less than 50 people on that live stream and so it's like you have to think about who is in the audience right and these medical device companies and these biopharmaceutical companies like they're getting wiser about like tapping into someone who yeah they may just be a big fish in a small pond it's crazy like a LinkedIn live event for a small niche audience I was like I wouldn't even know to bring that up to a potential sponsor so that makes me wonder if creators also don't know what they have to offer like it sounds like there's two parties maybe where one doesn't know what they want the other one doesn't exactly know how to deliver that thing like at some point angus do you just have like a set game plan when people come up to you and say hey this is this is kind of what we normally do this is what we're willing to do for you to to the point you made earlier about like smaller channels getting more exposure on on YouTube I think the more niche you can be is not just good for your kind of personal brand more more generally but it's good for sponsors as well well one of the issues we have with Ali's channel for example is that it is so broad and there are so many different potential brand opportunities but potential brand opportunities that only fits certain videos because we have six or seven different buckets and we have the again kind of size privilege I guess for Ali to be able to make content in all of those different buckets I wouldn't advise someone starting out to start out with the same kind of niche that Ali has sort of evolved into now which is as I said very very broad if I was like starting out I would go niche not just from a content perspective but also from a potential sponsorship perspective as Justin said like a dental hygienist with less than 10,000 followers easily making kind of a living off their audience and I think a lot of praises sometimes think I need 10,000 a hundred thousand a million followers to be able to get any kind of brand it was it's really not it's just matching the audience with the brand and that audience overlap being incredibly tight and not too diluted that's one of the issues that we have like fundamentally and that's one of the reasons that our rates maybe don't command what they should do in some instances if you were to compare it to for example that dental hygienist I suspect like her rates aren't too dissimilar to potentially what we're what we're getting on some Instagram and LinkedIn content but that makes sense because even though she might be X number of times smaller in terms of audience size the density of the ICP for that particular brand or that particular segment is so much higher in her in her audience do you think that the dental hygienist like did she have linked in live as part of her toolkit when she was figuring out that plan like to me that just sounds so crazy and there's so many opportunities like how do you actually land on what your offer is so in the case of like doctor Alex so she's in the the dental hygienist and the doctor Alex those are like different different examples but I can give you an example from my own business like a real example so like I have an in-person event called sponsor games and my presenting sponsor is Lulu which is my book publisher and they've been an amazing partner they've sponsored both years of the event but after year one I was doing a recap call like a debrief call with them about how it went and what they thought about it and all that and at the event we hired this like really cool like hipster barista coffee cart and they were making coffee for everyone all day and it was like super fun and they brought this laser foam printer I don't know if you guys have heard of this but like you can etch your brand logo onto the foam of the coffee so you get your espresso and be like sssss and it would like put the our logo of sponsor games on there and in the debrief meeting Matt who's a CMO of Lulu said you know what I really liked I liked the coffee foam art how much to be the coffee foam sponsor for a year too so like you know he understands this from a marketing perspective because like everyone's taking photos of the coffee and the foam and how cool it looks and all that and so he's like how can I get my logo on there next year you may just never know that the brand would care about that until you have a dialogue and so I heard beneath the surface of your question to debt to to Angus that like that sounds like a lot of work Justin you're recommending that I put together a custom proposal for everyone but like what if you have a lot of inbound and like you don't have time to do that and all that and I say that's like a that's a terrible excuse like that is you will literally make ten times the amount of money by doing customized bespoke recommendations if you want to do the volume game sure fine have a media kit with five packages and you force feed that down brands throats y'all you'll make money especially if you have a large channel yeah you'll make money but you're leaving a huge amount of money on the table by not directly showing how you're gonna give them an ROI on the investment how do you know I mean I assume you have some kind of framework for how to price yourself in situations let's assume you land on the creative and you're gonna do latte art on a LinkedIn live coffee session or something along those lines how do you know how to price that well I'll tell you what not to do Devon uh which is to just spit back one number uh two thousand right which is what a lot of creators do they just the brand asked them how much it would cost for this particular set of deliverables and they and you cough back a number the reason that that's a really dangerous approach is number one how do you know whether they would have been willing to pay you ten times the amount ever for that deliverable because it was just so important to them And you're the most important influencer on their radar to help them accomplish. Maybe the CMO kid is obsessed with you. And they just have to secure you because of some random reason. How do you know whether they would have paid you a lot more money? And so my biggest piece of advice is another reason why it's important to get on a phone call. Because I advise, I have this kind of script in my book sponsor magnet. I advise people to say something very specific in this scenario. So you ask all these questions. You do the discovery, you figure out what's important to them. And then at the end, you say, hey, you know, I'm super excited about this. I'm going to go back now and put together a custom proposal of how we can bring this partnership to life. Usually what I do is like everyone listening or watching this, please write this down. Usually what I do is I put together three to four different packages to give you a sense of how we can collaborate here. Do you have a sense of what I should set those three to four tiers at from a budget feasibility perspective? And then you shut up. You don't say anything. You lean into the silence. By the way, this is very different than asking what's your budget. Because if you ask what's their budget, they don't want to tell you. Because if they say 10K, all you're going to come back and say, okay, well, here's what I can do for 10K. When in reality, most brands are playing a game of Tetris. Remember, I ran an agency, right? When I'm running a campaign, oftentimes it's not just with one person. It's with 20 people. And so I have this larger budget that the brand allocated. It's 100K, 500K, a million dollars, whatever. And I have to Tetris this budget together amongst all the different creators and all their different budgets. And I've got this spreadsheet and I'm trying to just try to allocate, put money in different buckets and all that. And so if you only give them one price at the very end of this process, you may just like fall off the radar and they can't work with you because there's no other options to work with you other than the one number you gave them. But if you give them a range and you say, okay, great, I've got between five and 20K, at least they have some sort of option to move forward with you at. And so my biggest teaching about sponsorships is that you should have this diversified approach when it comes to sponsorships. Not every brand needs to pay you your fixed rate. And this is the rate I get on every single deal and if they can't hit that, I'm not doing it. It's like, no, you should be equally tickled about getting a 10K deal. Then you should a 30K deal because that help keeps the lights on, that helps pay your employees and your editors and your VA and all that. And so you should look at your sponsorship as this like holistic thing where you have income from a lot of different sources. - I wanted to spin it to Angus. We just talked about this range of offerings. Is that something that you do at the Aliab Dull Team? You don't just have like a set kind of thing. You've got a different, but what does tier three look like versus tier one? - I generally put together three options for every single brand whenever we are negotiating. Usually I have a decent idea at this point like what their budget is and I'd put their budget as the middle option. Essentially and the higher option will be their budget plus something else that they may have mentioned on the call as being particularly important. Sometimes I actually leave out usage and creation of this boat content because it's like, well, this is like the package and then but if you also want XYZ, we can do that. It's like a bit of sort of a throwaway remark of just testing the waters to see whether they would be interested in doing a bit more. But yeah, there's always packages, there's always choice. - One thing that I think is important to bring up at this point in the conversation is like if you're a YouTuber especially and you primarily focus on long form and you're thinking like what would I even put in packages? 'Cause like all I do is YouTube. I don't have any social media, I don't have a newsletter, I don't have community, I don't, I'm just a YouTuber. Well guess what, 2026 is the year that you need to stop being lazy and figure out at least one other distribution platform where you can serve your audience. Right, again, it's not just about serving brands because look, let's face it, the end of the day, like you need to be able to have some sort of other set of levers, other surfaces that you can offer these brands because if all you're gonna be able to offer them is just more videos, then of course they're not gonna pick package four because they'll just say no if it goes well, we'll come back for another one. And so I really do think that if small, if you want sponsorships to be an important part of your revenue strategy, your content strategy is a deeply intertwined factor here. - What are some good resources other than yourself that you point people to? - Frankly, this is a terrible answer probably, but like it's one of the reasons why I wrote the book. My book sponsor, it's like a resource that I wanted to exist 15 years ago to like learn this stuff ourselves. But there's a lot of like, you know, Colin and Samira have some really great guests on who talk about their own brand deal process on their YouTube channel and their podcasts and things like that. I think they also have a brand deal program and stuff too. So like learning, you know, just like being in community with other creators who are doing it can be very, very helpful. Just be careful not to like ask them about their rates and use that to set your rates 'cause competitive pricing is a terrible idea. But like yeah, like honestly, not living on an island and just like learning about this stuff, I think this is crucial. - I guess how did you navigate this a few years ago when things were smaller and you didn't have as many opportunities? How did you level up very quickly? - A combination of like just exposure to it and speaking with Justin. Yeah, like it was a combination of the two of those. Yeah, Justin's book is kind of the only thing that I can think of. I've been made aware of at least that really tackles this whole brand deal space in a way which is sort of accessible and not aimed at the kind of traditional paid media buying kind of landscape, which is, I don't mean that in a sense of like Facebook ads and stuff, but just more in terms of, yeah, traditional advertising, but that was the sound of me sending some money to English for his promo. - I was gonna say, like you finally got your Ali Abdul endorsement. New week kick, just 10 minutes later. - I mean, like there's obviously books on, traditional books on negotiation and that kind of thing which he used for, but those books are only good if you know the how of the mechanics of actually making and packaging a deal and looking at contracts and that kind of thing. So I would also say one other thing just to add is like, I think more creators need to see themselves as a business. I agree with Justin, like you can't kind of fool yourself into thinking, that's just my creative expression. I don't want anything to do with the business. If you want it to be a long-term career, you need to see it as a business and you actually need to start like taking that part seriously. And if you have a team great, you can outsource it to them, but if you don't then learning the skill of sales through stuff like brand management and brand partnerships, 100% something that you should be doing in-house if you can. Who is a creator or behind-the-scenes operator who is on your radar right now that is worthy of a shout out? - Can I answer in a different way? In that one brand slash app that I think is doing marketing slash social is very well, it's actually one that's not yet launched called Kinso, so Australian-based unified inbox kind of app, but the way that they've gone about growing their weight list and their marketing team and the founders, you would have seen one of their rules at some point in the last six to 12 months guaranteed. I think what they're doing is super, super interesting in terms of the diversification of different people creating content and then kind of remaking the same thing on a different account like I just think it's, yeah. They're leveraging their own team and their own distribution networks of their marketing team, their founders and the app pages itself to I guess create kind of flywheels of viral content. - Got it. - At this point, he's probably way bigger than me, but when I first started watching him, I was really blown away by Caleb Ralston. He obviously, brand strategist has worked with some very large and reputable clients, but he released this YouTube video, which was like a masterclass course. I think it was like four or five hours on brand strategy and it was super fascinating to me. I just think that this whole trend of like super long in-depth videos, like I ended up watching the whole thing over like, I don't know a month, I kept coming back to it to like finish it, but like I'm always really inspired by people who are experimenting on the platform and really knows who their ICP is. They're not trying to get the most views. They're trying to like find the exact, especially ideal clients for whatever their business is. So yeah, big shout out to Caleb. Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode. If you're new here, please consider subscribing or leaving us a review. It really helps in the early days of this show. If you'd like to Angus and want to hear another episode from him, there is one on the channel. We'll put it in the description box. As always, we have a new episode coming next week on Thursday. Thank you so much for being here. We will talk to you soon. (gentle music)