Brands don't know what to pay creators

Almost half of the people who buy creator content for a living cannot tell you what they are paying for. That is the finding of a survey by Billion Dollar Boy of 1,000 marketing and procurement leaders, and it explains why creator pricing feels broken to everyone involved.

Half the buyers admit they cannot price the deal

Billion Dollar Boy asked 1,000 marketing and procurement leaders about creator fees. Half said they misprice them. Forty percent said they believe they overpaid. Danielle Wiley, who runs the influencer agency Sway, told Digiday that in her experience brands pay too much nine times out of ten.

Read that from the buyer's side. Procurement exists to know the price of things. Marketing exists to know what a channel is worth. Half of both just said, in writing, that they do not.

The confusion is on the buying side

Ask why and the people running these deals give the same answer. Wiley says there is no consistency in how creator pricing is presented. Her agency asks every creator for the same package, one post, thirty days of paid usage, two months of organic usage, thirty days of exclusivity, and gets the price built back a different way every time. Roz Sedaghat, who writes the contracts at the creator platform Pearpop, says usage is often not defined at all when the offer goes out. Someone types "organic" or "paid" into a brief and everyone assumes they mean the same thing.

Look at who is failing to define it. The brief comes from the brand. The contract comes from the brand's agency or platform. The usage terms are the buyer's to specify. When the buyer cannot say how long it wants to use a video, or where, the creator is left to guess, and the buyer then calls the guess expensive.

Creators are doing their job

Influencer marketing has been on media plans for more than a decade. Creators build audiences a brand cannot reach any other way, make the content, publish it, and report back. I ran that business at Walee, where we took 18 percent of Pakistan's influencer market and put creators behind a livestream that reached 3.4 billion views and 70 million people. The creators delivered. The part that lagged, every time, was the buyer's ability to say what a view or a sale from that audience was worth to them.

Iluka Enright at Movers+Shakers says pricing is going back to old-school media kits. That is a creator fixing the buyer's problem for them. Television solved this in the last century. Thirty years later, buyers who spend millions on creators still have not written down what they want to buy.

Two hundred tools exist and the big advertisers ignore them

Go to G2 and count the influencer marketing platforms. There are close to two hundred. Half of them are bright young teams who have not yet learned what measurement is. The other half includes real instruments: platforms that track a creator's sales, views, reach and engagement across networks and put a number on each one. Most of the big advertisers I have sat across from have never trialled any of them. They buy creators the way they bought print in the nineties, on a rate card someone emailed, and then complain the rate was high.

Price the creator on what the creator generates

There is no mystery about how to do this. Pay per thousand views, the way every other channel is bought. Pay per completed view. Pay a share of the sales the creator drives through their own link. Pay a base for the post and a bonus for performance. Each of those gives the buyer a number to compare across creators, across platforms and across the rest of the media plan, and gives the creator a reason to perform.

That takes buyers who are willing to try more creators, in more places, with more than one pricing model, and to run the measurement themselves instead of waiting for a creator to hand it to them. It is the same discipline every other channel got twenty years ago.

The price problem is a measurement problem, and it belongs to the buyer

Nine deals in ten close at the wrong number because the person paying never wrote down what they wanted or what it was worth. Creators are generating the revenue and pushing the creative work forward. Marketers and procurement teams have spent a decade blaming them for a price they never bothered to define. The survey just put a number on that.