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Part of Brand deal income: five parts bundled into one number
Brand deal income mistakes seen from the repair side
Brand deal income mistakes, nine of them: answering on rate first, blocking a category you need, and disclosing somewhere nobody actually looks.
Most bad sponsorships are not badly negotiated. They are badly decided, days before anyone opens a contract, in a reply written in four minutes because the email was flattering.
These are nine errors of judgment rather than errors of drafting. The contract mechanics sit in the guide to brand deal income.
What to take away
- The expensive mistakes happen before the negotiation, in what you agreed to think about the deal.
- A sponsorship spends three thingsyour time, a publishing slot, and a portion of your audience's patience. Only the first is usually counted.
- Any deal that costs you the ability to do something else later is more expensive than its fee, whatever the fee is.
1. Answering "what is your rate?" first
The question arrives in the first email and it feels rude not to answer it. Answer it and you have priced a job neither of you has described, which means you are guaranteed to be wrong in one direction.
Reply with the questions that determine the price: what the deliverables are, where the work runs, for how long, and whether there is exclusivity. Then quote. A brand with a real budget is used to this. One that will not answer has not scoped the campaign.
2. Letting the first offer become your ceiling
Whatever a brand offered you once tends to become the number in your head, and it was never based on anything except their budget line. Worse, an early low agreement becomes a precedent you have to argue your way out of with that same buyer.
The fix is to derive a floor from your own costs and the value of the slot, write it down, and keep it somewhere you can see when a flattering email arrives. A number you calculated on a quiet afternoon is more reliable than a number you calculated while excited.
3. Selling capacity you do not have
Sponsored work takes longer than your own work, and the extra time is not production. It is approvals, revisions, waiting, and chasing. Agree to three campaigns in a month and the fourth thing that breaks is your own publishing schedule, which is the asset the brands were buying.
Count backwards from delivery through the approval chain before you accept a date, and hold a hard limit on how many paid pieces a period can carry. That limit is the same discipline as a publishing rate you can hold, discussed in creator career paths.
4. Blocking a category you actually need
An exclusivity in a category you rarely touch is cheap. An exclusivity in the category most of your other income comes from is a decision about your whole year, taken for one fee.
Before agreeing to any restriction, list the categories your other work depends on, including affiliate arrangements and your own products. Anything on that list is expensive to close and should be priced accordingly, or refused.
5. Making the sponsored piece your best work of the quarter
It feels like professionalism. In practice you have put your strongest idea into a piece that a third party can ask you to edit, that may have to come down later under a deletion clause, and whose rights you may have partly given away.
Give sponsored work solid, reliable execution. Keep the idea you have been saving for something nobody else has approval rights over.
6. Letting the brand define success after the fact
If nobody agreed what the campaign was for, the assessment happens afterwards, using whatever number is available, and that number is frequently one you do not control. You then get judged on an outcome nobody asked you to produce.
Ask at the start what they are trying to achieve and how they will decide whether it worked. Write the answer into the brief. If they cannot say, propose something specific and get it agreed. A deal with an agreed measure is a deal you can be rebooked from.
7. Treating enthusiasm as diligence
A manager, an agency or an intermediary being excited about a deal is not the same as anyone having read the terms. Their incentive is the deal closing. Yours includes what the deal does to you afterwards.
Read the agreement yourself, whoever brought it. Ask who holds the contract with the brand, whether you are a party to it, who pays whom, and what the intermediary's cut is and where it comes from.
8. Disclosing late, quietly, or somewhere nobody looks
A disclosure that is technically present and practically invisible fails at the only thing it is for, which is that a viewer understands the relationship before they take the recommendation seriously.
Say it plainly, in your own words, in the piece itself, at the point where a reasonable person would want to know. A platform's paid partnership label is a useful addition, not a substitute for saying it.
Requirements depend on where you and your audience are, and they change. Read the current source. In the United States, that means the Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements and reviews and its answers to the questions creators actually ask.
If a brand wants the disclosure minimized, treat that as telling you something important about the rest of the relationship.
9. Judging the deal by the fee
The fee is one term out of eight. A well paid deal that includes broad rights, a wide exclusivity, unlimited revisions and a deletion clause can be worse than a smaller one that includes none of them.
Compare offers on the whole package: what is delivered, what rights are granted, for how long, what you are prevented from doing, how many rounds of changes, when payment is triggered, and what happens if the campaign is canceled. Two numbers are only comparable when the things behind them are.
The pattern underneath all nine
Each of these is the same failure in a different costume: pricing the visible part of the transaction and giving away the invisible part.
The visible part is the video, the post, and the hours. The invisible part is the license, the restriction, the slot, the trust, and the option to do something else later.
Brands do not hide any of this. They ask for it plainly, in writing, and creators agree because the fee attaches to the visible part, while nobody has priced the rest.
A pre-reply checklist
Before you answer any approach, take five minutes.
- Would I talk about this product if no money were involved?
- What exactly is being bought, beyond a post?
- What does this stop me doing, and for how long?
- Can I deliver it without breaking my own schedule?
- Who is the counterparty, and who actually pays?
- What is the agreed measure of whether it worked?
If you cannot answer the second and third, you are not ready to quote. Everything else can be negotiated later.
Common questions
How do I say no without closing the door?
Say what you would need for it to work, and offer a smaller version at their budget: fewer deliverables, a shorter license, no exclusivity. That keeps your pricing intact and gives the brand something to take back to whoever holds the money.
What if I have already agreed to something on this list?
Deliver it properly, then write the term down as a thing you will not repeat, with the reason. One bad agreement is tuition. The same agreement three times is a pricing policy you did not intend to have.
Is it worth doing an unpaid deal to start?
Sometimes, for one round, with a defined scope and no rights or exclusivity attached. What makes it a mistake is not the absence of a fee, it is giving away the parts that would have had value later. Record the income and its treatment either way, since gifted goods are not automatically outside your tax records.
Should I tell a brand what I charged someone else?
No, and it usually breaches a confidentiality term anyway. It also drags you back to a single number rather than a package, which is where these problems start. The general trouble with comparing against other people's figures is set out under published benchmarks.
