Influencer Collaborations: Dos & Don’ts

Jon Pfeiffer and Niel Robertson appeared on a panel to discuss Influencer Collaborations – Dos & Don’ts for Influencer Talks presented by the Summit Spot on October 8, 2020.

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A transcript of the panel discussion follows:

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Moderator:

[Introducing Jon Pfeiffer]… who is an attorney that works with influencers and practices out of California. So I think we're going to start the session with having each of you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about how you started working with influencers. So, Jon we'll have you start.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I thank you. My name is John Pfeiffer. I'm an entertainment lawyer in Santa Monica, California. I've been started doing motion pictures and televisions about twenty-five years ago. And then about five years ago, I got a call from a mother of an influencer. They didn't know any lawyers and they asked if I represented influencers. And of course I said, sure, I would do it. And I realized it is such an interesting space, and frankly, a fun space. And then a couple of years ago, we started a podcast called the creative influencer, which is devoted to nothing but influencer issues and a substantial portion of our blog is related to influencers and we'll get to it and move it when we talk about representation. But I have free downloads for influencers that don't believe they're ready to hire a lawyer, but on how to comply with FTC is yours and all the other disclosures that you have to. So that's a little bit about me.

Moderator:

That's amazing. And it, it is a very interesting area of law. Niel, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started working with influencers? Oh, Neil, I think we're having a problem with your sound. Let's see here. We can get this sorted.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I'd sing while we're doing this, but I can't sing!

Moderator:

Can you try and chat again? Yeah. Gotcha. Great.

Niel Robertson:

My fault. I said I've been building companies for most of my life started companies. I have been in the marketing tech and non-tech world over and over again. I've always found that that's sort of the forefront, usually of technology and business. Previously, I'd built a company that was one of the largest affiliate companies in the world. Can we called big link? We had a couple million bloggers on it. The network produced a couple of billion dollars in GMV through the network and it sold a couple years ago to come across called sovereign. I got really interested in influencers because I saw sort of the success of bloggers and how they were developing different ways of monetizing their blogs. And there actually was still, is this amazing fitness influencer out of Adelaide Australia? Her name is Kayla CNS. I don't know if you're familiar with her.

She built this incredible business building like a 90 day, like sort of like beach body guide and really just using her Instagram platform to sell it on that business, I think is a million dollar a year business. Now this was a few years ago. I said, I wonder if I could do that myself. And so I found a fitness trainer here in LA she's about 30,000 followers. She was a fitness trainer to a lot of Instagram celebrities and decided to just build my own, my own book. So rented a white room. Did the photography learned Photoshop and built this really beautiful 135 page? You know, body guide very similar to tequila is, and just using her Instagram following, put it online on a Shopify store and started to push it. And we did well with it. You know, we didn't break the bank, but she had only 30,000 followers, which now seems to have poultry back then it was a lot bigger and we were able to basically break even on the project. And it just convinced me that this is really the future of social showing us the future. So I got into the influencer marketing industry and decided to build influence.co, which we'll talk about a little more.

Moderator:

Sure. Yeah, definitely. And so when did you start influence.co

Niel Robertson:

Of the business? About four and a half years old now.

Moderator:

Wow. Okay. Wow. That young and such tremendous growth. That's really incredible. So, you know, how, how, tell us a little bit about what influence.co does, like, what is it that you do and what is it specifically that you offer to influencers?

Niel Robertson:

Sure. So when I decided to get into the industry, we looked around and we saw a lot of companies four and a half years ago, jumping in and providing essentially a service where they found brands in one hand and they matched the, the influence on the other. And they sat in the middle and many times they ran campaigns or created a marketplace and tried to take some kind of a transaction fee for, for that. Well, that's fine in this businesses are interesting. We really thought that, Oh, we saw all those businesses focusing on the business side of the marketplace and not on the influencer side. We've fundamentally, always believed that being an influencer or creator would go from being a hobbyist pursuit or a side hustle into something that people took seriously as a profession. So we stepped back and said, how do we super serve this generation of people there that are starting with a completely new profession?

We call it the first digitally native profession being an influencer. And the model we came up with is that to quite a familiar one, it's LinkedIn, there's, everybody's been very used to using LinkedIn, but the influencer and creator world and, and job and resonate, does it fit into LinkedIn? The way LinkedIn works, doesn't really serve, you know, people that are trying to do that as a job. So we've been building piece by piece, the building blocks of a new version of LinkedIn designed for influencers, creators, and the people that work with them. And on the platform you can do, you can build your own professional resume, which you can use on the platform and off the platform. You can connect with influencers. We've got incredible community. That's growing every single day. You can ask questions, learn questions, share branded content, get feedback from people. And then we have about 250,000 people on the platform now, and about 75,000 of those are brands.

So there also is a way to connect with brands and of course I'm work with them, but we have a very different model. One that's much more like LinkedIn, where it's sort of a, a job posting the brand puts up a new apply to it, if you're and we just connect you and get out of the way. So yeah, it's been a really fun journey putting the influencer in the center of our cross hairs and saying, how can we just give this group of people, everything they need to be successful and to be actually find yourself in quite a unique position as thinking about the world that way. It's really fun though, to watch the, especially this year, there's been a wave of new companies that have focused on the influencer and the creator as their target and not as the business, trying to work with them. And so we're really happy to, because we worked with a lot of those people on the platform, really happy to see that come online.

Moderator:

That's really exciting. And so just like kind of a follow-up question to that in terms of, you know, collaborations, you said that you have 75,000 brands, which is a lot, do you sort of facilitate, does the platform facilitate or make some connections for collaborations?

Niel Robertson:

Yeah. So again, you can always think of like how we work very similarly to LinkedIn. So if I was a business, I could go on LinkedIn. I could create a company page all for free. I could start searching for people. I might need to hire for my business all for free. I could message them on the platform all for free. And LinkedIn just provides that as a service to the broader community. Of course, they have ways that they make money right in the same way that we do. If you are a business and you don't want to do all that hard work, you can essentially pay LinkedIn to market your job to people for you. And they apply to you. And they've got a tool set, LinkedIn recruiter that does that. That's our business model as well, but we don't take a percentage of the money that you spend on influencers.

We don't take a transaction fee. We don't manage the campaigns. It's very much this LinkedIn model where you can do it all yourself. Or if you just want our help marketing into our incredible community of influencers, we'll do that. And then we provide you the tools to help kind of manage them. So that's kinda, that's been our approach to it. And I think today, or at the end of last month, there was 660 active campaigns and influencers could try to work on, I think that's an order of magnitude bigger than any other place on the internet where you can find collaboration opportunity.

Moderator:

Absolutely. So if you're an influencer, you definitely need to sign up. Okay. And so, you know, John we're w the topic here today is sort of collaborations do's, and don'ts, what are the top areas where you see influencers and content creators getting themselves in hot water from a legal perspective, because obviously, you know, if you're not legally compliant, that's a big dome, right?

Jon Pfeiffer:

I have to take it from a glass half full perspective and talk about the Jews. Like I'm a lawyer. I can talk about donuts all day, but I'm going to take, like I tried to do is first I have three big dudes. The first Jew is to view yourself as a business, you are a startup, treat yourself that way. You have to keep your money separate. This is not. If you get a check in and from a brand, you just can't put it in your account, not keep track of where it came from, because you're going to have to file taxes. And you're going to have to keep track of this stuff. And you, you want to develop your brain just like any other startup would be would do. And I know that

There's going to be a lot of, kind of feeling out where you're going to be. And I had one client who started out, she did makeup tutorials, and then she realized she doesn't even wear makeup. So she did a complete pivot. So do treat yourself as a startup because you are, I mean, you use that model.

The second thing is, do follow the law and I'm going to oversimplify it. But if you follow these things, it's, you guys got to keep you out of hot water is first disclosed. You have a relationship with the brand. I mean, the people that will do to make it look organic that, Oh, I'm just using this, but they're paid to do it, but one that's against the law, but to just disclose it because people expect it and you actually have to be honest, it is all of my clients. I have them before a brand deal where they're going to give some sort of review. The brand has to send the product to the client to see if they even like it. So it's, Hey, if they, if, if it gives him a rash, you know, it's something you can't say a positive review about that.

So actually give an honest opinion when you're doing that. And then the third, and this is where the lawyer comes in is the intellectual property rights, the trademarks you can't be. I mean, I don't have any logo on my shirt, but if I were in a video for one brand and I had a logo for another brand in the video, you've already violated the contract. So you just have to be aware of what's in the background. I'm looking and I'm in my home office now, and I'm looking in the background. I don't have any brands tough up. I do have my kindergarten diploma, by the way, that's an aside. And then the last thing I'll say is do is read the contract. I know it's legal ease, but it's going to tell you what you have to deliver. It's going to take, you know, the, the deliverables part of it and a minimum.

It's going to have to tell you when you do it. And then it'll also talk about what you just give away, give away what you just gave away. Did you give away the right to use this forever? Did you give away the right? I mean, my biggest fear for a client is that I'll do some brand deal and then I'll be driving down sunset Boulevard and I'll see their image on a billboard and sunsets famous word, these billboards everywhere. I see their image because I didn't carve down the rights close now. So those are my three do's is just treat yourself like a business, because you are be honest when you are reviewing things and then three actually read the paperwork and would say too. The other

Moderator:

Thing, you know, it's funny. I, I graduated from law school in, Oh gosh, I think it was, was it like 2003, 2006. But I, I, I had a partner that was a little bit, you know, more senior and then a partner that was more junior and the more junior partner used to always tell me, like, you're using too much, like simplify the words. Let's, you know, that's the old way of doing things. The new way of doing things is using more simple language. So I would, you know, I would add to that is that you'd be surprised if you do read the contract, but sometimes there's illegally, but a lot of times, you know, especially younger lawyers are using more, they're using less terms of art. You know, the attached here too with like, you know, not in Vogue so much anymore. So you'll see a lot less legalese and some of the contracts these days. So, you know, don't be afraid to just read through it.

Jon Pfeiffer:

They don't say attached here to anymore. It's incorporated here in, by reference and they'll have a link to a website with a 27 page terms and conditions as are binding that I actually do print those out. And I do read them for the client because we just did one Monday where it was a YouTube video, but then in the charter conditions online, it gave them the right to use it in all traditional advertising, the name, the image, they could be a magazine photos. It was like, no, we didn't do that deal. That deal will cost you double. So it really is important to read it.

Moderator:

Yeah, definitely. So, Neil, you know, you have been a part of so many collaborations with brands and influencers. W what do you find to be the most common mistakes that you see influencers making when trying to secure paid collaborations?

Niel Robertson:

Sure. I mean, I think, I think brands and influencers, frankly, make a lot of the same mistakes. So I'll just sort of lump it as generally speaking. What does everybody struggle with by and large? This is a young industry. This is an industry where most transactions are. They don't have the benefit of someone like John and his experience. They're just getting started both on the business, on the influencer side. And so there's some basic things that people forget to do. Number one is just write down in some form of email, what it is that you've agreed to. I think, you know, because we don't run campaigns are, you know, we don't, a lot of people don't come to us when they experience problems, but if they kind of can't arbitrate it with the brand directly or the influence directly, they will come to us. And 99.9% of those is because someone didn't write something down and something was assumed.

And so it doesn't take very long to write down, this is what I'm agreeing to. These are the dates I'm agreeing to it on these, the platforms I'm agreeing to it. You know, if the product doesn't arrive, this is what happens, its product arrive and it's incorrect. What happens, or I decided that I don't want to review it. What happens if I miss my deadlines? These are essentially all the structural pieces of a contract, but if you can't get to the point about writing a contract, just write down what the common agreement is. And, you know, and so I would say that very few of the arguments that I see people get into are debating something that was pre-agreed. It was debating what they thought the other person would assume would be the norm on something that wasn't agreed. And I think if John had materials that you can use to start off with, it's great.

I don't think it's a problem for anybody to propose having a contract. Some influencers might feel sheepish about throwing a contract on the table with a, with a young business. If they're only getting paid $60 to do something, there's a sort of level of practicality around what people can sort of afford to do from a review perspective. But if nothing else taking a look at a document that is kind of a good industry, that it's standard and try to go through and pick out the main topical things that are trying to be covered. Like John was saying like, where can your imagery be used? That those kinds of things, what happens when, you know, deadlines are met or products don't arrive, or they don't meet a certain standard, et cetera. Like what we see a lot of times where a brand will send something to an influencer and then the influencer will get busy or not like the product or whatever.

And then the influencer doesn't take the time to send the product back. And I think that's kind of one piece of professionalism that I would really encourage influencers to think about the industry as of yet doesn't have any common rating system. There is no, you know, Glassdoor for influencers. There is no Yelp for businesses that work with influencers. There is no endorsements on LinkedIn, obviously at scale, we think that providing some kind of this system is useful, but it does accumulate over time. And influencers do talk and both as a business and an influencer, I would also just say, play the long game. Like act as much as a professional. Like you can, you know, stick to, you know, the high road, if you find yourself in a tangle and, you know, because over time you want a lot of chances at bat to kind of work your way up to bigger and bigger contracts. And people do build reputations, whether they're ready to publicly online or not. We see that already happening on the platform. You know, when brands are bad actors and they try to post something to the platform, a number of influencers will go in and be like, I tried to work with this brand and I had a problem. There's no official rating system, but you know, people's memories are along on both sides of the equation.

Moderator:

I definitely think that's true. Yeah. And that tacked on to what John said, right. To treat yourself as a business. I can say, you know, we work with a lot of influencers doing brand deals. And I two things that I can think of right now that kind of play into that one. We definitely, you know, the influencers that maybe worked with us and did something that wasn't necessarily a paid collaboration or came to support us for one of our events. We remember those influencers when a paid collaboration comes along. So, you know, I, I try and always think of them first. Like, Oh, they were really agreeable. Or they went the extra mile here or, you know, they didn't love the product. And they ended up sending it back to us or offered to send it back. And oftentimes the client will say, now it's okay.

You know, maybe they can pass it along or donate it to somewhere, or what have you. And from my side as the business side, I've had clients that have not, you know, they agreed to do a paid collaboration. Then the influencer met their end of the contract and they didn't, then the client didn't pay the influencer. And we paid out of our pocket before. And I do that because it's my business and that's my reputation on the line. And we have a good reputation in the industry because of stuff like that. So I think that your point, both of you made the same point, which is think of the long game and you're influencing is a business. And so you want to try and think of that. And there's those of us like on the PR side that, and the production side that do this over and over and over again. And we definitely, I don't have an a rating system maybe like, you know, on a like Yelp or whatever, but I have one in my head and I'm guessing pretty much everybody else does too. So I think that that's really, really great advice.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And I'd like to, I'd like to echo what Niel said, because the point is so important. It's B be easy to work with because the long game that's where the real money comes in is when you have repeat brand the brand going for the influencer for repeat campaigns, which happens a lot. I mean, they first have to know it's the old adage of sales they have to know like, and trust you once they know you, if they like you and they trust you feel much, they'll go back to you before they'll go to a new influencer because they know you're a known commodity, easy to work with. I mean, it's, it's Neil's point, but just look at the long game.

Moderator:

Yeah, that's definitely true. We have probably, there's probably like 30 influencers on our list that we work with over and over and over again. And like we've developed friendships with them over, over time, you know, and we just, we know we can call them if we need something or whatever. And likewise, we have some that we know are lovely, but a little bit more difficult to work with. And, you know, maybe they're last on our list that we,

Jon Pfeiffer:

I have those clients that you have to negotiate the morals clause because they might be coming into an issue. And then you have those it's like, yeah, whatever, whatever you want, my client's not going to do anything to violate that.

Moderator:

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think that that is important to recognize that you're a brand and you're, you know, along with a business, you're a brand. And so everything that you're putting out there, people are digesting it in a certain way. And some people are going to like what you put out there. And some people aren't just make sure whatever you're doing is on whatever brand you're trying to create.

Niel Robertson:

I would add one more, one more dimension, which is in terms of professionalism, we see the more communicative you are, the more successful you are. It's a very small part, part of the whole spectrum of things to be professional about or things to make sure you do in, in and engagement, but communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate, right. We have on our platform, we have a built in messaging system. So you can organize all of your brand conversations. But, you know, I know people are spread between email and DM and messaging systems like ours. It's just really important to get in front of any changes that you have in plans. And so I would say one of the biggest complaints that bubble up to us is, again, not someone, someone doing something wrong or malicious or creating a horrible piece of content, or all of a sudden, you know, spewing vitriol, and having some, you know, breaking some morality clause or something that like gets you in trouble.

It's just, I'm so sorry. I, you know, my grandma came into town and I got really busy and I had to move my apartments. And like the dog ate my homework, like hall of fame from influencers is insane. And I would say that two years ago, this was actually probably the biggest problem and the influencer and creator landscape is that so many influencers and creators were flooding in and they were, there's such a, like a mediocre level of professionalism. I think as people have realized they can make a serious business out of this, they've sort of self-regulated a bit, but it's a very, very quick way to get a bad reputation amongst brands and agencies who are talking to each other and things like that to just to play the dog ate my homework thing. We see a lot less of it. But if you think back to your engagements with brands and if you've ever pulled the dog at my homework trick, I would just clean that one up really quickly because it's, it's, it's really annoying to everybody.

Moderator:

Yeah, definitely. I would, I, that we've, we've experienced that, but, you know, I learned something when I went to work for the first law firm, actually out of law school, the one of the partners that I work with, the, she gave me the best piece of advice. And it's just a great life piece of advice. If you're not, if you don't have a contract, ask them when the deadline is, when do you want this posted by? And that way, you know, and if it's not a realistic timeframe for you, then it's okay. I think to write back and be like, I have a lot of projects right now. I think that that's not realistic. I think from a brand perspective, they would rather just get an actual timeline from you rather than, you know, you coming back to them with an excuse. It's the same way as any other job.

Moderator:

Like if there's a deadline, you need to meet the deadline, barring some actual emergency. But I feel like a lot of times we get this on our end is like influencers, won't ask us for a deadline. And so sometimes we'll push back and say, Hey, do you a date? Like when you feel like you would be able to post the content by, and we'll, we'll, you know, we try to be flexible with them. Cause we don't know what their projects are going, they have going on and they're freelancers. Right. So I think that's a really important aspect of it, but the excuse is definitely aren't good. And the way to avoid that is to ask, you know, what, for a deadline. And then I would calendar. If I were, if I were on the influencing side, I would be calendaring my deadlines for things. So they don't miss anything.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Okay. And Laurie, just let me give you the flip of that. If you're the influencer and a brand comes to you and says, I need it tomorrow, which happens more than you would think, just be very wary because if they're that disorganized about, they need it for their campaign, they're going to be just as disorganized about getting a check in the mail to you. Yeah.

Moderator:

I, I would definitely agree with that. Yeah. And you know, on our side we will have brands that will come to us, wanting to work, wanting results that quickly. And we always know on our end, it's just, we just can't promise that because everything takes time, quality takes time. So yeah, that's definitely a really great point, John. So, you know, John, what are some negotiating tips that you can give influencers when trying to sort out collaborations?

Jon Pfeiffer

It depends on who your, what the brand is. I mean, if you're doing a Google deal or you're doing a deal with YouTube directly, you're going to have very little wiggle room because they'll use the excuse. Oh, we can't give it to you because then we'd have to give it to everybody, which I don't buy. But that's, and the lawyers who work there when they go someplace else, they're going to realize how frustrating that is. But that said, there's also the brands that they're first time brands. So it's there, they've pulled their contract off the internet. Many times it's inconsistent internally. You know, one term will say you have to do something, but then another term, another paragraph will say later that, no, you don't have to do that. So I guess the advice would be, is decide what the main material points are that you can live with.

You know, what the deliverables are and the dates for the deliverables, how much you're going to get paid, how long they can use it, what they can use it for and then make sure that's right. And push back. If that doesn't meet. And to Neil's point, you can do this in an email, at least in California, oral contracts are binding. I can't speak for outside of California, but they're binding. And an email would be some indication of what your agreement was. Even if you don't have a signed, written contract. So push back. If it's not what you thought it was the agreement to say it doesn't have to push back in a, in a hard way, but it'd be, I think we have a misunderstanding or I thought we had to this. Cause that's where again, following Neil's point that's, that's where you're going to get a lot of disagreements.

Moderator:

John, I have a question for you. So if, if, if a brand has giving product is, is an end, does an influencer is an influencer obligated to do anything. If they're being gifted, something versus being paid for the collaboration.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Well, if, if they're given product and there is a post or a video, you must disclose as if you were paid a hundred thousand dollars. I mean, the rules are, it doesn't matter who it's from. So if you and I, I, I've done guest lectures at U S at a USC where I went on and follow the Kardashians for a month. And they're forever touting their sister's products or somebody else's product. Well, I'm disclosing that it's an endorsement, it's an endorsement. If somebody gave it to you, you have to disclose people think, no, I don't have to, but you do. So if, if somebody sends you out of the blue, say a brand sends you out of the blue, a pair of sneakers. Now why they would do that. I don't know because how would they know your size? But that's what popped into my head. So they send you a pair of sneakers. You don't have any obligation to do anything with them, but if you do something with them, then you have to disclose that it's an endorsement. But if you're not going to do anything with it, and it's a value and you don't want it, I, I echo you'll send it back. It's just the professional thing to do.

Moderator:

Yeah. And, and just to make that clear to everybody, what John's referring to, like your, your need to disclose that's under federal law, right? And every state in the United States, right? John

Jon Pfeiffer:

If you're going to post the United States, the federal trade commission, the FTC requires you to do it. And they're actually revising their laws, the rules now to make it easier to go after smaller influencers. Cause they don't, they don't, there's just too many people kind of getting by, with not following the law. So looking at one, making it so you can go after the influencer, would you always could. They typically went up to the brand, but now they're going to do the influencer and then they're going to go after the advertising agency too. So they're having hearings now about revising it. You definitely want to follow that because even if you have a thousand followers and you're posting the FTC is an equal opportunity enforcer in the sense of yesterday after the big ones, but they also want to make a point to the little ones. So smaller micro influencers will know that the rules apply to them as well.

Moderator:

Got it. Okay. That's good to know. Neil, would you, would you have any tips for negotiation with influencers? I mean, you're seeing so many deals happening, you know, he, you know, just a great volume of deals happening on your site, what would be your best negotiating tips? So

Niel Robertson:

I think it's really important to understand your own data and then what the brand is trying to accomplish. So for example, for brand, as launching a fitness products that then this product might be targeted mostly at women, it might be targeted at men. It might be a mix. And as an influencer, you have your own audience. Demographics are your audience, demographics, female, are they male? How skewed are they? There's other dimensions like, you know, when you put, you know, links and swipe ups and stories, you know, what level of clicks do you get through, right? What's the commercial quality of your audience versus others. And so I think a lot of people focus on how many followers do you have? What's your engagement rate. There's some formulas you can use to sort of guesstimate what you should be charging for people. But I think the way that you can increase those prices as an influencer is say, okay, great.

But on top of that, you're looking for this very specific demographic. This is the demographic that I have. Here's other products that are similar price point just in our category. When I put them on my, on my stories and swipe up, I've gotten this many clicks. You know, my wife is an influencer with about 10,000 followers. And so she does this very effectively. She ends up getting way above market rate because she actually has an incredibly engaged commercial audience. When she puts products on her stories, she gets like, and she does a lot of tracking and with affiliate codes and things like that, she gets incredible clicks and incredible buys. So she can sort of rationally argue for higher price points than just pulling a table of data. And we, we publish at the bottom, the infants.co website. You can actually see a link on influencer rates and we have to be published the largest rate survey of influencers in the world.

All the influencers in our platform, many of them have made public and we actually compile those. So you can sort of see where you are versus everybody else. So if you wanna kind of get above the averages, you have to be thoughtful about how to pair your unique dataset and quality of your audience with what the brand wants, you know, and, and that kind of goes into negotiate. Do your best option to negotiate is to find your brand, that your audience is really relevant to, if you're just spraying and praying and casting that net and Tim, you know, answering every DM that you get and applying to every single thing, you don't really have any leverage, right? Because there's no specificity there. But if you're really being thoughtful about, you know, I would talk about this product anyway. Even if you hadn't approached me. And here's why, because my audience like this product and that product, et cetera, then you've already got some leverage with the conversation.

I would say, just as a general rule of thumb brands, it's a lot of a volume game, especially you're working with micro-influencers, you're reaching out to a lot of people because if you're reaching out on DMS, the response rates pretty low, sometimes you can get maybe like one out of 10 people responding. Then you kind of go through this like quality selection process and funnel. And along the way, what really stands out to brands or people that are actually doing a little bit research, being a little bit specific, giving them some insight into how working with them is going to work better than the average person they're talking to keep in mind that you're sort of in a job interview process with, you know, 60, 70, 80, a hundred other people, there might be five, six, 10 slots there, but you are competing with everybody else.

So differentiation in that negotiation process matters. And it's not really about price. Brands are very, most brands have not done this before. They're very anxious about it. And so if they feel like you are going to help make it a great experience, steward them through and get them outsized results for the same amount of money, or just a little bit more money, just like John was saying, right? Like know someone, you know, like them and then trust them. You can earn all three of those things in the negotiation process and you don't have to have the bottom of the basement price.

Moderator:

Yeah. I would definitely agree with that from the brand side. We, you know, it's, it's all across the board really when it comes to influencers and the rates that we get when we reach out for a collaboration and there's so many factors that go into it. One thing I think an influencer needs to realize is that, you know, Facebook and Instagram, they've really cracked down on the API access that you, that we have from like the brand perspective. And it really happened with like all the election stuff, the last cycle. So we don't necessarily have access to the data other than like engagement rate, but we don't necessarily have access to the data that you're seeing on the back end. So for example, story, data brands have no access to that. Or PR agencies have no access to that. So that's one way that you could justify your rate.

If you can show, you know, you should be tracking all of that. Like how many views you're getting and swipe ups and all of that data helps you justify your pricing. So I think that's one thing that's really, really important. And then I also think this is something that Chloe digital, actually in the first session this morning touched upon which they kept bringing it back to owning your own platform, focusing on your website, your blog. And if you can tie in, you know, a blog post into it, that is kind of like, I always tell a client when you get a digit, when we get a digital placement for you on a blog on vogue.com or whatever, it's like an atom bomb that almost lives forever, at least for as long as, you know, they're keeping that story on their server. And it's a lot longer than a story, for example, with a swipe up that, you know, disappears in 24 hours.

So if you can do something that's just a tiny little bit more effort, but can create an exponential amount of value for the client. Then that's another way that you can justify an increased price. And then the third thing that I would say is, you know, if you have a portfolio of really beautiful content and that's what you're focusing on is like the way that you, you know, do your photographs, or maybe you style really great. Maybe you do it like in a great vignette with, you know, a beautiful background and you have flowers and all of that. Those are all things that you can point out as a point of differentiation. Everybody has their own point of differentiation. So just hone in on what those things are for you. Are you super authentic when you, you know, when you do your stories and you get great engagement and lots of DNS and asking you for links or whatever, or is it that you have beautiful content, did you create your own filter that, you know, and would that filter the photos look beautiful?

What is it about you as an influencer? That's your point of differentiation? I think one other thing that I'll point out is people love attaching media kits to emails. And they're usually like pages long. No, one's going to read one that's pages long. There's an influencer that just sent me a quote unquote media kit. And it was one page. And it had her rates for different things all on the one page with like her top line stats on the other, on, on the same page. And I was like, that was the first I'd ever gotten to work with like thousands of influencers every year. And that was the first that I got and like that. And I was like, this is amazing. It's all in one page. And I immediately forwarded it to all of my clients. Cause I was like, this is so easy for them to digest. I can just forward it to them. And that, that goes into like what you guys said, make it easy to work with someone. So what do you think? You know, John, you touched on this before about like the billboard on sunset Boulevard or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about like usage rights? Cause I feel like that's one area where influencers, perhaps they're not protecting themselves enough,

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right? It there's two parts to that. One is ownership of the deliverables. And I can always tell a sophisticated brand because they do not want to own the deliverables, but the new ones always want to own it. It's like I pay for that. I want to own it. No you don't. If you don't, what if there is a trademark lawsuit down the road, you don't want to own that. If there's a copyright lawsuit down the road, you don't want to own that. If there's some writeable publicity issues that come up, you don't want to own that you, the, the influencer, you want the influencer to own it and the influencer wants to own it so they can use it forever. If it's a video, at some point, the contract will end and you can turn on ad sense on that YouTube video. So you want to own it. But then now to get down in the weeds with the IP intellectual property is you want to look at, if you're the influencer, you want to see what uses they can make of, let's say it's a static Instagram post. So it is a photo of you sipping a new kind of latte.

How long can that be used? How long do you have to keep it up in the sense of, can you ever take it down? I dunno, you'd want you, but if you want to do, can it be used in print advertising? So if it's a fantastic photo, it gets great traction. You get a lot of feedback. That's positive. Can they put it in print advertising? Can they put it on their website? The brand, put it on their website. Typically the deals will allow the brand to, to boost your posts. W they can whitelist it, or they can put it on their own social media platforms, but can they keep it there forever? So you want to talk about how long it's a matter of how long and where it can be put because a deal that includes just digital, just digital, because most of them are just digital that they try to also include traditional media.

Well, that's worth twice as much, at least twice as much. So you don't want to give that if you're an influencer, you want to make sure that you've understood the use and for how long and can the brand then repurpose it in a year, you know, is this like a Geico commercial, or you see them read you the Geico commercials? Not only East coast, they have these commercials, but on the West coast, they're, they're, they, they replay them every couple of years. It's the same commercial. Do you get paid or is it a one-time use? It should be a one time use unless you're getting paid. So what's the usage issues on where it can be, where can we use? And when they say the word, the, the legal term to watch out for is in perpetuity. If you see the word in perpetuity, that means forever, and you don't want that, unless it's, they can keep it in perpetuity for archival purposes for internal use only. Okay, fine. But can they use your image in perpetuity? That means you can be a grandma and they could be doing something that you shot when you were 18. You don't want that. So you just want to look out for how long and where it could be.

Moderator:

Yeah, I would. Absolutely. And even big brands make that mistake. I worked with a big, a big brand that did a celebrity collaboration just a month ago. And it was very clearly stated in the agreement that the brand could not use, even though it was, it was in a, in a film that was being released for fashion week and it was going to be on social media or whatever. But the brand, it was very clearly stated that the brand could not act as if the celebrity was endorsing the product in any way. And then the brand put the product, the photo of the celebrity next to the product on their website, selling, you know, with the, you know, selling the product or whatever. And obviously the lawyers immediately made them take it, take it down. So even for a little extra money too, yeah. Even large brands will try to push the limits. You would think sometimes you think, Oh, they're so big. They're never going to, you know, cross, cross the line or whatever, but you do have to be your own advocate or hire an advocate for you, particularly with those larger deals. Neil, have you seen, you know, issues on, gosh, the amount of the volume of deals that you're, that you're seeing the deal flow that you're seeing. Do you see a lot of issues with usage rights on, on influence.co?

Niel Robertson:

I would say that smaller influencers and businesses haven't grappled with this very much yet. I think when people take their first steps at influencer marketing, they're trying to collect as much data as they can. And so they're being not, not sort of thoughtless about what they're doing, but they're trying to just get as many data points as they can quickly. So they're working with influencers trying to try different types of influencers, maybe a mommy blogger audience versus a fitness influencer audience versus a pet influencer audience might be more reactive to me. And so a lot of the efforts that we see are around that before people are getting into much more structured and organized purchases of influencer, sometimes content or content plus audiences. And so that's the phase that we see most people on our platform coming into, not so much in much more sort of sophisticated celebrity level of stuff that you're talking about.

But I think what's also happening is that brands are realizing, I think, I think the brand fan mentality has shifted from, I want access to influencers because I want their audiences to view them as media properties or little mini magazines, you know, owned by one person. And I want to get in front of the audience that reads that magazine to part of the job of a brand now is, is to have a constant stream of branded content that's unique and contextualize into hundreds or thousands of different lifestyles. I sort of used the example where, you know, when I grew up, you would go to malls. And if you went to a mall, you went to the Tommy Hilfiger store and it would be the same ad and window display on every single Tommy Hilfiger store. And everybody consumed the exact same, like visual. This generation wants a brand contextualized into the lives of every single influencer that they're interested in.

And they want to see it in a hundred different ways and a hundred different settings. And so brands are starting to realize that that is actually the job of marketing is to create branded content in situ tons and tons and tons of it. And it's about the audience value, but also about just the content creation in situ. And so I think that that wave is turning into a tsunami and it's coming very quickly. So not a ton of it now, but I think people are, are just the, as influencer marketing evolves and people are realizing that the world is about a thousand ads, not one ad that is going to become an even more important thing, because people are gonna wanna use that content, even as something as simple as can I take the image that you created for your Instagram and kind of put it on my instinct Ram as the brand like this, a very simple example.

I think a lot of up and coming influencers would be like, heck yeah, promote me. And I think that's fine, but as you get bigger, a bigger and bigger promote me might not be your number one thing. It might be protect me. And so then you're getting into the stuff that you and John are talking about, where you need to think about protecting yourself versus you're promoting yourself. And this is the spectrum. There's nothing wrong with being in this, being on the part of the spectrum where you're like, please use my image everywhere forever. Right. That's fine. That's a part of the journey at some point in time, you'll have climbed the ladder a little bit and you'll start to think more specifically about it than that.

Moderator:

Yeah. And we we've seen that with influencers. You know, we've been doing this for quite some time and I actually started out as a blogger. I can call myself an influencer, but, and so I have a lot of friends that like before Instagram even started that, you know, now they're big, big influencers and in the beginning they'd be so flattered when a brand would post them, you know, on and tag them on Instagram. And now of course they're much more protective about that. I would say my advice would be, I think potentially a PO allowing them to repost on the Instagram feed is fine, but like something like a website or in an ad or billboard, even when you're small, you want to be protective of your image. And there's a cost to that. And I would also say to tag onto what you said, Neil, it's interesting how you have predicted this evolution.

And it's kind of happened also with the name, like right when I first started, you were called a blogger and then an influencer, and now people are sort of shifting to calling themselves content creators. And it's because they're creating content. And one of the things that I would say for the last two or three years, we've always told brands. You should really look at what an influencer is doing. Not just that they're promoting your product because you don't know what kind of results you're necessarily going to get. Especially since you don't have access to their like, you know, backend data, but they're creating content for you. It's like having like a little mini photographer and stylist and all of these things all rolled into one. And there's a value in that. So we always tell brands to look at the content they create is like, you know, something that is a value.

And that's usually on our side, what we try to negotiate for us to be able to repost. If we, if they paid for a hard post, we want our brand to be able to repost that hard post. So just, you know, a little tip on the influencer side, I think that's one definite place that things are going to grow. I mean, if you're a brand, even if you're a baby brand, if you're posting one image a day on Instagram, that's 365 images that you need per year, and that's a lot. And you know, John can tell you that legally, you can't just use any image that you want to use and you can get yourself in hot water because images are copyrighted. So brand has a lot of content that they have to create and not a lot of resources that they can go to, to find original content that's not copyright protected.

Niel Robertson:

And I would, I would, I would actually say that there's actually in this moment in time, it's very much in the favor of the brand. If you think about it from like a cost arbitrage perspective. So I just had a, a daughter she's six months old now. And so I looked at a lot more baby-related content than I ever have before. And I saw this incredible piece of content, but this is like when I was looking at strollers where an influencer couple had basically taken, they had gone on vacation to Germany and they were up in the Hills overlooking like Bush Feinstein or some castle or something like that. This was this unbelievable photography of this stroller there. And I thought to myself, like that's one of probably a thousand different contexts, which is stroller is being put in a brand, could never fund the complete construction of that trip to get that piece of content.

They're only paying for probably the thousand dollars at the influencer charge for the actual content creation, but didn't pay for the hundred thousand dollars of, you know, costs around it. So it's actually a really good deal right now, if you find these influencers who are like maybe a street wear influencer and a mommy blogger and a travel influencer or whatever, they're literally taking your products at no cost to you and inserting it into a context and aesthetic lifestyle, et cetera, that would cost you an incredible amount of money to produce and charging you a hundred thousand dollars, whatever. So it might sound scary as a brand to think about having to create 265 posts a day, but it's actually an incredibly stacked in your favor now to get the breadth and distribution of being able to present your brand in a bunch of different lifestyles, which expands your potential audience as well at a cost that is just for the cost of producing the picture, not producing the container of the picture, if that makes any sense.

Moderator:

Yeah. It's definitely a good deal for a brand, for sure. And then I think brands that they can think of it like that, you know, I think it's, it makes sense. Okay. So John, I'm going to leave the last question with you. And then we have some audience questions that we'll go through. People are often like afraid to hire an attorney. And I get this, you know, I'm an of counsel at a law firm and I do some part-time work in light. They're often afraid to hire an attorney because they think it's too expensive, but we, and Kat and the attorney that I work with, we always talk about it like this is your business, you know, can you talk about some of the things that an influencer should absolutely have an attorney handle, even if you are just starting out

Jon Pfeiffer:

At some point, a manager will approach you, or you will approach a manager and the manager will give you a contract review in so many influencers are so excited. They've just a manager wants to represent me. I don't care how much money you're making. That's a point where you use it and you're going to have to do it on an hourly basis, but hire a lawyer to look at that document because the vast majority, where do my clients come to me after they have a problem with their first manager and they want to change managers and they want me to help negotiate out of that management agreement, but they're in for five years. So they're in for three years. So if initial point where you need a lawyer is when you're getting ready to hire a manager, just to make sure it's straight up because there's great managers, there's some fantastic managers.

And then there are managers who aren't as ethical and aren't looking out for their client the way they, and then once you're working with a manager, you'll know when it's time to get a lawyer because the man, she will tell you it's time to get a lawyer. But as a rule of thumb, anytime your dos are over $10,000, you definitely want a lawyer involved. And Oh, all, but one of my clients on a percentage basis and the standard fees, 5% of gross. So it's not like you coming from money out of your pocket. Other than when you're doing the original managing management contract, it's money that you would be making in your, getting up the team, the lawyer is the cheapest person on the team. Believe it or not. Cause the manager would typically charge 15%, 10 to 15%. If you have an agent, they charge 10%.

The lawyers industry, your standard is 5%. Although I know some charge more than that. So when you believe that you have a, the volume of deals where you know that this is you, you're in this for the long haul, this is what you gotta do as your primary source of income, as opposed to a brand deal. Once, you know, once every six months, you definitely want to seek out a lawyer because many times, because the terms are not for the reasons we've talked about, you know, on the usage and in other things, they're not as one or they're not as fair as they should be. And if you've seen enough of the deals, I know where the middle ground is. I know what's fair. I know where when the influencer, I actually had a brand asked me, I represent the influencer and the brand said, can you write the contract for us? I said, absolutely. I'd write the company.

It's the best influencer DOE got, but you want that somebody to just circle back around and actually answer it, your question we can get to about the $10,000 gross amount of the contract. That's when you really want to think about getting a lawyer involved. Because if you think about it, it's only $500 and it's not out of your pocket. It's just from the money you'll be getting in for that $500. You can get so much protection and anything over that. Absolutely. You need a lawyer because you get into the 50,000, 75,000, a hundred thousand dollars deals or beyond you just want to have protection. And by that time, all my clients that are in that area, don't even blink an eye. They're like, this is just the cheapest insurance I could buy is to have a lawyer look at that.

Moderator:

Yeah. And I Al I would also say too, you know, I think people have this idea that lawyers are really expensive, and I'm not saying that all are, but you can usually find a lawyer somewhere along your journey. I was, I was on a panel not too long ago. And somebody was talking about like, well, if you can't afford the lawyer at the big slick law firm that has, you know, the BW on Madison Avenue, you start with a lawyer that maybe graduated, you know, five, six years ago and is a little bit younger. And there are, you know, your hourly rate. It's like, for example, since I don't practice full time, my hourly rate is much lower than cat who owns the law firm that, you know, I I'm an UpCounsel at because she's been practicing full-time for many, you know, for much longer than me.

So her hourly rate is higher than mine doesn't mean that I'm not a good lawyer. It just means that my rate is commensurate with my experience. Right? So that will be another piece of advice that I would give somebody. And then the other thing too, I see influencers come. They come to me a lot of times, influencers that we work with, even though, you know, I don't really practice full time. I have a PR agency that we'll get a lot of influencers. That'll come to us with like maybe a reality show, TV deal or something like that. And I would say, if you get, if anybody comes to you in that entertainment space where you're going to be filmed and something is going to be on TV, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, whatever, it's worth it to get a lawyer.

Jon Pfeiffer:

That's the spin off all of these, we've done. Many reality shows for the clients. They'll have book deals. There'll be the merchandise deals. If, if you're going to be in stores with DIY kits, who do those deals, I'm just thinking of this, you know, when you're starting out as the brand deal. But I forgot to mention if you, if you believe you can't afford a lawyer, you still have to comply. We have free resources on our website that you can download. You don't have to give your email to get up. You can just go to the website and get their, their do's and don'ts, which is commensurate with this panel. But they're also the proper disclosures for FTC for each of the platforms.

Moderator:

And Jon, can you give us the name of your website so that we can, I can write it down

Jon Pfeiffer:

Just the way my name is spelled on the zoom Pfeifferlaw.com. So that's

Moderator:

Going to be P as in Paul, F E I F F E R law.com.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yes. And there's a social media section where there's, I think we have 10 downloads again, the free, it will at least get you in compliance. So you don't have to worry about, did I do the right disclosure or not?

Moderator:

That's so great. Well, so now we're going to take some questions that we got from the audience on the first one is for Neil. How does influence.co simplify the collaboration process? Sure. So

Niel Robertson:

One of the things we try to focus on all the parts of the collaboration process to take a lot of time. So right out of the Gates, what takes a lot of time is finding influencers. So, as I mentioned, you can use the platform for free, and we have tons of search tools that help you kind of hone in on who you want really quickly. You also can put up a campaign brief, which is like a job description, and you can set filters for who can apply to you, and then have people apply to you. You can also do that for free. There are some limits to what you can do that for free on the platform as well. So that really reduces the amount of time that you need to spend hunting through Instagram, because your hashtags are, think through the community and really have people that are interested in your brand part to you.

That's one thing. The second thing is we talked about media kits before. If you go to eclipse.co and you just click around a little bit, you'll come across our profiles were the first company to ever have public profiles are basically built digital media kits. And there's a lot of subtlety into how we built those digital media kits. And that goes back to what Lori was saying. Every single person in the community builds their own resume. We don't scrape databases. There's no AI here. It's actually humans doing this. And what they do is they pick and choose the branded content that they've created before. And they put it on their profile. So right out of the Gates, you can see who they work with. So you don't have to go rifling through their Instagram, opening up photos, looking for the brand tags and hashtags. The second thing is you can get a very quick take on their aesthetic and you know, it matters a lot.

Laurie mentioned that, you know, it's tough because you don't have access to the API. We have access to all the APIs. Everybody gives us that access when it's set up. So we have engagement rates, we have likes and comments and all their photos. You can see the likes and comments on their branded content versus generally speaking on their content. We really consolidated everything that you need out of a media kit to get a very quick read on it. And the reason I say that is because if you're looking at 60, 70, a hundred different possible candidates to work with, it's really time consuming. If you have to open up Instagram and open up 10 of each photo and try to find the stuff that's branded it, the people comment on it. We've just, we've organized our media kits. So you can very quickly look, are they an aesthetic fit?

Are they an America fit? You've got audience demographics that are built in and totally freely available on the platform that takes a lot of the timeout. We have application management and workflow tools that allow you to sort of like keep the whole process clean. Our system is fully integrated with a messaging system. So it's just really a pain when you're trying to communicate with 30 people. If you're doing in email box, I challenge you to name the accident, give the real name of every influencer that you've probably looked at in the last two days. You probably don't know you're probably another handle. And then on top of that was their email address. It's incredibly hard to dig through your work, email address and find the thread from one influencer. If you're working with 30, having it all in one place just really simplifies it. And then, you know, one of the other things that we spent time on is when you actually are running your campaign, you're doing a lot of publishing.

If you're trying to publish like 30 different people have been published content within the same two or three days, you'll literally spend hours a day going through every single person's Instagram, trying to figure out if they've published or not yet. And we built a tool that essentially does reporting for you and helps you understand who's published, who hasn't published, if they have published, what other likes engagements calculate that I'll calculate a big, beautiful sheet of imagery that you can print out and hand to your, your bosses or your partners or the case may be where we're very focused on being a practically PRI mostly free and practically priced solution. If you do decide to go pro that is oriented at like one of the things that take a lot of time and reducing that time to where you can do influencer marketing for about 15 minutes a day. So it's kind of a collection of things that we do to manifest that into reality, but that's where we've focused. Our energy is just streamlining the process.

Moderator:

Amazing. Well, we are out of time. We could probably go on and talk all day long about this. I want to thank both of you, Neil and John so much. So Neil influencers can go on influence.co and sign up, right.

Niel Robertson:

That are totally free to start applying to brands today because your profiles.

Moderator:

Yeah. Yeah. And I would say my best advice for influencers is definitely create a profile with influence.co. It is, it is definitely one of the industry gold standards. A lot of brands are on there and working with them. So if you're, if you're starting off or trying to take things to the next level, they're a great resource. Neil, thank you so much for joining us today. And John, thank you so much for your insightful information. The legal part of things can be scary for a lot of people. So I feel like you, you made it not so scary. You guys have a really great day and thank you again. And if anybody needs to get in touch with them, you can it's Pfeifferlaw.com and then influence.com. Thank you guys. Have a great day. Take care. Bye bye.