The transaction at the heart of what is now called creator marketing — a term that has largely supplanted "influencer marketing," though the work remains the same — has always been simple enough: a brand pays a person to say something nice about a product. But as with most simple transactions on Madison Avenue, the paperwork has grown complicated.
The complication, in this case, involves usage rights: the contractual terms governing where a creator's content may appear, for how long, and in what paid or organic contexts. These provisions have become, according to executives at agencies that specialize in such arrangements, a persistent source of confusion and escalating cost.
"There's no consistency in terms of how pricing is presented," said Danielle Wiley, founder and chief executive of Sway, an influencer marketing agency. Ms. Wiley said her agency requests pricing with specific usage terms attached, but responses vary wildly — some creators quote by the day, others by the post, still others include no paid usage at all.
Roz Sedaghat, director of legal affairs at Pearpop, a creator marketing firm, said the problem often begins with imprecise language during negotiations. "Usage rights are presented as organic or paid, and then left at that," she said. (One imagines the contracts of the 1960s, when an actor signed away residual rights over a three-martini lunch, did not require quite so many footnotes.)
The complexity has not gone unnoticed by brands, which face their own pressures. Meta has reported that partnership ads generate click-through rates 13 percent higher than standard brand advertisements — a figure that makes the content valuable enough to fight over. Tim Sovay, chief partnerships officer at CreatorIQ, noted that the constant demand for fresh creative assets means lengthy usage rights may be less useful than they appear.
"Brands are rewarded by replacing, feeding, and replacing their advertising assets month over month," Mr. Sovay said.
Some agencies have begun experimenting with non-concurrent usage — securing rights for specific windows rather than continuous periods — or pre-negotiating extension rates before campaigns begin. Aundrea Leckie, a director at Open Influence, said she recently structured a deal for a seasonal travel brand using six months of non-concurrent usage, a term that would have seemed exotic not long ago.
The industry, in other words, is doing what it always does when confronted with friction: inventing new vocabulary and hoping the invoices eventually make sense.
Original story published in Digiday: "Marketers say usage rights are driving up the price to work with creators"