Talent Managers Keep a List of the Brands That Lowball, with Gigi Harville (The Paul Harville Group)

Your agency is sending offers out under your logo right now. Somebody on the other side is reading them and deciding whether your brand gets a reply next quarter.

Gigi Harville manages talent, and she has been doing it since 2009. She sees what hits creator inboxes: three TikToks, a story, six months of exclusivity, ad rights, $250. She says no on the spot. Then she tells the other managers, and they tell theirs. No one sends you an email about it. Your shortlist just gets thinner, the creators you wanted start passing, and nobody in your Monday meeting can explain why. The cheapest offer you ever sent is the one line finance will never find, because it does not show up as a cost. It shows up as access you no longer have.

She is not anti-brand. She told one creator to accept a fee well below her rate, because the brand came back fast and excited and had clearly run out of budget. That brand returned months later with three times the money. In the same week she watched a creator with 10,000 followers, every video clearing 100,000 views, get offered $500 and almost take it.

Her verdict is blunt. They are offering crumbs, they know their own budget, and if creators start saying no together, the budget comes up.

If you run creator marketing and you have never seen the offer that goes out with your name on it, watch this one.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open
 00:17 Follower count stopped setting the price, and nothing clean replaced it
 09:03 The small creator pitch is ten years old. Why it is different this time
 10:10 Same engagement, lower rate, and who keeps getting it
 10:56 The terms nobody can redline, and the likeness rights that never expire
 25:09 What a creator is worth once the scope of work decides the price
 29:42 The below rate offer worth taking, and the one that is an insult
 32:02 $250 for three videos. The brands that get cut off a roster
 34:14 Engagement is purchasable now, so she watches the lives instead
 40:06 Selling a smaller creator to a CMO who only knows the big names

Music licensed through Soundstripe.

Code: IH7G4PMANDB2VSFW

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