The I Am [Dot. Dot. Dot.] Podcast

Ep#61 Navigating Brand Deals: How to Protect Your Content & Maximise Earnings

• Kristen Werner & Mia Steel • Season 1 • Episode 61

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Welcome to a pivotal discussion on maintaining control over your content during brand collaborations. Kristen Wenner and Mia Still join us to dissect the complexities of User-Generated Content (UGC) and gifted collaborations, offering you essential strategies to ensure your creative work is not just recognized but also monetized.

Key Highlights:

  • Control Over Content Usage: Explore how to manage your content's use by brands, particularly the differences between organic usage and paid advertising, and how each impacts your potential earnings.
  • Navigating Gifted Collaborations: Understand the financial implications of accepting free products, including tax responsibilities that might surprise new creators. Learn how to evaluate whether these opportunities align with your financial and brand goals.
  • Asserting Your Worth with Brands: Kristen and Mia share their personal strategies for confidently asserting your worth in brand negotiations, ensuring that you are compensated fairly, even as a newcomer to the industry.
  • Drafting Effective Contracts: Gain actionable advice on creating contracts that protect your interests. We’ll discuss what terms should be included to safeguard your rights and ensure clear expectations are set with brands.
  • Securing Financial and Creative Rights: Discover tips for securing both your creative rights and financial future in collaborations. Learn how to leverage your unique content and audience engagement to forge beneficial partnerships.

Whether you're just starting out in the UGC space or are a seasoned content creator, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you navigate brand collaborations confidently and profitably. Tune in to transform how you handle brand deals and take control of your creative career.

Don't miss this essential guide to mastering brand collaborations—subscribe now for more expert insights on navigating the digital content landscape.

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Speaker 1:

Okay, welcome to our little mini pod snackable and delicious content to ease your weekly curiosity. I'm Kristen Wenner, joined by Mia Still, and we are just going to jump the hell in.

Speaker 2:

Let's go All right. We've got a question from one of our members that is inside our VIP Facebook group. I'm going to have a bit of a chat about it. So she said I approached a brand for a gifted couple collaboration and they have accepted, which is a win. Yay for her. I'm very pleased at this, as it is a brand I really like. But is it fair to say the video can only be used as organic content and if they want to use it as an ad they have to pay for it? Not sure how to navigate this Great question.

Speaker 1:

It comes up quite a bit Before you go on, mia, sorry before you go on for anyone that's just tuned into the podcast, we're talking about UGC, so user-generated content, where a brand is paying our creators to do the content. So just to clear that up, in case you haven't listened to the podcast before welcome, please continue.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, this is a good question that we get all the time, and a lot of times the brands will want to give you the free product as a gift and not actually pay you money to get the content in return. And sometimes that's great. If it's a product that you really love, you're going to buy anyway. You get practice with your content, perfect. I've done lots of gifted collabs, but generally sometimes the brands will want to use that content as a paid ad and I mean, it's not wrong to do that if you want to want them to use it as a paid ad, but it kind of means that they can use it forever. They might make a lot, a lot of money from your content and you're not actually getting compensated for it. So it's always good to have a contract, even for a gifted collaboration, and generally I personally will say yes, you can have the content for your organic social media, so on your TikTok, on your Instagram, even on your YouTube, whatever. But if you want to go and use it and put money behind it and use it as paid media, I'm going to charge usage rights for that. So for every month that you run that ad, I'm going to be charging. Generally I like to charge about 30% of my base rate. So I haven't charged them for the content. They've got the content for free. But if they want to go and run that on their meta account or TikTok ads, I'm going to charge them 30% of my base rate for every single 30 days that they run that ad. And you know, they might just say, yep, cool, we're just going to put it on our organic feed, see how it goes. And then, if it all of a sudden performs really well, they might be like oh, I want to turn this into an ad. I'm going to go back to Mia and say, look, I want to run this as an ad. I want 90 days usage and then you can charge them for that.

Speaker 2:

So, whatever that might be, so it's just a good idea. I mean, it's a good way to make some money and just have a little bit more control of your content. And you'll have that in your contract. So when you do a gifted collab, you'll say, yes, this is for free in exchange for this product. However, if you want to run it for paid ads, there will be an additional fee of this and you must ask for permission to do that. So, and also keeping in mind that the old ATO tax man you actually get paid. You actually have to pay tax on a gifted item. So you're actually paying tax on that. So that's an expense to you as a creator. So if you get, you know, given $150 bag, you got to pay tax on that. So keep that in mind too when you get gifted products. That, yeah, got to take that into consideration as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so quickly, because it's we just want to answer these nice and quickly for everybody. I suppose the biggest thing with certainly new content creators is that fear of like oh, I don't want to like, I don't want to go back to the brand or I feel bad, maybe I should just take it. So is that something that you know? You just have your contract ready to go from the very start. It's in there anyway. You send it back and therefore it's written in there. They need to read that and understand that. And then there's a bit of a negotiation, because I know there would be that fear of like oh, but then what if they say no? And so do you want to just kind of, I suppose, prepare people for what that looks like and give them the confidence just to send the thing, own that space and feel really comfortable with what they're sending to the brand?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. Generally, brands will already have knowledge on how it works and that a contract is a really good idea to cover your butt and cover their butt too. So it's not un, what's the word? It's I can't even think of the word Like, it's not weird to send them a contract, yeah, uncommon. There we go.

Speaker 2:

It's not uncommon for creators to want a contract and to send them that and to want to be paid for. What's the worst that's going to happen is the brand is going to say, oh, look, no. And you're like okay, no, worries, I wasn't going to get paid for it anyway, so don't be afraid. And it also shows you know, a bit of authority on your side. You're kind of standing up for what you're worth and that you know you're not just going to give your content away willy nilly and they can do whatever they want with it, because that can cause issues as well.

Speaker 2:

Generally, for organic content anyway, you can't really say, oh, go and put it on your Instagram feed organically for three months and then you've got to take it down. Organic content kind of stays on their account, but they just you just want to make sure in your contract that you say I don't actually give you permission to use that content in any other way, cut it up for ads or run ads with it. You just got to save your butt because you don't want it to come and bite you in a few months time when you know they've plastered your face on a bunch of ads that you didn't agree to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so if anybody's curious about contracts inside our community, we have Ange from Startup and Running Now she does contracts for UGC creators, and inside our community we've also got the course that talks through how you actually set up UGC and contracts and all that kind of stuff. So if you need any help, just send us a DM or reach out to Ange from Startup and Running. But that's all. That's our little snackable, delicious piece of content for you and we're going to go All right. Enjoy. Bye. Sick job, mate Shit podcast. There's so many good ones too.