The Fast Traack by Traackr
The Fast Traack by Traackr
SXSW 2025: How Pay Transparency Can Professionalize the Creator Economy
This special edition of the Fast Traack Podcast features a live recording from the SXSW 2025 panel, "Let’s Talk $$$: Pricing Transparency and Equity in the Creator Economy."
You'll hear from Christen Nino De Guzman (Founder & CEO, Clara for Creators), Jamie Gutfreund (Founder, Creative Vision), and creator and Founder of “Smarter in Seconds,” Blair Imani Ali (@blairimani), in conversation with Traackr’s CEO, Pierre-Loïc Assayag.
The panelists share eye-opening insights on the current state of creator compensation, the lack of standards in pay, and the ripple effects of opaque pricing on trust and professionalism in the industry. Together, they explore actionable solutions for creators, agencies, and brands.
During the conversation, you’ll learn:
- Why pay transparency is critical to equity and sustainability in influencer marketing
- What creators, brands, and agencies can do to establish industry standards
- How brands can avoid common pitfalls like payment delays and creator exploitation
- Ways to build stronger creator-brand relationships through trust and communication
Keep up to date on what’s happening in the influencer marketing industry by following Traackr on social.
Have a question for us? Email ft@traackr.com.
SXSW 2025: How Pay Transparency Can Professionalize the Creator Economy
You are listening to the Fast Track Podcast, hear the stories, strategies, and insights from the change makers in the influencer marketing industry. Today is a special episode featuring a live discussion at South by Southwest. You'll hear from Pierre the week Asay, CEO, and co-founder of Traackr, Christen Nino De Guzman, founder and CEO of CLA. For creators, Blair Armani, content creator and founder of Smarter In Seconds, and Jamie Goodfriend, founder of Creator Vision. During this episode, you'll hear why pay transparency matters for both creators and brands, and more importantly how the industry can build toward a creator ecosystem that has wide industry standards. Enjoy.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Hey everyone, thanks for joining us. Oh, I like this an engaged room. Thank you Jamie. I'm Pierre Loïc Assayag CEO & CO founder of Traackr. We are a technical solution that is often the backbone of creator marketing projects and programs for brands. One of our top issues is Creator Pay, and so transparency is key to what we do. And I'm here with Christen Nino de Goman with Blair Imani and Jamie Gutfruend. Before I let them each introduce themselves, I have to say that it's special that today is International Women Men's Day, and I'm here with three amazing women who, as you'll discover, are really the trendsetters in this industry. So what we talk about today is what we do outside of this room. Maybe before we get started, as JV sort of engaged in this front, I'd love to hear from you guys what brings you here and more specifically, who's involved in creator payment in some way, shape or form, whether you're a creator, an agent, an agency, a brand, raise your hand.
Now if you don't believe that there are issues with creator payment that it's already optimal, just bring your hand down. Otherwise keep your hand up. Okay. I didn't see many hands going down. Okay. Alright, so hopefully we'll be able to offer some answers today and on this, why don't we get going, and let me do this so that we make this a little more interesting than just reading a resume. If each of you could introduce themselves and at the same time answer a question around how do you think about pay transparency, what is it for you? How do you define it? And maybe Blair, can you get us going?
Blair Imani
Oh, fabulous. Hi, my name is Blair Amani. I'm the creator of a show called Smarter in Seconds, so I love to give definitions. That's my whole job. I am a content creator, a strategist, and also a producer. I also have a podcast called Thoughts About Feelings with Michael rets, who you might know as the library guy. And I would define pay transparency as just having some sort of standard, having some sort of process so that we can make sure that bias doesn't infiltrate the process of giving people what they're due, giving people what they're worth and making sure labor is compensated. There is a pay gap between creators across gender, across race, and so having some set of standards will help to alleviate the biases that might come and infiltrate that process.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Awesome. Christen, you have a very specific point of view on this because you're founder, CEO of Clara for creators, and so you have a very specific view on the impact and the relationship. So help us understand this better.
Christen Nino De Guzman
Yeah, so really excited to be here. My name is Christen Nino de Guzman, and I am the founder of Clara for Creators. If you haven't heard of us, we're essentially a Glassdoor and a pay transparency app for creators, which I started after working in the industry for 10 years at platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest after seeing growing pay disparities happening in the creator economy. And I think for me, pay transparency is such an important discussion because the creator economy is still very much an unregulated industry when it comes to creator compensation. And when you look at the corporate world, for example, we have guidelines and we have salary ranges so that we are not contributing to pay gaps, and that is still lacking for the creator economy. So pay transparency is really important discussion for creators to have with one another, but also not just within these specific communities of black creators talking to black creators or Hispanic creators talking to Hispanic creators because that's how the pay gap continues when you're only talking to people in your inner circle. So I think really my goal as a founder is to help with the conversation of pay transparency and with access to information so that creators can be paid fairly.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Got it. Okay. And Jamie, founder of Creative Vision and you have a long resume before that, that is super relevant as well to this conversation. You
Jamie Gutfreund
Say, I'm old,
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
You've worked No, I said experienced and you've seen both sides and it'd be interesting to hear from you as well in the dynamic brands, creators, what do we need to not step over to overstep, et cetera.
Jamie Gutfreund
Hi everybody. Thanks for coming and making the effort to be here today. This is such an interesting topic. So I am a recovering CMO and I've worked at big brands and I've worked at agencies, so I've been a buyer and a seller and most brands are making an enormous amount of mistakes. And I founded my company to help them not make so many mistakes as they're moving their money from, as I say, from TV to TikTok and YouTube and meta, most brands focus on brand safety and they should be focusing on brand stupidity because they do dumb things and they're focused so much on a creator saying something crazy. And yet most brands have no clue how to pay creators the right way and then complain about the fact that they have agents and managers and don't want to set benchmarks. So this is an ecosystem, it's a marketplace, but it can't be a marketplace until everyone has the same information.
Now, that might mean a brand pays more and it might mean that a creator gets less. It might mean that a creator gets much more and a brand pays less. We don't know because every single person has different pricing and that is not how you build an industry. And this is the year 2025. I think Leah Haberman is in the room, I don't know where you're sitting, in case you missed it, newsletter creator, she was saying that 2025 is the year of the creator economy is going to be professionalized, and that's what we're here to do.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Absolutely. One very amazing and very scary stat in this regard that our team was gathering was the fact that the creator economy is set to reach, I think it's 500 billion in five years. So just to set standard $500 billion means that we enter the top 30 economies in the world by way of GDP. So this is how big it is, it's roughly, it's a good 10 x from where we are today. So next five years, if we are in an industry that is going to 10 x to Jamie's point, we are going to need to find ways to standardize in order to scale creators, brands, and middlemen. Middle agencies will need to figure out where's the value add and how things get priced. I will make a confession. We actually started this panel in the green room before coming here and we're all in this really engaged conversation.
I'd love for us to continue it because I think it's really relevant. I shared one stat from a survey that we did fairly recently and the research is not out yet, so don't go try find it, but I promise we let you know. We interviewed 500 marketers and ask them among many other questions if they thought that creators get underpaid, overpaid, or paid fairly, and two out of five of the marketers said paid fairly, and another two out of five said overpaid. And the rest, very few, the last one out of five said, I dunno. So the acknowledged that they didn't have the information, the conversation we're starting is that if we run the same survey with creators, which we'll do, we most likely to get the same answer, that creators will feel underpaid and undervalued by brands. And guess what? They're probably both right. But until we set some standards and define how this space should be structured and organized, it's hard to get more assertive answers. I'd love to get you guys' reaction and let's do this more as a conversation than just me interviewing you. I'd love to get your reaction to this stuff. Does it resonate, does it not resonate? And what shall we do next?
Jamie Gutfreund
I talk a lot. So one of you guys go,
Blair Imani
Well, I think a lot of content creators are under the impression, and I was just on a panel at the Climate Power Conference talking about how so many creators feel like they're not getting what they're owed. And I think that it's also a very complex subject because I know content creators who sometimes are looking at the pay terms, getting down into the information, it's a net 60, but it's a higher paycheck. I know so many people who would rather take slightly lower pay if they can pay you into net seven. And so looking at all the different conditions for pay and just the process is so opaque and the only times you really hear about content creators and getting paid is when don't when it turns into a net 90 when it turns into you having to chase down your paycheck. And I think that's why pay transparency is so beneficial to the brands themselves.
So there's a standardized process so that we know all the different middlemen that I'm sure you are going to talk about between you and the brand and getting the pay. And so I think that brands need to value creators and I think creators need to know how they're getting paid, why they're getting paid, and what their peers are getting paid in order to be competitive in the process. It shouldn't come just down to who has representation and who has an advocate and who doesn't. And it often comes down to that, which you can definitely speak to.
Christen Nino De Guzman
Yeah, I mean I think one of the things I noticed, especially working with creators on the day-to-day when I was at TikTok was that it's like the wild wild west when it comes to creator payments and you would have one creator charging $20,000 for a video and another one charging $2,000. And I think on the brand side it's so unclear and it's so sporadic and you have no idea really what to expect when you're reaching out to a creator their team. But I think for the creators, it's also confusing. I would get the same question every day of how much should I charge? And even as someone who had 10 years in the industry, I'm like, well, I don't know because I see some creators making 20 times what you're making. So I think really what brands can do, if there's anyone in here on the brand side, is just ensuring that you're doing the right thing and not contributing to the creator pay gap. So one thing I've seen quite a bit recently is brands establishing a baseline rate for creators in a campaign so that you're not paying any creator under let's say $2,500 for a particular campaign. That way instead of paying one creator $500 and one $10,000, at least you have a baseline. So the pay gap is lessened. So there are things that I think we can do to help with the disparities that we're seeing, but we're a long way from where we need to be
Jamie Gutfreund
Because the process on the brand side, let's just remember most brands for the last 50 years have been paying for 32nd spots and 32nd spots is what drive the entire advertising and marketing industry. Then you got into influencer marketing and that was gifting and then it started to be in the pay space. So there's not a lot of systems that are recognized as this is the best practice. Most brands don't even realize that their agencies are paying 120 days. They figure, okay, I'm paying the creator. And the creators don't realize that the brands don't know, but it's the brands that are in danger of getting called out. We were talking about this, there's been horror stories where because of the time delay. So what happens is if I'm a brand, I pay my media agency, my media agency finds the creator agency, the creator agency finds the manager and the manager finds the creator.
And that's like a giant daisy chain of problems. The brand thinks, okay, I've paid, the agency doesn't get paid for 120 days. That means that the creator and the marketing agency aren't going to get paid for a hundred and God knows how many days and then the creator thinks, oh damn, YouTube or whatever, skims didn't pay me and gets pissed. I dunno, does anybody ever in the room ever had that situation raise your hand and you get pissed? And the only thing that you can do to manage that is to go public and have a customer service problem. So it puts us in an adversarial dynamic when it should be that the creator, the agency, the brand and all the other people have a grownup conversation to figure out this is the process. One of the crazy stats, I did some research with the Harris poll, 85% of creators say after a campaign, they never hear back from brands about how the campaign was evaluated, how it performed. And that is insane because that's all the best learnings and it's because everyone I think is so silent, and this isn't standard practice, but anybody in this room has the ability to ask for that because all of you seem to be involved in the payment process in some way, ask for it and let's start to make it standard practice as opposed to having it be this byzantine process of telephone I think is kind of what it's like.
Blair Imani
It definitely is. I'll speak to an example of that when you asked, I raised my hand immediately. There is a situation a few years ago during the Stonewall 50th anniversary celebration where I, and so many of my friends in the lgbtq plus community, I'm bisexual, love to come out every day, any bisexuals in the room, period. I love you. Okay, so when it came to this campaign, we were like, oh my gosh, we're going to be part of this amazing celebration. We're going to be standing on the shoulders of our legacy. It's going to be involved with people who are at Stonewalls. It's going to be beautiful. And then our one friend who's a photographer who's the only one among us who had representation was the only person who got paid on this campaign. So from our side, we had volunteered for what we believed to be an effort that was going to represent the entire community.
The next thing we know we're on the sides of buses and billboards. And the visibility was cool until we all got together at a celebration and our friend who's the photographer, he was modeling in it, but he's also a photographer and he was paid to model disclosed that he got paid and we're all sitting there a little bit broke figuring out we didn't get paid. And so this ended up being an issue with the creative agency. The creative agency wasn't being equitable in how they were dishing out payment. New York City pride had no idea that this was happening until I got on Twitter. It was back in 2019 back when it was still Twitter and spoke about it because it was really frustrating and it felt very exploitative. And I think that that ends up what's happening. It becomes a customer service issue because I don't have any contact for the people at New York City pride.
The process is so incredibly opaque and it ends up becoming an issue of can we get paid? And everyone ended up getting paid after the fact. I would say nine months after that initial payment was issued to the one person who modeled and got compensated. So it was something that was able to be rectified, but I think it shows that a lot of times brands are not under the impression that exploitation is happening. They definitely don't want to be getting into crisis comm situations, but it's this, the lack of the process is going to continue to be an issue. And if we're going to do 10 x, we're going to have 10 x more of those problems. And it's already, you can see glimpses here and there, whether it's on beauty, TikTok, whether it's on fashion threads, you can see it starting to simmer below the surface, but it's because that daisy chain and that game of telephone that happens and sometimes the only person who ends up being able to speak out is the one with the biggest platform.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Yeah, it makes sense. And it's really unfortunate because it stands in the way of everybody doing a better job and being compensated for it adequately. I have a very skewed view in the market because of the solution that we offer. What we do as a software company is that we work with brands that are interested in getting access to that information to the finite details so that they can actually act on it. So it's very much performance driven. Unfortunately, these are not the majority of brands yet in the market though the market is getting to us fast. What we're seeing though, and I'd love to get your thoughts and reaction on this, is that when we first bring a new brand into our platform, it's just like shedding daylight on a place that had been dark for a long time and it feels very uncomfortable.
It's uncomfortable for the brand, it's uncomfortable for the agencies working with the brand because guess what, if you haven't measured something properly forever, it's unlikely to already be optimized. And so you're likely to find a few skeletons in the closet here and there and it feels difficult. So there's a level of resistance from all parties as we go through this process that is painful. And I'm curious to hear from you guys, one, if it resonates with your experiences, but maybe more importantly, how can we ease this? Because at the end of the day, what I can tell you is that once you get to the other side, it's better for everybody. It's better for the brand, it's better for the creators. And guess what? It's also better for the agencies because now the brands can invest more money with being clear eyed with where the investment is going to go and why. But how do we ease that transition?
Christen Nino De Guzman
Well, I think Jamie and Blair, and we all talked about it earlier, but just I think more transparency in general, even on the agency side is really helpful because you have these brands spending millions and millions of dollars on campaigns not knowing where their money's going, and then you have creators who aren't getting paid that much, but the brands don't know that, but the agencies know that. And I think one thing that's really important if you're working at with the creator agency is just making sure you're doing your due diligence on that agency, whether that's through budgeting, but also in the treatment of the creators that you're working with. Does your brand know when the creators are getting paid? Are they getting net 60? Are they getting net seven? Are they getting paid at all? There's a lot I think that you can do to kind of investigate how it's going on the creator end.
And I know Jamie just mentioned the feedback loop, which is important for creators to understand if they're getting how it's going and if their content resonated. But also I think brands can ask creators how did it go? And I think a lot of brands would be kind of shocked to know that some of the creator agencies that they're working with aren't paying creators on time or they're ghosting creators or the creators are having to research and go through all these different channels to get paid. So making sure that your brand is working with a creator agency that actually knows how to work with creators. I'm
Jamie Gutfreund
Going to say an example. How many people here know Ridge wallets? Sean Frank. Okay, that guy is a ninja. I don't think he's here, but anytime he writes or speaks, I lean in because he is a ninja. And so Pierre, you mentioned why it's good for brands to have this transparency. It's because you know how much you can actually spend and have it be good business. And this is the work to become a professional industry. So Sean Frank knows exactly what his yield is when he does integrations with creators, and this is on YouTube, so he has lots of data speaking of YouTube. And what he figured out is that one of his biggest creators, marquees, Brownley, anytime he did a post or partnership, his sales went through the roof. So they had a grownup conversation. He's now part of the company and he could afford to pay him what he was worth because he knew what the value was for his business.
I can tell you most brands have no clue, and that's part two. Part two is the difference between looking at creators through the lens of old school media and looking at them as advocates. There's a big difference between advertising and advocacy and advertising. I heard a great quote today, you cannot buy a piece of culture, which is interesting, but most brands are still looking at a creator and saying, okay, they have a million followers, I'm going to get a million followers. You're not. So they're trying to price it based on follower count, where as we all know, the algorithms determine how much content and what content and who sees what it's your audience. And so by understanding both pieces, brands can actually be much more sophisticated. But that's not how the industry started. It's where we're going. And it's super important to have learning conversations with brands who are making decisions. And I have a lot of tough conversations with people about this because they don't know, and many of them are relying on a creator marketing agency. And don't get me wrong, there's some excellent agencies out there, but there are some that are not so excellent. That's how I'll say it. And they're not teaching the brands and they're not teaching the creators. So I think all of the people involved have to start to get smarter about the money. It's always about the money, and that's how people are motivated and incentivizes where the money is.
Blair Imani
I was going to say there's also this, so speaking of the million followers, the conversation, I think that started happening I think two to three years ago around micro influencers at such an interesting aspect to this dimension because it's like, are you buying the follower account or are you buying the engagement rate? Are you buying the clickthroughs? Are you buying the views? And so I think looking at, or are you just having this person who is an expert in this subject who might have more of a niche field? And that's where those micro influencers come in. And I think talking about standardizing the process is so important because is it equitable? If I spent the same amount of four hours to create this video and I have 800,000 followers and somebody else spent that same four hours to create their video and they have 80,000 followers, is that an equitable process?
And it has to do a lot with what those goals are. And I think that sometimes when it comes to campaigns, and I'm often doing this, I'll have a briefing call, but I don't do debriefs, so I'm going to start doing that immediately and I'll ask, what is the goal of this? Is it brand awareness? Do you want signups on your mailing list? Are you just trying to move product? Are we trying to have an aspect of the culture be part of the conversation? And that way I can strategize my content most effectively. But I think that conversation also needs to be happening on the agency side with the brands ahead of time so that way they know which content creators to reach out to and then also who they're compensating because that labor should be compensated as that baseline. And then we can start getting into the margins on exclusivity.
Okay, we're going to be doing ad spend for 60 days, we're going to be doing, you can't work with any other brands for 90 days or just 24 hours before and after the post. And so I think that's where those higher amounts can come in, but that should be standardized as well. And I think content creators will start to feel better because this animosity can get created between us when we feel like, oh, you're getting this. We're on the same campaign. I already know you're getting paid more than me and not, I don't think healthy for the industry.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
The irony of this whole conversation is that maybe the most overused term in creator marketing is authenticity. And not that I disagree with the fact that the reason why creators are successful is because they resonate with the audience in such a way that their content feels authentic even when they mention a brand that they truly believe in. But authenticity has to be proxy for trust and short of creators and brands being able to trust each other because you feel that you're being compensated fairly, that you're not being taken advantage of, that you know what the intents are, that you trust your agency that is working with you. There's a lot of friction that enter the space and makes it very complicated to do what it is that we preach.
Jamie Gutfreund
I would ask Christen a question. When you're doing deals, do brands, I find that they do not look for creators. Not all creators do the same thing in terms of where they are in the funnel. Some creators are great for awareness and just getting the word out. Some creators are great in that consideration part where it's like a how to video or talking about the best way to take care of the products and getting the audience really engaged. And then you've got creators that are really good for more UGC drive to conversion. I find it's, there are very few brands that understand that and they think of all creators as all things, and that influences the pay and how their results go. Where are you in that discussion?
Christen Nino De Guzman
Yeah, I agree. I think usually there's a few decision makers at the top who are like, we want to work with Mr. Beast or, and they're not really understanding their goals and how that's going to trickle downstream to the creators that they're selecting. And I think that understanding is really important because you have creators like Blair who do a great job with advocacy and getting the word out about different movements. And then you have other creators who are great for click-through rates. And so typically what I find is we try to do a mix, a healthy balance depending on what the client goals are, but there's way more education that needs to go into the brand side, the decision makers and helping them understand this is why these creators would be good for this campaign.
Jamie Gutfreund
I just find it fascinating how few creator teams have access to any kind of strategy or education. There are brilliant people in this space that really understand the business strategy of creator marketing, but they don't understand, for example, we were having a very robust conversation about an excellent best practices. Do an organic post, see which one takes off and then boosts those posts with paid. Seems pretty logical. And yet the reason that doesn't happen, Pierre, you are telling me exactly why you take that.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Yeah, this is the sausage factory and all of its shortcomings for the most part, it's not a lack of understanding of what you just said. That feels pretty obvious. But for most brands, the way that they're currently structured, it's very difficult for them to do this at multiple levels. Starting with the fact that if you haven't anticipated the possibility that you'd be boosting, it means that after the fact you need to renegotiate with the creator the terms that you have so that they give you the rights to boost their content, which usually is going to take anywhere between 24 to 72 hours at the very least. And often it's you're going to miss a window for boosting a viral post. Then you continue with issues internal to the structure of the brands between media teams that are typically completely separate from the teams managing and working with creators.
So again, your incurred delays and challenges in this, the one that comes along with it. So the third challenge is that way too often you boost in all the wrong places. What do I mean by this? The media team that is in charge of doing the boosting or the agency has limited view into the work of the creator and whose audience they resonate with. So they will often click the easy button, whether it's on TikTok or Instagram to say, just pick the audience on my behalf. And what does the platform do? They do? They do just that, which is they pick the audience or the brand. And what we see through the data, the job we do, we see views skyrocketing and engagement staying flat. What does it mean that you put your post in front of a lot of people who didn't care for it? And the creators, often when you talk to them beforehand, they will know that and they even may attempt to tell a brand that it's the case, but they come short of being able to get through. So again, we need to go back to transparency, what success looks like, what do we need to move ahead with on this?
Jamie Gutfreund
I want to share a bad story that I can't say names, but this is a typical conversation when I say, oh god, okay, so a big clothing company, conglomerate owned a couple brands. The digital team launched two apps for two of their brands, and one I would say is cotton good. They're both cotton goods, but different parts of your body is what I'll say. One's more commercial and one's more consumer. Anyway, I don't understand the premise of why anybody needs an app to buy socks or whatever it might be these days. Okay. So I was talking to the digital team. I happened to know the marketing team that was also doing a bunch of work with creators, like 500 creators for campaigns. And I was talking to some of the creators that were participating and I said, are you doing links so that once your awareness post goes on and you're going to click over and connect to the app?
And they said, no, I talked to the marketing side, I talked to the digital side. None of them had talked to each other about connecting the dots and about connecting. It's literally connecting the plumbing. So you had the market team spending a fortune to just carpet bomb the world, and then you had this digital team that created an app and it's like if you build it, they will come. No, they won't. And the creator saying, wait, I don't understand. They're not talking to each other. It made no sense. And it was corporate structure because typically in organizations, if you haven't worked at a big brand or in big organization, corporations are structured vertically. You've got your e-commerce team, your marketing team, your whatever team, your other whatever team, and people go horizontally. I don't care if this message came to me from the e-commerce team and I don't care if it came from the whatever team. I see the brand in total, but the organizations don't look like that. So one of the superpowers of creators that I have found is they are literally the canaries in the coal mine and they can pressure test all the leaky buckets in your team. It's always the creators that figured this out.
Blair Imani
It's so true. I also have a terrible story about something that happened with me. I had done a video, I posted it, I knew they were going to boost it. Amazing. We didn't get into the specifics of where they were boosting it to. Turns out they picked their audience, not mine. And I honestly don't think it was their audience. I think it was just like the world in general. And as somebody with a lot of identities who's very outspoken about advocacy, it was not a great time for me. I literally was on a plane, landed to all of these hate comments, and I'm so glad that I have, I'm with DBA, an amazing agency and they fight for me so hard, but they were relentless in trying to get this ad pulled because it was just exposing me to more and more hate. And we see this happen so often, especially with lgbtq plus creators who will do a collaboration with the brand.
We can think of many that come to mind. It goes out to more of the brand's audience than their audience. The brand is initially seeking out more saturation within that LGBTQ plus market. Through that content creator, it ends up going to a more mainstream market and then you see a lot of hate and backlash. I think what happened with Dylan Mulvaney is a horrific example of how that can pan out. And in my case, it was just the team's not talking to each other, people not considering what's the goal of the and how can we protect creators? And that's why it's so good to have representation. But it came down to me having to send an email directly to the folks who were doing the ad spend with the permission of DBA to be like, hi, I'm getting harassed. Please pull the ad. And only then was it being able to get pulled. And so I think it was so complex it was really difficult, but I don't think that when people are thinking of doing brand collaborations with content creators, they're so intent on vetting the content creator, making sure the content creator is good, that sometimes the other processes don't get the care that they need because people don't have these learnings. There's not a lot of education like you were saying from the brand side about what these processes should look like. And sometimes content creators need to be involved in that as well.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Yeah, absolutely. I'm sorry I had to go through this. Unfortunately,
Blair Imani
I used to work at Planned Parenthood. I'm used to it, but it still sucked.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
I bet. So we've shared all of the shortcomings of the category that we live in, all of the horror stories, maybe not all, but a bunch of horror stories. You guys know the adage, the future is already here, it's unevenly distributed. I'd love to understand from you examples, if you have one tidbit of something that has been done right in a collaboration with a brand that actually starts showing us the way into more of this should get us on the right path.
Christen Nino De Guzman
Well, I touched on this briefly earlier, but I think the biggest thing is, like Jamie said, it's about the money creators care about getting paid and getting paid quickly. And anytime your brand can do something like set a baseline rate in a campaign to ensure that there's not as much of a pay gap or pay disparities happening, that is going to go so far with creators. And I've seen it firsthand when I worked on campaigns at TikTok, that was something that they did and the respect and I think back from the creators of like, oh, well I was only going to charge this much, but now I'm getting paid this much. They really appreciate that because being a creator is hard and they work in silos and they don't always have access to representation or the proper mentorship that they need. And a lot of creators as we know are young and some of them haven't gone to college, maybe they don't have negotiation skills. So anything that your brand can do to really advocate on the creator side I think is really, really important and will go a long way. And the creator community, that is what you want for your brand. Usually the goal of a lot of these campaigns is to build brand sentiment. Well, you can do that firsthand by working with these influential creators to love your brand and advocate for you.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Can we stay on this for a second because I'd love to understand, is this the recommendation you're making or is this something that you're seeing happening with some brands?
Christen Nino De Guzman
I'm not seeing it happen widely. I've seen it happen once or twice, but I would make the recommendation that if you are doing a campaign, you are holding yourself to some sort of standard with the way you're paying creators so that you're not contributing to these massive pay disparities. And like I said, it would help just so there's not one creator getting paid maybe 20 x or if at least if that is happening, at least you're not paying a creator $200 because that's all they ask for. I'm a
Jamie Gutfreund
Gen X, so typically I'm not trying to save the world, so I tend to be much more commercial. But I will say that one of the traits that brands need to think about from a purely yes, it's good for the world and I think that's important. I do. No, I sound like I don't. Being creator friendly and being a creator friendly brand is a business benefit. It is a strategy especially like let's look in beauty brands that treat the beauty creators well have a much better chance of getting the best talent because obviously creators talk and if you're a brand that's not creator friendly and there's better words for that, you are having a business challenge. That's like being the bully on the playground. I will share an example of something that I thought was really well done a couple of years ago. I did a campaign with Logitech for creators.
Not only did they hire creators, but we built a creator academy so that we provided content about a number of different topics for creators to learn because they were the audience. It was altruistic but commercial at the same time. So it was a win-win for everyone. We did a series of shows, we had a cohort of creators that were brought in. We gave them equipment, we gave them lessons in terms of how to set up your studio broadcast equipment. We brought in financial experts, we brought in crisis communications experts, and we helped really bootstrap these creators who were just getting ready to be on the verge of blowing up. And they were not only treated fairly, but they became unbelievable advocates for Logitech and it was a win-win for everybody and just incredibly effective. That's a good story.
Blair Imani
I also have a good story, I can't disclose names, but I did a campaign with a major bank and it was all about black women and all about investing. It would be a terrible time to not have paid those black women content creators that you hired on time to talk about fair pay and equity in the inequities in the banking system. And so one of the things that they did was earmark out of their budget for that campaign to go directly to the content creators themselves. And that doesn't always happen very often. Usually it goes through to the media agency and then it goes to the talent agency and the talent agency deposits to the content creators. But I think in this specific case specific, given the subject matter that they're discussing, it went directly to the content creators and then the commission was paid directly to the media agency.
And I thought that was very smart because it was no ambiguity. You knew exactly when it was coming and such a hot button topic. And I think that, I'm not sure if that could become a standard practice, but I think it is much more pragmatic that way. You don't have this daisy chain of the net 20. And so that way you still have the media agency getting paid for hiring and bringing in the content creators and scouting them and vetting them. You still have the agency getting paid for negotiating because it's not about the standards that we're trying to set industry-wide is not about trying to remove agents or remove the media makers outside of it and just getting it directly to the content creators. We still need this infrastructure. It's about making sure that everyone is paid equitably and paid on time because those two conversations have to be happening in tandem. And so I thought that was brilliant because it would've been a very bad look. So I think all the money that it cost them to do those individual transactions that they made back tenfold in the lack of crisis PR that they had to hire.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
That's awesome stories guys. I appreciate you sharing them. I'll add one to this that some of, and again, I'm representing more of the brand side in that we work primarily with brands. Some of our largest customers have gone all the way to requiring from the agency partners full transparency on data and just that seemingly simple thing is completely changing their practice because now that they know how much each creator makes, it gives them the opportunity and the responsibility to make sure this is done right and that having access to the data and being able to act on it, we've seen is creating a sea change within these organizations hasn't reached the media teams yet. So the boosting is still out there to be figured out, but at the very least by way of which creators to engage and what fees and when we have a negotiation have it be completely open to say, Jamie, love your content, but we are not going to pay you on the base of your number of followers. This is what you present to our brand, here's why.
Jamie Gutfreund
But I think it would be helpful because you say that, but it's hard for people to understand what you mean about, can you go into a little bit more detail? I was on the other side of that. I was at an agency that one of our clients started using Traackr and they said, okay, now you have to run everything through Traackr. And we were like, and it was a lot of work, but I could see the benefit of it ultimately for the brand because they had knowledge. But can you just explain that part
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
For sure. So again, if we go back to when we bring in a new client onto our platform, very often the way creators get paid before we come on board is that the creator fee gets rolled into the agency fee. The company is going to pay the agency a big fat check. At times it's campaign to campaign. Other times it's a retainer and the agency figures out who gets what within that. So what percentage of fee is going to go to the creators and then what percentage of the creator fee goes to each creator individually. And the brand has zero visibility into any of it. Large brands will work with 20, 30 agencies all at once in one market. So multiply that by the number of markets that they're in. It's nuts, the complexity and the lack of visibility that they have. And so when we come in with a technical solution and we say from this point onwards for each campaign, you need to share the detailed fee on who makes what, what's the efficiency cut, what's for what assets that are developed. It completely changes the landscape for the brand and for the agency. And like I said, it creates a level of discomfort at first that you experienced firsthand apparently.
Jamie Gutfreund
Well, as we said, when the tide goes out, you see who's swimming without their bathing suit on. That's not the mantra for the company, but that's what it was.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
And so it creates a level of discomfort that everybody has to deal with because to stay with your analogy, it's the emperor of no close is the first thing that you get to see. But we've seen, and like I said, what we've seen is that once you get over that hump, it creates an opportunity for the brand, the creators and the agencies to do better because now you have a baseline now and you can improve upon what you're doing. And on the brand side, it creates this amazing effect that when the person in charge of creative marketing can go in front of the CMO and the CMO in front of the CFO and explain why they need to 10 x their investment because now they know
Jamie Gutfreund
That's the key question. And for creators, I think it's challenging because they don't realize what it takes behind the scenes because all they experience is someone like Christen saying, Hey, I got a deal for you for 10 grand. It's going to be this blah, blah, blah. What's happening behind the scenes way back in the supply chain is the CMOs going to the CFO and the CEO saying, I need $10 million for my media budget. And they're saying, okay, so you're going to bring in a hundred million dollars worth of revenue for that. And there is this entire gymnastics equation and modern dance moves that go on where they're contorting themselves to try to deliver that. And until you have that kind of data that is very specific, it's still creator marketing is still going to be a tactic. That's why most brands and media agencies stick with straight media buying because it's really simple, it's measurable to the degree that it is, it's accepted and nobody gets fired for buying a TV ad. You don't. But if you can't measure and explain that you don't value, what you don't measure is the phrase, if you can't explain at least the parameters of your creator marketing campaign, it's like you're begging for money. If you prove that it works, then you're golden. So for all of us in this room who are invested in the creator economy as our employment and our future, we want this to happen so that the CFO and the CEO EO are saying, okay, this is great. Let's keep going.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Absolutely. It's the pain on when you first receive a vaccine like that pinch is what we need to get over with because what's on the other side again is better for everybody for sure. That's the core challenge is how do we get to a space where we have enough information in enough data to scale that category. The one thing I was going to say, so my background before starting this company in tech was in marketing attribution. So I used to count the beans on building marketing mix modeling. So I was doing all the data side in a world that was pre-created economy. And it baffled me to see that brands have been able to spend as much money as they have in the tens of bins of dollars on the back of fairly limited and shallow data on the performance that they're able to demonstrate.
And the only reason why it happened is because the other side of that equation that is much clear, whether it's on it's affiliation. And so the conversion to sales or traditional digital marketing and digital ads performance started plummeting and as these known KPIs, so the key performance indicators for the brands were going down, a lot of brands started looking for alternatives, any alternative to something that could be better than this. And so we got into a space, but we haven't built that infrastructure quite yet. I mean, we are attempting to do it and we're in the process with our clients to do it, but as an industry, we are not there yet in building all the plumbing to stay with your analogy, that will get us there.
Jamie Gutfreund
I'm going to just ask a geeky question. Does anybody in this room know what an MMM study is? Okay, there. See, there's five people. An MMM study is what brands and their agencies use to determine where their money goes for advertising. And those models are outdated. They've only just in the last, say two years started to factor in creator marketing as a input in terms of what model spits out. You should spend seven. And it always used to say you need more tv always. And so it would say 70% of your spend should be in tv and that's 40% cable, whatever it might be. Now it's connected TV and then outdoor, whatever it might be. And creator wasn't in those models, and it's usually about two years of data that are correlated to sales. So the idea is the model says if you spend $10 million on tv, you're going to get X amount of sales, and that is how advertising is run. It's an overly complex system that I've simplified, but that's basically how it runs. And now creator marketing is being integrated into mms, but most people in the business don't know what that is because we speak creator, we speak how to make a great piece of content, the full 360 of understanding what's happening on the brand side, which is where the money comes from. That's critical.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Awesome. My last question to each of you is give me one recommendation that you make to the people in this room if you're a brand, if you're a creator, if you're an agency. So I guess three recommendations.
Jamie Gutfreund
If you're a brand, check every part of your content supply chain and know how it works and make sure all the plumbing is connected and don't assume anything. And then make sure the people that are working on your creator marketing have a 360 view of the entire campaign.
Blair Imani
If you're an agency, my recommendation would be to start creating those standards so you don't contribute to the pay gaps and have bias be part of that process. If you're a creator, I would highly recommend taking yourself very seriously. There is so much hoopla and conversation around creators and how we're dismissed and demeaned. Don't do that to yourself. Don't be part of that. You have to take yourself seriously. You have to run it like a business. And it doesn't mean you can't still be whimsical and still be effervescent and creative. It doesn't mean you can't still dress like this, but you do have to take yourself seriously. And really, if you need a lawyer to look at contracts, have a lawyer, look at contracts, always have a lawyer, look at contracts, and if you're a brand, just trust that creators talk to each other that this transparency will be happening regardless of whether or not you're involved in the process and you want it to end up on your side. So whether that's working through organizations like Traackr to make sure that data is standardized so that you have that for yourself, it's already happening. And so if you want to be in on that, I would just recommend getting part of the process because otherwise you won't have control of it. And that's not good for the brand side.
Christen Nino De Guzman
Yeah, I think if you're a brand, do your due diligence on your agency that you're using, which means saying, Hey, can I look at the contracts that you're sending out to creators? Can I see the template? Read through it yourself and try not to be too scared. If you are a creator agency, I would say do feedback. Get feedback from the creators that you're working with, and try to see how they're perceiving you as an agency and the campaign as a whole, because that will obviously make you better at your jobs. And then I think as a creator, keep the conversation around pay transparency going because it's still 2025. We have a huge way to go in terms of creators getting paid fairly and setting a market rate. That's fair. And we have a lot of work to do.
Pierre-Loïc Assayag
Brands, you need to start saving your data today. To Jimmy's point, especially with AI models coming out, you need months or years of data to train them. So as we moving into a model that is much more automated in making recommendation on where to spend your money, you need to start saving and AC occurring that detailed historical information to train your AI models because it's coming for creators. What you said I think is perfect. Just ask for feedback. Ask for feedback. Request that debrief with the agency and with a brand after you run a campaign. And for agencies, your unique value proposition is not operating in the shadows. Your unique value proposition is a special skill that you bring that got you hired with a brand. Focus on that. And it's okay to share the data because what your job becomes is just to outperform your competition.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fast Track. If you enjoyed this episode, brighten someone else's day by sharing it with the front. And if you want to keep up to date on what's happening in the influencer marketing industry, follow Traackr on social, that's at T-R-A-A-C-K-R on any social platform. We're always sharing fresh insights and hosting exciting events aimed at connecting marketers and creators. Thanks again and see you next time.