Influencer marketing agency for brands

What we do

We run brand partnerships with YouTube creators, end to end. You send a brief and a budget, we come back with creators who fit it, and we handle everything from the rate negotiation to the reporting afterwards. One contract with us, one invoice, one point of contact, however many creators the campaign involves.

The roster is majority US, across golf, finance and family. Talentted grew out of a creator dubbing company that worked with some of the largest channels on the platform, which is where the content knowledge comes from and why concept work is part of the job rather than something we leave to you.

How rates are set, and why subscriber count is the wrong question

Subscriber count is close to meaningless as a pricing input. Channels with twenty million subscribers average thirty thousand views a video. The algorithm distributes to viewers, not to subscribers, so the only number that prices a placement is average views.

A workable formula: take the creator’s YouTube RPM, charge a CPM of 1.5 to 2 times that, and multiply by their average views across the last twelve to twenty uploads. A creator on a $10 RPM averaging three million views is a $60,000 placement.

Across our deals, brands pay a CPM between $25 and $180 on long form, and between $5 and $50 on short form. That range is wide because the inputs vary enormously, and three things move a rate more than size does:

Audience geography. Views are not fungible. A view from India is worth roughly a tenth to a twentieth of a US view to most advertisers. Germany and France sit near parity with the US. If a creator’s US share is under 30%, you want the UK, Australia and Canada carrying the audience past a combined 40% before the rate makes sense.

Audience age. At identical view counts, a creator with an adult audience prices at roughly five times one whose audience skews to children, because the audience watching is not the audience holding the wallet.

Vertical. Finance, business and property audiences sit at the top of the range. Their viewers arrive with buying intent already formed.

What changes the price once you are negotiating

A few structural levers, all of which are worth knowing before you receive a quote:

• A 90-second integration runs 10% to 25% above a 60-second one, and is not always the better buy. An extra thirty seconds in a seven-minute video can cost enough retention to reduce the views you paid for.
• A full dedicated video runs about 1.5 times an integration for any creator above roughly 200,000 average views.
• A three-video package typically earns around 20% off the per-video rate. A video plus shorts bundle earns 10% to 20%.
• Paid usage or whitelisting adds 15% to 30% for 30 to 90 days.
• Cross-posting to all three platforms usually costs nothing extra. Most creators, especially smaller ones, post everywhere anyway and are rarely asked. Write it into the agreement, because you are getting it for free either way.

On exclusivity, our advice runs against what most brands ask for. Buying a category lockout with a percentage uplift is a poor trade for a creator, because it prices the brands they must now turn down at zero. If you want exclusivity, buy it with guaranteed additional videos instead. You get more content, the creator gets certainty, and the negotiation stops being adversarial.

Where campaigns actually fail

Not at price. Deals die at contract stage, and almost always because something appears in the draft that was never discussed: a minimum view guarantee, a usage-rights grant, a whitelisting permission, a penalty tied to performance. By then you are negotiating commercial terms inside a legal document, which is the most expensive place to do it.

Watch for commercial terms hiding inside creative briefs. We have seen a delivery requirement of 80% of expected views written into what was presented as a content guide. That is a performance obligation, not creative direction, and a creator who signs without noticing has taken on risk nobody priced.

The second failure mode is measurement. Most brands judge a campaign on link clicks and signups alone, which captures direct conversion and nothing else. Two numbers we would ask any creator for, and that almost nobody requests: the ratio of returning to new viewers, and the creator’s highest and lowest view counts that year. Without the second one you cannot tell whether your video over-performed or under-performed for that channel, which means you cannot tell whether the creator or the concept was the problem.

The concept is the part that is worth paying for

The single most useful thing we have learned about retention: an ad read placed inside an action beat does not cost you the audience drop that a standard sponsor segment does.

On one campaign we built the product into a competitive challenge so that the participants could not complete the challenge without using it, and the read happened during the challenge rather than in a segment before or after it. Average view duration did not dip where sponsored segments normally cost a video. A variant of the same idea: find the moment in a concept where the creator has to stay still, because the audience already expects talking and nothing else is happening.

The retention cost of a sponsorship is not caused by the ad read existing. It is caused by the ad read being a break in the content. That is a concept problem, and solving it is what an agency should be for.

What you get from us that an in-house team cannot do alone

Access, speed and concept work, in that order of difficulty.

Most of this industry is slow, and there is no structural reason for it to be. A salaried talent manager gets paid whether or not your campaign moves this week. We get paid when the deal closes and the campaign works, which is a better incentive than the hourly one and the reason a deal that fits can close in a day rather than a month.

We will also tell you when the answer is no. A brief that cuts against a creator’s own plans, a product they would not use, a lockout that damages them later: these are all reasons we decline, and a shortlist you can trust requires that we do.

Ready to see names? Book a call and bring the brief and the budget.