You're not imagining it.

Pitches that used to get responses are going unanswered. Brands email you asking for your rates, you reply promptly, and then… silence. Or you get the dreaded "we're going in a different direction" after three follow-ups.

I was just chatting with my team of sponsorship coaches inside Wizard's Guild about this exact pattern, and we're seeing it across hundreds of creators. There's not one reason this is happening — there are five. And more importantly, there are five tactical fixes you can start using right now.

The AI Slop Problem Is Real

Marketers are getting absolutely hammered by AI-generated pitches right now.

These aren't thoughtful, personalized emails. These are automated blasts — tools that let people email 100 brands a day with zero personalization, sometimes using AI agents to hit send without any human involvement. Somehow these marketers' email addresses end up in databases, and now their inboxes are a wasteland of identical, robotic outreach.

So when your pitch lands in that inbox? It gets lumped in with the slop.

Here's the fix: video pitches are now the default. Short, personalized, and obvious proof that a human being made this.

The structure maps closely to the ROPE method I share in Sponsor Magnet — but you're delivering it on video. Lead with something relevant to them in the first five seconds: a campaign they just ran, a product they recently launched. Follow up with organic content showing your audience has existing affinity for their brand. Share proof of your work with other brands. Give them something tangible.

Then — and this is the move I've been seeing work — send it via a LinkedIn cold connection request, not just email. Connect with the influencer marketing manager, open with the relevancy hook, drop the video link. If you want to warm things up first, follow them, engage with a few posts, then reach out. That friction you skip by going cold costs you.

Niche Is Your Moat Right Now

The more generic you are, the harder you're getting hit.

Lifestyle influencers, generic food creators, travel creators with no specific angle — they're feeling this more than anyone. The supply of creators is way up. Budgets are tighter. And brands have more data and software than ever to help them find exactly who they need.

But niche creators? They're weathering this.

One of our coaching clients, Dr. Alex, runs a podcast called Digital Pathology Place. She's not pulling hundreds of thousands of views — she's pulling hundreds, maybe thousands. But she's crushing it with brand partnerships because if you're a medical device company or a biopharmaceutical brand trying to reach pathologists, you don't have a lot of professional creator options. She's not one of the faceless many. She's the only option.

That's leverage.

If you've found yourself in "generic" territory, the fix isn't reinventing yourself overnight — it's getting more specific in your outreach. Pull audience data that proves your niche. Survey results, job titles from your newsletter list, household income data, psychographic information — what problems are your people actually dealing with? What's keeping them up at night?

Scarcity is your friend right now. Position yourself as the only option, or one of a very small handful. Commodity creators are getting hit hardest because brands can partner with anyone. Make it clear that they can't get what you offer anywhere else.

The Macro Headwinds Are Real (But That's Not an Excuse)

Here's the thing — I usually hesitate to bring up the macro landscape because it can feel like a copout. Like you're just playing the victim.

But you need to understand what's actually happening so you can respond strategically.

Brands are dealing with economic uncertainty, concern about a potential recession, companies cutting headcount because of AI efficiencies, and most importantly — tariff chaos hitting supply chains. If you're a consumer brand and your margins are getting hammered because of manufacturing and shipping unpredictability, the last thing you want to do is pour money into an influencer campaign and then face a supply disruption right when you're driving eyeballs to your landing page.

April and I actually lived this. We had a deal with a jewelry brand — I tell the full story in Sponsor Magnet — where we did everything right, created the content, were about to launch, and the day before they had a supply inventory disruption. They were out of stock on the product we were literally about to promote. Total nightmare. They'd spent money to hire us, and we were about to send a wave of traffic to a page where no one could buy anything.

Multiply that by 100,000 for the brands navigating tariffs right now. Of course they're being conservative.

And here's what makes it worse: big brands are like giant ocean freight liners. They can't turn on a dime. If they made conservative plans 6-9 months ago, it might take 6, 9, even 18 months to course correct — even after things stabilize.

So what do you do? Start pitching B2B brands and SaaS products. They're inherently less exposed to tariffs and supply chain disruption than consumer brands. If you're already working with consumer brands, propose smaller, lower-risk activations to keep the relationship warm rather than losing the deal entirely. And reframe your pitch around ROI — not just awareness campaigns, but content they can repurpose for paid ads, or conversion-focused partnerships where you're confident you can drive actual actions.

Your Rates Might Need a Reality Check

I know. Bitter pill.

But here's the truth: a lot of creators are pricing themselves out of deals without realizing it — especially if those rates were set during the 2021-2022-2023 boom. That period was genuinely unusual. Brands were splashing cash. Inbound was super healthy. They were still figuring out influencer marketing and willing to pay a lot for not a lot of work.

That period is over.

Brands now have software that tells them if your audience has fraudulent followers, if they have existing brand affinity, and exactly what demographic slice they're trying to reach. They can slice and dice audience data in ways they couldn't five years ago. The information asymmetry that used to work in creators' favor has shrunk.

This isn't about racing to the bottom. It's about structuring deals smarter.

A few things worth considering:

Add a performance-based component. A hybrid deal — baseline compensation to create the content, plus a performance kicker on the back end (say 15-25% of each sale you drive) — shifts the perceived risk. It also signals you're confident in your ability to actually move the needle.

Bundle deliverables more creatively. Instead of just dropping your rate while the brand concedes nothing, add value. A newsletter mention. A social post. If you've got a list of 3,000 engaged followers, that could be the thing that makes your ask feel justified at the number you actually want.

Propose longer-term commitments. Sometimes locking in multiple months changes the math for everyone.

Get creative about payment terms. A brand once told me they only had $5K left in their Q2 budget and couldn't make my $10K ask work. I said: pay the $5K from Q2, and the remaining balance from Q3 budget. They literally said, "We didn't know you'd be willing to do that." In Sponsor Magnet, I share a story about a creator who used this move — and instead of a $10K deal, walked away with a $60K always-on annual contract at $5K a month. Because the brand said, "If you'd do that for us, can we just lock in the whole year?"

Don't assume the brand is going to come to you with creative ideas. That's your job.

Your Warmest Leads Are Already in Your Inbox

This one I have to bring up because it shocks me every time — creators consistently overlook it.

If cold outreach conversion is down, the answer isn't to just cold outreach harder. It's to go back to brands who have already worked with you.

They know your audience. They've approved you internally. You're already in their vendor paperwork system, you've got your W9 on file with them, they know what collaborating with you looks like. Convincing a past sponsor to come back is infinitely easier than convincing a new one to take a chance on you.

The reason most creators don't do this? They're terrified of hearing that the last deal didn't perform.

I get it. But think about it this way — Nelson Mandela said, "I never lose. I either win or learn." If you go back to a brand and they say the last engagement was great and they have a new campaign coming? Amazing, easy yes. But if they say it went average, or didn't drive as many sales as they hoped? That's information. That's an opening.

"Thank you so much for sharing that. I actually had some suspicions about why — I noticed a few comments from people saying they'd tried your product and it didn't work for them, but I know you've completely reformulated since then. What if we made that the focus of the next engagement? Let's re-educate the market on what's changed."

You go head-on to the objection. You don't hide from it.

Also remember: brands are understaffed and overworked. The person who used to handle creator partnerships might have gotten laid off. Now it's on the affiliate marketing manager who's also managing paid clicks and billboard advertising and an outside agency that's not pulling its weight — and their kid is sick at home and they just had to cancel their vacation.

All of these are human problems. If you can reach out and make it turnkey — "Here's the idea, here's exactly why it works, here's what the investment looks like, just say yes or no, we don't even need a call" — sometimes that's all it takes to get the deal.

Default to Action

There's no single reason for this slowdown. It's the AI pitch flood, the macro economy, tighter budgets, brand software getting smarter, and some creators whose rates just haven't adjusted to a new market reality.

But none of that means the game is over. It means the game changed, and the creators who adapt are going to eat while everyone else sits around complaining that brand deals aren't what they used to be.

So — which of these five things are you going to tackle first?

If you want support navigating all of it, that's exactly what we do inside Wizard's Guild. From outreach and pricing strategy to putting proposals together and navigating tricky situations with brands — it's all there. Come check it out.