Brand Deals 101

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What are Usage Rights? Should I let a brand run Paid Media or use Whitelisting on my Facebook or Instagram? What are Dark Posts?  Watch to learn more about what to do if a brand wants specific terms for usage rights/paid media/whitelisting in the brand deal or sponsorship.

Usage Rights, Paid Media, & Whitelisting

What Are Usage Rights?

What are usage rights? These are terms in a contract where you're allowing the brand to use your name and likeness and content in a variety of ways. So name and likeness is just a fancy way of saying that they want the right to use you and your personality in connection with your content. The most common is, you know, allowing the brand to reshare or re-post your content on the brand's social media like their Instagram or their Twitter. 

You know you'll also see terms like their "O&O" site, which means the brand's owned and operated sites like their website and so on.  Maybe they wanna embed it on their site, landing page or maybe even an e-commerce partner. There are other less common types of usage, which brands sometimes try to slide into the language which would allow any usage, not just social media or digital channels.

They’ll say things like print, "OOH" which means out of home, like billboards, broadcast, meaning that they could use clips of your video on TV, and so on. And so these types of usage are, again, less common but they should be paying you more money for that. Oftentimes the brands really don't have a plan to use your content for these purposes, but you still want to get them to remove that because technically they could use it for that if you agree to it.

What is Paid Media?

What is paid media? Paid media rights allow the brand to use your content for advertising purposes. Meaning that they'll put additional money behind your content to expose more people to it. This could mean ads on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. Typically they'll be targeting certain types or ages of consumers. This is critical, because depending on how long you've agreed to let them run paid media with your content, your face is going to be potentially connected with this brand for a while.

One thing to think about is that if you watched my video on exclusivity, let's say the exclusivity is 30 days, but the brand wants paid media rights for a year. So you could conceivably run into a situation where six months down the line, you've partnered with a competitor and let's say you put out a post or a video, and the original brand is still running paid media with your old content. That doesn't look great for everyone involved, right? 

I mean the new brand isn't gonna be thrilled, your credibility with your audience may be compromised, and the original brand isn't gonna love it either because the value of the paid media asset that they paid for is reduced if you're out there promoting another brand, ya know? The best solution to this in my opinion is to tie the paid media usage period to the exclusivity period. Let's say they're both 30 days, so that there's no situation where something like that conflict arises.

What is Whitelisting?

This is where the brand or the agency the brand works with asks for advertiser access to one of your social media accounts like Facebook or Instagram. 

Example:‍

Let’s say you made a post on Facebook in partnership with the brand, and so what that allows them to do is to go into the back end and put additional money behind your post on your feed so that it amplifies it to more people. The reason that brands like doing this, frankly, is those ads perform better. I mean just think about it. If you're scrolling through your feed, what are you more likely to stop on?

A video of a creator talking about a brand's product or an ad straight from the brand's page?

There is another type of paid media that some brands will do called dark posts. In this scenario you'd still grant them access to your Instagram or your Facebook, for example, and typically you'd record a video or take a picture talking about their brand, but you don't actually post it to your feed natively. The brand then uses those assets you created for them to make an ad that runs through your page as a sponsored post.

Pricing Usage and Paid Media

How do you price usage and paid media? In my opinion, there are two different ways to look at this. On the one hand, as a creator, you might be thrilled about the potential of additional exposure that you could get from a brand re-posting your stuff on their accounts, right? Sometimes some brands have millions of followers and especially if they tag you in the post it could be very beneficial. 

If they're gonna be putting a ton of additional money behind the posts, it's just something to factor in when you're deciding how much usage you're comfortable granting them. Now the second way to look at it is that they're using your name and your likeness and your content as an ad. They're getting a lot of benefit out of this partnership and let's be real, it's probably costing them a lot less money to partner with a creator like you than a traditional production company or an ad agency to make an ad. You should feel comfortable pricing accordingly to ensure that you're being compensated for the benefits that the brand is receiving.‍