I need to be very careful about how I write today’s newsletter.
What I’m about to tell you relates to a partnership into which I entered with a brand via a PR agency. The dust has, thankfully, settled. Kinda. The content has been published, I’ve been paid, and we all appear to be getting on with the rest of our lives.
But I’m still slightly unnerved by it all.
Regardless, I need to offload this today. I just won’t be mentioning any names and some of the details will be a little light on specifics. I trust you understand why.
It’s common practice to work with a brand via an agency. It makes total sense - particularly if the brand in question is a big deal; why on earth would they expend their own team’s time to deal with the endpoints of marketing campaigns (that is, after all, what we creators and influencers are)?
The great thing about this is that it enables you, as that creator, to develop a relationship with that PR agency. Most are utterly lovely, genuinely have your best interest at heart (along with the brand’s), and are likely to provide opportunities to work with different brands in the future. It’s a win-win-win situation.
The agency’s job is simple - in theory. They’re given a product, campaign, or piece of news by the brand which needs amplifying via coverage on social media. It’s the agency’s job to recruit creators, influencers, and other call-us-what-you-likes who have built sizeable audiences that fit the marketing strategy’s target persona.
If the agency gets this process right, it’ll generate significant interest in whatever it is the campaign is focusing on and drive leads or confirmed sales back to the brand. Everyone, consequently, wins; the creator scores a big video and gets paid for featuring the product, the agency gets paid by the brand, and the brand itself sells more stuff.
There are KPIs (key performance indicators) involved in this. The brand will give the PR agency a specific number - or ballpark - to hit in terms of coverage. It might be a view threshold, or as detailed as an exact ROI for the marketing campaign. This is entirely understandable and exactly how marketing works; if you’re investing in external resources for a campaign, it needs to have a profitable outcome.
At the heart of this sits the audience - the potential customers. They’re not stupid. They can’t be tricked. Their attention needs to be grabbed ethically. This is why influencer marketing works so well. I used to work in marketing, and if I’d had access to this form of promotion it would have been game-changing; the ability to pay someone for access to their highly engaged and tightly defined audience is absolute gold dust and a brilliant way to spend your budget.
There are some charlatans out there, though - as I discovered recently when I engaged with a PR agency to help promote a marketing campaign for a brand. To cut to the chase, once the content had gone live, it was clear that something was badly wrong. Views were crashing in like the moment the door was flattened by White Walkers at Hardhome. At one point, 2,000 views per hour were flooding a video which should never have been that popular. Worse still, those views were resulting in zero engagement; the White Walkers were smashing their way in, realising there were no recruits to make their own, and continuing their march towards Kings Landing.
This is really bad news on YouTube. It’s classed as fake engagement and goes against YouTube’s policies. Obviously. I’d also wager that it would go against the policies and goals of any brand marketing campaign which is looking for real human beings to buy its products.
This agency was buying fake views and sending them at a rate of knots towards my content. I can say this confidently because they admitted it. They also admitted that they were doing so to hit a KPI for the brand. I have all of this in writing.
I am not making this up. Although it did feel as though Jeremy Beadle* was going to make an appearance on several occasions during this farce.
The reality of this approach is that it could have earned me a strike on YouTube. To put that in context, if you get three strikes from YouTube for breach of policy, you’re out. Your channel is deleted. Gone. Business over. Livelihood finished.
The matter is resolved now, as noted earlier. But it wasn’t an easy thing to fix from my side. It involved removing content, engaging in some genuinely horrible discussions around contract breaches, and panicked re-hashing of contracts. I won’t go into any specifics, because my concern is that, given how slippery the PR agency in question has been, I do not trust them one tiny bit.
Worse still, this all happened over a weekend when I was supposed to switch off after a ridiculously busy period of work. Most of those horrible discussions took place while I had my 15-month-old son sleeping on my chest; a sacred time for any parent and one during which I did not want to be dealing with such needless stress. In fact, it completely ruined a weekend during which I was supposed to be recharging with my family.
Alas, this is the reality of running a creator business. Although, I’m happy to report that, in my experience, this is very rare. Every other PR agency I’ve worked with has been trustworthy, lovely, and, most importantly, only interested in legitimate ways to help a brand promote its products.
One day, if I feel it’s safe to do so, I will reveal the name of the agency I’m referring to today. I think that’s an important thing to do; I do not want other creators (or brands) to suffer as I did with this one and we need to shine a spotlight on the charlatans of this industry.
*one of the UK audience, there