The Branded Content Rundown, Part II

Getting started and getting paid with sponsored content gigs.

Branded content is, whether you like it or not, an ever-bigger part of our work lives. Journalists, artists, and other creatives are supplementing their incomes with lucrative contracts with big brands.

Whether you’re just curious about the world of branding and advertising, or you want to dive in and try to make more coin, this guide, produced by seasoned branded content expert (and Study Hall member) T.M. Brown, will tell you everything you need to know — the good, the bad, the weird. Stay tuned for further installments in this series.

Branded Content Rundown Part II: Get In, Get Paid

I remember the email that changed things for me. It was in January of 2016 , a few months after I filed my first piece for SPIN’s branded content department. My editor — an often avuncular, sometimes cranky music industry veteran named Randy who had decided to cash in on his contacts and for whom I will always have a soft spot — asked if I was free for some work that would happen in the middle of March. I said sure, assuming that it would be another small freelance gig that I could pull off after hours from my day job. Instead Randy told me they want me to go to Austin for SXSW and cover some of the brand activations they were producing. They’d pay my way down there and put me up, and throw me $3000 for three days of work.

That sort of lump sum was so foreign as to be shocking. I told Randy I was in, and silently celebrated this weird luck I had into. I didn’t think I’d ever get this sort of offer again so I took it as a sort of manna from Unilever, and looked forward to spending a few days going to shows and doing what I figured real music journalists did. (For the record, Austin during SXSW is hell on earth. The influx of tech-industry ghouls attempting to inject something interesting into their lives by eating BBQ they read about on a food blog and seeing bands at pop-up venues like the Spotify House and the Pandora Gulag is something to behold. Everything in Austin is branded to within an inch of its life during SXSW. The only blessed people are the food vendors who charge three times their normal prices in a welcome middle finger to the venture capital-funded horde.)

After collecting that handful of clips and cash in Austin, I figured it’d be back to peeling off a few hundred dollars here and there. Instead, the floodgates opened. Assignment rates started climbing, and I started becoming a known quantity with different studios. I was about to quit my full-time job in the second half of 2016 — a not entirely smooth transition but easier than it would have been a year earlier.

As much as this sounds like the beginning of a “I Got Rich, and So Can You” infomercial, I mean it when I say I’m not special. I’m not an especially talented wordsmith, nor am I a great interviewer, and my brain short-circuits if I have to write anything longer than 2000 words. Some of all this — probably most of it — is luck (much like non-sponcon writing). Hitting the right editor at the right time, meeting someone at a party, a friend of a friend introducing me to the right person at a publisher. Both the stuff that is luck and the stuff that isn’t can, fortunately, be learned.

Know Your Worth and Set a Rate

We are all inured to devaluing ourselves in the face of an opportunity. There’s a socialist dissertation in there about the scarcity and precariousness of work in 2019, but we’ve all run into a scenario where we accept terms below our internal standards. Branded content is no different, which is why I treat any new client like a scumbag banker. Take a lower rate to get your foot in the door, produce phenomenal work, and then let them know your real rate when you’ve become a known quantity. You are trying to make yourself more than a replaceable part; you need to become an integral part of whatever machine you’re in. Man this is a bummer of an analogy, but I mean so is capitalism so here we are.

Once you’ve filed a piece and wowed the powers that be, don’t be shy about securing the bag. If that’s $2 / word, go for it. Want to try and grab $3 / word? Shoot your shot. You’ll get a feel for which studios have the money to shell out for freelancers and which ones are truly scraping the bottom of the barrel in their cost-of-sale spreadsheets. There is a fine line to be walked here — I very nearly lost my biggest client because of a miscommunication where an incoming managing editor thought I was playing hardball by asking for a rush charge — but it’s about getting a fair wage for demonstrated expertise. (Rush charges, by the way, are completely fair game to ask for and most studios I work with understand that. If a piece needs to be turned around in fewer than five days, I charge 1.5 times my usual rate; if it’s less than 48 hours then I charge double.) I have never met an editor in branded content that begrudged me for asking for what I consider a fair rate. Many of them are ex-journalists and know the drill, they just happen to have a lot more cash at their disposal.

For what it’s worth, my rates are as follows: $1.50 / word at Quartz, $1.50-$2 / word at Fast Company, $2-$3 / word at Vox, $1.50 / word at the BBC (this varies since I do a lot of editing for them as well), $2 / word at SPIN (I haven’t worked for them in a long time), $1 / word at Thrillist (Ditto). I’m a “consultant” at Fast Company and Axios and my rate is typically $100 an hour. Between those clients I’ve invoiced about 70 different projects this year.

What the work for these studios actually looks like varies from project to project. I’ve worked on developing scripts for branded videos for studios that have done the pIvOt To ViDeO, acted as managing editor for large projects, and written social copy when my editors were in a pinch, among a bunch of other stuff. Most commonly, I’ll be asked to write ~800 words on a previously agreed-upon story that a content strategist developed during the initial pitch process and compensation will be based on that word count. There are times when I’m asked to pitch stories or tweak a strategist’s work to make a given piece of content mesh better with the editorial tenor of a given publisher. An editor asking you for input on a pitch is cause for celebration. It means you’ve become a trusted sounding board for the studio, and that your ideas are moneymakers.

Couple of things I’ve learned over the years: If an editor gives you a word count range, always contract against the top end of that range. You can’t run out of ink on the internet, which means you’re most likely going to be filing long. Might as well get paid for it. Expertise does count for something in sponcon — I’ve gotten assignments because editors know I’m a music and sports writer by background — but true value for editors is in speed and clarity, two things I’ll discuss at length below.

In good months, I’ll work on three or four branded pieces and lay the groundwork for a couple more so that my pipeline remains full. There are the odd bonanzas where I’ll write five pieces plus be asked to do some editorial consulting and, I don’t know, host a branded podcast or something dumb. Those are good months — but they’re also just balancing out the dry spells that we all know and dread, and exist even in spon con.

I will say something that may rub people the wrong way and I apologize if that’s the case: My rates are not your rates, necessarily. Many of these editors I’ve spent years working with and have developed bonds that make our relationships especially valuable to the studio. I’ve worked gratis for editors countless times, helping them spitball ideas and craft pitches and tweak copy. For some of those shops I get a higher rate simply because I know the studio, clients, and players really well. Those bonds come with some risks as well: If an editor I’m close with leaves a studio I’m more or less back to working from square one. Such is the shaky ground all freelancers have built their careers upon.

Deliver On Time, and Deliver Clean

In some ways, there’s a bias against sponsored content. I’ve worked with a lot of sponcon editors and every single one of them could hold their own in any editorial newsroom. In fact, the people trying to get branded content out the door have to deal with a lot more bullshit than your average editor because they have to convince both their account managers and their clients that this is the best way forward, even if neither of them think so. That means they’re looking for collaborators who make their jobs easier, which is where you come in.

Bungling deadlines is a quick way to get yourself blacklisted from any studio. Clients get very upset if they don’t get drafts exactly when they want them — never mind that they take their sweet ass time returning the favor, as if they don’t understand publishing timelines the minute they have to look at a piece of content — and editors are under immense pressure to adhere to oftentimes unreasonable timelines. Any good editor will do their best to buy you as much time as possible and you should obviously feel comfortable asking for extensions when necessary, but punctuality will score you a lot of bonus points. (If it’s my first time working with a client, I make it a point to file early. If you can turn something around in 24 hours you will make people who control a lot of money very happy.)

A quick aside that I promise is going somewhere: My first job out of college was working for a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It sucked! But one thing I took from that job was to internalize an old saw about consulting: You have to pick two out of three from good, fast, or cheap, but you can’t be all three. (This apparently has a name which I didn’t know until five minutes ago: The Project Management Triangle! Very exciting.) Sponcon is about being good and fast. We’ve talked about the latter, and the former is just as straightforward.

Filing clean, tight copy will make any editor’s heart sing. Writing branded content is not getting your first big national glossy feature. It is at its core a defensive game. It needs to be good enough to satisfy the communications ghouls looking for enough brand mentions as well as protecting your editor from the admonishments of their editorial counterparts, but you are not getting a Pulitzer for any of this work. Good enough is good enough, just make sure it’s clear, concise, and shoves the interview with the assistant VP in charge of operations at the very top of the piece. That always gets ‘em.

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