Are Creator prices heading for a crash in 2025?

Thanks for reading our new version of the DRPCRD newsletter. The aim of this new format is just to spread joy and wisdom about creator marketing 🎄. We’ve also teamed up with some top creators to write their own stories and advice for brands in the space, so read below for our first one.

If a friend needs some of this wisdom every fortnight, they can subscribe on this link!

💸 Will we see lower creator content prices in 2025?

A growing supply of creators…

There’s never been so many creators in the UK, all getting more brand savvy and growing their audiences. This gives brands a lot of choice, we see some client shortlists for brands being anything up to 50 candidates per brief. Ultimately this brings price as a more important factor when choosing who to partner with.

• We estimate that there’s 75,000 “creators” in the UK, actively engaging with brands on a paid basis.

• There’s over 250,000 people working with brands on a loose basis, taking free product and brand “ambassadors” (half of those could be Gymshark athletes).

• But importantly we’re seeing this grow constantly over this year - we now scout for new creators who are coming up, by talking to the biggest talent agents and our own team’s obsession with social media. More creators means more choice, and more competitive prices. Exciting times.

Generative AI and software making it all so easy…

• It’s never been easier to create professional-grade video at scale. Services like Runway and Descript will continue to get more advanced in 2025. Capcut just dropped some crazy new features including multi-cam editing and audio separation, both FREE 🤯

• Expect to see even more players in the video creation AI market coming, every company that raised big VC money this year will be launching early in 2025.

• Meta has recently released open source AI that will automatically translate videos into mulitiple languages (imaginatively named Translate)

• Not to be outdone, TikTok has launched Symphony, an AI-powered creative suite helping advertisers instantly ideate, write scripts, create avatars and translate videos. Mental.

As content-led social algorithms demand more content from creators to grow their audiences, AI is giving everyone a big hand in keeping up.

Performance media is coming in 🔥 in 2025…

• You have probably seen loads of creator content x brands in your feed this year. And loads of it is selling product, ad-style, shot face to camera. But it’s mushroom powders and gadgets, drop shippers (beware), and those picture frames that hold your kids terrible pictures. Not the big spenders.

• The big brands are coming in hot in 2025 for TikTok, and they’ll be investing big in creators. But why might that have downward pressure on prices? Because brands are starting to bring their performance budgets - budget that is highly optimised and has to work hard to perform for click through or conversion to sale. That means it has to be cheap, which brings us to…

• To make this even easier for brands, TikTok is re-launching their TTCC product (it’s called TikTok creative challenge), which brings free creator content at scale to performance brands who wish to spend big on TikTok. TikTok subsidies the creation of 30+ videos that the brand can optimise to their hearts content. Keep spending ad money, and TTCC will keep giving you content to optimise (all free). And yes - DRPCRD is a TTCC partner. Get in touch if you’re interested in knowing more about this.

So in short - the creator content market is heating up going into 2025, and we do think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on prices for content, with a lot of price sensitive brands coming in. Mixed with a big growth in creators who can create videos easier than ever - surely prices will go down on average (though we don’t expect bigger creators to charge less - if only). Anyone disagree with those market economics?

🧐 Creator tip: Cole Anderson gives us 3 tips for working better with creators

3 ways to work with creators better - written by a creator who knows. We asked comedy creator Cole Anderson James how brands might get the best from creators. He’s what he told us.

Let creators into the creative process
Let the creator take the reigns, they know exactly what works for their audience. They’ve built up the followers over years, so they can tell what’s going to perform well. If the content is too ‘addy’ or features too much input from the brand where it changes the style of my usual content, it always has a negative impact on results. Building the relationship between yourself and the creator is a great thing to do, if it’s an easy team to work with then it’ll get the best out of the creator, and the video will be a much better piece of work.

Set everything up front - don’t add requirements later
Sometimes a script is approved, a creator makes the content, and the brand come back and want bits added in that weren’t agreed at the start. It’s not easy going back and re-filming. A lot of the time we schedule time to film and edit a video. The lighting will be different, we won’t be able to get help from others for filming at short notice, won’t have access to the same locations etc. Clients often don’t think of what goes into making these videos, it’s a lot of work and changes are tricky.

Respect the contract
Always make sure the creator is clear with all deliverables and usage - for example - if there is a lot of paid spend behind the posts where the client wants it pushed to a million+ people, make sure I know about that up front. I’ve had it where my video was pushed to 27 million people (at a very low cost!) via ads, and they hadn’t make me aware of this beforehand - it doesn’t really leave a great impression, and creators talk!

Follow Cole’s TikTok by clicking right here.

📈 Trend of the week: #SubtleForeshadowing

I don’t know if the name of this trend is supposed to be ironic, but there’s not much subtlety in this trend. Teasing the end of a video throughout the video itself, which keeps the viewer entertained and eager to see the end in full. It’s a dream for the algorithm when it’s done right, because it’s literally designed to keep people watching, meaning completion rates are as high as possible.

It’s a great format that brands could easily get in on - they don’t have to be disaster videos, pranks or falls - any reveal could be teased in the same way to keep retention high.

Audience retention is all that matters in the world of social content. Everything else falls into place when viewer retention on your video is good. Let’s explain why.

It starts with the platforms themselves. TikTok and Meta want one thing, that you as an everyday user are entertained by content so much that you just keep watching and scrolling until your real life slips away. And so when a video is posted, the algorithm watches how it performs before deciding to show more and more people the video.

What is the algorithm looking for? Is it Likes, Comments, or some positive brand sentiment? In a word - no. It looks to see how many people finished watching the video. How many people watched it twice. How long people watched it for, on average.

Engagements are a nice sign of positive potential, but they’re vanity metrics - meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Even shares mean nothing to an algorithm if those shares don’t turn into more viewers who watch the film for any decent amount of time.

How many people were served your video (views), and how many people bothered to watch until the end (completion rate %). That’s all you want to learn from on your video performance, as a brand or a creator.

If you can build this one metric, everything else will fall into place.

Thank you for reading this. To talk creators to us, email Will and Tim on [email protected]. Chat soon!