By Chris Smith, Head of Agency, The Gold Studios Group
I’ll say it plainly: rate cards are a lazy way of selling.
I know that’s not a popular opinion in an industry where one-pagers and pricing decks get sent out on autopilot. But after four years, over 1,300 brand deals, and partnerships with the likes of Airbnb, Spotify, Liquid Death, and Live Nation, I can tell you with complete confidence that a rate card has never once been the thing that closed a deal for us. Not a single time.
And I think it’s worth talking about why.
Sales, whether you’re in talent, brand partnerships, or any other commercial role, is fundamentally about one thing: understanding what someone needs and then figuring out whether, or how, you can meet it. That’s it. The moment you skip that step and lead with a price list; you’ve already lost the plot.
Think about how it works in any other industry. You walk into a car showroom. Nobody hands you a brochure and says, “pick one.” They ask you questions. Are you commuting? Do you need boot space for kit? Are you on roads or off them? Those questions exist because the answer shapes everything that comes after. The same logic applies when someone is buying a house. A good estate agent isn’t just matching bedrooms to budgets. They’re asking whether you’re planning a family, whether you want outdoor space, whether you’d rather sacrifice location for size or size for location. The conversation is the product.
It’s exactly the same in talent and brand partnerships. Possibly even more so.
No two brand deals look the same. Not even close.
This is the part that gets lost when agencies default to rate cards. Brand goals are so different from one another that treating them the same from the outset isn’t just lazy, it’s commercially damaging.
Take two deals we see regularly. On one side, you have a brand that wants exceptional creative. They’re not focused on the talent’s audience or follower count as the primary driver. What they want is someone who produces content that looks extraordinary, glossy, high production and is genuinely compelling. The content won’t sit on the talent’s channel. It sits on the brand’s page, gets put into paid media, and runs as an ad across short-form platforms. Usage rights and out time matter enormously here. The deliverable is the asset, and the strategy behind it is a paid media one.
Now put that next to a conversion-focused deal in the gambling or iGaming space. Suddenly, creative production quality matters far less than the talent’s ability to drive action. The brand wants to see first-time deposits. Sign-ups. People actually converting off the back of that content. The metrics are completely different, the way we evaluate talent fit is completely different, and therefore the structure of the deal is completely different.
If you sent both of those brands the same rate card, you’d be getting it wrong for both of them.
Every deal requires questions. How many videos? Which platforms matter and which are being tested? Is Instagram the priority, or is the brand trialling Facebook with a smaller portion of budget to see how it performs before committing further? Is this a one-off content play or the start of a longer ambassador relationship? All these questions directly affect the package, the pricing, the platform split, the deliverables, the terms.
And the bigger the deal, the more important those questions become. A long-term ambassador partnership demands even more rigour upfront, because getting the brief wrong at the start has a much longer tail.
This is also where four years of deal data becomes genuinely useful.
One of the real advantages we have at The Gold Studios Group is that we’ve been doing this long enough to have granular data across every deal we’ve ever done. Platform by platform. Pricing trends. Volume. What has worked and what hasn’t across different verticals and different campaign objectives.
That data doesn’t just help us internally. It means that when we’re in those conversations with brands, we’re not just asking questions, we’re bringing informed perspective. We can advise on what we’ve seen work in their space, help them understand where their budget is best placed, and give them a read on what the market looks like. That’s a very different conversation to sending over a PDF with three pricing tiers and waiting for a response.
The questions open the door. The data and experience help us walk through it together with the brand.
The same principle applies when we’re signing talent.
We don’t rush to contracts. We take time across multiple conversations to understand what each creator actually wants from their career. Because everyone is different. Some want to build slowly and sustainably. Some want to monetise hard and fast. Some have firm views on which brands they will and won’t work with. Some have longer-term ambitions that go well beyond brand deals, whether that’s TV, live, or building their own IP.
If you don’t know any of that, you can’t represent them properly. And if you can’t represent them properly, you probably shouldn’t be signing them. We’ve walked away from signings for exactly that reason. After those conversations, if we don’t genuinely believe we can meet what a creator needs, we say so. That’s not a loss. That’s the job being done right.
The biggest thing that questions do, which a rate card never can, is open doors. A conversation surfaces things you didn’t expect. It creates options you wouldn’t have thought to present. It builds trust. And in this industry, trust is the actual currency.
If you want to grow in this space, whether you’re an agent, a manager, or running a partnerships team, the thing worth investing in isn’t a better rate card. It’s better questions.
About The Gold Studios Group
The Gold Studios bridges brands and creators through the power of entertainment. Delivering campaigns that drive billions of views, millions of followers, and moments that actually stick. From branded content and original series to talent representation and live bookings, we make every collaboration count. We don’t just understand the creator economy; we’re built for it.
