When Content is Late

Jessy: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. I am recording this a little bit early. Why? Because will be in California for about two weeks without my microphone definitely with my computer, cuz there’s no way that I can leave that. But that’s okay and I wanted to do a couple of episodes for you guys.

So, very excited to be, here I will be I don’t know, enjoying the beautiful, sunny California weather, hopefully. I will be chilling, after a successful LA experience and hanging out at VidCon when you are listening to this episode.

If are at VidCon, by the way, I really hope that you stop by. I’m speaking on one panel. I’m moderating another, I’m also participating in their mentorship program. I love VidCon I’ve spoken about it just slightly, on this show but it’s like everything that I stand for is all about networking and education and connections, and I like loving everything about the influencer industry and the critter economy.

So hope you guys are there. This year’s pretty wild because there are three big creator economy or adjacent events that are happening simultaneously. So I’m feeling like everyone’s more spread out and I might miss the people I know some people are at Cannes. Cones. No Cannes. Cannes. I’m sure the French say it much more beautifully, but I think it’s Cannes. I never say it out loud and we see it written down.

Everyone’s there and that’s a film festival. So it’s so interesting I read this article actually drum, the drum.com was talking about how the creator economy is really having a huge presence at Cannes like never before despite it being historically a film festival.

So I know tons and tons of people who are going, I hope that’s Awesome I also hope the Influencer Marketing Show is awesome. We have a booth there and Stacy from my team will be there. You could win a free membership at our booth so I hope you sat by and say hello. And that’s such a great conference as well.

I went last year, we got drinks after. It was a really good time. So it’s a great conference if you’re local to New York or in the tri-state area and don’t necessarily feel like going all the way to France or all the way to California like I am.

But selfishly I hope a lot of you guys are at VidCon and we’ll come and say hello gonna be there all the way through Saturday cause I think both of my panels are all on that Saturday which I know is past the industry track. So I don’t know if anyone will be there besides creators, which is all cause I love meeting creators, that’s fine.

This week I wanted to sort of parlay the conversation that we just had at our most recent manager meetup. So we don’t record those. We don’t record our brand connects we don’t record our executive circles. Because they’re more intimate conversations. And I want everybody to feel really safe in that space. There are no dumb questions feel safe to ask anything you want to answer in any way you want. Not have to think about it, thinking oh my God this is being recorded who knows who’s gonna watch it?

So we don’t record them. They’re incredible, especially the manager meetup one. So we have it every month, the third Thursday, and it was a really interesting conversation this past week. So today we’re gonna be talking about when content is late and how to manage everybody’s expectations.

Jessy: All right so when content is late from the creator standpoint and or the timeline just gets like all fucked up from the brand side, the agency side, there are so many people that where deadlines are dismissed how do you handle it and what do you do?

I will say that In my experience the majority of the time when content is late it happens to be of the creator. 

So some of the conversations that we had in the manager meetup were obviously from the manager’s perspective and questions around does any of the illnesses fall on me to keep my creators organized.

Am I expected to be the mother and the therapist and should I indulge in that? Should I condone that and do that for whatever it takes to get my creator’s content in on time? Is there an expectation that if there is a manager in the mix, he or she should be the one responsible ultimately for getting content on time?

That’s part of the manager’s responsibility to, push the creator to make sure that they’re delivering what they need to deliver, have it all in time et et cetera. All these questions were being asked, and then the manager from their perspective at what do I like, say enough is enough and my name is on the line or I need to penalize you for being late.

Can I incentivize you for being on time? All these questions came up. It’s a really interesting conversation. It’s certainly nothing that’s ever gonna be going away and your response to it is probably gonna be unique to you.

I think that like my two cents are the following. I think that if you’re a manager and you are managing talent that is chronically delayed on deadlines, they miss them all the time, there are a few things that you can do but ultimately I wanna empower our managers listening to say that it’s your choice what you wanna do.

You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to acquiesce you don’t have to, stress yourself out could just say this does not work for me, and call it a day and work with another creator instead. Or you could be that support system for them. You could help them improve their business operations by streamlining their calendar and their deadlines and all that.

But is a choice I just wanna, like level set with that and make it known that that is my stance on is completely up to you. So what I will say is I wonder if there’s a certain dollar amount that justifies a lot of this unquote bad behavior.

If an influencer is your number one earner they’re bringing in that much money, there probably is a threshold in which you turn a blind eye, or at least you make a lot more successions. 

But I will say that like the bright line test which might be monetary. If they’re lower on your roster, they’re not bringing in that much money and they’re also a nightmare, I hope that’s a clear indicator that like cut the fat like they’re not someone you wanna be working with for a variety of different reasons but that sort of makes your decision easier. So don’t fret over things that should be easy decisions.

I know it’s not easy, quote unquote to tell somebody that it’s not out and you guys should part ways. Hot tip that I always give to people is I always say we’re putting a pause on things and you can lay on the sword fall on the sword a little bit if you want and be like I wanna make sure that I can justify the commission that I’m taking from you and it seems as we’re not aligned, it seems if we’re putting in a bit more work than we’re used to and lets a pause on this for now.

Be really clear about what would unpause the pause we really need to hit these deadlines. Why? Cuz it’s not even just our name on the line. It’s like if one partnership gets pushed it almost feels like another subsequent partnership then is affected so if it affects your entire business and it’s sort of like a virus. It just spreads like it’s just never worth it. Unless they’re making a shit ton of money for you.

So, I just wanna be clear about that. I do think that there’s a threshold. A monetary threshold. But even then you gotta see how it affects your overall business. Is it seeping into other things? Is it affecting the morale of your team? Because it’s never an isolated incident It always affects other things.

So I think you just have to look at it really holistically free to put a pause on things. Feel free to then say if we’re pausing like it is because of these missed deadlines and I would love to continue working together but we’d have to ensure that we could hit these deadlines appropriately get everything that we need on time reading the briefs, et cetera et cetera. And hopefully, they come back and they change. But I tell you realistically, very few people in this world change. 

So I just think that like successful people hang out with successful people. If you wanna be more successful, you have to think like a winner. You have to be able to surround yourself with that thing like that as well and the people who are just like chronically having issues being professional, they’re not gonna reflect well on you. They’re not gonna make you a winner because they’re not ones either. They’re probably lots of things that are getting in their way. 

Maybe it’s imposter syndrome, maybe it’s, we talked about ADHD on the call. I have ADHD too. I come up with coping mechanisms to make sure that like I can live a fully functional life they aren’t able to help themselves, chances are you absolutely won’t be able to do it either.

 From the brand’s perspective, what do you do to make sure that content isn’t late? Oh my gosh, build in extended deadlines. 

I feel like everybody does this but for anyone who’s listening and has no idea what I’m talking about, if you really need content on a Friday him you need it Monday and get it in early. Because chances are, they’ll be a little bit late or they might miss something, or who knows what but you gotta build in extra time. Really important. Managers can use this too. Agency people can use this too.

Basically, there are multiple chains of approval, usually layers of approval that this has to go through. So if one thing is late, it is everything else back. So just build in extended deadlines and it’s absolutely best practice.

The other thing that was really interesting was the concept of, building in protections in your contracts. So I think that this could apply to managers in their influencer agreements. I think that this could apply to agency brands in their influencer agreements.

But basically saying essentially we have deadlines and every day or whatever cadence you wanna make it, maybe every three days that it’s late you give it a period whatever we, deduct this amount from your fee because you only incentivize people so much you can only chastise them or try to teach them to do better. 

That goes so far but money talks and so if the bank account is being affected, it’s a motivator for a lot of people and it’s nothing bad. It’s just business, in my opinion. 

So I think that it’s a great idea. We heard a couple of people talking about it and our manager meetup from an influencer perspective for those agreements for representation, I thought it was a really clever idea. So something to think about there.

And then the last thing that I wanted to mention in terms of getting in the content on time, is to explore automation. Because what I will tell you is that when I had my own agency we built out so much tech, and one of the things that we always had is in our CRM, there was a section for a due date.

Every week before that due date, an email would automatically go out to the person associated with that campaign, and it would say, is everything on track to be delivered on time and within a week, if the answer was no chances are you can fix it. But if you ask the day before and the answer’s no, I don’t know. It’s questionable. If you’re actually able to fix it at that point 

So a week before check it would be great if you could, automate that I’m all for automation but at the very least, add that to your list of things to do because if you check in, I think seven days before is a great moment to do it.

And just checking in is everything running on time. Just wanted to resurface these certain things. Maybe include the brief maybe some more visual examples if you could provide them then. We’ve had a couple of pieces of content come in already actually and they’ve included X Y Z and we’ve really thought it was great.

So while you’re putting the finishing touches on it, just something to consider. Have an open of communication, Encourage them to say if you have any questions whatsoever let us know. This is how to reach us. And the last thing is if there is any reason at this point a week before to think that your deadline is not gonna be missed, you must let us know by X day at X time so we can resolve it. Cuz deadlines are really important to us. 

Look, we can go on and on about why people miss deadlines, mostly creators. I don’t know that’s like the most important thing. Some people are talking about how creators never had a real job, quote, unquote. 

A lot of them especially Gen Z. They never did much of corporate at all. They explored consecration and it took off for them and was good for freaking them, but they don’t necessarily know what it feels like to have a boss and to have deadlines and to build a calendar and could make the argument that that’s what managers are for.

Can make the argument that a manager who’s like really good at their job should be doing much much more than managing this person’s calendar. 

So I bring all that up to say the reason why they’re not delivering on time, we can guess, we can put on our like guessing hats and say, I don’t know, maybe it’s this maybe it’s that but don’t think that’s, worth our time. You know me guys. I always wanna be really solutions-oriented.

So these are a few ideas that I had for you, but is such an interesting conversation and I wanna hear your thoughts. So check out the YouTube video of this, the podcast of this episode, and comment below. And tell me what’s worked for you for creators to hit their deadlines for creators to not be late, for the content to be approved on time which we didn’t really touch on much but a whole conversation about timeliness professionalism, and I wanna hear from guys. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you guys, next week.