Brands are being tossed around and taken advantage of when it comes to entertainment marketing. Each artist ‘representing’ party has their own agenda that does not value the situation of the brand all the time. Some generalizations below I have experienced first hand in my career:
Record Label Brand Partnership team – prioritize activating partnerships if it increases sales and marketing during album release. Don’t participate in touring or everyday life of the artist.
Talent Agencies – oversee too many artists to care. Transactional and driven by volume, not quality. Massive overhead that is baked in to their fee when it takes 1-2 people to handle many partnerships appropriately.
Brand Agencies – have limited or zero music industry experience and don’t have access or a relationship with true decision makers. They can’t “speak the language” or relate to artist teams. They contract another group on this list to execute, causing a further separation from the artist and another mouth to feed. Also massive overhead that is baked into their fee.
Artist Management – too busy with the livelihood, touring, legal, music production, family, businesses and the endless list of tasks an artist has to accomplish on a daily basis, so brand partnerships are low on their priority, hence why they reluctantly work with the above list.
Because of this, brands often…
- Do not work with the best party to execute on their behalf. Contracted ‘representing’ parties do not care about the brand’s overall mission, goals, or strategy and have their own agenda in the ideation and execution process.
- Hand off a large sum of money that is divided in MANY ways before reaching the artist bank account, making the artist bothered, not engaged, and mundane when receiving the partnership from someone other than management knowing they are being undercut.
- Don’t have access to the artist to make it a collaboration, nor do they receive feedback from the artist.
- Run into scheduling issues as the contracted party lied and are actually ‘not as close’ to the artist as they suggested.
- Don’t utilize the full team of the artist (publicity, creatives, etc) which can result in better campaigns, headlines and press because some ‘representing’ parties are not associated, nor do they care to give that extra effort and tie in more of the artist’s team
- Miss a wonderful time to activate (album release, tour announcement, festival run, personal life accomplishment, etc) because the contracted ‘representing’ party does not have coverage of said time in schedule
You may say…. yikes! Then who can I trust? Who should I work with? This all seems so exhausting! And that’s where I come in.
There are wonderful, hard working, execution oriented people at labels, agencies, and management companies that can get the job done. I know a lot of them! But knowing WHICH party to activate, for YOUR goal is crucial. It’s all case by case.