In today’s saturated and burgeoning creative market, becoming invaluable to Creatives is not just a strong differentiator; it’s essential. The number of talent spending less than a year at an agency is increasing, while social media platforms offer a direct conduit for Creatives to engage with brands. Agents and agencies must evolve from mere facilitators to indispensable partners.
1. Understand the Creative’s Unique Needs
Understanding the unique needs of each Creative is crucial. That’s where the magic happens—by identifying the potential of individuals and shaping a vision for their future. A good agent manages a Creative’s business, but a great one finds opportunities in unexplored avenues. A good agent acts as a manager, a great agent serves as a co-pilot.
Steps to take:
- Spend quality time with your Creative to understand their needs, future plans, life perspectives, and non-negotiables.
- Utilise data analytics and analyse sentiment for optimal market positioning.
- Continuously discuss, review, and refine plans with your Creative.
- Reverse-engineer the plan. For example, if your Creative’s goal is to attend a Prada fashion show, identify what talent attend these shows. Analyse, where the gap is and fill it.
- Nurture the uniqueness of your Creative while maintaining robust relationships with brands.
If you study the Forbes 2023 ‘Top Creators in Fashion’ you will be surprised by the variety of the talent featured, each of them have honed in on their niche interests whether that be humour, content style or even the audience that they speak to.
It is truly the age where authenticity is valued over everything else, the agencies job is to help their roster to find their spark and encourage their passions in the public sphere.
2. Provide Financial Security
Financial instability is a universal concern for Creatives. Transparency is often the leading cause of Creatives leaving their agencies, even before poor representation. This is followed by the desire for streamlined operations to reduce daily friction.
“Fashion is opaque about who gets paid what and this enables a culture of complicity in bad behaviour and miss or non-payments and poor treatment,” Fashion Roundtable’s Cincik says. “So much work is for free that unless we have a more transparent payment and hours wired system, it’s hard to see how it will change.”*
How can you make this change?
- Adopt transparent accounting methods, clearly communicating campaign budgets, commissions and payment terms.
- Streamline payment processes to ensure a consistent flow of income.
- Aim to provide financial stability, mitigating concerns over payment delays or discrepancies. This will cover your back as well as the Creatives’.
3. Networking and Exposure
Exposure can make or break a Creative’s career. The role of an agent or agency goes beyond making introductions; it’s about creating opportunities.
How to Do It:
- Attend industry events and workshops.
- Cultivate close relationships with the marketing teams of brands your Creative aims to collaborate with.
- Offer free advice to build trust in your expertise.
- Over time, you’ll become a go-to for quality and professionalism, increasing your Creative’s opportunities.
- Grow your influence, and in turn your Creatives’ too.
4. Adopt Technological Solutions
In the fast-paced creative industry, staying ahead of the curve technologically is crucial. Imagine doing a triathlon and while you are running, swimming and cycling other competitors are using rockets. Who at the end wins? Who finishes the race? The old ways of using multiple software tools or platforms that don’t integrate well with each other, is leading to repeated work and represent high potential errors.
Because of this, agencies and agents are finding out about issues only when a crisis occurs, rather than being able to anticipate and mitigate them. In most cases, the growth of the agencies is restricted due to the inability to quickly adapt to new opportunities or scale operations.
In the meantime, miscommunications, late payments and a lack of transparency lead to strained relationships between agencies, Creatives, and brands.
Where to start:
- Seek streamlined and centralised operations.
- Use CREATIVESAPP to give you an edge on the competition.
- Keep up to date with technological advancements and industry trends.
Becoming invaluable to Creatives as an agent or agency requires a multifaceted approach along with time and trust. By focusing on understanding the Creative’s unique needs, providing financial security, expanding networking opportunities and adopting technological solutions; agents and agencies can become not just facilitators but invaluable partners for the Creative.
With CREATIVESAPP, agents will thrive. Our platform handles the entire payment system, invoicing, project management, contact management and communication. It does so while guaranteeing transparency, timely payment and growth.
Ultimately, in 2024, the research is clear, Creatives are looking for fair and ethical practices in their representation. For larger agencies, CA represents the possibility to gain a unique competitive advantage. The platform increase productivity by over 80%, saving 19 hours per agent per week and a guarantee of operational and reputational excellence.
*Forbes 2023 Creators Report
*”Are Models the Next to Unionise” Vogue Business
