Why most brands overpay for reach and underpay for conversion.
The metrics that actually matter — and the ones everyone still chases.
// Letters
High Signal.
High Signal.
Zero Noise.
What we're learning, as we learn it.
Every week, we run campaigns across dozens of markets. We see what converts. What tanks. What everyone keeps getting wrong. These letters are where we share that.
70+
Campaigns behind each letter
Weekly
New issues
0
AI fluff
+ What You'll Get
Intelligence, not content.
Not polished thought leadership. Raw observations from inside the machine. Written for people who actually run campaigns.
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01 -
02 The outreach mistakes that kill deals before they start.
We see them every week. Patterns you can fix in an afternoon.
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03 Shifts in creator pricing, platform algorithms, and buyer behavior.
Called out before they hit the mainstream — so you act early instead of chasing later.
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04 What we got wrong, what surprised us, what we'd do differently.
No revisionist history. We ship the loss along with the win.
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Published Thursdays. ~1,800 brand managers and creators read it. No lead magnets, no drip sequence, no follow-ups. Just the letter.
+ Recent
The latest four.
Most recent issues. Every letter ships with data from a live campaign — no fluff, no recycled takes.
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#026
Why We Walked Away From $120K Last Quarter.
A brand offered $120K for three integrations across four months. The brief wanted line-by-line script approval, a posting cadence that would replace the creator's tentpole videos, and category exclusivity. We said no twice and the brand walked. Six months later the creator is still on the roster and his channel is stronger than the deal would have left it.
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#025
Your Creator Got Hacked Mid-Campaign.
A creator we'd placed with a fintech client got hacked at 2am, mid-campaign. By 7am his channel was live-streaming a crypto giveaway scam right above the sponsor integration. The window to act is about six hours. The hour-by-hour crisis plan, and the three contract clauses that turn a wish into a plan.
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#024
One Algorithm Change From Zero.
An 800K-sub channel went from 300K views a video to under 4K in one week. No strike, no warning. The brand mid-campaign on that single creator absorbed the loss, and platform risk stays the line item nobody puts in the budget.
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#023
Your Best Creator Doesn’t Have a Face.
A 500K-sub channel with elite retention, perfect demo match and the highest-CPM niche in our tracker. Rejected in 48 hours: no face on camera. Faceless channels dominate the highest-converting niches on YouTube — finance, true crime, documentaries, science, deep analysis — and most brand briefs filter them out before anyone looks at the data.
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#022
A 22K Finance Channel Out-Earns a 90K Art Channel 35 to 1.
Six months tracking two creators with nothing in common except discipline. One had 90,000 subscribers and four years on the channel. The other had 22,000 and fourteen months. Why size-first creator briefs keep missing the vertical that actually decides who pays.
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#021
Your Competitor Paid 3x What You Offered. You'll Never See the Invoice.
A brand manager called a creator's number “insulting” and passed. Six weeks later that creator went live with her direct competitor — at a higher rate. The asymmetry that quietly decides who gets the creators brands actually want.