In this instructional video, Luke Ihott (co‑founder of Genesis and Creative Cartel) shares a comprehensive pricing framework for creative strategists. Drawing from his mentorship program, community data, and real‑world deal examples, he outlines the four primary compensation models—retainers/flat fees, percentage of ad spend, bonuses, and per‑brief fees—along with typical price ranges (e.g., $40‑$250 per brief, $3K‑$7K monthly retainer, 1%‑5% of spend, average 3%). He explains how to align pricing with deliverables, the importance of capturing upside from high‑spending brands, and productivity benchmarks (30‑50 ads per week as a sweet spot, up to 100 ads possible). The video details common contract gates such as ROAS, spend, and milestone thresholds, and offers negotiation tactics for structuring deals. He provides a calculator example showing how different base fees and spend percentages translate into monthly earnings, illustrating potential income from $15K‑$30K base up to $100K+ with performance incentives. The content concludes with calls to action for accessing a detailed pricing document, joining the Genesis community, and seeking further mentorship.
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In this video, I want to talk about the secrets to pricing for creative strategists. So if you are a creative strategist, if you're an aspiring creative strategist, great fucking choice because a lot of people want to hire you guys, right? And a lot of people are making a lot of money doing this, okay? I don't know if you will, but potentially, okay? And when— if you're going to do that, you need to understand, uh, how to price yourself accordingly. So all what I've done is I've documented a ton of stuff from my mentorship, from my Genesis community, from the Creative Cartel. I am able to see a ton of different deals from every type of brand and agency. I know what the averages are, how people are pricing this. So hopefully this will give you a sense of like, how do I price myself? How do I make the most money? What makes the most sense? What are the common deals? What are the average stuff, et cetera? Um, before we get into that, if you don't know who I am, my name is Luke Ihott. My business partner Mario Castelli and I are copywriters who generate over $100 million each with our copy. It's definitely more than that, but that's at least the minimum. We have a community of 412 creative strategists called Genesis. You can look down below and sign up if that's something you're interested in. We help people make winning ads, funnels, and a lot of money. We run something called the Creative Cartel where we work with brands like this. So creative strategists from brands like this, and these brands collectively are doing over $1 billion in spend. Here's a wall of some of our recent wins. You can actually see some deal structures right in here. Okay. $17K, number one business investment I made this year. Get the number 1 ad for an 8-figure brand, close a $5K a month plus 3% spend, $40K per month, first client in the second week, record month of $60K plus, fantastic coaches and mentors, et cetera. A lot of stuff in here. We don't even do a great job at collecting our feedback, but you can see this thing down below and I'll continue to fill it up. The point being, I work with inside of our mentorship, which is slightly different. Like I'm running a cohort right now of 8 people, We so far have 100% success rate in people getting their ROI from the mentorship and significantly raising their income. Some people come in at like $15K, $17K, we help them get to $30K. Uh, some people start out from zero, we're helping them get to $8K and $10K plus. So we have a pretty consistent track record of how to help people land clients. What are the breaking points in terms of the psychology and the actual practical things? And then most importantly, we have a lot of visibility into what are the deal structures, um, and how are people getting paid. So that's what this video is all about. If you want access to this document, you can sign up to my email list below and you'll get access to this plus plenty of other things. Okay, so the first important thing is pretty basic. You're going to get paid based on retainer and flat rates, a percentage of ad spend, and possible bonuses. Okay, percentage of ad spend is really where you can make the most amount of money if you're good, and then retainer is just what basically pays the bills. So this sets your floor and this is going to create your ceiling. So one of the important things to understand, and this should just help you as you start to price things, is One monster ad for a brand can carry like the whole account. It can, it can really be a huge, huge advantage for them, right? So you want to set up your deals so that you can capture a piece of that because it's absolutely huge and you may not hit them consistently. Of course, if you're inside of our programs and watch this channel, your likelihood of getting winners is going to go up significantly, but really, really powerful. Some other things is you want to price the deliverable. So the most common objection is most people want to hire full-time creative strategists. And really when you ask them what they mean by full-time, they just mean that they want your attention and want you to do like 5 to 10 ads per week or something like that. Some people really do want you full-time and they don't want you working with other clients and that's okay. Some of those deals are great and they pay well, but right now with the market, creative strategists are pretty in demand. So most of the ones that I work with work for, you know, anywhere from 3 to 4 different clients, sometimes more. But with 3 or 4 good paying clients, you can easily make Not easily, but with 3 to 4 good paying clients, you can make $15K to $30K per month as your base with performance incentives on top of that, which can put you to $50K, $60K, $70K, even $100K+ per month. That's the extreme outliers. I'm just giving you a sense of what that works. So you wanna price your deliverable. So don't be intimidated by the objection. That's why I say full-time means nothing. Like we just get this all the time. Yeah. Just apply for it. Make sure it's clear on what their deliverables are. And if they really want you full-time, then don't work with them. Be honest. But most of the times they just want a certain amount of deliverables. The other thing is that agencies don't really pay that well, but agencies are amazing ways to get proof. So if you wanna get a really good client, a lot of times you have to go through agencies to get that proof. And so understand that when you're working with an agency, your job is just to crank out winners so then you can go get better clients that you can get a percentage of upside. So when it comes to your base, typically the lowest that I see is around $40 to $50 per brief, and the most that I've seen is around $250. Some people charge $300 per brief, whatever. The average is usually around $100 to $150 for a brief, sometimes $200. Trying to squeeze out a big number on here doesn't really make the most sense because the upside that you can get on the percentage if you're working for a brand that spends money and you're good is so big that trying to negotiate, you know, extra $50 per brief, like, yeah, it can add up for sure. But I would just be, I would just try to find the absolute, like just find a number that works for everybody and then capture a lot of the upside. The other limiting factor for how you get paid is how many ads you can write per week. So 5, 10 ads per week, 100 ads per week. So most of the best creative strategists I know are around 30 to 50 and it requires speed. It requires processes like Claude, you know, AI obviously requires a system. And it's challenging to write 30 to 50 banger ads per week, but that's sort of the sweet spot of where most people get to. I believe it's possible to do about 100 ads per week if you do basically 8 ads. Let's say you do 5 ads in the morning, 5 ads in the afternoon, and you do that 5 times per week. It's doable to be able to hit 100 ads per week, but that is besides the point. So, Yeah, my math was totally wrong. That would be 50 ads per week. But regardless, I think this is like the upper limit. I think it's doable. It's just not ideal. Okay. So that's what I said is like the big, big upper limit and 100 to 150 is about a good, a good rate. Probably 150 is where you want to be at. So this means that your base can be around this $18K to $30K. So most people are going to be like in these 4, these like 6 squares from $12K at the lowest to $40K at the most. And this is the base, okay? Anywhere from 100 to 200 doing 30 to 50 ads per week. So this is kind of the sweet spot of where you want to be. Here's some averages based on the things that we've seen. So $3K to $7K a month is the fat middle. All right, so that'll give you an idea. Let's say that you're basically doing— I'm using my calculator right now. Actually, I should just use it on here. Okay, this is cool. So let's say that we're doing 150 ads per week or $150 per ad and we're doing like 10 per week, whatever. So that'll put you around $6,000. Okay, some people will do less. Sometimes it's like 5 briefs, 8 briefs, 7 briefs, whatever. And so you can kind of see where we get this $3,000 to $7,000 per month. And then percentage is usually around 1% to 5% and most land around 3%. And then sometimes people do account-level percentage, but that's more rare. So you're looking anywhere from $3K to $7K per month plus like 3% deals. Okay, the average deal on file is $4K base plus 3%. Okay, now depending on where the stage that you're at, so if you don't have proof, you're probably gonna be charging just per brief. And then if you have a few winners, maybe charging more. If you're proven, this is the range where you'll be in, and this is the type of retainer deals that you may have. Again, if you're doing an agency, you're really just there to get proof. So I wouldn't worry about how much you get paid. And then in-house contractor direct with the brand. Here's some of the things that you have. Okay. Now some of the things to pay attention to is you're gonna have your retainer, your percentage of ad spend. A lot of times there's a condition on that percentage. So things like a ROAS bar. So if you hit XYZ percent, if it's above this ROAS, then you get the spend. You really wanna pay attention to those, those terms. And it's important to have a sense of how much is the brand spending? What's the hit, the average hit rate of other creative strategists? You wanna ask these questions because sometimes these certain gates or conditions kind of fuck things up. I prefer a more simple deal, like just this percent, no matter what, but a lot of brands are gonna wanna have different types of conditions. So you need to make sure you understand those things. And then you have milestone bonuses. Bonuses are cool. I mean, I've seen people get $10K bonuses and things like that, which is pretty significant. But I think in the long term, I would prefer to have percentages over time. You can see some different deal structures that are in here and read through them. I won't actually read through them. You can kind of check this out on the document. But I want to show you every deal that we've seen. So you can see, like, these are a lot. These are all, like, real deals that are in here. $100 a brief, $120. And you can see some of the, some of the conditions. So not a whole lot of $10K ones. This is a pretty nice range, probably for better brands. Here's another one, $5K. So anywhere in this $5K to $7K, in this like 1 to 3 ish percent is pretty standard. Okay, and here's a little chart. You can play around with different numbers, so you can look at like how much your spend is driving, what your deal structure is. So let's say you're having an average of like a $5K plus 2.5%, right? Like what this can look like, you could go all the way to making $30,000 per— again, you know, getting a million dollars in spend on your ads is, is pretty crazy, but it's, it's a possibility. So you can see some of these different structures. Obviously you can see Like just a 5% makes this huge difference, right? The $3K base with 5% and $5K 2.5%, you can just compare these ones together, right? And see how things work. So you can play around with these numbers and these different deal structures, and I encourage you to do that, especially with AI. It's so easy, and you can kind of figure out what makes the most sense to you. So some of the gates that people have is spend gates. So basically it has to spend a certain amount. ROAS gates, win gates, time-based ones, et cetera. Here's some different common ones. And here's some different negotiation things that I've seen. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory. So honestly, I think just getting this document, throwing it into your Claude is gonna be helpful. For me, the most important thing to see is what are people charging, which are a lot of these numbers are here. And so what is the average? Which I think we kind of put up here. Okay, those are numbers that make the most sense. These will change over time as the market shifts and things kind of change, but hopefully this gives you some insight and gives you a little bit of comfort to know like what are people actually charging for and what is average and what makes the most sense. Okay, let me know down below. We have a ton of different client getting material and a ton of different stuff related to this, so any questions that you have, put them in the comments below and I will try to answer those as as well. Really any video topic that you have down below. There's also resources for things like copy blocks, which are really good for getting good at copy. There's a link to a call if you want to have a call with my business partner's brother. Actually, he will take those calls and see if you're a good fit for Genesis. I think we have discounted slots that we open up every single month. And then there's tons of other resources down below, including the email link if you want to get this document. So I appreciate you guys and I'll see you in the next video.
