The exact "creative strategist" rev-share & bonus structures my students use to make $15K-$40K/mo

In this video, I want to talk about how you can structure bonuses and rev share deals as a creative strategist, give you some guidelines and best practices on what you can do based on things that my students have been doing that's been successful for them, so you can enter into conversations and start making more money as a creative strategist. Okay, so let's start with our little infographic here just to kind of land overall where we're going to go and what we're covering. So there are 3 bonus structures for you to pay attention to. One are fixed bonuses, which is basically a flat dollar amount based on specific triggers. So, if you have top performers or an ad winner or certain milestones, you get a flat fee. Then there's also ad spend share, typically around 2 to 5% of an individual ad spend. So, if an ad spends $40,000 in a month, at 3% share, you're getting $1,200 earned, which is powerful. And you can also get paid based on the account level. So, percent of total monthly account spend. This is typically more senior and depends on how much, roles and flexibilities that you have, like how much contribution you have. These can go anywhere from 0.5 to 1.5%, and you can see an example. Brand spends $300,000 a month at 1% share, it's a $3,000 a month bonus. Again, requires being the go-to strategist, shaping vision, being on strategy calls, et cetera. Those are the three different structures. Some of these go in ascending and descending order, basically meaning some brands wanna set this up where basically the more money that the ad makes, you're getting less pay, so it's descending, right? You start at 5%, then it goes down 4%, 3%, whatever. Other ones are ascending, which basically means, whoops, that's weird. Other ones are ascending, which means you start at maybe 2% or 1%, and as the ad spends more, you're incentivized more to hit it, right? That's just a matter of incentives. Every ad account is different. Every person is different. I think it just makes sense to do like a flat percentage overall. Versus playing with the sending and descending things because you want to incentivize— you want to be incentivized to do the best job you can. So that's what I personally think. But the overall thing is that you want to build win-win deals, okay? So just understand the structures here and it'll give you the power to negotiate with them. The other thing to pay attention to that we'll cover is what value you actually provide, which is 1, mastering AI as an orchestrator, 2 is your human judgment and taste, and 3 is performance-based strategy. So we're going to talk about that in a second because it's really important to understand if you want to make more money, what value are you providing and creating? And of course, you can stack these things together. So let's jump in to what we're doing. This comes up quite a bit. People want to know how you can structure bonuses and rev share deals and things like that. So this is exactly what I am sharing based on what's working inside of my community. Okay, by the way, if you want to know who I am, my name is Luke Iha. I run a program called Genesis where we have over 400 marketers, creative strategists, and D2C brands I also run private mentorship cohorts where I help people scale to $15,000 and $20,000 a month as creative strategists. Our best students are hitting $30,000 and $40,000 a month. You can see some of the results from some of the students that we've had in here. This is someone from the YouTube video. There's a bunch of different ones. $11K a month thanks to the creative strategy, et cetera. You can get access to this document and you can read through these at your own leisure. I have also sold over $100 million worth of goods myself using my copy. I work as a creative strategist for an 8-figure brand, and the reason I'm sharing all this is so you know that what I'm talking about is not based on theory, it's based on what's actually working, right? Because I work so intimately with so many different creative strategists, I typically know what is working in the market at the point in time. So if you're watching this and it's anytime around whenever this video was posted, all this stuff is holding true. Okay, so before we talk about money, we need to talk about value, because money is always correlated to value. So the way to make more money is to ask yourself, what value am I providing and how can I provide more of it? Okay? So you want to understand these right here is the value that you provide, right? So one is mastering AI as an orchestrator, doing performance-based marketing that gets tangible results, and then sitting in a strategic role. So these roles together basically comprise being an AI-powered creative strategist. That's it. So the value you provide is mastering the AI tools that exist, leveraging your creativity and strategy at the highest levels, and if you're focused on performance marketing, doing stuff that actually performs the needle. Okay? And a huge component of what you do is actually literally physically having a body and a nervous system and being able to feel ads. So you're developing pattern recognition, taste, and judgment, which is actually quite hard to bake into and train into an AI. And then of course you're the orchestrator. So you're moving and managing and directing it. Okay? This right here is, to me, the best, like, cluster of skills that you could be developing as any type of marketer. If you build these clusters of skills, you are positioning yourself to be the least replaceable version. Obviously, no one knows what's happening with AI, but the least replaceable version, right? We're in unprecedented times and things change all the time, but the moment that creativity, strategy, and human judgment and taste are completely eradicated, even if you're a master of these tools, that means we're playing an entirely new game and paradigm of life. So we're not worried about that. So basically, you can have peace that if you're moving into this creative strategist role and following these things in here, you will continue to be able to contribute value to people, right? So again, like I said, the value is orchestrating. It's using your taste and judgment. And it's also about mastering and using AI and understanding things like that. Okay, so with all that in mind, let's talk about where we're currently at. Because most of your bonus and— the reason I bring up the value of what you provide is because you want to make sure that all the incentives are aligned. That's basically it. So you want to make sure that what you're providing in terms of your value and what you're getting paid is aligned with the value that you're bringing to the company. That's the biggest way. So right now, the reason I bring up some of this stuff and feel free to read where I believe the role is going and some things on here is because what I'm saying may shift. But right now at this point in time, creative strategists are being asked to simply write ads because ads are the most valuable thing that companies need, which just makes sense that your base pay, right? Your rev share, your deals, your bonuses should be tied to how your ads do. They can also be tied to how your editorials and funnels do, et cetera. But for right now, it should be basically your ads. So, your per ad rate is your base income, which typically ranges from $50 to $250. You know, where you fall in that range depends on your experience, track record, and the brand. I have students at all, you know, levels of this, this game. A lot of them are around the $100 to $150 rate range. And you can see this infographic in here, which I've shared previously. And you can see, all right, if I'm getting paid this per ad and doing this many ads per week, what does my weekly and monthly income look like? Now let's layer in the bonus structure. So like I mentioned at the beginning of the call, the first structure is fixed bonuses, which is just a flat, number, right? If your ad is the top performer that month, you get $1,000. If your ad is a winner, whatever their criteria for winner is, you get $500. If it crosses $50K, you get $500. Crosses $100K, you get $1,000, right? It's very, very simple, very, very clean, and very, very clear. And for the most part, it's pretty easy to negotiate this stuff. That's basically it. The next structure is ad spend share. So, you earn a percentage of whatever an individual ad you wrote gets spent on. The sweet spot is around 2 to 5%. 5% is on the higher side if you can get it, but 2% or so is nice. So you write an ad, if the ad spends up $40,000 over a month or two at 3%, you earn $1,200 from that single ad on top of whatever you were paid to write it, okay? And there's different thresholds, so the percentages can change at certain thresholds. It could be a flat rate at whatever it is, but that's the basic structure that you have, and this is great 'cause you're directly incentivized just to get these banger ads. The more winning, high-performing ads that you can do, awesome. But you just want to be aware of like, what are the margins, right? What are the COGS? Like, what kind of flexibility do they have? And understanding the value you contribute. If you write an ad that's spending $100,000, you know, we had one of our students and he wrote an ad that I think did something like, there was an advertorial that was like anywhere from $700,000. I believe it was around, maybe underestimating it, but like $700,000 grand they spent on it, or it was close to $1 million they were able to spend on this thing. You know, he was charging such a small amount and was afraid to ask for any bonus or upside or something like that, but you have to understand the enormous contribution of value that you're providing to a company when it's able to crack a winner and spend millions of dollars on it. It's insane. So, you need to understand your value as well and just make sure that you're aligned with your incentives. So, the last one is account-level bonus, which is basically based on the entire ad account's results. The range here is lower, typically 0.5 to 1.5, 'cause you're getting a cut of everything. And really, this only makes sense if you're the primary creative strategist for the brand. It's much harder to negotiate, but that's just another structure that I see together. Of course, you can stack these things together. In general though, I think starting off with just the base pay and starting off with fixed bonuses is the most important one you can do. Once you start to have a good track record like some of my students do, and especially when you're getting more and more winners for the brand, you're in a good position to renegotiate with them and get a higher base pay, like $200, $250 per ad, and a bonus structure on top of that because once you're producing solid winners, they just wanna keep you as much as possible, right? So you wanna understand that. Here's a different guideline on some of the months that you could do going forward and some little FAQs and whatever. And if you want access to this document, all you gotta do is opt in below to the email list and you'll get a document that's sent to you that has everything I've ever done on this channel. Including this document, which will be posted as well. Okay? I hope that this was helpful for you to see some of the different structures and ways that creative strategists are setting up what they do. And I also think it's really important to understand your own value. At the end of the day, what I highly recommend that you do is you can just take the transcript from this video. You can go into Claude or any AI, and you can basically say, hey, I wanna work, I wanna get, you know, bonus structure or whatever. And you can give it the details about your, the brand you're working with, some estimates in terms of like, you know, what kind of spend they're doing and maybe what the margins are and what makes sense. And you can ask it, you know, what is the, how can I be most incentivized? How can I create a win-win scenario? Because if you know that and you understand the details and the numbers and the different structures that people are using, it should give you the confidence. 'Cause the big blocker oftentimes is not knowing what to do. It's having the confidence to negotiate and understand your own value. But, you know, once you're able to crack that, it's like, hey, it's not like me trying to get something from them. It's just about aligning incentives. So the whole system is incentivized and everyone wins. When you can adopt that mindset, it becomes such a more powerful place to negotiate, but you're never able to really know that unless you dig into the details of what creates a win-win scenario and you know all the different ways to set it up. So like I said, I would highly encourage you to take this transcript, pop it into one of your favorite LLMs, give it context about the company you're working with and ask it, hey, how can I create the best win-win deals and provide the most value to this company? and that will typically guide you and will give you the confidence from which to negotiate. So that's all I have. Let me know in the comments below any questions you have about this topic, and more importantly, what other videos, other topics you want me to cover, because we have plenty more cooking up for you. Appreciate you.