🔴 She's worked 100+ brand deals. Here's her playbook.

Gigi Robinson is a brand deal expert. It’s the core of her business as a creator, a skill honed during her student years as a campus ambassador for a total of 13 brands. We spoke to her about the best practices she’s learned over the better part of a decade dealing with brands and agencies.

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— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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Brand sponsorships are the primary source of income for nearly a third of six-figure creators. Gigi Robinson has spent almost a decade learning how to make that model work.

Her education on this industry started while in college, with a Google search, around 2017. She'd seen campus ambassador programs like Tinder University and Bumble Honey pop up around USC, where she was a student, and wanted to know what these programs were — how they functioned and how she might get involved.

The pitch read for her like a fantasy version of a college job: set your own hours, throw parties, seed product, drive downloads.

Her first ambassador gig was with the shoe company UGG. Then came Abercrombie, and then she kept going until she'd worked 13 of these programs. The pay was fine for a college job — typically $14 or $15 an hour, and around $150 per post on her Instagram account with roughly 1,000 followers — and the job gave her a front-row seat to the machinery of advertising.

She started small, hosting brand-sponsored events for the social media club she'd joined. Eventually, she hosted for Greek life, and grew confident enough to walk into a coffee shop off campus and ask the owner if she could take the place over for a more involved brand activation.

"I'll throw down $2,000 and see who shows up," is how she remembers the pitch. And indeed, people did show up.

Gigi was learning field marketing in real time: how early to start promoting an event, where to put the product, how to fill a room, what a brand expected in exchange for its money. After spearheading enough campaigns, she noticed something: even though the brands that offered these programs cycled through, the agencies running their ambassador programs often stayed the same.

So she began building relationships with the agencies. When a campaign ended, Gigi would go back to the people who had already hired her and ask what they had coming up in the fall. If she didn't hear back, she'd follow up two or three weeks later. If another program was opening, she'd ask how to get in.

At 20 years old, she’d nailed the key to getting rebooked: do good work, make yourself easy to work with, and give the person holding the budget a reason to hire you again.

Later in her college career, Gigi landed a photography internship at the Aerospace Corporation, where some of her assignments involved shooting classified equipment for internal reports. When she later interviewed for a job on Paramount's photography team, the woman hiring her saw that Gigi knew how to walk into a high-stakes room and conduct herself accordingly. She knew how to sell.

It’s what has defined her creator career — preceded by years spent learning how to work for brands, how to represent them, communicate with the people inside them, and be trusted with their money.

Six years later, Gigi is a creator, speaker, author, and founder of Host of Influence, her professional-development platform focused on the working relationship between brands and creators. She’s a global ambassador for Adobe Express, an ambassador for Acrobat, and has partnered with LinkedIn, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Brand partnerships account for roughly 60 to 65% of her revenue, with individual deals typically paying between $3,000 and $10,000. After bringing in around $200,000 annually for the past three years, Gigi says she's on pace to land near $400,000 this year, with agency retainers and a growing paid-speaking business making up much of the increase.

Gigi has spent enough time working with brands to know how uncommon ordinary professionalism can be. The same agencies that kept hiring her in college taught her that the person signing the next contract may be the same person who signed the last one.

"When a creator is entitled, they don't get rebooked," she says.

That doesn't mean accepting whatever a brand asks for. In fact, much of Gigi’s playbook is about getting more precise about what, exactly, a brand is paying for, and finding ways to keep that revenue generative.

Learn more about Hosts of Influence.
Connect with Gigi on LinkedIn.

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Gigi now works with three contractors — an executive assistant, social media manager, and video editor — who help her keep up with brand deal volume without giving up a fixed 20% of her revenue to management.

Gigi's brand deals typically land between $3,000 and $10,000, and she holds that floor firmly. If a startup can't afford her usual rate, she doesn't simply discount it. She changes what they're buying: less usage, a shorter exclusivity window, or fewer deliverables. That keeps a smaller deal from setting a lower precedent for the next one.

Gigi thinks brands, particularly in B2B, have gotten too aggressive with exclusivity. Her preference is to keep it to around a month.

More importantly, she treats exclusivity as a negotiable part of the deal. If a brand wants more of it, that's worth more money. If its budget is smaller, the exclusivity window can shrink. And if she already has a conflicting partnership, she'll tell the brand when that window ends and ask whether they can work around it.

Gigi wants creators to think beyond what a post does on their own feed. If a brand likes the creative, they can pay to run that content as an ad to an audience it chooses.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn hired her to make an ad that ran on her Snapchat account, with about a month of usage rights included in the deal. Roughly six months later, LinkedIn came back with another $5,000 because it wanted to keep boosting the ad.

Put an expiration date on usage. If the brand wants the content longer, it has to come back and pay again.

Gigi treats each platform as another potential deliverable. For newsletter partnerships, she can bundle her sends through beehiiv with the LinkedIn-native version she runs in tandem, and a traditional LinkedIn post driving readers to the newsletter version — "it’s basically like three posts in one," she says.

Even her dogs' Instagram account, which sits at around 11,000 followers, has generated nearly $10,000 in pet brand partnerships this year.

If a post underperforms, Gigi acknowledges it, explains what she thinks went wrong, and offers a next step: perhaps 30 days of usage so the brand can put paid spend behind the content and see whether it performs better as an ad.

It's the same principle she learned during those college ambassador programs: make yourself someone the brand wants to work with again.