Winfluence with Jason Falls

A creator with four hundred followers asks for two hundred dollars to make your brand a video. Is that unreasonable—or have you confused buying content with buying an audience?In this episode of Winfluence with Jason Falls, Jason makes the case that brands need to swallow the bitter pill: product-only payment is no longer a dependable foundation for a content program you expect to run on demand.Gifting still happens. And Collabstr’s 2026 marketplace report actually shows average UGC campaign costs falling. But a brand moving from product exchange to paid production faces a new cash requirement regardless of that trend.Jason breaks down what brands are buying, why follower count can be the wrong yardstick, and how to budget for creators, shipping, platform fees, rights, approvals and the people who move the work through. He also shares recent Entribe guidance from his own work: budget at least $150–$250 per engagement, which can include 1–2 videos. That is scope-specific guidance, not a universal rate.Chapters00:00 Winfluence opening00:25 Your product is not a production budget01:51 Budget for the work02:41 Buying production versus buying an audience04:04 Where product seeding still fits05:13 Why your costs can rise while UGC prices fall06:28 What brands should budget for UGC08:36 Calculate cost per usable video09:49 Test hooks, angles and creators10:30 Build a dependable creator program12:28 Scale the budget and the approval process13:08 What creators owe brands13:41 Swallow the bitter pillReferenced resourcesCollabstr’s 2026 Influencer Marketing ReportInsense product seedingCohley’s product-seeding fit testJoinBrands pricingInsense pricingCohley on quality versus volume in UGCMarketing Happy Hour: The 2026 Creator PlaybookEntribeSend your experience or a business problem to [email protected]. Subscribe, rate the show and share this episode with the person who approves your content budget. Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Your business doesn't need more marketing noise. It needs people who trust it, recommend it and choose it. That's influence, and it's what Winfluence has always been about.In this episode, Jason Falls explains the show's new direction. Winfluence is now officially Winfluence with Jason Falls, and episodes now live at FallsPartners.com. The topics are getting broader, but the mission isn't: helping small-business owners and lean marketing teams build lasting influence for their brand or business.Jason walks through the four ways the show will help you do that:Influence through influencers and creator partnerships (yes, the rants stay)Influence through your own thought leadership and content, podcasting includedInfluence in search, both traditional SEO and AI-powered agentic searchInfluence through social listening and understanding your audiencePlus the thread that runs through all of it: putting AI to work responsibly, without surrendering your judgment to the software.Got a business problem you'd like solved on the show? Email [email protected] page and show notes: https://fallspartners.com/blog/winfluence-with-jason-falls-new-direction/ Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello again friends. Thanks for listening to Winfluence, the Influence Marketing Podcast. It’s been a minute! For those keeping track, the last time I posted an episode of Winfluence was two years ago. I hope you haven’t missed me, but I also hope you’re excited to hear something new from my thoughts on influence marketing. And, as a measure of transparency, know that the only reason I stopped regular episodes of the show is … well … it worked. I’ve been blessed with a full roster of client work in that time and just didn’t have the bandwidth to keep up the pace. But that means I have two more years of experience dealing with the day to day of influence marketing strategy, campaign management, execution and measurement. I’ve also been teaching students an influence strategy course at the University of Louisville, so it’s not like I’m coming back to the podcast without new ideas or fresh perspective, so I hope you’ll appreciate that. And, to be realistic, I can’t promise I’m going to churn out a weekly episode from now on and be right back in the saddle. Let’s just say when I’ve got to something to share with you, I will. So your subscription is still worth holding onto. And I won’t be throwing countless episodes at you just to stay top of mind.  For those of you who enjoy a good Jason Falls rant now and then, you’ll be delighted to hear that those moments are really the ones when I have something to say and share. So expect less interviews and more grumpy old man wishing the world would be better. When a new episode of Winfluence pops into your feed … It’ll be fun, for sure. What burr in my saddle has me champing at the bit to return to the podcast?  Talent managers are killing the creator economy.  I explain how and why on this episode of Winfluence.  Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As we enter 2024, I told you we were going to dial in our pursuit of changing the mindset in the influence marketing industry to help brands and agencies focus on influence, not just influencers. So we’re going to have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people along the way to make that happen.We’re going to kick off the year talking to one of my favorite people. Krista Neher has been a leading authority on digital marketing for as long as I can remember. She’s a six-time best-selling author and found of Bootcamp Digital, an education brand that offers digital marketing certification.Along the way, Krista has had to not only teach people about influence marketing, but dig in and practice the craft a bit as a consultant, too. But her wide range of expertise and ability, plus her focus on making digital marketing a practical and cost-efficient investment for her clients gives her that broad perspective I look for in someone to just chop up and chew through the conversations in the space.Today on Winfluence, I’ll dig into influence marketing with Krista. We’ll talk about how to build an influence plan, calculate the value of your influencer relationships and I’ll see if my assertions about influence marketing hold up to her scrutiny … it’s a perspective I certainly respect and know you’ll enjoy.This episode is presented by CIPIO.ai. Scale acquisition of user-generated content and flip those social videos into ad creative using powerful generative AI toolset. Sign up for a demo at https://jasonfalls.co/cipioFind this episode online at https://jasonfalls.co/kristaneher Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It’s been a minute. If you haven’t noticed, Winfluence has been on a bit of a holiday hiatus. Honestly, its a good thing for me … client work ramped up toward the end of the year and I simply didn’t have enough time to fit in the weekly interviews and production to give you an episode worth listening to.Instead of rushing to crank out something mediocre, I opted to step back, focus on the client work and reassess what Winfluence is and can be. For the last few weeks, I’ve thought long and hard about the show. I even entertained the notion that maybe it had run its course and wasn’t worth the energy to crank out more episodes in 2024. But then two things happened. First, I thought about the state of things. And to be quite honest, we’re not done. There’s a lot still to accomplish in influence marketing. A good portion of the industry is still falling over itself doing things poorly. The bigger the creator, the more likely you’re going to have to deal with talent managers. Every talent manager I talk to these days seems to be more and more out of touch with the reality brands face with budgets and return on their marketing dollar.Brand managers are still pushing influencers to just be advertising shills.And we are still thinking of influencers as the key to success, when the whole premise of this show and my approach to the craft is centered around the influence … not the influencer. It’s about to be 2024. And most of the people in the industry spending dollars on influence marketing are still functioning like it’s 2007.The other thing that informed my thinking, I want to save for later, so listen to the full episode for that.In this episode of Winfluence, I’m going to list some things that are still broken about our industry. I’m going to carve out a few ideas on what we can do to fix them. And I’ll recommit to you that this show is not only not going away, we’re just getting started. Watch or listen to the full episode at jasonfalls.co/2024reset Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.