Brand Deals
& Influencer Agreements

A brand deal contract is the written agreement between a creator and a brand that defines what gets delivered, when payment lands, who owns the resulting content, and what happens if the deal goes sideways. The contract decides whether you keep the upside of the partnership or trade it away in the fine print. Most brand-side contracts default to the brand's interests on usage rights, exclusivity, and termination, which is why a creator-side review or counter-draft is the difference between a clean deal and a deal you regret six months in.

You are. The FTC Endorsement Guides place the disclosure obligation on the influencer individually, not on the brand or the agency that hired you. The brand can be liable too, but that does not transfer the liability away from you. Even if the contract makes the brand responsible for compliance, the FTC can still name the creator in an enforcement action. The substantive rule lives at 16 CFR Part 255 for the full text and recent amendments. The practical implication is that disclosure language should be drafted into your contract before posting, not figured out after a campaign goes live.

It depends on what the contract says. Without an explicit assignment or work-for-hire clause, the creator generally retains copyright in the content under 17 USC §101, and the brand gets only the usage license the contract specifies. Many brand-side contracts include broad assignments or work-for-hire language that transfers ownership entirely. The negotiation move is to keep ownership and grant the brand a defined license: where it can be used, how long, on which platforms, and whether paid amplification is included. Each of those dimensions is a separate fee item if the brand wants more than the baseline organic post.

Industry-standard exclusivity is 30 to 90 days post-campaign for a defined category of competitors. Anything longer than that should come with proportional compensation. A 12-month category-wide lockout for a single sponsored post is not standard; it is a brand-side opening position that negotiates down. The right test is whether the exclusivity period plus the category breadth blocks income you would otherwise earn from competitors. If yes, the fee should reflect that opportunity cost or the exclusivity should narrow.

Yes, even when no money changes hands. Anything of value received in exchange for promotion is a material connection that triggers FTC disclosure rules per the FTC's social media influencer guidance. The contract does not have to be elaborate, but it should at minimum confirm what the influencer is committing to do (post, story, mention), what the brand is providing (product value), and that disclosure responsibilities apply. Gifted-PR deals without any documentation are the most common source of accidental FTC noncompliance.

A kill fee is the partial payment a creator receives when the brand cancels the deal after work has started. Without a kill fee clause, you can spend days on concepting, filming, and drafts and walk away with nothing if the brand pulls out. A standard kill fee is 50 percent of the total deal value if the brand terminates after the strategy call, scaling up toward 100 percent as more deliverables are completed. The clause is the single highest-leverage protection a creator can negotiate into a deal, and it is almost always missing from the brand's first draft.

Yes. Perpetual or unlimited usage clauses let the brand keep running your content in their ads, on their landing pages, and in their email campaigns with no expiration date. Industry-standard usage windows are six months to two years, scoped to specific channels and geographies. The negotiation move is to define the usage window, the channels (organic social, paid social, brand-owned web, partner channels), the geography (US-only vs worldwide), and whether paid amplification is included. Each expansion beyond the baseline should have a fee attached.

For the contract document itself, you should not rely on AI to draft or finalize it. AI tools cannot account for jurisdictional differences, current FTC enforcement positions, or the platform-specific clauses that brand counsel will push back on. Use AI to learn the concepts so you can ask better questions; do not use it as the final document. For AI-generated content created during a brand campaign, ownership runs through copyright law, and the US Copyright Office's AI authorship guidance limits copyright protection to human-authored portions. The contract should explicitly address whether AI-assisted content is permitted and how ownership flows when it is used.

Cross-border brand deals add a second layer of compliance: Canadian Competition Bureau guidelines on misleading advertising, Quebec consumer-protection law for deals targeting Quebec audiences, and platform terms that may treat Canadian and US creators differently for paid amplification. The contract should specify governing law, dispute-resolution venue, and whether disclosure obligations follow US FTC rules, Canadian Competition Bureau rules, or both. StarGuard Law is admitted in California, Ontario, and Quebec, which is the working geographic footprint for most US-Canada creator deals.

Yes. If you start with the Single Deal Review and decide to upgrade to Full Deal Negotiation after seeing the redlined contract, the Single Deal Review fee applies as a credit toward the Full Deal Negotiation engagement. The Creator Deal System tier is a separate engagement that pays for the master template suite rather than a single deal, so the credit mechanic does not apply across that boundary; the strategy call sets the path that fits the volume of deals you actually run.