How to get brand deals in 2026 ft. AJ Eckstein

**AJ Eckstein** (0:00)
We're the first agency ever to pay out a million dollar something creators.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
You're managing eight figures in spend at your agency. How are you determining this is the fee the creator gets?

**AJ Eckstein** (0:09)
What brands we're looking for today is like the highest possible quality. AI generated content, AI generated influencers is bringing everything to zero. The only last moat left is brand. We're seeing the shift from demand to brand.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
There's still not enough good storytelling. There's a lot of content, but there aren't that many amazing storytellers yet, and that really helps you stand out.

**AJ Eckstein** (0:28)
The only signal that rises above the noise is storytelling creators.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:33)
How much of your inbound is from your content?

**AJ Eckstein** (0:36)
The best opportunities are always outmatched. No one's going to throw your hat in the ring. You have to throw your own hat in the ring.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
This applies in so many areas of business.

**AJ Eckstein** (0:44)
In anything, no one's going to save you.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:48)
AJ, you are the founder of Creator Match, which has started as a agency connecting brands with B2B creators on LinkedIn. You've since expanded to B2B creators across platforms and more recently, into setting up creator programs for these brands. But just to contextualize for the listener, that's the basic TLDR of what you do, what Creator Match is.

**AJ Eckstein** (1:12)
Yeah. Now, we build creator programs for the fastest growing tech brands in the world. The tech brands could be B2B, they could be AI, they could be just SaaS in general. I think early on, you have to niche down, whether you're a creator and you're niching down on your own content, whether you're a brand and niching down on who you're trying to serve, and then over time, you start to expand. I love to see this analogy where when you are an early stage founder and you are a first-time founder like myself, you want to try to own the entire swimming pool. But instead of trying to own the swimming pool, you need to own one swim lane. If you give the analogy of sports, there's never the best swimmer in the world. There's never the best runner in the world. It's the best runner for the 300-yard dash. It's the best runner for a certain stroke of swimming. Over time, once you start nailing these swim lanes, you can add more. But to do everything, you do nothing. And early on, we nailed LinkedIn Creator Marketing. Once we started nailing that, brands asked, hey, we want more, we want more. Okay, well, what do you want? And then they told us what they wanted, and now we do all channels. We do more than just B2B, but all things really tech, creator marketing.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:13)
I have to give you credit for this analogy. This is very much the TED Talk speaker in you coming out.

**AJ Eckstein** (2:18)
I have done one. I did one last year, and that's in a whole other rabbit hole we can go down. That was a very fun moment.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:25)
Okay, well, we'll get to that a little later. But one more contextualizing question I want to ask you, just to somehow contextualize the scale of your business. Is there any number you can give our listeners for that purpose, whether it's some average deal cost, margin, total bookings from last year, whatever it is, any number you are comfortable sharing to establish what your business is doing?

**AJ Eckstein** (2:45)
So our business, think of it like an ad agency where we are really a bank that we manage a lot of money. So brands give us anywhere from, you know, it could be six figures, it could be seven figures in a wallet, a wallet could be tied to a campaign, it could be tied to a period of time. And then we essentially deploy capital as efficiently as possible and as fast as possible with creators. So in year one, in a 12-month span, we hit a million dollars in essentially managed creator spend. That was just on LinkedIn. We were the first agency ever to pay out a million dollars to LinkedIn creators. Then in year two, we hit that number much sooner, and we were doing it on a channel.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:28)
Which I should say, year two is wrapping up in this June. You are at the two-year mark essentially.

**AJ Eckstein** (3:32)
Correct. Literally, when this comes out, we will be at year two. And then we hit that number in just a couple months across multiple channels. And now we're doing that essentially every month. So the goal is now to manage over a million dollars a month in instead of media or ad spend, creator spend across all channels. And we have brands really spending across the gambits. Some brands spend maybe made five figures a month. Some brands are six figures a month. And then some brands are like, I need to go crazy for a launch. And I need to literally spend seven figures for this month or the next two months. So, I mean, we are managing millions on millions of dollars. And we have to now have a whole bank strategy for the amount of money that we manage across different banks because we're hitting FDIC insurance limits.