🔴 How to make and monetize viral TikTok shows

ft. Penn Weinberger, founder of content agency Bad Behavior

Author

Francis Zierer
November 08, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes

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Today’s guest is not a creator.

I reached out to Penn Weinberger because he’s the founder of Bad Behavior, an agency brands hire to produce content (largely short-form video) with creators and influencers.

We spoke about:

  • 💫 Differences between celebrities, creators, and influencers

  • 📱Building viral, highly monetizable short-form video shows

  • 💵 Pricing contracts with brands and creators

  • 📈 How the creator market has changed in the last five years

I boiled down much of the advice Penn had for creators in the “Steal This Tactic” section in the bottom half of this issue — don’t miss it!

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Watch the full interview on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

P.P.S. Send me a reply if you enjoyed our taking a bit of a different approach this week! Or drop a comment (at the link in the upper left of this letter)!

Engineering virality

What is true virality? 25 million impressions. This is what Penn Weinberger was taught in the year he spent working for Jerry Media, the advertising company built around a portfolio of multi-million-follower Instagram accounts in the 2010s.

“I became obsessed with the idea of a viral moment. What does it mean to create this moment?”

Penn spent a year at Jerry as a “hybrid sales, account manager, utility person,” learning about social media brand advertising before being poached by the founders of a then-new agency called Fallen Media.

This was mid-2020, as the pandemic kicked off and short-form video became the leading social media product. Penn spent two years there as Head of Partnerships, overseeing all client-facing (brand-facing) business. Clients included all manner of household names, including Lyft, Cash App, and Meta.

The team’s most visible achievement was a TikTok show called What’s Poppin? With Davis, which Penn helped develop and monetize. He says it was generating over six figures in annual sponsorship revenue.

Bad Behavior: Notes from a middleman’s view of the brand-creator relationship

After two years with Fallen, Penn left to start his own agency, Bad Behavior. This was in October 2022.

Why do brands come to Bad Behavior? To crack social media: to fill gaps in an existing social strategy or to build one from scratch; for bespoke, end-to-end, performant short-form video production; even for one-off campaigns; for full-service social channel management.

Bad Behavior still works brand-first and primarily in short-form video — brands are clients, creators are talent. They’re producing street interview series, talking head shows, game shows, placing creators on red carpets — all manner of formats within short-form. There are seven full-time employees, plus a crew of freelancers. The full-time team is:

  • Head of Agency (Penn, leading partnerships)

  • CEO

  • Two senior creative project / account managers

  • Two senior producers / creative directors

  • Community manager

Clients include brands like Cash App, Benefit Cosmetics, and Bet MGM.

More of Bad Behavior’s clients

The big KPIs Penn says his team tries to push and orient their clients around, though, are shares, bookmarks, and percentage of video watched. “Are people clicking away after five seconds, or are they watching 40% of the video? Because that’s pretty strong.”

I asked Penn to get into how the agency approaches more creator-facing work.

Getting the best possible work out of talent:

For brands, Bad Behavior is a creator-whisperer; for creators, it’s a brand-whisperer. Brands don’t always understand how to best work with creators; creators don’t always know how to structure a mutually favorable business deal.

Key to creator-whispering: let them do their thing.

“We definitely want their personality, and we always tell them, ‘Hey, feel free to improv. The script we're sending you is really a guideline. Just don't go too far this way, don't go too far that way.’

You can tell when a creator or an influencer is saying something that's not in their own voice, and no one wants that. They're not happy, we're not happy, the viewer's not happy.

We try to empower them as much as possible. Our whole goal is to put a team around this creator so they can do what they do best and not worry about things like putting a team together, editing, or pulling a stranger off the street to ask them if we can see their apartment.”

Pricing a deal on the brand side

Bad Behavior does not, at this time, have any creator clients. Their clients are always brands, with the contract pricing in both the agency’s fee and any necessary budget for creator talent.

“Our standard, most-offered model is us operating as the always-on content partner for a brand, meaning that for their TikTok, sometimes Reels, sometimes YouTube Shorts, we are producing upwards of 20 to 30 video assets per month.

For work like that, the brand is typically paying us on a retainer basis, anywhere from, like, $10,000 to $50,000 per month.

The biggest variable within the pricing is the level of talent that we're using. They have 10,000 followers today, but I bet if we check back in in six months, they'll have 320,000 followers. And at that point, they're going to be 32 times more expensive than they are today.”

Pricing a creator’s fee

Creators are not Bad Behavior’s clients, but it’s still their job to advocate for a given creator's value to their brand clients; here’s how they do that.

“A lot of creators think in terms of paying for a post on their own channel.

But for a lot of what we do, we are using this creator as a host. So rather than paying them to post on their own channel, we're giving them an hourly rate or a project rate, which, a lot of the time, can look completely different because we're not tapping into their audience.

A lot of the time, we don't even tag the creator in the content. They are truly just a face or one of a few faces for a brand. And for that, on the low end, we're paying anywhere from $100 an hour to $10k, $20k per package.

The biggest cost variables are [the talent’s audience] and the content format.”

More creators have managers than ever before

I asked Penn if they’re primarily working with fully solo creators or if some of the talent they utilize has representation, which would surely drive fees higher. His answer points at a maturing industry — influencer and creator advertising looks more and more like any other type of creative industry:

“It's actually a mix. It seems like a lot of smaller creators now have management, even if they wouldn't have had management a couple of years ago at that same level.

If I had to guess, it's probably the same as the music industry, everyone's looking for that next big artist, right? Everyone wants Billie Eilish when she only has a hundred streams on SoundCloud, because then you're still there when she has a hundred million streams.

I think people are going more and more after that on social.”

There are more creators than ever and more business-savvy people looking to build businesses with them. At the very least, there are two more since Penn started at Jerry Media — Fallen and Bad Behavior.

Connect with Penn: [email protected]. They’re always looking for new clients and creator talent.

See Bad Behavior’s work.

🎙️ It was impossible to fit every topic we talked about in this newsletter — check out the podcast for:

  • ⛳️ Red flags to look for when working with brands vs. creators

  • 🦠 Engineering virality, even when it’s unpredictable

  • 🏠️ How Bad Behavior’s team is structured, and why

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

Building a viral, highly profitable TikTok show

How does one craft a TikTok show with six figures in annual sponsorship revenue? Penn left Fallen two years ago, but much of what he worked on there is still thriving — I asked him to get into how he and his colleagues there built What’s Poppin? With Davis.

At the time of writing, What’s Poppin? has a total audience of over 2.8m — 2.1m on TikTok, 405k on YouTube, and 298k on Instagram.

The Fallen team found Davis Burleson, the host, making comedy clips online. He was a freshman-year college student just riffing, messing around with short-form, with a low follower count. They approached him with an idea for a man-on-the-street show — he was the talent, they would provide production and business acumen.

How did they monetize it? Penn emphasizes brand safety:

“I feel like an old man and hate myself for saying this, but brand safety is a big one.

There is, again, a fine line. What’s Poppin? With Davis, it's raunchy in the best ways without losing brand safety. You can send that to any person at any brand and they're not going to recoil from it, but there's a couple jokes or references that are a little bit risque.”

It’s brand-safe but not anodyne. He’s an authentic participant in youth culture as both a creator and consumer; brand catnip with an audience. It took two months for the team to get their first 1m-view video. Then it snowballed:

“People are not just viewing these videos, but they're following, they're sharing, they're doing these deeper secondary actions.”

A few pieces of advice for creators (and brands looking to make great content)

“The number one ground rule is consistency. If you're developing a show, even if you have a bad creator and a bad concept, if you're posting every single day, you're going to see growth.

If you’re posting every day and you have a great creator and a great concept, all right, now we really have something.”

Pitching brands

Creators should pitch brands like journalists pitch publications — you need a developed, well-articulated, original concept that makes unique sense for both parties.

“Come with an idea. When a brand feels like you want to work with them because they're that brand versus just looking for a paycheck or a quick post, that really resonates with them. They want to hear why their brand will plug in well with your audience.”

Journalists pitch editors privately, over email; creators seeking brand deals don’t have to do that and might even benefit from pitching in public:

“If you want to go after Nike, create a video for them. Show them what you want to do. Tell your audience to start tagging Nike in your comments. It's very grassroots. It's very guerrilla marketing.”

One more thing that you’d think obvious — make yourself reachable. Put your email in your social bios:

“Something I'll just say to all the creators out there is make sure you have your email in your bio. There's been so many times where we're scrolling through hashtags looking for an up-and-coming creator, and a lot of the time, on TikTok, you can't DM someone unless they follow you.

So many people have fallen through our fingers just because we haven't been able to get ahold of them.”

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week we spoke to two different journalists who recently published articles about how specific products are marketed along gender lines and what that means.

Our first guest, Teddy Brown, wrote about Zyn bro culture for The New York Times. Our second guest, Emily Shugerman, wrote about direct-to-consumer women’s healthcare products for The Guardian.

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