Up to 65% of creator budgets stops before the creator. TrinityP3 names four fixes

A consultancy bulletin published on 21 September argues that creator budgets shrink badly on the way to the people making the work. TrinityP3 calls the paper “Unmasking the Invisible Margin in Creator Marketing”. Its central figure is 65 percent, the share a bundled agency deal can absorb before a creator is paid.

A 100,000 dollar brief can leave 35,000 for the creator

TrinityP3 models one campaign two ways. Under a bundled arrangement, 35,000 dollars of a 100,000 dollar budget reaches creators directly. Under an itemised arrangement, that figure rises to 60,000 dollars. The gap sits in talent fees sold as a package, technology gateways, compliance work and management time.

Darren Woolley calls convenience the expensive part

Woolley, who founded TrinityP3 and runs it globally, puts the problem in one line: “Convenience should never cost you half your campaign output”. Lydia Feely, the firm’s general manager, worked on the same bulletin. Their argument is not that agencies should work for free. It is that a buyer cannot judge a fee they never see.

Four clauses TrinityP3 wants in the contract

The bulletin lists four contractual guardrails. Unbundle and itemise every creator cost. Allow open-market sourcing rather than a single roster. Pass through platform rebates in full. Keep audit rights so someone can check what the talent was actually paid.

The complaint lands in a market that already admits it cannot price this work. Marketers have said that creator fees are largely guesswork. Payment plumbing is consolidating at the same time, with Later folding Mavely into its own brand. On the media side, three in four advertisers plan to change how they pay agencies.

Open your last creator campaign invoice and look for a single line called talent. If the fee paid to each creator is not shown separately, you cannot tell whether you bought 35 percent or 60 percent of working spend. That one line is what the four clauses are for.