Most Creator & Brand Relationships fail BEFORE they even start.

Hello friends! Welcome back to Creator Etiquette™.

I just gave my biggest keynote to date at CreatorCon mainstage and Adobe Acrobat handed me the most perfect tool that EVERYONE in the room of 350+ of creators, brand strategists, social media managers, and brand-side marketers, could work with anywhere any time. Instead of giving them a typical presentation with my 45 minutes, I custom built  a shared PDF Space so that audience members could follow along AND access the resources after. 

This newsletter is written in partnership with Adobe Acrobat to take you through what it REALLY takes to build a brand-creator relationship and the Creator Etiquette™ that goes into that.  

To put it bluntly: I think that most brand-creator partnerships fail before they ever get into contract — and it starts  with the brief the brand writes, and the creator accepts. 

Generic briefs that read like wishlists and shrink  the creator's voice before the concept  is even drafted. - Context-blind briefs that hand a TikTok concept to a LinkedIn-first creator and call it a cross-posted strategy. I see these situations every week in our creator world. 

And the room I walked into, on stage, already had experienced the same broken handoff before; I could feel it the second I asked for hands. So I rebuilt an imaginary brief, live, on stage in front of the audience  using Adobe Acrobat’s AI-powered tools.

The theoretical brief I created was pre-loaded into the PDF Space we were working in, along with other key documents for reference throughout the workshop.    The example brief was written for a LinkedIn executive creator, with no clear deadline about deliverables or call to action…and surprise! It was generic on purpose. I let it sit on the screen in silence and watched the room read it and giggle in unison. 

Then I opened  the PDF Space inside Acrobat and we all got to work. Hundreds of people in the audience scanned the QR code, joined as viewers to follow along, and  I workshopped the brief with them inside of the workspace in real time. 

I built my whole Creator Etiquette™ methodology around four parts: Context, Constraint, Creator Fit, and Call, which became the spine of the brief we wrote together.  We worked in rounds to differentiate and cleanly go through workflows for both creators and brands so everyone in the room could resonate.

Here’s what that looked like: Generate Podcast helped summarize our resources before we got to work, which was a crowd favorite. Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant pulled context from every document inside the PDF Space, with clickable citations back to the source so the room could verify everything as we went. 

By the end of the workshop, the rebuilt version was sitting next to the original on screen… same product, same creator, completely different ask.

Audience members walked away with frameworks to implement into their workflows and a rewritten mock brief by three hundred people, all in one PDF Space. The energy of that room is what I keep thinking about after leaving Covington, KY. 

The thing that made the presentation work well was not just my framework, it was that the audience  was finally in the same room with the people on the other side of the table to create better work together. Adobe Acrobat PDF Spaces gave us a place to collaborate together, in the open, without the friction of a contract or a misread tone in an email. 

I have run versions of this workshop before, on stages and inside boardrooms, but this was the first time the room got to write the answer with me instead of just watching me explain it.

I think the technology is doing something the rest of the industry has not caught up to yet. PDF Spaces is the first workspace I have used that holds research, source documents, audience notes, links and an AI Assistant in one place that multiple people can be inside at the same time. For a methodology that is fundamentally about brand-side and creator-side seeing how the other side thinks, that infrastructure is everything. Without it, I am still running this workshop on slides, but with it, I feel like I am running it inside the actual environment professional partnerships should be built in.

The methodology and the technology found each other thanks to my partnership as an Adobe Acrobat Ambassador, and what came out of that on the mainstage is the closest I have ever gotten to teaching this work the way I have always wanted to teach it, at scale.

This is what professional development looks like in the creator economy.  Practice codified, written down, tested in rooms with real money on the line, and made shareable enough that both sides of every partnership can use the same vocabulary the next day. Creator Etiquette™ exists because the unwritten rules of brand-creator work have been treated as instinct for too long, and the people who get burned by that lack of structure are almost always the creators with the least leverage. 

And if you want access to the recap PDF Space from the workshop, click the link! . Inside it you will find all of the  documents we used as our source library, the four-part framework as a reference, the Email Template Library, the Glossary of terms creators get burned on, the Creator Etiquette™ Code of Conduct, and ,  the Adobe Acrobat use cases doc with some  real Acrobat workflows and an  Acrobat Prompting Guide for you to use at your leisure. 

Reference whatever you need. The whole point is that both sides see how the other side thinks and to create better work together.

Thank you to everyone who showed up IRL and to the entire Adobe Acrobat Fam for letting me run a workshop where people walked away inspired.

— Gigi

Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom

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