Talent agency scams come to TikTok – 04/13/2023 – Market

When Celeste Polanco amassed 100,000 followers on TikTok, she started thinking about money.

“I knew I was in a position to get brand deals,” said Brooklyn-based Polanco, who creates lifestyle content. “But I didn’t know anything about the business side of things.”

So Polanco, 30, was interested when a rep from the Carter Agency, a talent agency that represents video creators for TikTok, got in touch in 2021. She liked the energy she felt from Ben Popkin, a rep for the agency. , during their first meeting, which took place via video.

“I let him know my limits and the value I believed I had as a new influencer in that space,” Polanco said, adding that Popkin indicated that value was higher than she realized.

She signed a contract.

Polanco’s story is not unusual among many people who have embraced TikTok in recent years and found themselves blessed by the mysterious algorithm that distributes the videos they produce to vast numbers of users. The path from fame to fortune on the platform is being mapped in real time, often by TikTok itself. Most users don’t earn money; those that do win typically do so by promoting brands and products. Talent agencies can help negotiate this type of contract.

Now, more than a year after signing with the Carter Agency, Polanco says the company has not paid her for several contracts she fulfilled while working with the agency. According to documents provided to The New York Times, the Carter Agency negotiated contracts on Polanco’s behalf worth at least $10,000, and Polanco says he never received a penny of that money. Polanco is just one example of two dozen creators who have reported similar problems with the agency to The New York Times, including withholding money and withholding information from creators about the agency’s pricing schedule for brand contracts.

The newspaper attempted to contact the Carter Agency via email, text message and phone, seeking its response to these allegations, but the agency did not respond.

Niké Ojekunle was one of the first female creators to talk about the agency, on TikTok and on the “Women in Influencer Marketing” podcast in November.

On TikTok, Ojekunle accused the agency of claiming to represent her when she was trying to sign a contract with another creator. She said she has never signed any business deals in her ten years in the business as an influencer.

From pranks to profit

The Carter Agency was founded by Josh Popkin, who worked with his brother, Ben Popkin, and a handful of other entrepreneurs. They represented dozens of video creators for TikTok, and an archived version of the agency’s website, which later went offline, mentions a list of “strategic partners” that include Netflix, Amazon, McDonald’s and the NFL. (An Amazon representative denied that the company was a “strategic partner” with the agency at any time. The other companies did not respond to requests for comment.)

Before founding the agency, Josh Popkin was a content creator at TikTok. His account, which at one time had more than 3 million followers, made headlines in the second quarter of 2020 for a video in which he overturned a bathtub full of milk and cereal on the floor of a subway car in New York.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which controls public transport in the city, called the prank “despicable”, citing its impact on essential workers who were struggling to keep the metro running amid the pandemic. Popkin apologized via a video, which is now only viewable by authorized users, on his YouTube channel; he also closed the TikTok account where the prank video was originally posted.

Agency-related entrepreneurs often sent their clients a statement of work after securing contracts with a brand. These documents, in common use in the industry, detail project deadlines, payment amounts, and the type of video creators commit to uploading.

Agencies like the Carter Agency make money by taking a percentage of the amounts paid to creators. Documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that creators typically agreed to have the agency take a 20% to 30% commission, with the remainder going to them. But many of the creators claimed to have received far less money than they were owed, or that they simply weren’t paid.

Timisola Ogunleye, 27, a breeder who signed with the agency in 2021, said the company has landed contracts with Clean & Clear and Neutrogena, among other brands. She accepted the 30% commission charged by the agency, but the amount seemed high to Ogunleye, who also works in the casting and video production business. “I still have a career, which is my focus,” she said. “So the deal was either agree to pay their 30% or get nothing.”

Riri Bichri, a creator known for her nostalgia videos about the 2000s, signed with the agency in 2022. She said her hope was that “I got signed a decent contract, which I didn’t, and that I could work with people in generally honest, which didn’t happen either”. The experience, she said, “made me realize that it was very easy for them to act that way, because the business is so new, so little regulated.”

Arielle Fodor, 30, a kindergarten teacher who became a TikTok star under the pseudonym Frazzled, created a spreadsheet to keep track of money she says the agency owes her. According to emails she showed The New York Times, a brand informed Fodor that she had paid the Carter Agency for her work at least six months ago. Fodor showed the paper the contracts that stated she was owed $28,000 for this job. She said she hadn’t seen a penny of the money.

Multiple creators also accused the Carter Agency of taking advantage of non-white creators.

Domenica Comai, a creator in Los Angeles who has worked with the agency for more than a year, starting in 2021, said she believed that Josh Popkin “was primarily targeting black people, people of color, and I think generally speaking, maybe also the most vulnerable people”.

Comai created a chat group in November 2022 to bring together about a dozen female creators who say they have been exploited by the Carter Agency. The members of the group are all women, including Ogunleye, Bichri and Fodor. Almost all of the participants are of color (as are most of the people who spoke to The New York Times for this article).

Crystal Scruggs, a Houston-based creator, said that Ben Popkin had mentioned the battle of black creators when he was trying to convince her to sign with the agency in August 2022. “When we spoke on the phone that day, he said several times that, because I was a black creator, I deserved it, and that he wanted to make sure people were paid equally in the world of influencers.”

Scruggs, like Ojekunle, had already spoken to Fast Company magazine about his experience. She said she closed only one contract while working with the agency.

Peter Rodriguez, 27, a video maker in Tampa, Fla., produces videos for TikTok with his twin brother, also named Peter Rodriguez. (His father and a third brother also bear the same name.)

The Rodriguez brothers started working with the Carter Agency in early 2022. Rodriguez said the pay they received was far from the $18,000 to $25,000 per post that Ben Popkin mentioned in one of his emails. (The New York Times had access to this email message.)

Despite that, Rodriguez was thrilled to receive anything, he said, because he normally made videos for free. For him, the dream was to earn enough money to quit his day job and focus on TikTok.

In September 2022, the brothers received a statement of work from the agency regarding a contract with a deodorant brand. The amount, according to a document provided to The New York Times, was $350 for three TikTok videos.

The brothers later signed a new contract directly with the brand: $16,000 for two videos, according to a contract seen by the newspaper.

And while stories about agencies rushing to sign young, often inexperienced, talent are well known—the music industry, for example, is rife with lawsuits related to this type of contract—, the novelty of TikTok and the opacity of the influencer economics make people like Rodriguez especially vulnerable.

Alexis Farkas, 28, is said to have worked for the agency for two months in 2022 as a scout looking for new influencers. Josh Popkin emphasized the need to find breeders who didn’t have managers, said Farkas, who lives in Newtown, Pa.

A warning from TikTok

In November 2022, Ojekunle, a very popular breeder known online as Specs & Blazers, posted a video in which she accused the Carter Agency of numerous wrongdoings.

She wasn’t the first. In January 2021, Stephen Odea, known online as Stephen Alexander, created a TikTok account called @TheCarterAgency and posted two videos; in one, he wrote that the agency took advantage of its clients.

Ojekunle’s video and subsequent videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. In one, she described her surprise when a breeder contacted her in late 2021 asking if she was satisfied with her representation by the Carter Agency. Ojekunle had worked with the agency on individual contracts, but said she had never signed a contract naming the Carter Agency as her representative. She believes the company was using her name to help recruit others.

In late 2022, Ojekunle received an email from Jesse Greenspun of Malibu Marketing Group, another company created by Josh Popkin. In the email, provided to The New York Times, Greenspun said he was working with Naturium, a skincare brand, and that he had a potential business opportunity for the influencer.

Ojekunle said he later spoke with Susan Yara, the founder of Naturium. Yara said that Greenspun had introduced himself to Naturium as Ojekunle’s manager.

“I worked for the Carter Agency and Malibu Marketing Group as a contractor, paid by the hour, but left in November,” Greenspun wrote in an email to The New York Times. He denied that he had introduced himself as Ojekunle’s manager.

After Ojekunle’s video gained popularity, Ben Popkin sent an email to Carter Agency clients. In it, he defined the influencer’s claims as “unfounded” and wrote that Ojekunle had a contract with the agency but that the company had decided to break it because she was “unprofessional” and had not produced the promised materials. Ojekunle denied these claims.

an uncertain path

“It’s good that there’s at least one group that fully understands what’s going on,” said Yasmine Sahid, 26, of Los Angeles, a member of the female breeders chat group created by Comai. She instructed her lawyer to send the agency a letter in January demanding $50,000 in outstanding payments and asking the company to show its license to operate as a talent agency.

The agency did not respond.

Deciding what to do next is tricky. Fodor contacted the Federal Trade Commission and said the man who answered the phone recognized his voice from social media and spoke to her about his wife, who also works in education. “And then he said he wasn’t the right person for me to contact, and he apologized,” Fodor said. She ended up finding a lawyer, who is now working with some members of the Comai chat group.