Johanna Voss wants to know why contract redlining is a problem.

Voss, a talent manager, regularly negotiates with brands and agencies on behalf of her influencer clients. In doing so, she’s become accustomed to redlining, or striking out, certain clauses in contracts, often in the terms and conditions section, or the “fine print,” where she says she generally advocates for more creator protections. According to Voss, it’s crucial for talent managers to be able to redline the terms and conditions, especially to reflect discussions that were part of the negotiation process.

But what was once a regular course of business is now getting pushback. Instead of being able to redline contracts like usual, Voss said she has recently been sent contracts to review after negotiations, with language that Voss can’t redline.

“The brand gets everything,” Voss told Marketing Brew. “There’s zero protection of the creator. I’ve had about four or five [deals] come over in the past couple of weeks where they send the agreement, they’re like, ‘Oh, FYI, we can’t redline terms and conditions.’”

Voss isn’t alone. In the last 18 months or so, Molly Tracy, CEO and founder of talent management shop Vrai, told us she’s gotten “a lot more pushback” on editing the terms and conditions of a contract, often being told that her agency can only edit the scope of work.

The rise in agencies and brands limiting redlining comes as the creator economy continues to surge and as influencer marketing deals become more commonplace. Some marketing experts say that limiting redlining could be a simple efficiency play as investment grows and as marketers have more contracts to work through. But talent managers told us it’s causing friction in the negotiation process, all while putting them in a difficult position.

“It’s starting to become really problematic,” Samantha Hicks, managing director at Shine Talent Group, said. “We will agree to specific terms…and then we get the contract, and it’s completely different from what we’ve agreed to, and they won’t accept redlines. That obviously puts us in a tough spot because we can’t accept that.”

Continue reading here.—KM

Ahead of the busy holiday shopping season, Google is souping up its retail ads with new loyalty features.

The new features include a way for retail brands to offer personalized pricing and shipping perks to members of their brand loyalty programs on both free and paid shopping listings on Google, while also helping brands target lapsed customers.

That includes rolling out a “loyalty mode” within Google Ads’s retention goal feature, which creates bidding strategies designed to target loyal customers. If a brand sees higher lifetime values (LTV) from its existing loyalty program members than from new ones, it may choose to set lower target ROAS for higher LTV customers, Jyotika Prasad, the company’s senior director of retail ads, explained.

“Loyalty is a foundational feature,” Prasad told Marketing Brew. “The core of this is really [having] a personalized loyalty experience versus [showing] the same experience to all your customers.”

Read more here.—Jasmine

For Eric Shin, the path to becoming a restaurateur didn’t start in a kitchen. It started with a pair of drumsticks.

While most people only know him as the founder and CEO of SeoulSpice Korean Kitchen, which has 10 locations across the country and counting, he also moonlights as the principal percussionist for the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC.

As the child of Korean immigrants who also ran a Korean eatery, Shin’s ascent into the food business may seem natural, but it wasn’t always that straightforward. In fact, growing up, he aspired to emulate the aspirations of his dad, who wanted to be a software engineer.

“I was obsessed with computers, video games, and oddly enough, sports; my dad really wanted me to fit into Western culture,” he told Retail Brew. “He had me playing baseball, football. I was into skateboarding—just a little potpourri of everything Americana.”

Fast forward to high school, and he said he was already running a web design business while also “getting into classical music and jazz.”

“I figured, since I already had my company in high school, I didn’t need to go to college to study computer science,” he said. Instead, he went to Juilliard.

But somewhere between music school and his tenure at the National Symphony Orchestra, Shin’s entrepreneurial streak resurfaced—this time in the form of SeoulSpice Korean Kitchen, which opened its first location in 2016.

While there are some similarities between his career as a musician and a restaurant owner, Shin believes there are many parallels between the two industries: “[The restaurant industry is] one of the most honest things in the world. We all love food. We can have different beliefs, we can have different color skin, but something about food can always bring us together. Music is kind of the same thing, too. We all love music. These are necessities.”

Continue reading on Retail Brew.—Jeena

Busy marketers, rejoice: The Refill delivers top Marketing Brew stories in a breezy, AI-voiced format that fits into your day. Today, get a rundown on redlining limits in creator contracts, hear about the impact of the “quiet ad” from brands like Calm and Angel Soft, and check out Google’s new personalization features for retail ads.

Catch the latest episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your audio media.

Real jobs shared through real communities. CollabWORK brings opportunities directly to Marketing Brew readers—no mass postings, no clutter, just roles worth seeing. Click here to view the full job board.

• Vice President, Marketing and Innovation at a food manufacturer (hybrid)
• Vice President of Brand Marketing at an insurance services provider (hybrid)
• Executive Director, Marketing & Communications at a cancer research and treatment center (hybrid)
• Vice President of Product Marketing at an IT services and consulting organization (remote)
• Vice President, Communications & Public Affairs at a multimedia entertainment company (in person)

Stories we’re jealous of.

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• Deadline wrote about marketing lessons from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement announcement.
• Blackbird Spyplane, a Substack focused on style and culture, investigated J.Crew’s use of AI-generated imagery for several vintage-seeming Instagram posts.