How much product should you set aside for a creator campaign?

You sell a solid shampoo bar. The sentence the campaign is standing on is written down — it lathers in hard water and doesn't leave a film — and the names you're writing to are sitting in a spreadsheet, read twice and still being cut. Then somebody on the operations side asks the question none of that answered: how many bars should they pull?

Two answers arrive quickly. One for every name on the list, or as many as the number of videos you want back. With a fee going out alongside the bars, the second one is close; with no fee, neither is. And what neither of them accounts for is the thing this page is about: every bar leaves the shelf before anybody knows what came of it.

What are you counting?

Bars that go out the door.

A bar that goes out is gone. Our guide to sending a creator free product instead of paying them puts the obligation side of one send at its narrowest: "one tin, out the door, and no video on the other end of it. That's a complete description of what you've committed to." That guide is describing a send with no fee behind it, where "Nothing is owed." Put a fee behind it and the fee buys what that guide calls "the right to require", and the first thing on its list of what that covers is that the video happens, and when.

The shelf is this page's side of the same send. Paid or unpaid, the unit is off your inventory the day it ships. Which of the two you're in decides where the number comes from, and that is the next question.

So the number you're setting is a number of sends. The list in the spreadsheet is bigger than it: not everyone on it will answer, and what silence does and doesn't tell you is the subject of what to do when a creator doesn't reply. Whether the videos are fewer than the sends, and what that gap means, is what the fork below decides.

A send is not always one unit. What goes in the box comes off what you asked for, and one competitor's guide to forecasting and stocking a creator marketing program keeps the average number of units going to each creator as a separate input to its stock plan. Your own catalog settles most of it. If the sentence is about hard water over a few weeks, a single bar is the thing to send; if the sentence were about the three scents, the thing you sell is the three-pack and that is what a send is.

For the shampoo bar: the count has two factors, sends and units per send, and the second one is one bar. What nobody has named yet is the first.

Where does the number of sends come from?

That depends on whether a fee stands behind the send. It is the fork that decides where the number comes from.

With a fee behind it. What the fee bought is on the free-product guide's list, and the first item is "That it happens, and when." So there is one send per person you hired, and the budget guide settles that count from something decided earlier: "the count comes off the variations" you wanted to buy. Here the two candidates meet: with one video per creator hired, the variations you asked for are the videos you want back, so the sends are that number, and the units per send are whatever the ask is.

Still in that branch, what this page adds to the count is the shelf. The unit is already spent by the time an agreed job turns out not to arrive on the day, a case that has its own guide.

With nothing behind it. Then no number of sends converts into a number of videos you can plan around, because nothing was promised in return. A send that comes back with nothing is a complete thing that happened here, not a send that failed to finish. What's left is the question the free-product guide asks about a single box, raised to the whole batch: "Whether this is a cost you're willing to have spent. Would you sign it off again with nothing to show for it?" Asked of one box, it decides whether to send at all. Asked of a batch, it is the test that batch has to pass, so the number is the largest one that still gets a yes.

The share of unpaid sends that comes back with nothing isn't a sign of a badly run campaign, and at least one guide in the market works at it rather than closing it. One competitor's guide to gifting campaigns opens by naming the worry and putting it to its reader as a question — "Do you have the concern that influencers don't end up posting leading to high cost without results?" — and gives it a section of its own, in which everything recommended happens after the box has arrived. Elsewhere that guide's advice before shipping is to get the post agreed out loud, and the same sentence admits that such a promise "is not enforceable". What it offers against the problem, then, is a reduction it says works without being enforceable.

If what you want is a count of videos rather than a count of sends, the free-product guide says which arrangement to be in — "an output you can count on is a purchase with a fee on it" — and what one job costs is its own page.

For the shampoo bar: no fee is going out with these, so the figure handed to operations is the largest one you would sign off twice.

Why doesn't this line move like the rest of the budget?

Because three things are true of it at once, and no other line on the budget carries all three.

It only works whole. The product is one of the four lines on the campaign budget, and the line's name comes from the guide on what to pay a creator, where it reads "The product, and getting it to them." The budget guide is blunt about trimming the page evenly: "Some of these lines don't take a percentage at all — half the shipping doesn't send half a bottle. Cut evenly and you underfund the ones that only work whole." A send is sized by what you asked for, so taking a slice off this line doesn't make the sends smaller. It makes them fewer.

It comes out of the pile you sell from. The competitor's forecasting guide builds its stock plan in two parts, customer demand and the units going to creators, and keeps the second as a line of its own, then says what happens when it is missing: "Many brands forget this part - and it's where inventory shortages happen." Nothing else on this budget comes out of something the business is also selling.

It refills on somebody else's clock. Money already on the budget can be moved between lines in the week you decide to move it. The pile is drawn down the day you ship and replaced on the schedule of the people who make it, and supplier lead times are what that guide's stock plan maps, with longer buffers where production is overseas.

Each one alone is survivable. Whole units you can plan around. A shared pile is fine while the pile is deep. A slow refill on its own only moves the date the number is due. What the three together rule out is fixing this late: the shortfall can't be absorbed by sending a smaller amount, it has to land on either the sends or the stock you sell, and the way back runs on a clock the campaign doesn't set.

For the shampoo bar: the fee line and the ads line can be argued about next week. The bars can't.

When does the number have to exist?

Before the stock order, which is earlier than it feels.

The campaign's own calendar won't ask you for it. The guide on having enough time before a launch walks backwards from the day the videos have to be live and lists what has to fit in between, and the box is on that list as a wait you don't control: "The box takes the days the carrier takes." The whole calculation is that "The floor is the sum of the waits that aren't yours."

The bars being on a shelf is not among the items that guide lists, because its walk starts the day the campaign exists and a shelf with bars on it is what "packing the sample and getting it out the door" assumes. When that assumption doesn't hold, the wait that decides the campaign began before the walk backwards starts. The calculation isn't wrong; it is counting a different set of waits.

There is also what stays quick on the other side. Adding a name to the list costs you the typing. How many of those names you can write to is set by what you send, not by the calendar, and the guide on messaging several creators at once draws that line in two sentences: "The smaller question stops at the list." An offer doesn't travel the same way: "An offer stops at the slots." Asking for more bars is a third kind of request, made to different people and answered on their schedule.

Most likely you don't place the stock order yourself. That is why the number has to be said out loud to somebody, and the order's own date is why it has to be said now. Whoever places it is working from a figure somebody handed them, and if nobody handed them one for the campaign, the figure they have is for selling.

For the shampoo bar: the number goes to the operations side this week, while the list is still being cut.

What do you settle before you're short?

Which side gives way, and what would earn another batch.

Being short takes one of two shapes, and the competitor's forecasting guide names a version of each. On the campaign side, its list of what early planning avoids has "Delays in creator shipments", and where there are no bars to delay the same shortfall arrives as fewer of them. On the selling side it lists "Stock out" among what an unprepared brand can easily do. Beside that one it also puts "Over-order and tie up cash", so setting aside more is not a free move in that guide's own account of it.

Unnamed, the question is left to whoever notices first, in the week they notice. So name it while the figure is still on a page: if there are fewer bars than planned sends, does the campaign go to fewer people, or does the stock you sell run out? Both are real answers. That choice is yours, and only before.

The second thing is what the free-product guide already asks of a single box: "What would earn a second box. Name it now: a post, a reply to your message, a photo somebody forwards you from a group chat. It doesn't have to be a video. It has to be something you named before you had a result in front of you." There, the decision is whether one more box goes out. Asked of a batch, the same naming decides whether what you set aside is the campaign or the first part of it.

For the shampoo bar: the stock holds, the sends get cut to fit, and what would earn a second batch is written down before the first bar ships.

Frequently asked questions

The product isn't on sale yet. This campaign is the launch.

Then selling hasn't started drawing the pile down yet, but it is the same pile: the sends come out of the first production run, and that run was sized as opening stock. Creator sends are the part the competitor's forecasting guide says gets left out of a stock plan, and at launch there is nothing else drawing the pile down, so the refill clock is the only one you are working against. That guide maps supplier lead times and builds longer buffers for overseas production, which is the clock this question has to beat. Ask whether the run already has the sends in it while the run is still being decided, which is further ahead of the campaign than the campaign's own calendar reaches.

Who pays for the product and the shipping?

Whoever you decide, and the guide on what to pay a creator is flat about that: "Not one of those has an owner you can look up." What is settled is where the cost sits, on the campaign's budget instead of inside the creator's fee. What this page adds is which way that line moves. By the competitor's forecasting guide's account, shipping costs, packaging and operational overhead "scale with your creator volume", so the line tracks the number of sends decided above, video or no video.

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