Should you ask a creator for a testimonial?

Say you sell a water filter pitcher. Somebody on the call says the video should be a testimonial, and it goes on the list beside the other options as though it were one of them.

It isn't one of them. The others describe how a video gets made, and you can commission any of them from somebody who has never touched your product. This one can't be commissioned that way, because what it reports already happened or it didn't.

It is still a fair thing to ask for. There is a question in front of it.

What are you asking for?

A testimonial is a person reporting what happened when they used the thing over a stretch of time, rather than what they thought when they first opened the box. The name points at where the content came from, not at how the video gets built.

That is why the usual division stops short here. Our guide to putting an ask in a creator video draws it as "You write the place. The creator writes the words." With a testimonial, the part the video turns on is not a place you write. What somebody concluded about your pitcher after living with it is not a field on the page; it is a fact about them.

You can still settle plenty around it. Which of the products they have used, which stretch of that use you're asking about, how long the video runs. What you cannot settle is the conclusion.

For the pitcher: you can ask for a talking head video and say it has to show the pitcher under their own tap, because that is a shot you are commissioning. You cannot ask for a testimonial that says they stopped buying bottled water. If they didn't, that is what the testimonial says.

Can the person in front of you answer it?

This is the question that comes before the one in the title, and it has inputs you can look at.

They already posted about it, and nobody asked them to. Our guide to finding creators keeps a section for the people who already know your product, and it gives two entry points: your own account's comments, and a plain search for "your brand name and your product's name as plain words". A comment gets you a name to check. A post gets you something better — someone who, as the guide puts it, "knows the product and cared enough to film it".

Read the post before you count it, though, because that is a wider net than the one you want. Read it for which of the two it is: opening the thing, or living with it. And either way the same guide is careful that this "is not evidence that their video will carry a campaign", and puts that judgment at a later stage.

You sent them the product, and enough time has gone by that use was possible. That moves somebody from couldn't have used it to could have, and no further. Whether to send at all is its own decision with its own guide, and what the send tells you afterwards is settled there.

Two things are not inputs. The number on their profile says nothing about whether a pitcher has ever been on somebody's counter. Neither does a warm reply, which tells you nothing about whether they have anything to report.

For the pitcher: an unboxing on the day it arrived is somebody opening it. A kitchen video from well after it arrived, with the pitcher sitting at the edge of the frame, is somebody living with it. Only the second one is an input, and it still isn't the answer.

What if they haven't used it?

Then what comes back has the shape of a testimonial and none of its content.

You get a person saying the kind of thing an owner says, put together from whatever they have to work with: your brief, your product page, what other people have posted. It will look like the thing you asked for.

The cost lands at review. You wrote no line about what the video should conclude, so when it arrives there is nothing in the brief to hold the conclusion against. A line you wrote can be argued over at review. Use that never happened can't be added afterwards.

What still goes in the brief?

One line still goes in, the same one that goes into any brief with an arrangement to disclose: what the arrangement is.

The brief guide is direct about why. "Disclosure is a facts line, and the strictest one on the list. The creator can't know what your arrangement is unless you tell them, so it goes in the brief." The caption guide is blunt about whose job it is: "You owe this one, and it isn't ours to explain." What the line has to say, and what the law asks of it, belong to the brief guide's disclosure section, to the FTC's Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers, and to a lawyer rather than to this page.

Notice what makes that line different from the one you can't write. The arrangement is a fact you hold and they have no way to know. What they concluded about the pitcher is a fact they hold and you have no way to know. The brief carries the first kind in one direction only, which is why it has a line on the arrangement and no line on the water.

What are you giving up?

A note, and it's worth naming which one.

The revision guide sorts notes by what they can be checked against: "What the content shows is checkable against the standard; who's delivering it isn't." Every ordinary note on this video still works that way. If the video had to land that the pitcher fits under a standard tap and the shot never shows it fitting, the note collides with something the brief committed to, and you can name what it hits.

The conclusion is the one thing your brief could never set, because setting it is what this format doesn't allow. So if they say it was fine but they kept drinking unfiltered, there is nothing your brief committed to for that note to hit. You are not being refused a change; you never bought the thing the change would apply to.

There's a question under all of this we're not going to answer: whether a testimonial is worth more to a campaign than a video you could have specified. We don't have anything to stand on there. What we can tell you is which of the two you're in a position to brief.

So what do you ask for instead?

Then you ask for the video you can specify, and you choose it the way the format guide sets out.

For the pitcher: say the unboxing turns out to be the only post you found, and everybody else you're considering got theirs last week. Nobody has lived with it long enough to report anything, so the ask becomes a talking head video that has to land the one sentence about fitting under a standard tap, said however that creator says things.

Some of these answers are about timing rather than about the person. If the pitchers only went out recently, today's answer is no and it won't always be.

Frequently asked questions

Their post about the pitcher is already up. Can we just use that?

Not on its own. Our guide to finding creators puts it plainly: "Finding a video gives you a candidate, not permission." That guide is where the terms get picked up from there.

They used an older version of the product. Does that count?

For the version they had, yes. That is the version the video reports on, and the brief cannot swap it for another one.

So whether the old one is what you want reported is a question to settle before you ask.

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