Should you leave a creator a review?

Would you mind leaving me a review?

The message lands the day after the final cut, before the video is even up.

It reads like a two-line favor, and the reply people reach for is the one that costs nothing. Absolutely, you were great to work with. That line may well be true, and still empty. What makes it empty is what makes this request harder than it looks.

Here a review means the one thing: a short written account of working with somebody, left somewhere it stays, where a brand considering them next can read it. Not the notes you sent back on the draft. This one leaves your hands.

What are they asking you for?

They are asking you to say something about a person.

That is what makes it different from the rest of what the campaign asked of you. A testimonial runs the other way. You ask the creator to report what happened when they used your product, and the content of it is a fact about them, which is exactly why you can't write it for them. Turn that around and you get this request. They are asking you to report what happened when you worked with them, and that report is a fact about your own campaign, which you can write. It also has to be about them, and that condition is where the campaign starts falling away. That is the problem, not the relief.

It is a normal request, and the answer to it is yes. What you write attaches to them and stays attached, and the next brand reads it without you there to explain it.

So the thing to hold onto before you start typing is small and easy to forget: you are not the reader.

For the mug: you sell a travel mug whose whole claim is that you can drop it in a bag lid-down and nothing gets on your laptop. You know that campaign end to end. The person who opens what you write knows none of it.

Why can't it be about how the video did?

Because we have already said that how the video did isn't a fact about them.

The guide to going back to the same creator settles it in one line: "a video that reads like it missed isn't a fact about the creator at all." The same section closes the other direction, the one nobody argues with, just as firmly: "What landed was a sentence, in a content format, in a campaign. It isn't a reason attached to a person."

That judgment was written for a decision you make privately. Here it has somewhere further to go. What you write sits under their name and nothing else, so putting the campaign's results into it doesn't only misfile them on your own side. It hands the misreading to the next brand, with your name on it.

Which is awkward. How the video did is the part of this campaign you will know best.

For the mug: the video goes up this week and you'll know soon enough how it did. That was never what you were asked about.

Which parts of what you watched can somebody else read?

You are left with what you watched happen. You already keep that. The record of how the job ran is what a finished job leaves you, and it is where this reply gets written from.

But it doesn't all come out. That record was written for a reader who has the campaign sitting next to it, one who already knows what you asked for and when. The person reading the review has neither.

So there is a test, and it is the whole job here: can somebody holding nothing but your sentence read out of it what you asked for and what came back?

Take the entry you'd pull from the record, and the line you'd reach for instead. Only one of them came from anywhere.

The draft came back wrong. Nobody can read that. Your brief fixed three things and a stranger doesn't know which one moved, or what you'd asked for in the first place. It fails the test as written. It doesn't have to. Put the ask into the sentence and it brings its own context with it: we asked for one continuous shot from filling it to pulling it back out, and the first draft cut away before the bag opened. Now the reader has both halves, the ask and what came back, and neither one leans on the campaign.

They were great to work with. That one was never in the record. There is no ask in it and no outcome, only a verdict, and the next brand cannot do anything with it. Put it in if you like; it costs nothing and it carries nothing. Just don't let it be the whole thing.

For the mug: an entry that says only that a note went out is the part you'd have to rewrite. What somebody else can read is that you asked to see the inside of the bag dry as the mug came out, and that the next version had it.

What if it didn't go well?

The test doesn't change. The ask half is harder to find when it went badly, and one question finds it: what was fixed?

The deadline guide puts it plainly: "Something has to have fixed it. Otherwise nothing is late." That rule was settling whether anything was broken while the job was still open. It does the same work at this end. If the offer named a week, and that offer is the one they said yes to, and the video went up after it, both halves are already in one sentence. The shape is this: We agreed the video would go up that week and it went up three days after. A stranger can read that without you.

Now take the version of the same complaint with nothing behind it. Everything took longer than we expected. The same-creator guide has already ruled on what that is: "If nothing you agreed on fixed the timing, then nothing was broken and what you have is a turnaround you've now seen once." You expected something and you never said so. There is no ask half here, because there was never an ask.

There is a second way a bad-campaign entry goes wrong, and we have named it before. Where a message got no answer at all, we've said that "quietly ranking this name lower next time turns your own missing information into their problem". That guide is describing a list you keep to yourself. In a review the same move happens in the open, and what you couldn't confirm arrives at the next reader as something you established.

For the mug: the offer named the week the cut had to land and they took it, and it landed inside that week. That is writable now. What isn't is that you'd assumed a faster turnaround on the note, because you never said it.

When do you write it?

Sooner than the results, usually. The request can arrive before the campaign is over at all.

The timing follows from what a review holds. If its content were how the video did, you would have to wait. The content is what you watched happen, and that was finished when the work was.

So the line isn't the campaign's end, it's the work's end. Write it from the record rather than from memory, and write it once the record stops growing, which happens once the last thing you watched is behind you, not once the video has had its week.

For the mug: nothing went into the record after the final cut landed. By the time the message arrived the next morning, the record was already as complete as it was going to get.

Frequently asked questions

We decided not to go back to them for the next campaign. Does that belong in it?

No, and not because it's unkind.

Whether you go back is decided by the next campaign, which brings its own sentence and runs its own check, and a name can fail to come up again for reasons that have nothing to do with the person. A decision you made about a campaign they were never briefed on isn't an account of working with them at all. Nothing was asked of them in it and nothing came back, so there are no halves to read.

Nothing went wrong and nothing stood out. Is there anything to write?

More than you'd think.

We asked for X and X came back is a complete entry. It doesn't become one by having something go wrong. An uneventful campaign still has one in it; it doesn't announce itself, so it's the easiest one to skip.

See what this looks like for your brand

Sitting on one of these requests and not sure what's yours to say? Bring the campaign and we'll go through the record line by line with you.