Should you send a creator a reference video?

A rusted flea-market pan gets scrubbed back to black, and by the end somebody is cooking an egg in it. No talking, and you watched the whole thing.

That video is now a link in your brief, because you sell cast-iron skillets and nothing you had written down was doing what it does. Beside the link, one line: can we get something like this?

The link is useful. What matters is what it says once it's opened by somebody who wasn't in the room when you picked it.

What's in the video besides the part you meant?

Open it and count. A premise: an object comes back from the dead, in one unbroken shot. An order: the worst of it first, the payoff last. A delivery: no voiceover, nobody explaining anything. A room: a garage workbench, hard daylight, a concrete floor. And a person, whose timing is why the whole thing holds together.

Five things, and the video doesn't mark any of them. You thought you were pointing at one — the pan doing the work on camera. Nothing in the link says so, and can we get something like this? doesn't say it either. It names the video and stops there.

So the person opening it has to guess which parts were the ask, and nothing in the video rules any part of it out. That is the cost of sending it with nothing beside it that names a part: everything you never cared about is standing exactly where your ask should be, and none of it is safe to assume they'll drop.

Our guide to having more creators make the video that worked takes this up about a video of your own that worked, going out to a second creator: "A video shows the person more loudly than it shows the format: the delivery and the room are on screen, and the order the video puts things in is the quiet part. Sent on its own, it reads as make this, and you've lost the thing you were trying to isolate." The thing being isolated there is the format. Here there is no earlier result of your own behind the link, so nothing's cause needs separating out — the half of that sentence this piece borrows is the first half. What was missing from the start is the sentence nobody wrote.

Which parts were you asking for?

There's already a test for whether something belongs in a brief. What belongs in a creator brief sets it out as one question about one line: "Take one line. Ask what you'd do if the draft came back ignoring it." Four answers follow it, and that guide walks through each of them.

A reference video isn't one line. It's a stack of them, and none of them are written down. So run the test on the stack, one line at a time. Call that the sweep.

Take the skillet video. The pan has to go from rusted to cooking in the same shot. The draft comes back with a cut between the two states — would you ask for a change? Yes, and you can say why without leaning on the brief: a cut is the moment a viewer stops believing the change happened to that pan. That line stays, and notice that you just wrote it.

Now shot on a workbench in daylight. The draft comes back at a kitchen sink under a window. You'd notice. You'd also let it go, and you'd be a little embarrassed to send that note. It's out.

Then there's the thing you liked most and haven't said out loud: the person in that video is unhurried, and that's the timing you noticed. That one goes the way the brief guide sends upbeat tone. You'd send the note. Then you'd try to finish this matters because… and find that the only ending available is the reference was like that — which puts the reference exactly where the brief said so sits in that guide, and it fails for the same reason.

That leaves two. The draft comes back with a voiceover running over the whole thing: you'd notice, and you'd let it go, so it's out the way the workbench went. The order rides on the line that stayed, because a single shot from rusted to cooking already fixes which state comes first. It was never a line of its own.

What's left after the sweep is one sentence, and that sentence is what's carrying your ask. Why your TikTok content still reads like an ad puts the balance a brief has to strike as "Be specific about the main meme format, and open about the rest." A sentence can do that. A video is specific about everything at once, including the parts you'd have left open if anyone had asked you.

What the link lands next to

The link doesn't arrive in a vacuum. There is creator training that has people searching the niche they're making content for and keeping a running list of the hooks they find there, and the same training describes what happens next as taking what worked and then changing it, rather than leaving it alone.

If the person you're briefing works that way, your link asks them to start from your skillet video rather than from what they'd have found themselves. That swap can be worth making. You know things about your product and your campaign that searching doesn't turn up.

It is still a swap, and the usual reason for sending a link doesn't account for one. That reason — they'll understand what I mean faster — treats the video as extra information sitting on top of the brief.

What does the reference let you ask for?

When the draft lands and something feels off, what to ask for when a creator's draft isn't right puts one kind of note out of reach: "What the content shows is checkable against the standard; who's delivering it isn't." How the new person comes across sits on the far side of that line, and it doesn't cross back because a video you sent happened to have somebody you liked watching in it.

The premise, the order, the room and whether anyone talks over it are all things the video shows, so they stay on the checkable side. What they still need is something to be checked against: that guide's test only lets a note through when it collides with what your brief settled, "as long as it collides with one of the three". It also says that if yours settled different things, those are your standard instead.

So the test runs on what you wrote, not on what you sent. The pan not finishing the job on camera collides with the sentence you wrote. The kitchen sink collides with nothing, because you never made the workbench a line. The parts that rode along without a sentence are the ones you can't raise on the strength of the reference. Sending the video did not make them things you had written down.

Two versions already answered

Two versions of this question have answers on this blog, and this piece doesn't re-open either.

If the video is an instance of a meme format you've decided to join, how to decide whether to join a TikTok trend has the call: "Send the reference video instead of the list and you've asked them to reproduce someone else's execution, which throws all of that away." That guide names what goes over in place of the video, and it's more than one thing.

If the video is your own and it is the one that worked, a different question comes first — whether a second creator should make it again at all. The guide to having more creators make the video that worked settles both, including what to send if the answer is yes.

What's left, and what this piece is about, is the ordinary case: a video from outside, no campaign history attached, that somebody liked.

When the creator asks you first

Sometimes the request comes the other way. You send the brief, and the reply asks whether you have references or examples of what you're going for.

That isn't the same question. Reaching for a link is you choosing what somebody starts from; being asked for one tells you the brief left something open.

What you send is the same either way: the link and the sentence, or the sentence alone. What changes is where you look. The place they're asking about is the place your sentence didn't reach, so write the sentence for that place before you answer.

If you find you can't write the sentence, you've learned that before the shoot rather than after it. The ask you were about to hand over was one you hadn't finished making, and no video was going to finish it for you.

So do you send it?

Two cases, and the sentence decides both.

You can name what you're pointing at. Send it. Write the sentence into the brief — the pan has to go from rusted to cooking in the same shot — put the link beside it, and say plainly that the link is there for that one thing. The sentence is what you'll hold the draft to; the video is context. The link may stop looking necessary at that point, and letting it go is not a loss.

You can't name it yet. Don't send it yet either. The link will read as the ask the moment it arrives, and an ask that has already landed isn't one you get to finish later. Watch it again and write down every line you can name in it, including the ones you're unsure about, then run those through the sweep. If something survives, you have your sentence. If nothing does, what you have is a video you enjoyed.

Frequently asked questions

What if we have five videos to send, not one?

Then you have five stacks of unwritten lines, unless the sentence you wrote covers all five.

Check it the same way. If you can write one sentence and each of the five is an instance of it, send the set. That is a real use for a set, with the sentence doing the same job it would do beside a single link. If each video needs a different sentence, you're asking for several different things at once. Decide which of them you'd chase, and send the videos that stand for those.

The draft came back looking like the reference. Is that a revision request?

Run it through the test in what to ask for when a creator's draft isn't right rather than assuming either way. A draft that copies the reference closely may still land every line you wrote, in which case what you're reacting to is the thing you asked for arriving.

If the resemblance is the problem, and it reads as somebody else's video with your pan in it, you're most likely looking at a gap in what you wrote rather than something the draft got wrong.

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