Should you tell a creator how long the video should be?

You sell a dish rack that folds flat to the width of a laptop and goes back in the cupboard when the dishes are dry. A creator is filming next week. The brief is nearly done: the sentence a viewer should walk away with is that the rack disappears when you're done with it, the video has to be one continuous take from full rack to flat, and the fold has to happen on camera.

Then there's a line near the bottom. Keep it under 30 seconds.

Nobody on the call remembers typing it. It might have come off a template, or out of something somebody read. It will go out with everything else unless you take it out, and this line behaves differently from the ones above it.

What is that line asking for?

Two things are sitting under that number, and a third that may not be there at all. Only the first is what the line says.

The first is the runtime of the finished cut: how long the thing lasts.

The second is a worry. When the third isn't there, the worry is all the line has behind it. Name yours before you go further; the test below takes any reason you can put into words. The one this piece follows is that a long video loses people before the fold, and the fold is the whole reason you are filming this.

The third is a requirement, and it only exists when the cut has to fit somewhere specific — when there is a place on your side that the cut has to go into. That case has its own section below.

There are sentences out there that read like a spec and aren't. One competitor's brand-side guide to TikTok creator campaigns has one: "TikTok is synonymous with short-form videos, typically 15 to 60 seconds long." That is a claim about what's common on the platform. It is not a statement about your dish rack, and the guide doesn't offer it as one.

One competitor's creator training isn't about runtime at all. It puts the attention problem in the first moment — "You have at most two seconds to stop a viewer dead in their tracks" — and what it points at is the hook. That is the training's instruction to its students rather than a measurement.

Our own guide to picking a content format splits the problem somewhere else again: "That's the difference between what the content needs to communicate and how it appears on screen." It reaches length only in passing, through the second half — "A long spoken explanation can bury the one visual detail the campaign actually needs." That is burial: the viewer is still there and the detail is crowded out, which is a different failure from the one above, where the viewer has gone.

Run it through the test you already have

Our guide to what belongs in a creator brief has a test for exactly this, and it takes any line you hand it. "Take one line. Ask what you'd do if the draft came back ignoring it." Four answers, and each one sends the line somewhere:

1. "You'd ask for a change, and you could finish this matters because… without saying the brief said so and without borrowing a reason another line already gives you. It stays."
2. "You'd ask for a change, and you couldn't finish that sentence any other way. Cut it."
3. "You'd be annoyed, and you'd let it go. Cut it."
4. "No draft could ignore it, because it isn't about the video. It was never a brief line."

That guide never ruled on runtime; putting the length line through its test is our step. But the test holds up here, because it already threw out the line that lives next door. "Hook them in the first two seconds is the one people fight hardest to keep, and it goes out the same door," it says, and the reason is the one that matters for us: "If the opening buries your one sentence, you'd say so — but that note is already yours, because the sentence is already in the brief."

Now take keep it under 30 seconds and do the same thing. The draft comes back at fifty-one seconds: a long run of the creator working through a sink of washing-up, then the fold at forty-two. Would you ask for a change?

Maybe. So finish the sentence. This matters because… a fifty-one second video of a dish rack folding is a fifty-one second video. Keep going and watch where you land: the fold, which a viewer who left anywhere before second forty-two never reached. Ask what the fold was there for and the answer is the sentence, that the rack disappears when you're done with it. So the loss you would name is that the sentence didn't land.

You might object that the sentence line can't give you that note, because the fold is on camera and the video does say what it was meant to say. But the case the brief guide used to cut that line is a video in exactly that state: the sentence is in there, the opening puts something in front of it, and the note the guide hands you is still the sentence line's. Forty-two seconds of washing-up in front of the fold is the same arrangement, and unlike the question of who stayed, it is something you can see in the draft.

So for the dish rack, and for the worry named above, keep it under 30 seconds comes out at answer two: you'd send the note, and you can't finish the sentence without reaching for a line that's already in the brief. If you find you wouldn't have sent it at all, that's answer three. Either way it's cut, and you don't have to settle which.

What does leaving it in cost?

Two things, and neither of them shows up until after the brief has gone out.

The first is paid at the shoot. The brief guide is blunt about what every line does on arrival: "The creator reads every line as a requirement and builds around all of them, so a line that will never settle anything still spends the shoot." That applies to every line. Our read on why a runtime cap is a costly one to leave in is that it reaches so many decisions at once: how long they let the rack sit full, whether the fold gets one pass or three, how much room is left for the thing they'd have done that you didn't think of. The attention that goes to making the number work comes off the fold.

The second is paid at review. Our guide to what to ask a creator to change names the mechanism: "A brief that specifies enough makes almost any note collide with something, and then "it's in the brief" quietly becomes permission to rewrite someone's lines. It isn't." With the number in there, this is over becomes the cheapest note in the room: it needs no explanation and the brief backs it. The fold arrives too late to matter is the better note and nothing stops you sending it. What the number changes is which one is easier to reach for.

That guide gives a test for any note: does the note collide with something the brief settled, and does it stay off how they talk? The fold arrives too late to matter collides with the sentence and stays off how they talk, so it passes — the shape of the guide's own example, "Ask for a different opening if the current one buries the sentence, because the hook is a structural choice, not an expression of who she is." The limit sits beside it: "What you don't do is send back a script." You have that note whether or not the number was ever in the brief. And it is a note about where the fold sits, not about how long the video runs. The creator can answer it by putting the fold at second eight and keeping all fifty-one seconds; if the worry is all you have and what you actually want back is a shorter cut, you are sending the number again under another name.

When does the length line survive?

When something the cut has to fit into is already in your plan.

Our guide to what to settle with a creator before the shoot separates two kinds of answer: a term you add to a purchase, and the shape of the purchase itself. It draws that line at who posts — "In the first, the video goes up on her account… In the second, she films it and sends you the file, and the only place it ever runs is your ad account." Its verdict on the pair is two words long: "Different purchase." It isn't a term you add on afterwards because "It's the shape of what you're buying, and she builds the shoot around it." A length a place requires has that shape too: it changes what the cut has to be rather than what you may do with it afterwards. Carrying the guide's verdict over to length is our step.

So it isn't settled by who posts. In that guide's own plan the creator posts on their own account while the same campaign runs "two placements running out of your own ad account" — one cut, two kinds of place. Anything one of those places required of the cut would land on the video they posted.

What you can do is read your plan and put one question to whoever owns each place on it: does this one require anything of the cut? We can't tell you how any of them will come back — this page names no platform's limits, and we haven't checked. What comes back may not be a length; only a length bears on this line. If nothing comes back with one, you are in the case above and the line comes out with the rest.

If a length does come back, run the test again, both clauses this time. This matters because… a cut that doesn't fit doesn't run where you bought it to run. Nothing in that sentence leans on the brief. And it isn't borrowed, because no other line gives you this reason: a line naming where the video is going would give you they shot for the wrong place, and this one is the cut doesn't fit the right one. Two different notes with two different fixes. Answer one. It stays.

Notice what the line has become, though. The brief guide's signal for a fact is "ask where the answer lives," and this answer lives on a desk in your building, in two parts: which places are on your plan, and which of them this cut is going into. Nobody outside can reach that pairing, and the pairing is what makes the number a fact rather than a preference — not the number on its own, but that it applies to this video. So the line lands where the posting answer lands in the settle guide: "the offer settles it, and one line of the brief tells her." The offer prices a cut that has to fit; the brief states the number flat, the way it states any other fact they can't reach. Neither guide was about runtime; using them for it is our step.

For the dish rack: say the plan also puts this cut on your own product page, in a slot your web team built to loop beside the price, and when you ask, they tell you the slot won't take anything over twenty seconds. That twenty is nobody's rule of thumb and no platform's limit; it is your team's answer about a place you own, and the fifty-one second draft with the fold at forty-two would not fit it. So the line stays, and it reads the cut has to come in under twenty seconds; it also runs in the product-page slot. If no place on your plan comes back with a length, the line goes out with everything else that couldn't finish the sentence.

Can you settle it after the video posts?

Not with anything on your side of the login.

The question you'd want to answer afterwards is whether the fifty-one seconds cost you anything — whether people left before the fold. Our guide to asking a creator for the numbers only they can see puts that exact quantity on the other side of a login: "One part of that screen crosses over into your question: how the video was watched across its own length. Not how many people arrived, which you already have, but how far into it they got before they moved on." And it says who it's for: "It's kept for the person who posted it, so they can work out what to change next time."

So the view count under the post won't tell you: it counts arrivals, not what happened inside the runtime. You can ask — that guide's answer is to ask, and to ask for far less than you were about to — and what comes back is one video's shape on one account. It can change how the next video opens, which is what that guide says the ask was for. It won't give you a runtime to put in later briefs.

Frequently asked questions

Our testimonial guide lists how long the video runs among the things you can settle. Doesn't that make it a brief line?

It makes it settleable. That guide is marking off what a brief can reach when the thing you're buying is somebody's conclusion — the products, the stretch of use, the runtime — against the one thing it can't reach, which is the conclusion itself.

The test above asks a different question: not whether you can settle the line, but what settling it buys you. It isn't the same case: there the runtime sits beside the other conditions on what you're asking about, not beside taste. Whether the line stays there is the same test's call, and we haven't run it on a testimonial: ask what the runtime line does that the conclusion and the stretch of use aren't already doing.

The creator asked us how long it should be. What do we say?

Say what you know and don't invent the rest. The sentence, the shot, and the fold are in the brief, and what they're asking for is a read on how much room they have.

If a place on your plan has come back with a length, that's a fact and it goes to them as one. If none has, there's no number on your side to give.

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