What to ask for when a creator's draft isn't right

Say you're running a campaign for a stain-removal pen. The creator's draft lands, you watch it twice, and you have a list. The spill looks staged. The pen's barely on screen. She sounds bored. Nothing on it says there's a brand behind it. And someone on the call wants to know if we can run this as an ad.

Five things. They feel like one kind of thing — stuff that's wrong with the video — and they are not. Two of them are notes you send. One belongs in a completely different conversation. One is about you, and one is about her.

Nothing on the list is labeled. So label it.

What this guide covers

• Why can't you just send the whole list?
• What are you checking each note against?
• So how do you tell a revision request from a preference?
• What stays the creator's even if the brief mentioned it?
• What gets fixed no matter what anyone prefers?
• Is "can we run this as an ad?" a revision request?
• What happens to the notes you didn't send?
• Frequently asked questions

Why can't you just send the whole list?

Three reasons, and none of them is about being polite.

You may not get unlimited rounds. Go look at what you agreed with this creator before you write anything, and check whether it caps how many rounds of changes you get. If it does, this reply is one of them, and what's in it is what you're spending it on. Make it worth the round.

The video already exists. Some of your notes can be fixed with a trim or one line re-recorded. Others mean shooting the whole thing again. A note that costs a reshoot had better be one you can name.

And you picked this creator on purpose. If you chose them the way we'd suggest, you picked them for what they already do when nobody's asking: the situations they film in, the words they use for those situations. A note that asks them to stop doing that undoes the choice you made.

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What are you checking each note against?

You check each note against something that was fixed before the draft existed. If your creator brief did its job, that's three things:

• The one sentence a viewer should walk away understanding. For the stain pen, that was you can get the coffee off a white shirt at the table, before it sets.
• The content format you picked. For this one, a single continuous take: the spill and the fix in the same shot, no cuts.
• The element that has to stay intact. The stain has to be visibly there and visibly gone, in that one shot. Lose that and the format stops working, whatever else is in the video.

Call those three the standard. It isn't an industry convention — it's what our guide to picking a format and our guide to content that doesn't read like an ad argue a brief should settle before anyone starts shooting. If yours settled different things, those are your standard instead.

Check against nothing and you're arguing taste, with nothing to settle it.

So how do you tell a revision request from a preference?

Two kinds of note come off the list before the test runs, because the test only rules on what your standard covers, and these two are settled somewhere else. The first is the disclosure note, settled by what the FTC expects, and the disclosure section below takes it up. The second is anything settled by what you agreed with the creator: wanting the video to do more work than it was made for isn't a complaint about the video, and no revision answers it.

What's left goes through the test. Take one note. Ask what in the standard it collides with. If you can name it, you have a revision request. If you can't, you have a preference.

The test is what the brief committed the campaign to, not which words it happens to contain. A note can be a fair ask about something the brief never mentioned, as long as it collides with one of the three.

Here's the list from the top of this piece, run through both steps:

1. "The spill looks staged — the shirt looks soaked, not splashed." Your sentence says before it sets. A soaked shirt isn't that moment; it's a different, harder problem, and a viewer watching the pen beat it walks away understanding something you can't back up. Collides with the sentence. Send it, knowing it's a reshoot rather than a trim, because the take runs continuous.
2. "The pen's barely on screen." Check the standard. The stain's there and gone in one shot, so the element held. The format held. Does the sentence need more of the pen? No. It needs the viewer to understand what happened to the shirt. You want more than the brief committed to. Don't send it.
3. "She sounds bored." How she talks isn't one of the three. Don't send it.
4. "Nothing on it says there's a brand behind it." Came off before the test. Send it, regardless of what else you're sending. What it takes to fix is the disclosure section's business, not a fix you can specify from here.
5. "Can we run this as an ad?" Came off before the test. Different conversation.

Notice the axis notes 1 and 3 turn on. What the content shows is checkable against the standard; who's delivering it isn't.

What stays the creator's even if the brief mentioned it?

Suppose the read was part of what your brief settled, so "she sounds bored" collides with the standard and the test says send it. Don't.

The way she talks is off the table, and colliding with the standard doesn't put it back on. What you'd be asking her to undo is the thing you picked her for, and if you wanted a particular read delivered a particular way, the person to hand that to isn't a creator whose whole appeal is that they sound like themselves.

So the test needs a limit on top of it. 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. Creative freedom holds whether the draft came back great or disappointing.

You can still ask for a lot, as long as the ask passes the test and stays inside the limit — it collides with the standard, and it doesn't reach the way she talks. Ask for the stain to be shot closer if it isn't legible on a phone, because then the element didn't actually hold. 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. Ask her to re-record a line that gets a fact wrong when the sentence depends on that fact, because then the line defeats the sentence, and fixing what it claims isn't the same as fixing how she says it. What you don't do is send back a script.

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What gets fixed no matter what anyone prefers?

If the stain-pen video doesn't make clear that there's a connection between you and the creator behind it, that gets fixed, and nobody's taste enters into it.

The FTC's guidance for influencers is that a material connection between a creator and a brand should be disclosed clearly, and that the disclosure sits where people will actually notice and understand it. The FTC's native advertising guidance makes a related point: content shouldn't mislead people about being commercial in the first place.

• Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers
• Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses

Read them yourself, and if the stakes are real, ask a lawyer rather than us.

Is "can we run this as an ad?" a revision request?

No, and it's worth catching before it lands in a reply to the creator.

Somebody watched it and wants it working harder, and there are two routes for that. They aren't the same thing. Running the video as paid media from your own account is a question of usage rights: whether you're allowed to reuse her video that way. Running it through her handle instead of yours is whitelisting, and that's a separate permission, because the right to reuse somebody's video isn't the right to advertise as them.

Either way it's settled in what you agreed with the creator, not in the draft. If the agreement covers the route you want, you don't need a revision. If it doesn't, no revision fixes that either. Take it off the list and go read the agreement.

What happens to the notes you didn't send?

They go in a file, and the file is the input to your next creator brief.

Note 2 is the one to watch. You wanted the pen more visible and nothing in the standard covered it, which means the brief never committed the campaign to it and you wanted it anyway. Once is nothing. But if the same want turns up on the next creator's draft, and the one after that, you're looking at a brief that keeps leaving something out.

So write down the second version of that note. Not the pen wasn't visible enough, but we keep wanting the product on camera long enough to recognize it and we keep not asking for it. Written that way you can decide where it belongs next time: in the viewer sentence, in the format, or in the element that has to stay intact. Put it in one of those and a note about it collides with something. Bolt it on as a line about how she should sound and you've written yourself the over-specified brief the last section warned about.

Frequently asked questions

What if a note collides with the standard, but I'd rather not raise it?

Then don't. Passing the test makes a note fair to send; it doesn't make it mandatory, and it doesn't lift the limit.

Say it out loud internally, though. "We're letting the soaked shirt go" and "nobody noticed the soaked shirt" look identical in a month.

Can I add new notes on the second draft?

You can, and the test doesn't change: the standard was fixed before the first draft arrived, and the second draft doesn't reset it. What changes is what it costs.

Suppose the first version of the take had a cut in the middle and nobody caught it. That collides with the format, so it's fair to send now — but you're spending a round on something that was already there. Worth being straight with yourself about which of your second-round notes are that, and which are genuinely new: a change made in round one that broke something else, or a problem that only became visible once something else was fixed.

See what this looks like for your brand

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