What do you do when a creator sends you a media kit?

The list is down to three names. You watched their videos, read the comments under the newest posts, found the ones with a brand in them and read those comments too. The three that survived got a message about a stroller that folds with one hand.

One reply comes back the same afternoon, and it isn't a yes or a no. It's a PDF. Nine pages: a photo, a paragraph about who watches them, numbers broken out by age and location, a row of brand names, and a price list at the back.

It is the most complete-looking thing anyone has sent you all week, and it cost you nothing to open.

Keep it. Then take it apart, because it arrived at the point in your order where it settles the least.

What's in the one on your screen?

Three kinds of material in one document, and they don't settle the same question.

Two of them are what the market describes. One competitor guide, writing about what brands ask creators for, says that many of the creators who get asked already have "a media kit or rate card ready" and gives the usual contents as "age, gender, location, and engagement rate." Another, writing about Amazon creators in a section that also notes there are no set rates there, says creators "commonly send their rate card and media kit with pre-defined prices and content packages." Read those as descriptions of a document's shape rather than counts of how often it turns up. What it's worth when it does is the part you're deciding.

So: a breakdown of who's watching — age, gender, location — alongside a reaction figure this page doesn't use, and prices set before you wrote. Whatever else is in yours is particular to the sender rather than to the form, and in this one it's the row of brand names, which is the part that looks most like an answer and the part those descriptions don't mention at all.

For the stroller: the sentence your video has to land is that you can fold it with one hand while you're holding the baby. Hold the nine pages against that sentence and you'll find it isn't in them.

Which of your checks does it answer?

One and a half, and neither of them moves anything today.

Our guide to choosing creators orders the checks by two things at once: "A check earns an early slot by being cheap and able to settle whether someone fits." The first three are watching their recent videos, reading the comments under the newest ones, and finding their posts with a brand in them. All three are answered from posts anyone can open, and the order says of each of them that nothing is asked of anyone. Those are the three you have already run.

The breakdown of who's watching lands squarely on the fourth, where the order reads "Now it costs you — you have to ask, and wait. Only worth spending on people who survived the first three." Three names have survived them, so this is the first moment in the process when that check is yours to read at all.

The row of names touches an earlier one, and only halfway. The third check reads "Have they made anything with a brand in it before, and how did that land?" A list of names answers the first clause, since the past-work guide says such a list "tells you the work exists" — and for most of these names you had closed that clause already, from their posts. The same guide is just as clear that the list "doesn't show you the work", and warns what it invites: "you'd be reading a brand's size back onto a video you haven't watched." The clause that did the cutting is the second one. How the work landed is in the comments under those posts, and a list of names doesn't carry comments.

For the stroller: two of the names on the page are brands you had already found on their account and read the comments under. The third is one you hadn't seen, and it tells you a video exists somewhere you can't watch.

It came free. Does that mean you can act on it?

You can read it. It won't move anything, and the guide that set the order says why.

"Even if this check were free it would still come last, because it can't tell you whether someone fits — only whether to trust what you're looking at." That is a counterfactual about cost, so it already covers the case where a kit turns up unasked: the arrival removes the email and the wait, and leaves the reason untouched. The same guide allows that the order itself is negotiable: "The order isn't sacred." What doesn't move is the reason this check sits at the end, and that reason is not a cost the arrival paid off.

It is equally explicit about what the fourth check does for a list that hasn't come down to one: "It settles nothing about a pile of maybes." Three names, none of them chosen, are that list. So the breakdown is readable this afternoon and there is nothing in your decision for it to change.

One thing the free arrival does take away. The published check disposes of a candidate two ways, "If it doesn't come, or doesn't match, you drop the candidate." A document you never asked for can't fail to come, so only the mismatch half is still available from this arrival.

For the stroller: you read the breakdown, and none of the three names moves. The PDF goes in the folder with the name on it.

Can you put two of them side by side?

A second name answers the next day, also with a PDF. Two documents, two sets of figures, same page layout, and it will look like a table waiting to be filled in. Don't fill it in.

The past-work guide draws the line on this kind of material. Figures that arrive in a reply are "figures they are telling you rather than figures sitting under a public post you can open and check", and the reason it gives for keeping them apart sits in the same sentence as the instruction: "a reason to keep those figures out of any comparison between two creators: each one came from a job you didn't see." The objection is not that the sender wrote the numbers. It is that each side came out of something you weren't there for. Neither of the two on your screen says what window it covers, which screen it came off, or how long it was averaged over, so you have two readouts you cannot line up. The guide to asking for the numbers only a creator can see rules on a different object — a screenshot of one video — and names the same failure: "A table implies a comparison the material can't support."

The same passage of the past-work guide limits that limit. Of told figures, and of the fact that the sender chose what to put in front of you — "It is chosen: they picked what to put in front of you and they led with their best" — it says "Neither is a reason to discount what arrives." Keeping two sets of figures out of a comparison is not deciding either is wrong. The choose guide expects you to read the breakdown when you get there, and says "this is where you read it against everything else you've seen."

For the stroller: one document says the audience skews 25 to 34 and the other says 18 to 24. Fit was settled before either PDF arrived: the moment your sentence needs showed up in their posts, which is why both names survived, and the comments under those posts are where you read how it landed. Neither figure adds to that or takes from it. The two tables aren't a comparison either. What you have instead is what you had: two accounts, and the comments under them.

Is the price in it your price?

It's a price for a job you haven't described yet.

Deciding what to pay rules on the lists you look up rather than the one you were sent: "Because every one of those lists was priced without reference to your terms." The back page of a kit shares the condition that sentence turns on, and you can see it on the page: a figure for one video, a bigger one for three, both set before your message existed. A list keyed to an account, that guide says, is "pricing one part of the job as though it were the whole job."

Your job has terms that page never saw, and that guide settles them before anyone names a number. What it tells you to do instead of adjusting someone else's figure is write the job out once: "Write the job out once, the way you'd want it from either of them, and ask both."

A price list leaves that open. Writing the job out is still yours to do.

For the stroller: neither figure on the back page was set against the holiday weeks you want to keep running the video, so neither is the number you're going to agree.

What do you send back?

A reply. The useful kind says what you're going to do with what they sent.

The numbers guide answers the unasked-arrival case for its own material: "No. The only difference is that it cost you nothing to get, and nothing above changes for material that showed up on its own." Its material is a screenshot of a posted video's drop-off rather than a kit, so that answer isn't a ruling on the document in your inbox. What travels is the part about the exchange rather than the file: somebody sent you something, so there is a reply owed, and "a reply that says what you'll do with it is worth more than one that says thanks."

So the reply has one job, and it isn't a request. It tells them the kit landed and when you'll read it against the rest, which for this check means once the decision is down to one. Anything you might ask here is a request, and the past-work guide is direct about who those go to: "Not to anyone you are still deciding about."

For the stroller: the reply says you've got it and that you'll come back to the breakdown once there's one name left. The video you can't watch stays unasked for, because a request is exactly what it would be, and this isn't the name to send one to yet.

Frequently asked questions

The kit has no brand names in it at all. Is that a mark against them?

It isn't a fact about them yet. What a document leaves out is a fact about the document, because the sender decided what went into it, and a kit can be silent about work that happened.

Their account is where that check gets answered, and the choosing guide is explicit about what an account with nothing on it means: "An empty branded content history is something you don't know, not something you've learned." So the absence sends you back to the posts rather than down a name.

It arrived cold, from someone we never contacted. Same thing?

Different question, and it has its own guide. Everything above starts from a reply: you wrote first, to a name that had already survived three checks, and the kit came back where a yes or a no would have. A document from a creator you never messaged is an approach instead, and what to do when a creator asks to work with your brand begins where this page doesn't: "A name arrived before the campaign did."

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