The brief is the contract

When we started, the obvious first screen for a brand was a list of creators. Search, filter, shortlist, message. That is what every tool in this category shows, and it is what brands say they want.

We built the brief first instead, and made it mandatory. This note is about why.

A deal is only as clear as its brief

Go back through any creator deal that went wrong and the trail leads to the brief. Not to the creator or the brand, but to the document that was supposed to tell them both what the work was. If the brief says “a Reel about the product”, then a Reel about the product in the wrong tone, at the wrong length, with the wrong call to action, is still a Reel about the product. The brand is unhappy and the creator is right. Both are stuck.

If the brief is vague, every later disagreement is the brief’s fault, and the brief cannot be blamed. So the only fix is to make the brief good, and the only way to make it good is to ask for it before anything else happens.

What the brief does once it exists

It is not a form that gets filed. It drives the rest:

• Fit is measured against it. Creators are ranked by how well their posts and their audience match the brief’s topic and audience, so the shortlist is specific to this campaign rather than a generic “top creators” list.
• Offers inherit from it. The deliverables and the window on each offer come from the brief. The creator sees the same words the brand wrote.
• Approval is judged by it. When the brand reviews a submission, the brief is next to it. “Not what we asked for” has to point at a line.

What we refused

We were asked, more than once, to let brands skip the brief and go straight to a creator they already had in mind. We understood the request. We said no, and kept saying no, because the deal with that creator still needs a scope, and a scope written after the price is agreed is a scope the creator never got to price.

The compromise is that a brief can be short. A few lines is fine. It has to exist, and it has to exist first.

The part we are still working on

Reading a creator’s posts to score fit means asking the creator for permission to read them. We ask before we read anything, we ask again whenever what we read changes, and a creator can withdraw at any time. We are not yet sure the asking is clear enough. That is a separate note.