Your brief has two jobs at once, and most of the craft is doing both in the same few hundred words.

A brief has to make a creator choose your campaign over the others paying the same rate, and it has to be precise enough that you can approve or reject without an argument, so it leads with the offer, states rules a stranger could check, and leaves the creative to the creator. The one thing it must never do is hide a rule you will reject against somewhere other than the campaign page.

This is Discover, where most creators find you. Your campaign sits in a row with others, and a creator scrolling here gives each one a couple of seconds before moving on, so notice what the campaigns in that row lead with: the budget, the rate, the thing they want made, and not their brand story. A creator is deciding whether the work is worth an afternoon, and they decide it here, before they ever open your rules.

This is a campaign page that spent almost all of its budget, and look at how little work it makes the reader do: the rate is in the title, it is repeated per platform with the minimum and maximum per clip, and the description is one sentence. Four things belong in the opening, in this order.

The campaigns that fill their budget fastest hand over a folder and ask creators to cut from it, which removes the hardest part of the job and keeps your product on screen exactly as you want it. If you have raw footage, past posts, a product demo or a stream archive, upload it under Reference materials on the Details step and mention it in your first line, because sourcing material is the most common reason a creator likes a campaign and still scrolls past it.

Here is a brief in the shape a lot of campaigns take: "Make a fun video about our app. Be authentic and creative, and show how easy it is to use." And the same campaign written as rules:

Six lines, and a stranger could apply every one of them, which is the test worth running before you publish: hand your rules to someone who has never seen your product, ask them to review ten clips, and see whether their verdicts match yours. Words like authentic, high quality and engaging feel like direction and are not; you know what you mean, and a creator reading your page on a phone in another country does not, and neither will whoever reviews the clip next week. Almost every rule worth writing is one of six kinds.

Notice what is not on that list: nothing tells the creator how to be funny, what hook to open on, or how to cut. That is the part they are better at than you, and the part you are paying for.

An analytics screen recording and by when, a demographic split and in what format, a minimum view count before a clip qualifies, a country quota, how long the post has to stay up, whether likes have to be visible: these are all fair things to want, and they all cause trouble when they arrive after the clip is live. A creator who knows on day one that you will want a screen recording sends it without being chased; asked afterwards, the same request reads as moving the goalposts, and that creator does not come back for your next campaign.

Rules that decide approval belong on the campaign page, under Requirements, and the material creators work from belongs on the campaign too, under Reference materials, where every creator sees it on the campaign page: videos, images, brand assets, and up to four links, so a shared folder or a playlist goes there as a link rather than living in a chat. A rule that only lives in a chat cannot be used to reject a clip, and every step between the campaign page and a second document costs you creators. If your requirements section says only "read the full rules", the rules are effectively unwritten.

The Requirements step also gives you toggles: a brand mention in the caption, face on camera, a logo or watermark, a minimum video length, no recycled content, a link in bio, specific text in the caption, a required sound. Each one is a filter, and each one removes creators who would otherwise have posted for you, so before you switch one on, ask what you would do if a creator broke it. If the answer is not "reject the clip", it belongs in the description as context, or nowhere at all.

When you reject, name the rule the clip missed, because "Your caption is missing #campaigntag" tells the creator exactly what to change and the next clip they send you is usable, while a general reason means the same creator resubmits the same mistake, you review it twice, and they open a ticket to ask what they got wrong. This is also the real argument for writing the brief carefully: if you cannot point at a line when you reject, the line was never really there.

Stay tight on the checkable rules and loose on execution. Rules go on the Requirements step; source files, links and reference videos go on the Details step, where creators see them on the campaign page; Create a campaign walks through both.

Open your campaign page on a phone before you publish. In fifteen seconds you should be able to answer what you are making, what it pays and the most one clip can earn, what would get you rejected, and what they will ask you for after you post. If any answer takes longer than that to find, a creator scrolling Discover will not find it either, so rewrite until all four are obvious.

Lead with the offer, write rules a stranger could check, and leave the rest to the creator.

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