Distribution
Planning creator content for paid social, CTV and DOOH
A creator video does well. Someone suggests running it as an ad, then on connected TV, then on the screens in the station. It is a good instinct and it usually arrives six weeks too late, because by then the footage was shot for a phone held in one hand and the contract said organic. Both problems are cheap to avoid and expensive to fix.
Give each channel a job before you shoot anything
The same thirty seconds is watched three completely different ways. In a feed, with the sound off, by someone who can tap. On a television, sound on, by someone across the room who cannot tap anything. On a screen in a station, silent, by someone walking past with about two seconds to spare.
So decide what each placement is for. A social placement can send someone to a product page. A television or outdoor placement usually has to land the brand and the product on its own, because there is nothing to click.
Write down the audience, the message and the next action for each channel. That list is what lets the production team plan the footage, the framing and the versions you actually need, rather than cropping something afterwards and hoping.
Confirm the rights before you book the media
This is the one that stops campaigns. Before anyone books distribution, have the team managing creator agreements confirm paid use, duration, territory, editing rights, and any third-party permissions that apply: music, other people who appear on camera, locations, visible brands.
An organic post does not establish the scope of a paid campaign. It establishes that a creator agreed to publish something once, on their own account.
Put the planned channels in the first brief. Adding a placement later means going back to the creator with a weaker hand and a deadline, which costs more and occasionally costs the relationship. Our Rights Builder turns those five decisions into a clause you can paste into the contract, and tells you how big an ask you are making.
Confirm the terms for the specific assets you intend to run, not for the campaign in general.
Build the delivery list from the media plan
Work backwards from where the content will run. The media plan is the spec sheet, and it is much cheaper to shoot for three formats in one session than to reshoot for the third one later.
Confirm current specifications with the media owner before final delivery, because they change. Then keep a record of which version was approved for which placement, so an older edit does not get distributed by mistake. This sounds like admin. It is the difference between one asset library and eleven files called final_v3.
| Placement | Questions for the creative brief |
|---|---|
| Paid social | Which aspect ratios, captions, opening frames and calls to action are needed? |
| Connected TV (CTV) | What length, resolution, audio and legibility does the selected placement require? |
| Digital out-of-home (DOOH) | What screen format, viewing distance, copy length and sound assumptions apply? |
Tell the creator at the start, not at the end
A creator who knows the video may run as an ad shoots differently. They leave headroom for a crop, avoid a joke that only works for people who follow them, keep a logo out of the corner where a caption will sit, and say the product name out loud so it survives with the sound off.
A creator who finds out afterwards has none of that, and is now being asked to approve a use they did not price. The conversation is uncomfortable, the answer is sometimes no, and the asset you wanted most is the one you cannot run.
There is a fairness argument here and a practical one, and they point the same way. Paid use puts a creator’s face in front of an audience that never chose to follow them, which is a different thing from a post on their own account, and it is reasonable that it costs more. Saying so in the first conversation is cheaper than negotiating it in the fourth.
It also improves the work. Told what the campaign is for, creators tend to solve for it, because they know their own format better than the brief does.
The best organic asset is not automatically the best ad
Organic performance is a signal, not a promise. A video does well on a creator’s account partly because of the creator’s account: the audience already knows them, follows their format, and arrived in a receptive mood. Take it out of that context, put it in front of strangers who are paying for a television programme, and some of what made it work stays behind.
Ask the boring question before spending: does this still make sense to somebody who has no idea who this person is? Often the answer is yes, and it is worth checking rather than assuming.
If the budget supports a creative test, say what you want to learn and change one major element at a time. Record the versions, the delivery conditions and the success metric before you compare anything, because deciding what counts as winning after you have seen the results is not a test.
Three channels, one report, no invented totals
Ask the media plan to name the source and the definition for every metric, the same way you would for anything else.
Then resist the most common temptation in multi-channel reporting: adding platform reach figures together and calling the total unique people. The same person can appear in the social number, the CTV number and the DOOH estimate. Unless the measurement supports deduplication, the sum is not people, and presenting it as people overstates the campaign to whoever reads the slide.
If a brand lift study is part of the plan, confirm which exposure it measures and how the comparison group is chosen. Keep media delivery and survey results as visibly separate parts of the report, because they answer different questions and mixing them makes both harder to trust.
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