How to run a clipping campaign

Before you launch: what you need ready

• Source material. Long-form footage, product clips, stream VODs, an ad cut — whatever clippers will cut from. Campaigns without usable source material produce inconsistent clips no matter how good the brief is.
• A clear angle. What should someone understand after watching? One idea per campaign works far better than a list of messages.
• Non-negotiables. Claims that can't be made, words to avoid, disclosure requirements, competitors that mustn't appear. Write these down before launch, not in rejection notes afterwards.
• A review habit. Someone needs to approve clips regularly. Slow approval is the most common way a campaign underperforms — clippers move to campaigns that respond.

Setting it up

1. 1

   Write the brief

   Say what to make, what footage to use, what to avoid, and what gets rejected. Include one or two examples of clips you'd approve — an example does more work than three paragraphs of description.

2. 2

   Choose the platforms

   Pick where your audience actually is rather than all of them. A campaign spread across five platforms gets you a thin presence on each.

3. 3

   Set the rate and structure

   A per-view (CPM) rate, milestone bonuses for crossing view marks, or both. Per-view is the predictable default; milestones concentrate spend on clips that break out.

4. 4

   Set caps and thresholds

   A per-video cap stops one clip consuming the budget. A minimum view threshold stops paying out on posts nobody saw. Both are normal and both should be visible to clippers before they join.

5. 5

   Fund the budget

   Money goes in before clips can earn, which is what lets creators trust the campaign enough to spend time on it. Shoot's minimum is $500, and unspent budget returns to your wallet.

6. 6

   Choose public or private

   A public listing opens the campaign to the whole creator pool. A private invite link keeps it to your own community — useful for a first test or a sensitive launch.

7. 7

   Review submissions

   Approve what fits and reject what doesn't, with a reason. Structured feedback improves the next round of submissions; silent rejection just loses you the clipper.

Writing a brief that works

The brief is the highest-leverage thing you'll write, and the failure is almost always the same: too much about the brand, too little about the video. Clippers don't need your positioning document — they need to know what a good clip looks like.

Measuring it properly

Cost per 1,000 views tells you how efficiently the campaign converts budget into attention, and it's the number to optimise within the channel. But it can't tell you whether the channel is working — for that you need something downstream, tracked separately: signups, installs, branded search volume, sales. Judge the campaign on the downstream number and tune the clips on the CPM one.

• Watch the spread, not the average. A handful of clips will carry the campaign. Look at what the top clips did differently and put that in the next brief.
• Track approval rate. A low one usually means the brief is unclear rather than that clippers are careless.
• Re-brief rather than re-launch. Most underperforming campaigns are fixed by tightening the brief and adding examples, not by raising the rate.

Common mistakes

• Treating it as an influencer buy and expecting a fixed deliverable per creator.
• Writing a brief that describes the brand rather than the video.
• Launching with no example of an approved clip.
• Rejecting without reasons, then wondering why submissions dried up.
• Setting a per-video cap so low that a breakout clip isn't worth making.
• Spreading a small budget across every platform at once.