Before You Sign a Creator, Settle Who Owns the Video

A creator you hired posts a two-minute video about your product. It is good, better than anything your team has shot this year. Your paid media lead wants to run it as an ad. The web team wants the middle thirty seconds for the homepage. Sales wants to send it to prospects. Then somebody asks the question nobody asked before the shoot: are we allowed to do any of that?

The honest answer is whatever the agreement says, and in plenty of small programs the agreement is a direct message, a product shipment and a posting date. Work from the assumption that the creator owns what they make and that your rights are only the ones written down. A lawyer can tell you when that assumption is too cautious. It will rarely get you into trouble.

AI tools have made the first half of influencer marketing faster: finding creators whose audience looks like your buyer and checking their numbers before you reach out. Our AI influencer marketing playbook is mostly about that half. None of it helps with the second half, the agreement, and in my view that is where the most value leaks out after a post goes live. So before you build a shortlist, decide what you need to be able to do with the content.

The back of the card: seven fields to fill in before anyone films

Think of each creator as a trading card. The front has the audience, the niche and the engagement numbers that selection tools measure. The back is blank until you fill it in, and it is the side that decides what the partnership is worth to you.

• The organic post. Which platforms, how many posts or stories, which dates, and how long the post stays up. A post the creator deletes after a month is worth less than one that stays.
• Paid usage. Whether you can run the content as an ad, from your account or from the creator's handle, for how many months, and in which countries.
• Edits. Whether you can trim it, add subtitles, translate it or cut it together with other footage, and whether the creator approves the edit.
• Your own channels. Website, email, sales decks, trade-show screens. Each is a use, and each should be named.
• Approval. Who sees the draft before it posts, how many rounds of changes are included, and what happens if it misses the brief.
• Exclusivity. How long the creator won't promote a direct competitor, and which companies count. Name them; "competitors" alone starts arguments.
• Disclosure. The exact wording and placement you expect. This one gets its own section below, because it is partly your legal problem.

Disclosure is your problem too

The FTC's plain-language guidance for creators, Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers, says a disclosure has to be hard to miss, that in a video it belongs in the video itself rather than only in the description, and that creators shouldn't assume a platform's built-in disclosure tool is enough on its own. It is also explicit that free or discounted products count, so a gifting program needs the same instruction as a paid one.

It is tempting to treat all of that as the creator's job. The FTC's answers for advertisers say otherwise. In the Endorsement Guides FAQ, the agency expects a company to tell the people promoting it to disclose clearly, to check periodically what they are actually saying, and to act when it finds a problem. Its own summary is that your company is ultimately responsible for what others do on your behalf.

So put disclosure in the brief as a requirement, with the wording and placement you expect, and make approval of the draft conditional on it. You can also check a creator's habits before you contact them: scroll back through their sponsored posts and see whether the disclosure is up front or buried under a pile of hashtags.

Price the rights, not only the post

When you ask for rates, ask for them itemized: the organic post, paid usage per month, extra platforms, and raw footage if you want it. An all-in number hides the thing you are most likely to want to extend later. Extending paid usage is a much easier conversation when the original agreement already put a price on a month of it.

Then decide what happens at the end of the term. If your ad account is still running the video after the usage period expires, you are running it without permission. Put the end date into your ad platform the day you launch, and put it on the creator's record in whatever system your team uses to track partners. Whichever platform you choose to manage creators, ask the vendor whether the agreement terms can live next to the creator profile, so the person launching an ad can see the end date without digging through email.

What to send before the shoot

None of this needs a thick contract for a small program. It needs a one-page agreement both sides sign before filming, covering the seven fields above, the fee broken down by use, the delivery date and the approval window. A creator who has done sponsored work before will have seen every one of these questions. A creator who hasn't will appreciate knowing the rules before they spend a weekend filming.

I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. A short review of your template by one is cheaper than a dispute over a video that is already running in your best ad set.

When a creator says no to a field

Some creators won't grant paid usage at all, or only for a short window, or only if they approve every cut. That is their right, and a refusal doesn't have to end the conversation. It changes what the partnership is for. A creator who only allows the organic post is buying you reach inside their audience, and you should price the deal as that and nothing more. A creator who allows paid usage is also selling you an ad you didn't have to produce, which is a different and usually larger purchase.

What you shouldn't do is sign the organic deal and plan the ad campaign anyway, hoping to sort out the rights once the video performs. At that point the creator knows exactly how valuable the video is to you, and the negotiation starts from there. The cheapest moment to agree on paid usage is before anyone knows whether the content will work.

Gifting programs deserve the same discipline. Sending a product with no agreement feels low-stakes, but if the creator posts about it you still have the disclosure question from the FTC guidance above, and you still have no right to reuse what they make. A short note in the package that states the disclosure you expect, and a separate conversation before you reuse anything, costs very little.

Then build the shortlist

With the back of the card drafted, the selection work is worth doing properly. The free AI Influencer Marketing: The Data-Driven Creator Selection Playbook covers the evaluation dimensions that go beyond follower count, a head-to-head look at CreatorIQ, Grin, Modash, Heepsy and Upfluence, how to run a larger creator roster without a coordination team, and a measurement framework that connects creator activity to pipeline. Read the section on briefs and contracts with your seven fields next to it, and add anything it covers that your draft is missing.

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