How do you brief a clipping campaign?
State the money first, the material second, and the rules third: what the purse is, what it pays per view, how long views count, what counts as a valid delivery, where the source footage lives, and what you will reject. A brief that lets an editor calculate their earnings before starting is the one that gets the good editors.
Lead with the number
Editors are choosing between campaigns. The first question they have is what this pays, and a brief that buries it — or omits it — is asking them to invest hours on trust. Most won't, and the ones who will are the ones with the least to do.
Put the purse, the rate, the counting window and the verification rule in the first few lines. Everything else in the brief is downstream of whether those four numbers make the work worth doing.
Give them something to cut
The single biggest determinant of clip volume is how easy the source material is to work with. A link to a two-hour stream is a wall. Time-stamped highlights, a folder of pre-cut segments, a stems or instrumental version, an approved b-roll pack — each one lowers the cost of an attempt and raises the number of attempts you get.
Say what the moments are. You know your material better than any editor will after twenty minutes of scrubbing, and pointing at the six sections most likely to work is the cheapest performance improvement available to you.
Say what you'll reject, precisely
Vague standards are the main cause of disputes. "High quality only" tells an editor nothing and gives you unlimited discretion, which good editors read as risk. Name the specific things: minimum resolution, whether the sound must be audible for a set duration, whether captions are required, what content is off-limits, whether the posting account must be public.
Then hold to exactly that list. A campaign that rejects deliveries on criteria that weren't in the brief gets a reputation quickly, and it's not one you recover from cheaply.
Leave the creative alone
Specify the constraints and the rejection criteria, not the edit. Editors who are told exactly what to make produce competent, identical clips; editors given the material and the rules produce a spread, and the spread is where the outlier lives.
The line that converts, and that is worth saying out loud in the brief: we're not writing your video.
Post a purse on your sound and editors compete to cut it. Every rate, window and verification rule is on the contract before anyone commits.
Common follow-ups
- How long should the counting window be?
- Long enough for a clip to have its run and short enough that the campaign settles. Bounty Sounds bounties typically count views for 14 days from delivery. Whatever you choose, publish it before anyone claims — a window disclosed afterwards is the most common reason a payout turns into an argument.
- Should I require approval before the clip goes up?
- Only if you genuinely need it. Pre-approval adds a round trip that costs you attempts, and for most sound and stream campaigns the rejection criteria do the same job at a fraction of the friction. Reserve it for material with real legal or brand sensitivity.
- What if nobody claims my bounty?
- Usually the rate is wrong for the effort, or the source material is too hard to cut. Both are fixable and both are visible: a bounty sitting unclaimed next to comparable ones that filled is telling you which of the two it is.