Three pitches arrive. One is beautifully designed, one is a wall of text, one is two paragraphs and a link.
The instinct is to compare showreels and prices, because those are the two things that are easy to compare. Both are weak predictors of whether the project will go well.
Here's what actually predicts it.
Read the approach first, and read it before the reel
The most informative section of any pitch is the part where the creator explains what they'd do and why. Read it before you watch anything, because a good reel makes you generous about a thin approach.
You're looking for evidence of three things.
They read the brief. Specifically: do they reference your audience, your constraint, your one message? A pitch that could have been sent to any brand in your category was sent to any brand in your category.
They made choices. A real approach commits — this format, this structure, this treatment, and here's the reasoning. A pitch that offers three directions and asks you to pick is often deferring the thinking back to you.
They understood the problem, not just the deliverable. The strongest pitches restate your problem in their own words, sometimes better than your brief did. That's the single best signal in this whole exercise.
What a showreel tells you, and what it doesn't
Tells you: technical ceiling, taste, whether they can light and cut, what kind of work they gravitate towards.
Doesn't tell you: what they contributed. Reels are collaborative work presented individually — a stunning piece might be a great DP, a great colourist, a great edit, and the person pitching may have been one of four. It also doesn't tell you what the brief was, what the budget was, or whether the client was happy.
Two questions fix most of this: "what was your role on this one?" and "what was the brief?" Both are entirely reasonable and the answers are revealing. Someone who says "I shot and cut it, the client wanted X and we ran into Y" is telling you far more than the footage did.
Also watch for a reel that's uniformly higher-budget than your project. Someone whose work is all big-crew commercial may be excellent and may not be set up for a one-day, two-person shoot. That's a fit question, not a quality question.
Price is a question, not a ranking
The cheapest quote is the most expensive one surprisingly often — usually because it's scoped smaller and the gap surfaces as change requests later.
Before comparing numbers, normalise them. Three quotes are only comparable if they include the same shoot days, the same crew size, the same number of revision rounds, the same usage rights, and the same deliverable count and formats.
They almost never do. The most useful thing you can do with three quotes is put them in a table with those rows and see what's actually different — half the time the "expensive" one includes two things the cheap one silently excluded. What a fair rate looks like goes into the reasoning.
A quote that's dramatically below the others is a warning, not a bargain. Either they've misunderstood the scope, or they're buying the job and will need to make it back somewhere.
The four flags
No questions. A creator who read a real brief has questions. Someone who accepts a brief entirely as-is either didn't read it carefully or isn't going to push back later when pushing back would help.
A generic approach. Covered above, and it's the most common flag.
Revisions unspecified. "Revisions until you're happy" sounds generous and is a dispute waiting to happen. A professional specifies the number of rounds, because unbounded scope is how projects go bad for both sides.
Vagueness about who's doing the work. If the pitch is from one person and the reel is a team's, establish who's actually turning up. This is legitimate — plenty of good work is subcontracted — but you should know.
Two things people over-weight
Presentation polish. A beautifully designed deck signals that they can design a deck. Some outstanding shooters write terrible emails. Judge the thinking, not the layout — although if the deliverable is design-led, the deck is a work sample.
Speed of reply. Fast is nice. The best people are often busy, and someone available immediately is sometimes available for a reason.
What to actually compare
If you want a structure, score each pitch on five things and ignore everything else:
| What you're checking | |
|---|---|
| Understanding | Did they restate the problem correctly? |
| Approach | Is there a committed, reasoned plan? |
| Evidence | Have they done something comparable — in constraint, not just in polish? |
| Scope clarity | Is what's included unambiguous? |
| Working relationship | Would you want them on set for ten hours? |
That last row is not a soft consideration. Shoot days are long and the difference between a good and a bad one is mostly the people.
Talk to two, not five
A shortlist of two, each given thirty minutes on a call, beats reading five decks.
The call is where you find out whether they ask good questions, whether they push back, and whether their approach survives contact with a follow-up. It's also where you find the thing no pitch document contains: what they'd need from you to do this well — which is the beginning of the hand-off list.
Where Acumin fits
Pitches arriving through the Creator Network are structured against the brief you posted, so the approach section is present by default rather than optional — which makes the comparison in the table above possible without chasing anyone.
A creator's Acumin Score sits alongside the pitch, and it's booking-gated: ratings can only come from brands who booked and received delivered work, one per booking. That's a different kind of evidence from a showreel — it's about how the job went, not how the footage looks.
You can also see how far a brand read a pitch, which is a creator-side feature, and worth knowing exists on the other side of the table.
None of this ranks pitches for you. Understanding and fit are judgement, and the call is still the deciding input.
How to use this today
Take the last three pitches you received. Read only the approach sections, with the reels and prices covered.
Rank them. Then uncover the prices and see whether your ranking changed — and if it did, ask yourself which ranking you'd defend in six weeks when the work is late.
Related: How to hire a videographer, brief-first is the step before this. What a fair rate looks like is how to read the number once you've read the thinking.