A network brief goes out to creators, who pitch against it. The quality of what comes back is decided almost entirely by what you put in, and mostly by two fields.
Start from a Creative Brief if you have one
A network brief can be created from an existing Creative Brief, which is the right way round.
The Creative Brief is where you did the thinking: the one objective, who it's for, what they currently believe, the mandatories. The network brief is that thinking, published to people who might make it.
Starting fresh in the network form tends to produce a job posting rather than a brief: deliverables and a budget, with the reasoning left out. You'll get quotes back instead of approaches, and quotes are the least useful thing to compare.
The structured fields
These are what creators triage on before they read a word of your description. Thirty seconds on these seven decides whether good people even open it.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Speciality | Controls who sees it: the board filters to a creator's specialities |
| Industry | Narrows further |
| Budget range | Filters out people who'd waste both your time |
| Deadline | Filters out people who physically can't |
| Location, and remote | Travel cost, and eligibility |
| Usage | What you're buying beyond the production |
| Deliverables | The real scope |
Two of these are worth dwelling on.
Speciality decides your audience
The board shows creators the briefs matching their tagged specialities. Get this wrong and the right people never see it.
If you're unsure between two, the one your shoot is, not the one your brand is. A manufacturer commissioning a founder interview needs an interview specialist, not someone tagged industrial.
Usage is the field that gets skipped
Creators price production and usage separately. The ones who don't are usually the ones you don't want. A brief that specifies deliverables and stays silent on usage produces quotes that aren't comparable, because each creator has assumed something different.
State media, territory, duration and exclusivity. Pricing usage rights is written for the creator side and is worth reading to understand what you're actually asking for.
The pitch cap
You set a cap on how many pitches the brief accepts.
It's tempting to set it high. Don't. The cap is doing something useful in both directions.
For you: a bounded number of pitches is a number you'll actually read properly. Forty pitches get skimmed, and skimming selects for polish rather than thinking.
For creators: a cap signals you intend to read them. Experienced creators prefer a capped brief and pitch earlier on it, because their odds are real. An uncapped free-for-all attracts volume pitchers and repels the people who'd spend three hours on a treatment.
A modest cap gets you better pitches from better people. That's the whole trade.
Budget: name a range
Naming a range feels like losing negotiating room. It mostly saves everyone an afternoon.
A creator whose floor is above your ceiling shouldn't be pitching, and the discovery is better made before three hours of work than after. A range also anchors sensibly: a brief with no budget attracts either wild quotes or people fishing.
If the range is genuinely uncertain, say what it depends on.
Visibility, and inviting directly
Briefs can go out open to the matching board, or to a specific creator you invite.
A direct invitation is a much stronger signal than an open brief, and creators read it that way: someone looked at their profile and decided. If you already have someone in mind, invite them; you'll get a better pitch and a faster answer.
Reading what comes back
Read for approach, not price. Three good pitches usually contain three genuinely different approaches to the same brief, and that's the most valuable thing in the whole process (routinely wasted by sorting on cost).
Four things worth checking, expanded in how to hire a videographer:
- Did they restate your problem accurately, in their own words?
- Is the approach specific enough to be wrong?
- Are the references annotated with what they're pointing at?
- Is there a section about what they need from you?
And on price: compare like for like or don't compare. Same deliverables, same rounds, same usage. A low production fee with broad usage attached can be far worse value than a higher fee with clean, time-boxed rights.
Ratings you can trust
Every creator carries an Acumin Score built only from brands who booked them, they delivered, and were paid. It can't be farmed or bought, and it's a Bayesian mean rather than an average, so one friendly client can't produce a perfect number.
A new creator's score is supposed to be modest. That's the system being honest about thin evidence, not a judgement on their ability. Early on, their work and their pitch should carry more weight than the number.
After you book
A Delivery Room opens automatically for the booking: versioned cuts, timecoded comments, and the invoice in one place. That's where the rest of the relationship happens.
How to use this tomorrow
Take a brief you're about to post and check one thing: does the usage field say media, territory, duration and exclusivity?
If it doesn't, every quote you get back will be pricing a different job, and you won't be able to tell which.
Related: How to write a creative brief is the document this should come from. Reviewing work in a Delivery Room is what happens after you book.