How to Write Campaign Guidelines Creators Will Actually Follow

The most common brief we see is three pages long and gets skimmed. The most effective one is half a page and gets followed, because everything in it is a decision rather than a hope.

Guidelines are the only lever you have over content you are not directing. Get them right and creators make things that are recognisably about your game while still sounding like themselves. Get them wrong and you either get content that misses the point, or content so constrained that it does not perform.

Separate the three kinds of instruction

Almost every workable brief contains three different things, and mixing them together is what makes briefs unreadable. Split them.

• Requirements. Things that must be true or the submission is rejected. Keep this list short, because every item is something a reviewer has to check and a creator has to remember.
• Restrictions. Things that must not appear. Spoilers, unfinished areas, placeholder art, a build number in the corner of the screen.
• Suggestions. Ideas that might help. Explicitly labelled as optional, so nobody treats them as rules.

If a creator cannot tell which category a line belongs to, they will guess, and half of them will guess wrong.

Write requirements as checkable facts

A requirement should be something a reviewer can confirm in a few seconds without judgement. Compare these two:

Please make sure the video communicates the atmosphere of the game well.

Show at least 30 seconds of actual gameplay. Say the game's name out loud once. Put the store link in the description.

The first is a wish. The second is a set of facts a creator can satisfy and a reviewer can verify, and it leaves everything else to the creator, which is the part you are actually paying for.

Be specific about what must not be shown

This is where studios under communicate most often, and it is the category with real consequences. If there is an area of the game you do not want filmed, a cutscene that spoils the story, a boss that is not finished, or a piece of licensed music that cannot be in a video, say so explicitly and by name.

Creators cannot infer what is sensitive. A restriction that was obvious inside your studio is invisible to someone who has had the build for two days.

Say how the game should be named

For a game being marketed in China this matters more than it sounds. Decide the Chinese title, decide whether the English title should also appear, and put both in the guidelines exactly as you want them written. Otherwise you will get four different renderings of your game's name across twenty videos, and none of them will match what people search for.

Require disclosure, and make it easy

Sponsored content must be marked as sponsored. Rather than leaving creators to work out how, state the expectation plainly in the guidelines and let them use their platform's standard mechanism. Audiences on these platforms notice undisclosed promotion quickly, and it costs the creator more than it costs you, which is why being explicit is the fair thing to do.

Keep the list short enough to hold in your head

A useful rule of thumb: if the requirements do not fit in five bullet points, you are probably describing a video you should be commissioning directly rather than a campaign creators can opt into. Long briefs suppress participation, because a creator reading them is calculating how likely they are to do all this work and still be rejected.

What this looks like on NIWO

Campaign guidelines are set when you create a campaign, and creators see them on the campaign page before they decide to take part. Because they are visible up front, a clear brief tends to increase participation rather than reduce it: creators can tell whether they can deliver what you are asking.

Once a campaign is live the guidelines are locked, and changing them goes through an approval step. That is deliberate. Creators are making content against the terms they read, and moving those terms underneath work in progress is not something a platform should quietly allow.