Short-Form Vertical Ads Written Back From One Claim

I judge these on hold rate at six seconds, not on three-second views. A three-second view on an autoplaying vertical feed costs almost nothing and means almost nothing: the thumb was still moving. Six seconds means somebody decided to stay, and on the accounts I work on that decision correlates with what happens at checkout in a way the earlier number never has. Everything about how the shoot is structured follows from optimising for the second decision rather than the first. So the script gets written backwards from one claim. Not a message hierarchy, not three pillars — the single statement that survived legal review with its source attached, which for a supplement is usually narrower than the founder wants and for a law firm is narrower still. That claim is what the viewer has to be holding at second six. The opening exists to earn the right to say it, the middle proves it, the end tells them what to do. When a brief arrives with four things to communicate, my first deliverable is the argument for which one it is. How the shoot is structured: One day, shot as a matrix rather than as separate videos: several distinct openings against a small number of bodies and endings, recorded so they recombine in the edit. That is a production decision, not a volume promise — the number of combinations we actually build is set by what your spend can distinguish inside a fortnight, and I would rather ship four edits that get read than twelve that split the data into noise. Everything is 1080x1920 with the platform interface mapped on the monitor during the shoot, so nobody frames a face into the region TikTok covers with its own icons. Captions are burned in, always, because these placements are watched with the sound off more often than not and platform auto-captions place themselves wherever they like. Music comes from the TikTok Commercial Music Library or a cleared library track. Chart music does not go into a paid ad on my watch, whatever the organic account has been doing, and if your team has been boosting posts with licensed tracks that is worth raising internally today. Creators, rights and disclosure: Where a creator appears, the contract fixes usage before the shoot: paid media term, territory, whitelisting rights, and whether the ad may run from their handle as a Spark Ad or a Meta partnership ad. Twelve months and named territories are the terms I write; open-ended usage is not something I ask creators to sign. Disclosure goes on before the first frame, not in the caption, because Swedish marknadsföringslagen requires that an ad be identifiable as one and Reklamombudsmannen has been unambiguous about placement. An ad that hides being an ad is a liability wearing the costume of a performance win. Refusals: I do not cast a creator who has posted for a direct competitor in the previous six months. I do not produce testimonial video where the customer speaks a line they did not say. I do not shoot before-and-after body imagery for supplements or cosmetics, regardless of what the category is currently getting away with. I do not put a countdown or a fabricated stock number on screen. Not included: Media buying, account structure, bidding. Organic content calendars: this is paid creative and the two need different production economics. Landing page work, though I will tell you when the page is the reason the ads are not converting, and it often is. Who should not book this: Brands with no working ad in any format yet — vertical video is a poor place to discover your proposition. Teams that need the founder on camera but cannot get the founder for a day. And anyone who wants the creator relationship kept vague on rights.