Creator Sourcing and Contracting for Regulated Categories

A sourcing cycle ends with a signed roster of nine to twelve creators, drawn from around two hundred approached. The ratio is the deliverable. Most of this work is rejection, and the reasons we reject are what makes the roster survive a reading by your compliance team six months later, after somebody has screenshotted an ad. What gets someone cut: No on-camera test, no contract. We ask for a ninety-second unscripted read on a real product point, never a portfolio. A portfolio shows what an editor did. Sponsored density above roughly one post in four tells us their audience has already discounted them and your ad will inherit that discount. Anyone unwilling to invoice as a business, verify age against photo identification, or sign a usage licence without a fortnight of negotiation leaves at first pass regardless of how good the read was. Three categories, three different screens: For gambling operators, talent has to be over twenty-five and read as over twenty-five on camera, and we check the creator's own audience age split before an approach rather than after a shoot. Followings built on football fandom, teen-facing gaming culture or recovery content are declined on sight, and we do not enter a discussion about it. For freight and logistics, the buying audience is a few hundred people who can sign a tender, so the creator is an operator: a warehouse manager, a customs broker, a fleet lead. The screen is whether they can say dwell time or customs entry without reading it off a card. Follower count is close to meaningless here and we do not report it. For publishers, we screen for people who can read a paragraph aloud and sound like they meant it, and who have not already promoted three competing subscriptions this quarter. The contract, before anyone films: Usage window and territory named. The whitelisting clause pre-signed with the authorisation duration written into it, so nobody is negotiating permissions after a campaign has been built around the footage. Exclusivity limited to named competitors for a fixed term, because open-ended category exclusivity is unenforceable and creators price it as though it were. Removal on five business days' notice. No perpetual grants: a licence you cannot end is a liability that outlives everyone who agreed to it. How rates are set: By the work and the window. Shoot day, number of concepts, usage term, whitelisting term. Not by follower count, and we will not build a CPM equivalent on somebody's audience to justify a fee. A creator whose rate rests on their reach is selling something this practice does not buy, and the conversation ends politely there. We refuse: Gifting and barter. Affiliate and commission structures, which change what a creator says on camera in ways you will not notice until your legal team does. Marketplaces that sit between you and the person whose face is in your advertising. Creators who decline age verification in a regulated category, without exception. Not for you if: You want creators posting to their own accounts. That is influencer work, a different contract and a different rate, and we do not do it. You want a named ambassador with a public association to the brand, which needs a talent agent and a longer runway than this. You need forty creators next week: the screen does not compress, and a roster built that fast is a roster somebody has to unwind later. What lands at the end: Signed contracts, verified identities, a rate card by creator, the rejection log with reasons, and a shortlist of near-misses worth revisiting if the first creative points somewhere nobody expected.