How to write an influencer brief

A good influencer brief fits on one page. It tells the creator what the brand wants to achieve, who it's for, the one thing the audience should take away and the few rules that can't bend. Everything else, including the script, the hook and the caption, is the creator's job. Brands that brief this way tend to get content that's more on-brand, not less.

I've seen it so many times. A brand arrives with a beautifully produced deck: aesthetic references, three pages of dos and don'ts, mandatory talking points, required hashtags, an approved caption structure. Then the content goes live and it feels flat. The comments aren't there. The creator's other posts get ten times the engagement.

Kyra's own numbers show the gap. In our beauty benchmarks, among UK and US creators who posted both kinds of content between July and September 2026, the median creator's TikTok posts flagged as advertising had 0.66 times the engagement rate of their other posts. On Instagram it was 0.69. Some of that gap is just what happens when people see an ad. But a lot of it is the brief.

When a brand works with a creator, it's borrowing their audience. The creator spent years building a particular kind of trust with a particular community. The moment your brief overrides their voice, you've broken the thing you paid for.

The brief's job isn't to control the output. It's to give the creator enough context to tell your story in their own language. That takes six things:

1. The objective. One sentence. Launch awareness, trial, sales through a code, or something else. If you have two objectives, you have two briefs.
2. The audience. Who you want to reach and what they already think of you. Not "women 18-34". Something like "people who've heard of the brand but think it's for their mum".
3. The one takeaway. The single thing a viewer should remember. Not three messages. One.
4. The non-negotiables. Disclosure (#ad in the UK, and each platform's paid-partnership label), product claims you can and can't make, anything legal or safety-related. Keep this list short, because everything on it is a constraint on the creator.
5. The practical bits. Deliverables, posting window, usage rights, whether you'll run it as an ad, and who approves what by when.
6. How you'll judge it. Decide your measure before anyone posts. A brand building derm credibility shouldn't be judged the same way as one chasing reach. Industry benchmarks tell you where the floor is. Your own benchmarks should tell you how high you're aiming.

What's missing is on purpose. No script, no shot list, no caption template, no list of hashtags beyond disclosure, no mood board the creator has to copy.

Laura Romero, a campaign manager at Kyra, put it simply after we ranked the top creator ads of 2026 in our Friends of Kyra newsletter: "A creator ad that could be about any brand isn't really about yours."

Out of 1,093 paid creator ads we scored, only 74 scored above 50. One of the things we scored was how much the brand actually belongs in the video. The best ones share a pattern. Taylor Lautner's CeraVe ad opens with a joke about himself, and the routine comes after. Nobody scrolls past. The brief gave him the idea and left the rest to him.

A brief usually covers one post. The better question is what happens if it works. Harry's came back to Grant Beene for a second round, and the momentum carried over. If you plan for a second post before the first goes live, you can rebook fast and the audience recognises the creator with your brand.

The same goes for who you brief. The right creator in January might not be the right one in March. Treat the roster as something you keep refining from the results, not a list you pick once a year.

The irony is that the brands who brief most loosely, with clear objectives and real creative trust, tend to get the most brand-aligned content back. Creators who feel respected make better work. They also know their audience better than any deck does.

If your briefs are longer than one page, start there.

Copy this and fill it in. If a section runs past three lines, cut it.

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  Brand and product:
• 
  Objective (one sentence):
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  Who it's for, and what they think of us now:
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  The one thing viewers should remember:
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  Must include: disclosure (#ad and the platform's paid-partnership label), [any required claim or product shot]
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  Must not: [claims we can't make, competitors, anything unsafe]
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  Deliverables and posting window:
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  Usage rights and whether we'll run it as an ad:
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  How we'll measure it:
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  Approvals: who, and by when:
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  Everything else is yours.