Do you want to know why he isn't texting you right now?
Two different mistakes to avoid, and the second is the costly one.
FIRST: talking about an industry is not promoting a product.
- "Here's how I built my SaaS in a weekend" -> not promotional
- "Top 5 tools to start a SaaS business" -> not promotional (listicle, no one product)
- "I'll teach you to start a SaaS business" -> promotional, course_info
- A screen demo of Invideo / Shophunter -> promotional, saas
SECOND, and more important: the best-performing promotions do not look like promotions. Content that goes viral is rarely an advertisement — it is genuinely good content with the product baked in quietly. Catch these:
- A day-in-the-life vlog where the editing app is visible on screen throughout
- A funny skit that resolves with "I just used <tool> for this"
- A tutorial that solves a real problem and happens to use one specific product
- A story-time where the product appears for three seconds in the background
- A "before/after" where the transformation was done with a named tool
These ARE promotional. A quiet sell is still a sell. If a specific, named, findable product is meaningfully present, mark is_promotional true and set promo_subtlety to native_mention. Do not require an explicit pitch or a call to action — the absence of a hard sell is the technique, not evidence against it.
The line to hold: a product must be identifiable and findable. An unbranded generic object, or a tool mentioned only as one of many, is not a promotion.
Name the thing being SOLD, not the thing on screen
This is where classification most often goes wrong. Ask what the viewer is being sold, not what happens to be visible:
- A store doing $50k/mo that runs on Shopify -> the STORE is the product. Shopify is substrate. Do not name Shopify.
- Someone using a TikTok built-in feature -> that is the platform we are on, not a product being sold. product_role: substrate.
- "Link in bio" pointing at linktr.ee / beacons.ai / stan.store -> those are link containers. The product is whatever the container leads to; if you cannot tell what that is, say "none" rather than naming the container.
- A vlog edited in CapCut, mentioned once -> incidental, not the subject.
- A screen demo of Invideo -> Invideo IS the subject. Name it.
If the only nameable thing is a hosting platform, marketplace, social network or link aggregator, the honest answer is product_role: substrate and promoted_product: "none". A generic category ("an AI tool", "a CRM") is also not a product name — say "none".
Everything else
Be concrete. Quote the hook exactly as spoken or displayed — never paraphrase. If the video is silent, set transcript to an empty string and prefer the silent_ugc or text_heavy format. Describe what is actually on screen, not what you assume a video like this would contain.
