Nobody publishes their rejection rate. It is the least flattering number in a customer content programme and the one that decides whether anything else in it is usable.
So here is what gets rejected, in roughly the order it comes up.
The disclosure is missing or buried
The most common rejection, and the easiest to fix. The advertising label has to appear at first interaction: the start of the caption before the see-more cut or any hashtags, the first frame, the title.
A post with the label at the bottom can be a very good post. It is still non-compliant, and it goes back.
The product is not really in it
A beautiful video of somebody's kitchen with the product visible for half a second, out of focus, at the edge of frame. The brief asked for the product being used, and this is a video about a kitchen.
This one is frequent with genuinely good creators, because they are making content they would want on their own feed. It still fails the brief.
The purchase does not check out
Proof of purchase is matched to the customer and to the content they post. When they do not match, the content is not licensed and not paid for as delivered work.
Usually this is mundane: a receipt for the wrong variant, a purchase made outside the campaign window, someone who bought two and posted both as separate entries. Occasionally it is not mundane. Either way, an unverified trial is not a trial, and the whole verification step is worthless if exceptions are made.
The claim goes past the label
A customer says a cleaning product removed something the pack does not claim it removes, or that a garden treatment worked in an hour when the label says a day.
They are describing what they saw, honestly. It is still a representation the brand is answerable for under section 12A of the Fair Trading Act, which prohibits claims made without reasonable grounds at the time. So it is rejected rather than edited, because editing it would put words in somebody's mouth.
It crosses a category line
The therapeutic one comes up most. Somebody says a supplement fixed their sleep or a cream cleared a skin condition. Under the therapeutic and health advertising code in force since 1 July 2026, that is a therapeutic testimonial in an advertisement, and it cannot run no matter how true it was for them.
Alcohol rejections are usually about who is in the frame or who the content is being served to, both of which should have been settled at recruitment rather than at moderation. Food rejections are almost always about audience composition and children under 16.
It reads as a script
Forty participants, one brief, and eight of the posts open with the same sentence. That happens when a brief has been written too tightly, and it is our fault rather than the customer's, but the content still does not run.
The reason people believe customer content is that it sounds like a person. Content that sounds like a caption template converts like a caption template.
Something in the frame cannot be there
A competitor's product on the bench. A child in an alcohol post. An unsafe use of a product that has safety instructions on the pack. Music the brand has no licence to use. A face that has not consented to appear.
None of these are judgement calls. They are the reason moderation exists as a step rather than as a courtesy.
What does not get rejected
This matters more than the list above.
A lukewarm opinion is not a rejection. Somebody who says the product is fine, or good but not as good as the one they usually buy, has produced a genuinely useful piece of information. We do not script opinions and we do not reject people for having the wrong one.
Rough production is not a rejection. Bad lighting in a real laundry is the point. We accept rough production when the content meets the brief and the code.
An unusual take is not a rejection. The most useful content in most campaigns is the one nobody predicted, usually because the customer had a problem the brand did not know the product solved.
Why the rejection step is the product
Everything downstream depends on it. A licensed library that contains one non-compliant post is a library the legal team will not sign off. A trial count that includes unverified purchases is a number nobody can defend at a trading meeting.
And the content that survives moderation is the pool that paid amplification then selects from, so the standard at this gate sets the ceiling for everything that follows.
The full model is on the customer-generated content page.