Is This Illegal? | Canva Seemingly Screwed us on a Partnership on TikTok
Hello all. My name is Zach, I run a creator agency, and I'm wondering if one of my clients got screwed over and if there's anything I can do about it.
Up until this point I'd only ever taken on clients who create on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, but recently took one on who primarily creates on TikTok, because of that, my TikTok knowledge is nowhere near what I would like it to be and I'm worried I let a client get taken advantage of.
TikTok had invited her to the monetization channel called TikTok one and then approved her which is great. Shortly after that Canva sent her a collaboration request (Here Is A Screenshot Of The Invitation And Rules) for their campaign, CanvaLove. She created a video, following all the rules and guidelines, and then uploaded it by the appropriate date including the required tags and mentions. Since then it just stayed in her pending tab and never updated. After a few weeks, I reached out to another creator from that campaign and he let me know that she did everything right when submitting and that Canva is just slow sometimes on the backend, but they always follow through, so we kept waiting.
That was back in December. We weren't going to let this get to 6 months, so we reached out to Canva and after a million generic messages letting us know they were "getting this to the right team" and that "the concern ^((side note, they always called it the concern)) is more complicated than expected, but please know we are working on it" they finally got back to me today and said even though she did everything right and submitted in the window she was supposed to, that campaign ended so there's nothing else they can do, so we should just keep an eye out for more opportunities to collaborate in the future.
To me that can't be right, and I want to respond countering them and pushing back, but don't know how. Like is that even legal? Why would a brand ever pay anybody if they could just get a million people to post for them for free.
She edited the video herself, but I've edited for feature films and cable along with countless videos on channels with massive followings, so I can confirm that quality was not an issue and her video was of higher quality than most of the videos officially pushed in this campaign.
Canva is her dream brand, as she genuinely uses it every single day, so this was a big blow to her morale, and I want to do everything in my power to try and get her something out of this.
Any advice, resources, or opinions are greatly appreciated!
Thanks for your time.