5 Things That Make a Good Creative Brief
Get your act together before you start your marketing project
You know the old saying: garbage in, garbage out.
It’s particularly true at the start of a marketing project. If you don’t get “the brief” right, you not only waste a ton of time and money, you end up with the aforementioned “garbage.”
There are approximately 49.1 million articles out there about creative briefs (seriously, I just did a Google search.) But despite all those links, it’s amazing how often bad briefs rear their ugly heads.
So here’s article forty-nine-million-one-hundred-thousand-and-one on the topic. 😎
Quick definition: what do we mean by “creative brief?” The brief is the document that contains the project’s purpose, goals, requirements, messaging, strategy and deliverables.
Here are five things that make a good one:
1. It’s “brief”
If you can’t fit it on one page, you haven’t done the hard thinking or made the necessary choices to focus-in the work.
You can stick the 30-page deck with the business background and “creative inspiration” or “thought starters” in the appendix. But force yourself to get the brief itself down to one page.
You’re not going to be able to fit everything; that’s the point.
2. Scope is clear
What are you asking the team to make? Is it really “wide open” or is it “what’s the best live activation I can do on March 3 in Minneapolis for $100K?”
If you know the channels and budget and that you need three 6-second videos that are going to run on Facebook, JUST TELL US.
Too many briefs are “we’re looking for great ideas and we’ll find the money” when really, the media buy is in place and clients know exactly what they want to produce and how much $ they have. Tell us that stuff up front.
We can add the if-you-have-more-money-or-flexibility ideas at the end of the presentation to show you what’s possible beyond the core deliverables.
3. Defines the outcome
What do you want people to DO as a result of interacting with the ad/experience/activation? How will we measure it? This is the only KPI that matters.
(Side note: Many clients throw in a bunch of “mandatories” and I guess there’s no way to avoid that. But I would suggest that you get better work if you define the outcomes and are less prescriptive about how to get there.)
4. Is there an actual agreed-upon strategy?
Somebody needs to translate client needs into a true strategy. Often a client brief says “this is what we want” and it’s number of clicks or leads or a conversion target or a brand-lift number or something else.
That stuff is critically important, but a good brief doesn’t stop there.
What is the STRATEGY to get that result? It’s more than just the target demo, it’s how we think we’re going to get that target to do the thing we want. It has to take the leap and say, “we think that the best way to achieve X is to do Y.” Then the creative teams can focus on different creative ways to do Y.
If you don’t have a strategy and are using the creative development process to find it, you should be honest and clear about that. (Alas, this happens ALL the time, using creative dev cycles to find/debate brand and comms strategy. It’s not ideal, but it’s probably not going away. When it comes time to review the ideas, it requires more rigor to parse out what’s strategy and what’s execution.)
5. Schedule
Here’s what a creative team needs to know: When’s my first round review with my creative director? When do we share with the larger internal team? When’s the first client review? How much time do we have for revisions after the R1 client presentation? What’s the go/no-go date for a client decision? What’s the production schedule? (You can’t solve the problem unless you know how much time to solve the problem.)
In other words, a good brief from a client is: “Here’s my problem and here’s how much money I have. What’s the best, most effective way to spend that money and solve my problem? I need it by next Wednesday.”
But wait, there’s more!
So, those are the five. But here’s the thing…you have to debate and hone each of those five BEFORE you hand the brief to your creative team.
Are we really clear about what we want people to do and how we’re going to measure it? (If not, get clear before you ask a team for creative solutions.)
Do we know the deliverables that we need, or are we really open to explore various media channels and executions?
Have we made decisions about the strategy and honed it before passing it off for creative development? (The tagline or a brand mnemonic isn’t a strategy; they’re ingredients, not the recipe.)
Most brands would be well served by spending a little more time working with their agency partners to debate and hone the brief before asking teams to ideate (ugh, I really hate “ideate”) on creative ways to achieve those goals.
Happy briefing!
MORE: How to Build a Better Brief (with examples of good briefs and bad briefs.)
John Kovacevich is a creative director and the founder of Agency SOS, an agency that helps people who build brands. Our creative accelerator program helps brand managers put a quality brief in the hands of their creative partners.
