Creative agencies’ general dissatisfaction with the quality of the briefs they receive from clients is by now well established. It is not entirely the marketers’ fault, however. Getting better at something usually requires regular and honest feedback, and agencies are often reluctant to question their clients’ competences. Fortunately, there’s now a lot of advice out there for sharpening your brief-writing skills. Below are some of the best and most practical tips that we’ve come across. This is advice intended for the writing of marketing briefs, not creative ones, though there is a lot of overlap. Creative briefs are written by agency strategists for the benefit of their colleagues in the creative department. Marketing briefs are written by brand-side clients to commission work from agencies, and they lay out business challenges, objectives and audiences, propositions, KPIs, deliverables, timelines and that sort of thing. A well-written brief doesn’t guarantee that a client will receive great work from their agency, but it does reduce the odds that they’ll get a dud.
Before you start, be sure of your brand strategy. Marketers who skip this step have a tendency to jump straight to tactics, asking for campaigns in whatever channel is popular at the time. The ins and outs of marketing strategy are beyond the scope of this article, but such strategies usually describe a brand’s biggest challenge, its positioning and its target audience. If you haven’t made difficult decisions along the way about what not to do, it probably isn’t a very good strategy.
Keep it brief. Not only for the benefit of your agency partners, but also your own. Being concise will force you to focus on what is necessary and exclude everything else. If you have additional useful information to impart, consider putting it in a footnote or an appendix.
Begin with the wider picture of what is happening in your sector, and then describe the specific challenge that inspired the brief and how you would like to resolve it. And then leave it at that. Don’t be tempted to go beyond the business problem and start writing a creative or executional brief. Leave that to your agency partners.
Write clear objectives — but not too many of them. To give a rough idea of how many, a 2020 report by The Effie Awards found that Gold-winning case studies had 3.6 objectives on average, while non-winners had 4.3. Also, ensure that all the objectives relate to the same goal or strategy. Campaigns that try to do too much tend to do nothing at all.
Paint a vivid picture of your target audience by describing their motivations and routines. Don’t fall back on demographic descriptions. Labels like millennial and Gen Z have remarkably little descriptive or predictive power in the real world.
Be realistic about your budget. If you’re not clear about the pot, you risk receiving ideas that you cannot execute. Besides, clear constraints can be remarkably good at prompting creative thinking.
Ensure the brief has been signed off by everyone who has a say over its outcome. We also quite like the advice of Joe Talcott, a former CMO of McDonald’s Australia, who says that the person who should write the brief is the one ‘who has the most to lose if it goes wrong’.
Be upfront about the non-negotiable aspects of the brief, if there are any. Also, if something has been tried and failed in the past, share that information. But don’t let the brief become too negative. It should serve as a source of inspiration, as well as a source of information.
Deliver the brief in person and make time for follow-up sessions. If necessary, rewrite the brief after those discussions. Be collaborative.
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