A useful creative brief enables everyone to work towards a common goal: better work and fewer rounds of revisions. Make the brief useful. Here’s how.
Note From Tongal: “How to Write a Useful Creative Brief" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
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Having worked both client-side and agency-side, I know the good, the bad and the ugly authentic when it comes to creative briefs. When done right, a useful creative brief is not only a thought starter but also a tool for evaluating the success of the end product.
This article is meant especially for all you marketers out there. But keep going, even if you’re a creative, because the usefulness of a creative brief comes from you working together towards a common goal: better work, fewer rounds of revisions and more bang for the buck.
ABC of Success: Agency, Brief, Client
The creative brief is not the beginning nor the end. It’s not the beginning of the creative process for the agency or production company, and it’s not the end of responsibility for the client. If you think so, you end up with a counterproductive mindset – on both sides:
Wrong client mindset: “They’re professionals, they should know what we want. Let’s just show them that nice video from Brand X. That should do it.”
Wrong agency mindset: “We’re professionals, we know what they need. And they’d probably be open to making that spoken word ad with Lionel Messi we’ve been talking about.”
The creative brief is a crystallized vision of what the client wants to achieve. It’s a part of a process that forces the marketing department to align internally. If you don’t love and respect your brief, you can’t expect others to love and respect it either.
Right client mindset: “We can’t expect someone else to solve all our problems. Let’s first make sure this is what we want and then let’s give them enough creative freedom to execute it.”
Right agency mindset: “Okay, we understand what they want to achieve and why. How can we add that extra bit of magic so that we blow this out of the water?”
The Anatomy of a Creative Brief
If you want to see great examples of creative briefs, look no further than the Open Projects on Tongal. Open any project and you’ll see the building blocks of a creative brief:
- Background
- Objectives
- Key marketing messages
- Target audience
- Tone
- Exposure
- Executional mandatories
In effect, what, why, how and to whom. If you’re having trouble filling in one of the sections, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
The final point on the list, “Executional mandatories”, is a great place to store lessons learned from previous projects. Think of it as a checklist that you can bring with you to the set.
Let’s take a real-life example, from a previous project I was working on – on the client-side. We were filming an ad for a mobile app – and we were going to push it mainly to mobile devices. On set, the setup looked great. We were zoomed in close to the screen and could see what was happening in the app.
The only problem was that on set we were looking at the monitor that was 3 times the size of the screen it would be shown on. When we reviewed the final product on mobile, we realized you couldn’t really see what was happening on screen.
Live and learn. And update your Executional mandatories to:
- Content should be optimized for mobile use. The final review will be done on mobile – in portrait mode.
But What Makes a Brief Useful?
There’s more than one way to write a useful brief but there are some things they all share: they’re written with a purpose, followed with an easy intention and utilized beyond the initial steps of a marketing project.
A poorly written brief is a recipe for disappointment. Take the time to specify what you want – then make sure the whole marketing team wants the same thing. Even better, make sure your company stands behind what you want to achieve.
A useful brief gives creatives enough leeway to come up with new solutions. You have hired someone else to do the work for you because you think they can do it better than you could. Let them.
A useful creative brief is still useful at the end of the project. When doing the final revisions, have your creative brief at hand. Don’t like that maritime clock and you want it masked out? First, take a look in the mirror. Then at the creative brief. Does it say “Executional mandatory: no maritime clocks”?
Didn’t think so.
A project can succeed despite or because of the creative brief. The next time you’re writing a brief, make it count. You owe it to yourself, your team and your creative partner to give everyone a chance to succeed – as well as lay out the criteria with which to gauge which one it was: despite or because.
