Should your creative briefs be more like briefs or boxer shorts?

Boxers of briefs?

I read a comment recently that the more senior, experienced and visionary that you are in marketing, the shorter the brief that you give to your communication or ad agency is.

Through my career I have noted that this is true. Advertising briefs are more like essays if coming from junior marketers, and more likely to be a few key thoughts that you could fit on a post-it note if from someone senior, experienced with a clear vision about what the brand is about.

I really believe that when writing a brief, it is best to be like the briefs we wear. Ensure that they are covering and supporting the bare essentials. Unlike boxers that cover much more territory, but can leave things hanging free.

A long communication brief can be dangerous! As it then allows the creatives an opportunity to make strategic choices - instead of marketers. Marketers should be closest to their consumer, their brand and their market, and so they should be making the key strategic choice on what they want to communicate, and own, in the mind of their target customer.

I really believe that the best thing to give a creative person is a highly constraining brief. This means that the only escape is for them to engage their creativity to solve it. Put a creative person into a tiny box - and let them create a way out with a surprising solution.

Maurice Saatchi, of the communication group Saatchi & Saatchi fame, argued as far back as 2006, that brands should be able to express what they want to stand for in just one word. They then need to express that one word through their communication to establish and own one thought in a consumer's mind.

He said "When a company owns one precise thought in the consumer’s mind, it sets the context for everything and there should be no distinction between brand, product, service and experience". Consumers will not recall and remember more than one clear thought for your brand. Saatchi practiced this approach and came up with some of the most powerful and enduring slogans and thoughts in advertising history like "Labour is not working" and "The world's favourite airline".

I have always tried to ask the teams I have worked with to write their creative brief on a post-it note. I am trying to make that the small post-it note instead of the 2 or 3 pages usually written. 

This was reinforced by a Creative Director of DDB Paris I worked with a few years ago, who said that all he and his creatives really needed to create great advertising was a simple expression of 2 key things:

(1) What do you want to say?

(2) How do you want to say it?

I think there has to be a 3rd: 

(3) WHO do you want to say it to?

He felt that was part of (1).

Every time I look at ad test results or brand health monitor or tracking, it always reminds me that time after time it is proven that consumers can only take out one clear thing about any brand. It is us as marketers that try and make things too complex, as we try and cram in all we know about the brand. 

Many is the time I have seen brand teams rant that the agency work is "not on brief". But most of the time if one looks at the original brief there is more than one promises. The creatives have focused, and picked, on one of them in the ad. If as marketers they had focused and forced themselves to be very clear about the one key promise (and word) they wanted to ensure the brand owned, then work is much less likely to be off brief.

The post-it note approach works as a technique as it forces choices. It also checks if the story all links and flows through the WHAT you want to say into HOW you want to say it into WHO do you want to be talking to.

That is why when thinking of writing any creative brief for new communication we should be thinking of briefs. Think about covering the fundamentals only, rather than those boxers that cover more territory but risk things hanging loose…

Thoughts and comments? Leave a comment on the post!