Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotesThe creative brief is where organisations go to avoid choosing.
“Audience: customers.” Which customers? “Existing and prospective.” Excellent. We are now talking to people who buy the thing and people who do not. Add three objectives, five messages, seven mandatory phrases and a target called “engagement”. Nobody can accuse the document of excluding their department, which is why it cannot guide a single bloody decision.
Harrison’s agency spent twice as long on the brief as on the creative. That ratio sounds indulgent only because the waste from a vague brief appears later under more flattering names: exploration, stakeholder alignment, concept development, amends. Three teams build three interpretations. Twelve people comment on all of them. The shoot gets booked. Somebody finally asks what the audience should do and discovers the answer never existed.
Clarity has visible casualties. One audience is chosen, so another is excluded. One claim leads, so four departmental favourites lose. One behaviour defines success, so a decorative rise in clicks cannot rescue a failure to sell. A proper brief irritates the people whose ambitions it removes. That irritation is evidence that a decision occurred.
Length contributes almost nothing. Forty pages can preserve the minutes of every meeting without stating why this person should believe this message now. A useful brief can be read aloud and challenged sentence by sentence. Who is this? What do they do today? What are we asking them to do? What fact supports the promise? What constraint cannot move?
Answer those before paying writers, designers, producers, media buyers and developers to discover the disagreement through their invoices. The document gets revised before the first concept leaves the building.