Creative Re:Brief. A New Creative Brief For A New World

Creative Re:Brief
Workshop
April 2014
©robert graup, www.treesandforest.net

© ROBERT GRAUP, www.treesandforest.net
a bit about me
CHIATDAYGMO

62%
of consumers feel
there are too many
ads in media.
~Yankelovich
65%
of consumers
feel constantly
bombarded by ads.
~Forrester
65%
of consumers feel
bombarded by too
many ads.
~McKinsey
75%
of consumers feel
overwhelmed by
the amount of media.
~NBC

“In a world where media spend is in inexorable decline, and where
advertising per se is an endangered species, agencies don’t know
where to turn. The realization of the nightmare is under way.
And that nightmare is the utter collapse of the business model.”
~Bob Garﬁeld, MediaPost
“We are an industry in crisis and we are in denial of it.
Like global warming, we’re all going to put our ﬁngers in
our ears until it’s too late. And then we’ll get cooked.”
~George Prest, R/GA
•–—l—–•

CMOs say they believe their agency partners are "extremely valuable."
only12%
CMO Council, 2012

percentage advertising agency income "per unit of work" has fallen, a steady 20-year decline.
40%
Michael Farmer

As account planners, what can we do?

We have to relearn what we think we know.

We have to re-examine our key tool, the creative brief.

“Aside from our invoice, there is no document more central to what we
produce as an agency than the brief. The brief is the contract between the
agency and the client regarding the work. It is the interpretation of the client
brief to the agency, the distillation of the agency’s strategic process, the input
to the creative process and media planning. It's the mother of all agency
documents. The scaﬀolding you use to climb up to an idea.”
•–—l—–•
~Patty Lyon
EVP, OgilvyOne

“Giving a creative team a poor brief is like pushing them
onto a stage unprepared in front of an unfamiliar audience,
and saying, ‘Look, just entertain them, OK?’”
Vanella Jackson,
AMV.BBDO
•–—l—–•

The format of creative briefs has remained fairly static.

Creative Director Planning Director GAD
CREATIVE BRIEFClient Medium Deadline
Task
Thought
Because

All are based on asking the same ﬁve basic questions:

I think we can improve these questions to reﬂect our new imperatives.

“Spend as much time thinking about WHY you are about to
do this piece of communication as you do thinking about
WHAT the communication has to say. There should be a
seamless ﬂow from the client's business objective to the
marketing objectives and to the communication objective.”
~ Paul Burns
Saatchi & Saatchi London
•–—l—–•
objective

“What makes messaging interesting is the way we construct the story or
problem to which the message is the conclusion. If you want to make a
creative brief interesting you don’t do it with the proposition but with the
setup. Ask a more interesting question.”
~ John Griﬃths
CD, Spring
•–—l—–•
objective

The objective is the core nugget that explains WHY the agency is working on a project. It is
not the business objective or the marketing objective, but the role the advertising will play in
achieving them.
However, we often forget that we're not ultimately in the business of making ads, we're in the
business of solving clients' business problems through advertising.
objective

For most projects there should be one objective. If more than one is listed, they should be
prioritized.
•  Sometimes a bit of background on the project can help add context (especially useful for new
clients or new creative teams).
•  Give the business case.
•  If needed, provide a short overview of the conditions that precipitated the assignment and the
central business or cultural challenge to overcome.
objective

Questions that can help us ﬁll in the “Objective”:
•  What's the big business objective?
•  What issue is holding our client back from reaching that objective?
•  What keeps the client up at night? What are they most afraid of?
•  What does the client really want? What is their secret dream?
•  Why is communication needed at this particular time?
•  Why does our client need to advertise?
•  Is there a clear agreed role for advertising?
•  Is it realistic?
•  What is the challenge for our communications?
•  What do we want the target audience to do/think?
•  Where are we now?
•  Why are we there?
•  Where can we get to?
•  What could we do?
•  What should we do?
•  How will we make it happen?
•  What’s the client’s appetite for augmenting/adapting/ improving the current product or service?
•  What prior creative work may be relevant?
objective

All communications are designed to elicit some form of response from a particular group of
people. So, who precisely is our target audience? Get this right and the rest of the brief should
fall into place around it.
Rather than just stick to a series of bullet points, tell a story. Draw a picture with words. Avoid
being vague and generic.
The reader should be able to close her eyes, see the person, picture his home and yard (or
oﬃce), know how he likes to spend his free time, and understand what most excites and scares
him in life.
communities

Those “identifiable and reachable networks of people which either represent the target market or
influence the target in their purchase process....If mainstream media channels like TV are a shotgun,
digital is a sniper rifle. Our task is to turn one mass target into a series of small networks of people that fit
the ideal consumer or are connected to that consumer either through their friends or their interests.”
~Bud Caddell,
Undercurrent
communities
Old
mass market,
based on TV media buy
New
specific communities,
based on multiple analytics
•–—l—–•

“Inﬂuence Ripples”: overlapping conversations happening in a three-dimensional space—in real
time—all inﬂuencing each other.
communities
David Armano

Think about the individual, the community or network in which they interact, and the behaviors
or ripples among members of a network.
communities

Questions that can help us fill in the “target communities”:
•  Individuals:
ü  Who is the most valuable audience?
ü  Who is the most impressionable audience?
ü  Replace the word “individual” with the word “participant.”
ü  What do we know about them that will help us?
ü  What are the most insightful things we know about them?
ü  What do they believe before we tell them anything?
ü  What are their cultural influences?
ü  What causes buzz in their world? What competes for their attention?
ü  What should be avoided in talking to them?
ü  How do they feel about our brand?
ü  What do you want them to say about your brand?
ü  Why should they say anything at all?
ü  What is it people dislike about using your brand?
ü  What are the frustrations and barriers to using the brand?
ü  How do they think and feel about the category? Have these beliefs changed?
ü  What does our target audience really think about key competitive brands?
ü  Why aren’t they doing what we want them to do?
ü  What attitudes must we establish or change?
ü  How do our current customers find us?
ü  When, where and under what circumstances will they be most receptive to the message?
ü  What music do they like? Who are their friends? Where do they play?
ü  What motivates them, frustrates them, or makes them laugh?
ü  What kind of social currency do they have; to what extent do they share their brand experiences?
ü  Are there any secondary audiences?
communities

•  Community:
ü  What communities inform, inspire, or influence these individuals?
ü  Is there another group of people that can persuade the target audience? This group of people might be more likely to
engage with the creative assets or act on the creative to influence the real target audience. Think of this group as your
inspirational audience.
ü  What are the things they are talking about and sharing that relates to this market?
ü  What are the shared interests that define these communities?
ü  What is their shared emotional needs or desires that the brand can best address?
ü  When do they share? How? Where?
ü  Where else do members of these communities spend time online?
ü  What do these communities need?
ü  Who contributes to the conversation?
ü  Who influences this community? How? When?
communities

•  Purchase Journey
ü  What is their customer journey? (note that the traditional purchase funnel isn’t necessarily the
correct model)
ü  What resources does this target rely on in this process?
ü  What are the touch points or decision points at each stage in the journey?
ü  What channels can be used to address the touch points at each stage?
ü  Of all the stages, at what point is the brand most relevant?
communities
McKinsey SapientNitro

•  How do they use technology?
ü  What is the role for digital?
ü  What examples of innovation are there?
ü  Role for website/search?
ü  How does our audience use technology?
ü  How do they behave as internet users, are they more a scanner or scroller or clicker or
explorer or browser etc.?
ü  Are they likely to use mobile and other established platforms within mobile?
ü  Are they well represented in social media? How and where do they prefer to engage?
communities

useful ideas
(In 1990, the average U.S.
household was able to
only receive 33 cable
channels, Nielsen)
Old Brief Based On:
interruption
Re:Brief Based On:
engagement
“Consumers no longer have patience for advertising that doesn't inform or delight. They don't need to.
The same technologies that bring content to audiences anywhere and anytime often allow those same
audiences to skip, block, and opt-out of the advertising that pays their freight. Learned behaviors keep
evolving as users get better at blocking our messages. This leaves brands pushing harder and harder to
measure and improve ad viewability and work around still-pervasive banner blindness. The challenge is
there for even the savviest marketer, but so is an enormous opportunity: to produce advertising that
respects, engages, and connects with consumers. Advertising in the interest of the consumer.”
~Cella Irvine
Vibrant Media
(In 2010, Nielsen stops tracking how
many channels the average TV
household receives because in a
digital, time-shifted multichannel
universe, there no longer is a
“consistent” meaning for the term
“channel.”)

92% of Americans wouldn't care if brands disappeared. Only 9% believe that brands make a
meaningful diﬀerence in people's lives. (Havas Media)
Only 32% of Americans have a positive view towards the entire ad industry, around the same
low level as airlines, banks and pharma. (Gallup)
83% of respondents felt bad ads actually get in the way of their daily activities, including
working (20%), having sex (19%) or sleeping (13%). (InsightsOne)
useful ideas

Helene Duvoux-Mauguet

Rather than saying things at people to get their attention, we need to learn how to do things
for people. We need to ask how our brands can be more useful, more helpful.
As Edward Boches puts it, “we need to get out of the business of telling stories and into the
business of getting others to tell them for us.”
Or as Universal McCann’s Scott Donaton says, we need to move "toward a more relevant
storytelling model that people want to invite into their lives and share with others.”
useful ideas

“The ‘obvious truth’ that interruption is seldom enjoyed prompts the spin-
oﬀ question: Are there times when people enjoy being interrupted? Can
advertising ever be a welcome interruption? I wonder, is it now very
possible for advertising to be ‘non-advertising advertising’, no longer the
unwelcome intruder, but rather the source of any manner of cool stuﬀ that
causes us to grin and declare feelings of awesomeness?”
~Simon Pont,
Starcom MediaVest Group
useful ideas
Positive interruptions
•–—l—–•

“Consider the classic agency brief for a TV ad, with its focus on a message
or an idea to be conveyed. Now imagine a brief which asks for a certain
kind of 30-second experience, delivered in ﬁlm. An experience of joy. An
experience of waiting and anticipation. An experience of excitement. I can
easily imagine those kinds of briefs”
~Nick Hirst,
Dare
useful ideas
•–—l—–•
Positive experiences

“Everyone wants a conversation. They want inspiration. Inspire people with your
website. Don’t just interrupt, but interact. Asking about Return on Investment is the
wrong question today. You should be asking about Return on Involvement.”
~Kevin Roberts,
Saatchi & Saatchi
•–—l—–•
useful ideas
Positive involvement

How do we get there?

First, start with a brand's authentic "why," because without that you can't have a
conversation.
“So, we start with who a brand is, what the target mindset is and what are the shared values
between them and then how does the brand’s ecosystem and the consumers’ user journey collide
in fortuitous ways to create action, conversation and conversion that cements them to the brand.”
~Andrew Keller,
Crispin
How
What
We make great computers.
They’re beautifully designed
and simple to use.
Wanna buy one?
Outside In/
Conventional
Inside Out/
Remarkable
In everything we do, we challenge the
status quo. We believe in thinking
diﬀerently.
We challenge the status quo by making
products that are beautifully designed
and simple to use.
And we happen to make great
computers.
Wanna buy one?
Why
useful ideas
(See "Start With Why," Simon Sinek)

Second, we need to provide room so the audience can take our "why" and add their "why" to
it. According to Zeus Jones' Gareth Kay, this "means creating communication that is less finite
and complete. Build some gaps to allow for, and encourage, participation.”
The most effective brands in this new world, are finding ways to share beliefs with individuals
and the communities in which they participate. To involve them, to engage them.
useful ideas

Third, “(t)hink about how you can create value through being more invisible and frictionless,
rather than shouting for attention. When you think about things you engage with and love,
whether it’s a piece of technology or even the service in a restaurant, the best ones are the
ones that get out of the way. They are not obtrusive – the more invisible, the more powerful.
We have to start thinking about how to do stuﬀ for people that gets out of the way and is
more for them than about us."
~Gareth Kay,
Zeus Jones
useful ideas
(Also see “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky.)

Finally, strive for big ideas yet also start lots of small ﬁres.
•  David Ogilvy's belief that, “Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a
ship in the night” is still valid.
•  But, needing to “discover” the big idea shouldn’t bog us down.
useful ideas
“Teams who are briefed to ﬁnd the one big idea almost always come up
with a decent concept, while teams that are freed from the mandate for
one big idea think about the long view of the customer and come up
with rich experiences that work across the entire customer journey.”
~Kip Voytek,
MDC Partners
•–—l—–•

Starting many ﬁres doesn't mean thinking small, it means trying small on: iteration and
prototyping.
useful ideas
“in the life of a brand there is a continuous stream of actions every day and they
all can’t try to create a huge news day for a brand. We also need to create
snackable content, bits and bites–shareable, playable, postable quips that
maintain our strong relationship and give the world something to talk about.”
~Andrew Keller,
Crispin
“What a consumer doesn't want to see is the same idea done 16 diﬀerent ways.
Instead, come up with 16 ways to make that idea bigger.”
~Reid Miller,
Taxi
•–—l—–•

As with the old brief, the Useful Idea(s):
•  Should be rooted in the human need.
•  It should fight to be insightful, and inspiring.
•  It should be motivating to the target audience. As Jon Steel wrote in Truth, Lies and
Advertising, “If it’s not relevant to the consumer, it’s not relevant to the brief. It should
be true–don't waste time on wishful thinking or vague claims. If it's not 100%
supportable, drop it.”
•  It should be more than an offer or incentive. People rarely buy something only because
it's 10% off, or includes a free gift. Incentives are useful to strengthen the call to action,
but are rarely the basis for a great idea. Offers often form the basis for the idea, and act
as essential support, but a motivating useful idea must always go beyond “Buy x”!
useful ideas

If it helps, write it as a headline on a single piece of paper–on its own and make sure that it’s in
large type in the middle of lots of white space.
No supporting words. Then let it percolate.
Or, try Crispin's press release technique: express the useful creative idea in a breaking-news,
journalistic format. The discipline of this is about understanding the expectation of impact
within an idea as you concept it, vet it and create it. It’s about understanding what will drive the
conversation and illuminate the message in a spectacular way.
useful ideas

© ROBERT GRAUP
Will people get it?
Will it resonate with our target?
Is it something new?
Is it simple enough?
Can you support it?
Will it eﬀect change?
Is it participatory?
Is it generative?
Is it magnetic?
Does it stand the test of brevity?
Do you still feel proud?
Now Judge It:
If the Useful Idea fails these questions, you’re creating a poorly written brief.

The Useful Idea(s) should also be able to answer the "care" question:
The Care Question:
You can’t write this from the perspective of what the brand wants the target to think, it has to come from the audience’s mindset. If you’ve done your homework for
the previous question, you’ll know the answer to this and if you’ve done your homework well, you’ll know the answer is not going to be some marketing hype, but
something that satisﬁes a real need in their life–be it emotional, physical or mental.
useful ideas

The two major sub-questions:

Disruption:
How does the competition conventionally try to address/communicate the same issue? How
do we disrupt that convention? How will this eﬀort break away from the category in order
to best resonate?
useful ideas

Tension:
What is the psychological, social or cultural tension associated with this idea? What makes
our target tense about the idea? How can we release the tension and therefore adjust our
consumer’s thinking? This is our challenge and our connection opportunity, to ﬁt the brand
and product into our target's lives where it didn’t ﬁt before.
useful ideas

Questions that can help us generate Useful Idea(s):
•  What level of participation do we want or need? What's in it for the target; why would they want
to participate? Have we made it as easy as possible for them to participate?
•  What is our experience? Why should our target take part? How do we make space for sharing
and for new stuff to be created?
•  What results are we promising to our customers?
•  How does the creative foster a social experience?
•  How can we make this interesting?
•  Is there a frustration, aspiration, related life-need, emotional connection or shared belief you can
tap into and leverage?
•  How will the audience encounter the communication? How might that change from the first
encounter to later encounters?
•  What would make a real difference to people if only they knew about it?
•  How will you get people talking about your product and/or idea?
useful ideas

Questions that can help us generate Useful Idea(s):
•  What do we want our audience to know or learn? To feel? To do?
What’s tired, uninspired, and plain dead in how competitive brands communicate and behave?
•  What is the brand's ambition? How do we convey it in this instance?
•  Why hasn't it achieved that ambition already?
•  The question shouldn’t be “What can we tell the consumer to persuade them to buy more,” but
rather “How can we help our customer?”
•  If you could get one sentence through all the clutter, what would that be?
•  Is there an "enemy" we can play oﬀ of?
•  Who else is competing for our target audience's attention with similar or related messages? How
are our messages diﬀerent to theirs?
•  How do we think this will get people talking about the brand? Why might they talk about this
idea? And how do they get involved?
useful ideas

What makes it shareable, spreadable, and interesting enough to overcome indiﬀerence or
have people seek it out? It might be the creative idea itself. It might be what you do/make/
build. It might be the way in which you encourage and/or inspire sharing. It might be an idea,
concept, or social utility that inherently invites the co-creation of content.
useful ideas

“Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and
gave you the choice of taking your friends or your
movies, you'd choose your friends–if you chose the
movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king.
Content is just something to talk about”
~Cory Doctorow,
Boing Boing
Remembering that it’s the sharing, and the conversations that result, that matters, not the
content.
useful ideas
•–—l—–•

© ROBERT GRAUP
Insights
in•sight |'in¡sït|
One of the most important things to think about to help generate Useful Idea(s) is:
What is the insight?
“An insight is a revelation that produces great work
(there should be a degree of “Fuck me. I never thought of it like that!”)
~Simon Law,
Fabric Worldwide
•–—l—–•

Creativity and insights are
all about discovery.

© ROBERT GRAUP
“It is not about how hard you work. It’s about how well you play. It’s not
about how many hours you put in on a project. It’s about how many
random thoughts you put down on a piece of paper. It’s not about working
week- ends. It’s making sure your people have a life outside of work
because if they’re spending 60 to 80 hours a week looking at the same
four walls, they’re not going to bring anything to the table beyond what
they see in their cube.”
~ Guy Bommarito,
GSD&M
•–—l—–•
useful ideas

This is the way many people see creativity.
But we’re not creating widgets. We’re creating ideas.

“If you're going to test the boundaries then sometimes
you'll fail. But that's OK. It's not trying that's not OK. You
don't achieve extraordinary results through ordinary
eﬀorts.”
~Matt Fallows, W+K London
To do that, you need to feel comfortable stumbling around.

“When you first start off trying to solve a
problem, the first solutions you come up with are
very complex, and most people stop there. But if
you keep going, and live with the problem and
peel more layers of the onion off, you can often
times arrive at some very elegant and simple
solutions.”
~Steve Jobs
And around.

“More and more, both clients and agencies are
looking to harness alternative sources of
creativity and put them to work in a creative
brieﬁng that is collaborative and collective,
rather than linear and sequential.
~Nick Southgate, Grey London
With others.

Gary Koepke of SapientNitro, said he values the notion of “connected thinking,” and invites all sorts of
people from across the agency to come to brainstorming meetings–even people not with the agency.
useful ideas
“Ultimately what I like is the random molecule idea,” he says. “Invite someone who maybe
has nothing to do with anything. Maybe it's an artist or a musician. Maybe it's my mom.
Anybody to say, 'Why are you doing that?' or 'What's this?' or 'You guys always do the
same thing.' I believe everybody is creative, so it doesn't matter who's in the room, as long
as they've been briefed properly and somebody is managing that process.”

Owned
Media
Earned
Media
Paid
Media
Created
Media
useful ideas
If the media is the
message, what are
we saying?
What are the
target’s speciﬁc
media habits?
Any media ideas
that suggest
themselves given
the useful ideas?

Support refers to the evidence supplied to make the propositional claim more credible. As
in, what is the rational and/or emotional support or reason to believe the key message?
Why is it true? Why is it believable? Why does it make sense?
We need to give consumers permission to believe. Avoid laundry lists of every fact, feature
and beneﬁt. Instead, try supporting each word or phrase in the Useful Idea(s) with why?
Make sure the support is as focused as the insight.
The support section is most often abused by becoming the place to record miscellaneous
features or messages that don't support the idea, but are deemed suﬃciently interesting or
important to be mentioned somewhere in the input document.
Tip: Write the support as if it was the body copy for a print ad.
•  Tip: If you put “because” before each proof statement it should follow on from the
Useful Idea.
support

“Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to
overcome. Creativity thrives best when constrained. But constraints must
be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Too many curbs
can lead to pessimism and despair. Disregarding the bounds of what we
know or accept gives rise to ideas that are non-obvious, unconventional,
or unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint
and disregard for the impossible is fueled by passion and leads to
revolutionary change.”
~Marissa Mayer,
Yahoo!
•–—l—–•

This is not the place on the brief to get creative. It is the place to communicate the stuﬀ
that is non-negotiable and to set expectations vis-à-vis the client.
Tip: if there are creative routes that are possible given the brief, but unacceptable to the
client, use this section to rule out these routes.
Questions:
•  What must be included? What are the branding and contact details? Telephone numbers,
web addresses etc.
What has to be excluded? Simplicity is important. If there are assets, include a link.
Are there technical barriers that must be addressed?
Has the client provided anything they have had already designed and what they (dis)liked
about them. Are there colors, logos, websites, they (dis)like?
•  What's their favorite brand and how have they learned from things they've done in a
marketing sense.
If they’re aiming high, make sure you communicate that to the creative teams.
Make sure you understand why the clients believe they can achieve this and what great looks like.
constraints

What speciﬁc action do we want the target to do, and we can reasonably expect next, as an
immediate result of the advertising?
Stanford research B.J. Fogg created a model of three elements (motivation, ability, trigger)
that provide an answer.
•  When designing media, content, or experiences that bring change in an individual’s life or
lifestyle, we ﬁrst must persuade them to agree that a change is necessary, i.e., they must be
motivated to change. Next, in order to act out the change, the activity to be done must be
within the range of their ability. Then we simply need a trigger to facilitate that behavioral
change.
action

Ideally, the target is already motivated to do the behavior we are asking of them, e.g., they
want to lose weight, buy that new car, purchase that box of cereal, save money for retirement,
share that story. You can increase motivation with effective messaging and media, but if you
are artificially trying to create motivation, you're swimming upstream.
Similarly, it's best if our communities have the basic talent to complete a task, though we
often have “education” as a first step in many campaigns.
But even if the target has the ability, try to make the task simpler, which could be done
through decreasing the time or effort it takes, the attention or price it costs. (If you've ever
had to go through a long phone tree and hung up or dropped an online basket because of the
number of fields you had to fill out, you've dealt with a task where simplicity would work.)
action

The trigger is usually signiﬁed by an oﬀer or promotion connected to a call-to-action. You just
need to make sure that you focus on triggering people that have the ability or motivation:
•  If you trigger people at the right time, they'll be happy.
•  If you trigger them when they lack ability (or if you've made it too complicated), they’ll
get frustrated.
•  If you trigger people when they don’t have motivation (e.g. asking people to shop for
Christmas present in September), you’re just annoying.
action

“The brief is the equivalent of a fisherman's guide–a person who takes you to
the best place on unfamiliar water, shows you where to fish, and has some
ideas about the best flies to use. The guide doesn't do any fishing but makes
sure that the fisherman (the agency creative) has a more enjoyable and
successful time than he or she would have had on their own.”
~Jeff Goodby,
Goodby Silverstein
•–—l—–•

A few ﬁnal thoughts:

A point on brevity.
A lot of folks say that a brief needs to be, well, brief.
My approach is a bit different.
A brief should be kept as short as possible but no more so.
The idea is to discard the reams of the irrelevant while keeping the clear, insightful and
inspiring. This is about avoiding bloated, clichéd language, not about the number of pages.
The brief should contain nothing that doesn’t serve a specific purpose. If you strip away all
the clutter and extraneous stuff, you can communicate what truly makes a brand special
much more effectively. If that takes two pages great, if a single paragraph, wonderful.

Measurements. Yes. Include them. Measurement criteria are not only essential for
determining whether or not the communication has succeeded, but they also focus
the creative teams to consider how the creative is expected to work.
•  Identify and prioritize metrics
•  Feed from business goals
•  Develop test plans
•  Deﬁne data sources, frequency, and reporting mechanisms
•  Match audiences to appropriate reports
•  Relate measures back to objectives
•  Provide recommendations
•  Strategy adjustment
Continuous Improvement
4. Results Distribution
3. a) Tracking
b) Testing
c) Analytics
2. Establish Metrics
1. Outline Objectives
5. Action Planning

Seek ﬁrst to understand, then to be understood. Listen. Listen. Listen.
“The other guys think the purpose of communication is to
get information. We think the purpose of information is to
foster communication.”
~Mark Zuckerberg,
CEO Facebook

Make people feel comfortable. It’s not about being the smartest or the coolest.
“Great planning is about creating an environment in which
other people are more likely to come up with good ideas,
and in which clients will be more favourably disposed to
running the best of them’.”
~Jon Steel,
Goodby Silverstein

Briefing. Because I teach a lot of classes on brief writing, I often ask friends to provide recent
briefs that they've worked on (minus all the proprietary stuff). Usually I get nothing back. This is
not because there is nothing available but because the discussion that occurs during a briefing so
changes the brief as to render the original written one obsolete.
The first time the team sees the content of the brief should not be in the briefing. But it is the first
time that the entire team gets to go through the brief together.
Further, the brief document is necessary but not sufficient for a briefing.
•  Brief in situ. Bring the brief to life by bringing the user environment to the team. Or take
the team to the environment in which the brand lives.
•  Use visual aids. Mood boards, competitive ads, collages, consumer quotes. Paper the walls.
•  Be inspiring. “If a brief is given to a creative team by someone who sees it as a process,
rather than an opportunity, then 9 times out of 10 they’ll get exactly what they asked for,”
says Jason Little, M&C Saatchi.

I love W+K's Nick Docherty's distinction between the brief and the brieﬁng:

Whither the client? I believe in collaboration. The client should be involved as much as
possible. I also would rather get approval on the brief rather than create a separate input
document, criteria list, or client brief.
The issue we often face is that clients (in fact, people in general) have an instinctual aversion
when first exposed to things new and different. When asked directly what concepts they like, the
ones that are most literal, descriptive or similar to existing ideas and established category
conventions will often win out. But those kind of concepts often fail in the marketplace. This is
the “brander's paradox” laid bare: A brand must be differentiated to succeed, yet differentiated
ideas are at first disliked. If your client has a tough time judging breakthrough creative, your job
is to educate them way before you share the brief with them.

the re:brief template
client: project: date: job no.:
The Objective
Why are we doing this and how is it connected to solving the client’s business problems?
Target Communities
Who are the communities of consumers whose behavior/attitude we are trying to change
or influence?
Target Insights
What do they need, want or believe? What is the currency that drives them?
The Useful Idea(s)
What is the most useful ide(s) that can facilitate their participation and sharing? (info.,
content, experiences, stories, etc.)
Disruption
How will this effort break away from the category?
Releasable Tension
What is the psychological, social or cultural tension associated with this idea and how
can we release it?
Support
Why should they believe this?
Action
What specific action can we reasonably expect a consumer to do as a result of
our message?
Constraints
acct dir: creative dir: planner:

You never get the ﬁnal
direction until after the ﬁrst
creative presentation.
There are no brilliant briefs,
only brilliant ads.
There are no brilliant briefs,
but there are a lot of bad
ones.
©RobertGraup

Creative Re:Brief. A New Creative Brief For A New World

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