How we brief creative teams — and why most briefs fail.

Most creative briefs fail before the work begins. They fail because the person writing the brief is not the person who will judge the output, and the brief therefore omits the implicit standards the judge will apply. The judge then sees the work, dislikes it for reasons not in the brief, and the team rebuilds. We have seen this loop play out on enough engagements that we now refuse to start production until a brief passes a small set of completeness checks. Here is the template.

The single objective

One sentence. The thing this creative needs to accomplish. Not three things, not a list, not a hierarchy of secondary objectives. If the brief contains the words “and also” the brief is not finished. If the team can’t agree on a single objective, the team is not ready to brief work; it’s ready to have the meeting that produces the single objective.

Audience, named

Not a demographic bucket. A named, specific person who is the target of this work — or, if this is a programme rather than a one-off, a small set of named personas. A name is a forcing function: it stops the brief slipping into the abstract. “Sarah, 34, finance lead at a 200-person SaaS company in Berlin, currently uses spreadsheet-based reporting and is frustrated about it.” That works as a brief audience. “Decision-makers in mid-market B2B” does not.

The single insight

The non-obvious truth about this audience that the creative needs to land on. If the insight is obvious, the creative will be obvious. If the insight is too clever, the creative will misfire. The insight gets one sentence; the brief includes the evidence the insight is based on (research, sales calls, customer interviews) so the creative team can develop it.

Tone of voice

Three words, plus three words it is not. “Direct, witty, confident. Not earnest, not corporate, not preachy.” The negative half does most of the work; positive descriptors of tone are usually too vague to constrain.

Mandatories and forbiddens

Brand assets that must appear (logo, taglines, legal disclosures). Things that must not appear (competitor mentions, banned words, image styles the brand has retired). Most briefs are exhaustive on the mandatories and silent on the forbiddens; the forbiddens are usually what the senior judge actually has opinions about.

Reference

Three to five examples of work that is in the right neighbourhood. Each annotated: one sentence on what about it works for this brief and one sentence on what doesn’t. References without commentary are noise; with commentary they become the most useful part of the brief.

Format and channel

Where the work will run, with the technical specifications. Not “digital ads” — specific placements, specific aspect ratios, specific runtimes, specific copy length limits.

Success criterion

The metric or judgement call that will be used to decide whether the work succeeded. This is often the field people leave blank because they don’t know — and that is precisely why filling it in matters. If the success criterion is “the senior partner likes it”, write that down. If it’s “CTR uplift versus current creative”, write the threshold. The team will produce different work for different criteria.

Why this works

None of these fields is original. The discipline is in filling all of them in, in this order, before the kick-off meeting. A brief with one weak field is a brief that will produce a weak version of that field’s subject in the work itself. We have seen briefs spend three weeks in revisions because the “single insight” field said “our product is great”. The cost of leaving the field weak is greater than the cost of the meeting required to strengthen it.

What we don’t put in the brief

Solution suggestions. The brief defines the problem; the team brings solutions. If the brief contains rendered solutions, the work returned will be a worse version of those rendered solutions. The brief writer’s job ends at the success criterion field.