Carlos Perez

A while back, a client asked if I’d prefer to have a Creative Brief provided, or just all the background marketing paperwork.  I was obviously in favor of getting a good creative brief.  But the question was also a reminder there are scores of marketers who don’t understand that the quality (not quantity) of creative input has a direct impact on how much money they will waste or will get to keep in their wallets.

A former client of mine used to say, “show me crappy marketing work, and nine times out of ten, I’ll show you a crappy brief.”  If she asked her marketing agency to show her the brief during a creative presentation to her, that was a sure sign of trouble, because it meant that the objectives weren’t clear to her from the creative.  Once she looked at the brief, agency folks would usually be be raked over the coals.  The head AE would take a hit for the poor input, and the CD for not kicking back the brief and wasting time and energy of the creative team! No excuse of ‘the creatives didn’t follow the brief because…’ would be accepted either, since the AE and CD were jointly responsible for confirming the direction was followed, and the competency of the creative team fit the project.

Many agency account executives argue there’s not enough time to write briefs, or think they can work around the lack of a brief and still get a good end product for their marketing efforts. That lack of effort will reflect in money, either through bad results or creative cost overruns.  In contrast, I still get good, short briefs from a client who consistently wins DMA ECHOs and beats control efforts while working with different creative teams.  Their teams include very talented writers and art directors, but the common thread in their consistent high performance is their attention to input.

Creative briefs that work well seem to be derivative of the classic David Ogilvy brief. BUT, they work as long as the brief writer can honestly stick to answering the questions clearly on the form, instead of cutting and pasting volumes of unedited client blather and self-speak that is neither positioned, edited or made relevant. The other extreme is people providing too little input for the scale of the project (the lazy “This is big. I’m too rushed to write it down now-let me send you the client’s PowerPoint-we can do this in a call” approach) anticipates that some important focus will be recalled later by the creatives. Don’t count on it.

Every day, there are marketing articles, news items and blogs in which pundits (usually young enough to be my kids) offer theories as to why ‘impression fatigue’ is happening to marketing campaigns these days. Hooey. It’s easy to blame too many impressions, disintermediation of media, and viral marketing for this. Those are all just excuses for sissies. There are still plenty of campaigns, large and small, that do just fine because they have good solid roots. And I’d bet most of the winners responsible for creating them started with a pretty good brief. Those who didn’t likely had to beat the input out of someone up the input food chain.

Few marketers, even some veterans, will admit the dirty secret –  writing a good creative brief scares the hell out them.  Guess what?  It should if you want it translate to great creative work.  Every brief should be worthy of attention and respect by author and recipient, and no good creative can be led by a bad brief.  Those who are willing to face this fact should get trained on this skill and thinking process, and agency higher-ups who want to increase job security can do well to acknowledge that better briefs help their bottom line by reducing waste during creative development.  Agencies who demand that this is done end up making more money for themselves.   They become tougher, stronger, better marketers, and leave the sissies far behind.