I’ve never impressed a creative director with a creative brief.
I’ve back-rationalized more strategies, insights, propositions than I’d like to admit.
The most effective campaigns I’ve worked on have always been off-brief.
It didn’t take long before I starting questioning the value a creative brief — writ large.
So, I stopped writing them (more later).
There are three inherent flaws in the “classic” creative brief.
First, it implies a one-way, sequential creative process.
The planner first writes the brief and then briefs the creative who then comes up with the idea.
A baton is waiting to be passed.
A strategy is waiting to be translated into something ‘more interesting.’
A creative is waiting to be briefed before their work can begin.
The second flaw is the creative brief’s burden to ‘inspire’ creatives.
With such a burden, creative briefings become tacit standoffs between a planner who’s breathlessly trying to dazzle a creative with all the work/research/thinking he or she’s done and a stone-faced creative sitting armed crossed, refusing to be impressed because that would somehow admit that a planner did/found/wrote something he or she didn’t already know. Egos stand at attention.
The third flaw is that the world has simply become too complicated for a static, one-page brief.
There are too many channels that need to work together.
Too much data that needs to be considered.
Too little control in the chaos of social media.
To distill all of it down to something that arbitrarily fits ‘one-page’ sets the work up for failure. (Or, at minimum, a 7-point font fiasco).
And, more importantly, the fixation on utter conciseness misrepresents the way most consumers experience creative work in real life.
That is, mostly unnoticed and when noticed, diffusely and subtly across intertwining time and channels. Then deeply buried in memory until an unprompted need arises grasping for a solution.
A classic creative brief aims at the urgent end without seeding the ignored beginning or nurturing the plodding middle. With only ‘one-page’ of space — it has to.
Don’t write a creative brief.
Write a creative contract.
Have a think and quickly offer it your creative partners.
Have open conversation with an open mind.
Interrogate what’s important — together.
Disagree.
Be ready to be wrong.
Then, and only then, write it down.
This isn’t the planner telling the creative what to do.
This is a codification of a conversation.
An agreement of what collective hunch needs to be further explored.
A deal stricken between planner and creative of where to start.
It’s not one-page trying to do everything, but a formalization of future codependency.
It can change.
It’s supposed to change.
Talk more — update the contract.
The best work happens by dialogue, not decree.
Write a contract.
Kill the brief.
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