Your creative briefs suck.
It’s not personal — most creative briefs suck. (Including mine).
If you don’t believe me, ask your creative teammates.
Ask them how often they received a brief that actually helped them.
Or more miraculously, the last time a creative brief ‘inspired’ them.
Or one that, at least, clearly told them ‘what to do’ (in a day packed with other things to do).
Then ask your creatives how many times they actually just threw the brief away.
Here’s the thing: the reason why most creative briefs suck is they don’t commit to anything.
For all the research, word-smithing and toiling — most creative briefs lack conviction.
They ask for too much.
They don’t sacrifice anything.
They are burdened by client requests, personal insecurity and a perennial desire to ‘have it all.’
By asking too much from the work, they transfer unsurmountable dread from strategy people to creative people.
The best analogy I can give is playing roulette and betting red and black on every spin.
You’ll win every time. But you’ll win nothing every time. (I know there’s green — but you get the point).
In finance, it’s called creating a ‘boxed’ position — going both short and long on a stock. Regardless of how the stock does, you’ll always be right, but never making any money. This confuses winning with gaining.
They sound the same, but they are not the same.
Here’s some tell-tale signs of a brief that sucks…
It tries to ‘resolve’ a compromise.
As in, with brand X, you never have to choose between price and quality.
This might be true, but it almost always leads to linear predictable work.
It uses jargon.
As in, brand X laterally unlocks the infinite potential of human empowerment.
What?
It blindly projects ambition.
As in, make brand X the most famous Y in the world.
Great. How exactly?
Your creative brief sucks because it forgot its anti-brief.
Every brief that asks creatives to do something needs to articulate exactly what they should not do. And why.
Your creative brief sucks because it doesn’t the define the competition. The true competition.
Netflix isn’t fighting Hulu, HBO or Disney. It’s fighting Fortnite.
In your client’s mind, your brief might be competing against a decision to invest in factory robotic arms instead of a produce another ‘summer campaign.’
A brief that exists in isolation of its competition — internal or external — is a lie. Or a minimum, a hallucination.
And finally, your creative brief sucks because it’s not human. Or at least, it forgot about the humans it’s ultimately designed to persuade.
It forgot that we spend our days making what humans spend their days trying hard to avoid and ignore (i.e. ads).
Write a creative brief that commits to only what matters.
Sacrifice everything else.
It’s the ultimate respect for human attention.
For your creatives’ attention.
One brief. One bet.
It’ll suck otherwise.
