Great Creative Briefs, Make Great Results

Creative briefs can be quite overwhelming, especially for a very time poor Marketing or Brand Manager. Don’t worry, I’ve been there! You wish you could just simply plug an USB into your brain, download what you need and give it to your agency to go away and get it right the first time.
None of this is ground breaking by any means. It’s mostly common sense, but you’d be surprised how common it is for poor briefs to be submitted to creatives for deciphering.
So here are some tips to help you get out an effective creative brief efficiently:
1. Use a Creative Brief template
A comprehensive creative brief template ensures that you cover all bases and you don’t forget anything. There’s nothing worse to submit a brief and realise that you have forgotten a vital piece of information. A complete brief will save you cash in the long run by reducing the probability of your agency having to redo the work.
2. Be clear on your objectives, targets and out comes
What is your communication piece trying to achieve? Who is it suppose to talk to you? What do you want your audience to do? Is it a sales target or you get trying to get them to enquire? All these questions need to be covered in the brief to ensure your communication piece is taken in the right direction.
3. Provide insight
It’s important for your agency to understand why the business has made the decision to either do a campaign, change a brand or launch a new website. Insight will give your agency a better understanding of where your business is coming from and they will more than likely produce better work as a result.
4. Point form, point form, point form
Let’s face it you don’t have time to write a novel. Get to the point and get to it quickly, especially if you are briefing a large project.
5. Don’t provide unnecessary information
It’s obvious! You’re simply wasting everyone’s time. But people still do it.
6. Give everyone involved the big picture
Larger organisations most likely use more than one agency for a large integrated campaign. If you are one of those, let your agency know what they are working on is part of a bigger project. Advise them on what other elements are being used, so they know where their work fits into the bigger pictures to ensure that there is synergy overall. The more synergy, the more effective the campaign.