How To Write A Good Creative Brief.
Marketers: Read and Learn. Best article I've written in awhile.
The main purpose of Briefs: ASS-COVERING.
Creatives — copywriters, art directors, and graphic designers — should always refuse to do work for a product or service without a brief signed off by the client. Meanwhile, marketing people often fill out these briefs with the vaguest, most meaningless sentences possible that will make it impossible for the agency to blame them when the ads don’t work.
Marketing people do like writing briefs, just not in any way that is at all helpful to the creatives. They like writing them because it’s their own big-boy chance to be “creative.”, to giddily show off their master’s degree writing “skills” by lacing together several sentences filled with scorching hot, soul-snuffing buzzwords, the end result being newspeak bullshit as meaningless as…
Via my extensive experiences dealing with/responding to/helping rewrite briefs, I will now show (Paid Subscribers) exactly how to—and how not to—write one.