Writing an Impressive Creative Advertising Brief

An underlying goal of the creative brief is to get your creative team up to speed. Your passion in advertising can trap you in analysis paralysis and you might not be able to write a brief that’s concise, complete and useful. The secret answer? Keep it short. Cover it quickly.

Securing your client’s confidence is a huge win. But it’s fairly easy to not meet their expectations. And when you don’t hand them a compelling answer to their problem, it’s a glaring sign that your creative brief wasn’t well-written. When your brief fails to bridge the gap between their needs and your advertising ideas, your client will tend to:

• Think of you as unprepared

• Refrain from engaging with you and your ideas

• Look elsewhere for their advertising needs

• Question if they even need a creative team to help them

And what a waste—you could easily have conjured more interesting, actionable ideas during reviews with your team. If bland advertising ideas arrived at your client’s doorstep, you can point to lazy writing. A lack of preparation.

Contrast this when you become more intentional with your creative brief and apply useful principles. Your clients will instead:

• See you as a marketing expert

• Keep asking you productive questions

• Look to you again when they have similar needs in the future

• Know that having a dedicated creative team adds value by saving time and effort

But writing an impressive creative brief is one thing, and knowing exactly what it’s used for is another. To distinguish it from other marketing concepts, let’s discuss what a creative advertising brief is.

What is a Creative Brief in Advertising?

A creative advertising brief is normally used by members of the creative team, not by your clients. And it’s the core strategic document that guides your creative team in preparing for the advertising delivery.

Derek Rucker, a long-time marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management says that without a creative brief, “the creative team is flying blind without any guidance and their odds of landing on something impactful to your customer is up to chance.”

Since there’s a knowledge transfer that you need to overcome between your client’s vision and your team’s ideas, your creative brief comes to the rescue. And while there are many methods in writing one, to keep things simple, Julian Cole who is a seasoned veteran in the advertising space suggests a quick formula.

The Creative Brief Simplified: Get, Who, To, By

Strategy expert Julian Cole suggests to apply the Get/Who/To/By methodology when writing your brief. He lays out the formula as follows:

• Get – Target consumer (who is your audience?)

• Who – Consumer problem (what is your audience’s predisposition?)

• To – Desired response (what do you want them to think or do?)

• By – One message or action (what is your solution?)

Cole’s formula is an excellent starting point for writing your creative brief, because it allows you to declutter your mind from many possible distractions. It also drives right to the goal of your client, which is fulfilled by the fourth step.

As a ‘simple’ example he shares one he did for Spotify:

• Get: Old school music lovers

• Who: Know Spotify only for new music

• To: See Spotify as a place for all their listening needs

• By: Letting them know that the bands from the 80’s or 90’s are on Spotify

And he compares this with a brief for the same purpose, only made ‘wonderful’:

• Get: Gen-Xer music lovers

• Who: Think Spotify is a music streaming platform designed for the youth

• To: Reconsider Spotify as a song library for all music listeners, including them

• By: Showing that Spotify allows them to reconnect with good times no matter how much the world may have changed

It would appear that the second brief was written by a marketing professional with more experience. The information on this brief is more specific and refined. That said, the first, or the ‘simple’ brief, is enough to work on with your creative team.

While Julian Cole’s methodology will get you started writing, let’s hammer down the non-negotiable parts that must be included in your creative brief.

Essential Parts of a Creative Brief

Management software company Asana enumerates nine (9) essential parts of a creative brief:

• Title and description

  • Your creative brief is a project, so it needs a proper title and a description that explains it further.

  • Example: Title – Advertising campaign for new product launch. Description: As we prepare to launch Apollo Enterprises’ latest product, we need a series of advertisements to introduce it to the market.

• Goals and objectives

  • Define the specific business need and explain what success looks like.

  • Example: Reach 500,000 potential customers using paid search over a 1-month period and add 5,000 new subscribers.

• Audience

  • Outline your target audience. Be as specific as possible.

  • Example: Men, 30 to 65 years old, high income, at least a high school diploma. They like to work with their hands, they frequently use tools and gadgets.

• Messaging and tone

  • Establish what messaging you’ll put in front of your audience and determine the tone.

  • Example: We should celebrate the target audience for working with their hands. Let’s make them feel proud of their creations.

• Assets and deliverables

  • Specify asset requirements such as dimensions, the number of versions, and design elements.

  • Example: 3 separate advertisements, each with a different tagline and image. One version for each of the following sizes: 250x250, 728x90, and 120x600.

• Stakeholders

  • Identify all the important project stakeholders. Also include who you think might need to be part of the process.

  • Example:

    • Creative team: John (ad copy), Felicia (ad design)

    • Marketing team: Kelly (team lead), Joey (email marketing), Taylor (ad distribution)

    • Product team: Winston (Product Manager)

• Budget

  • Conduct quick research so you can list likely costs of production. State the budget as early as possible.

  • Example: The overall budget is $10,000 with $6,000 for ad spend, $3,000 for design, and $1,000 for copywriting.

• Timeline

  • Map out the important deadlines and check possible conflicts. Be open to possible adjustments. Pro tip: Work backwards.

  • Example:

    • Project kickoff: May 8

    • Final creative brief: May 12

    • Ad copy delivery: May 17

    • Ad designs due: June 5

    • Ad buy plans due: June 12

    • Ads are live: July 1 - 31

    • Measure ad success: Ongoing

    • Wrap-up: August 12

• Distribution process

  • Give the creative process a proper send-off by stating the distribution strategy. Know how your media assets will actually get to your audience.

  • Example: Use Google AdWords platform to deploy ads.

Knowing the core elements of your creative brief should help you conceptualize not just the content of the brief itself, but the strategy as a whole. To learn more about these essential parts of a creative brief, see The complete guide to creative briefs.

Now that you have a clearer idea of what your brief should contain, let’s learn how to write it well.

5 Characteristics of a Good Creative Brief

1. Empathizes with your target audience. Your brief should identify the pain points of your audience. Similar to user experience research, you should be explicit about what the consumer’s issues are.

2. Focuses on the key benefit. A key message of your advertising is what consumers hope to take away should they choose to become a paying customer.

3. Well-founded or supported by reliable data. You can maybe include this on the client brief or a little bit on the actual advertising, but the numbers are really for the members of your creative team. Data is a good motivator and an equalizer because it often speaks for itself.

4. Actionable. A well-written brief provides direction. Coupled with a well-defined purpose, having actionable items on it will better engage your team.

5. Draws clear lines. Most importantly, you want to be clear about the scope of your strategy. Just as important as clearly defining your audience, drawing clear boundaries in your creative strategy will make the process more efficient.

As you grow in becoming a skilled marketing professional and an expert creative, it’s just as helpful to avoid these five (5) things when writing your brief.

5 Pet Peeves When Writing a Creative Brief

1. Poor, vague objectives. At the end of the day, the creative brief is a strategy document. If you are too unspecific with how you write your purpose statement, then your advertising strategy as the end-product will suffer from lacking the proper foundation. Worse, poorly written objectives can slow down your creative team’s process and lead to misalignment.
   

2. Exceedingly wide targeting. It might be counterintuitive to trim down your audience, but being able to narrow your target recipients is a skill on itself in advertising. Derek Rucker, who wrote Seven Sins Of The Creative Brief emphasizes that “targeting everyone means you have a nearly inexhaustible media budget.” Targeting too wide an audience will waste time, effort, and money.
   

3. Needless jargon. It can be easy to get lost in too much industry jargon when you’re working with experienced professionals and when you’re all immersed in the process. This can lead to miscommunication with the client and can even come off as useless nonsense, especially if the jargon somehow makes it into your client presentation from your creative brief. How troubling.
   

4. Not refining. While a creative brief isn’t expected to be a final, customer-facing production, you’ll be perceived by your creative team as an amateur if you don’t take the time to refine your brief. Details such as grammatical errors and a clear lack of editing can slow the creative process down.
   

5. Non-actionable metrics. Rucker also says that bad measurement is a sin in writing your creative brief. “The sin is not in a failure to measure, but in measuring without a plan,” he says. When you only plan how to measure results after an advertising campaign, you’ll likely end up with metrics that won’t be of much use.

The First and Last Rule in Writing Creative Briefs

All the advice put together in this article can be so much to take in. But if you need one hard and fast rule in writing an impressive creative brief, it’s this: be brief.

Here, we learned Julian Cole’s simple formula of Get/Who/To/By. And we also covered the essential elements that must be strictly included. However, an underlying goal of the creative brief is to get your creative team up to speed. Your passion in advertising can trap you in analysis paralysis and you might not be able to write a brief that’s concise, complete and useful.

The secret answer? Keep it short. Cover it quickly.

If you're interested in developing impressive creative advertising briefs for your brand/agency, reach out at kevinringpis@gmail.com and tell me how I could help your marketing/growth team.